Griff

This is a Budget that gives breathing space to families and businesses, and hope for the future. 🛍️ Taking 70,000 more retail, hospitality and leisure business out of business rates and revitalising our high streets. 🏡 £1.5 billion extra for social and affordable homes, taking spending to £40 billion over the next 10 years. 🚪£4.7bn for Your First Home, which is expected to support around 70,000 first-time buyers who don’t have access to the bank of Mum and Dad. 📍And unlocking the potential of every part of this country with a new wave of devolution. Labour decisions. Breathing space today, and fresh hope for the future. 🌹

Steve Borthwick has finally put his England players on notice - now it's time they delivered if they want to be anywhere near the plane to the World Cup, writes ALEX BYWATER trib.al/GylWdM6

A Budget that amounts to pissing into a westerly gale - tinkering around the edges while the British economy burns, with a treasury packed full of economic arsonists. It is an insult to every taxpayer, every struggling business and every family being bled dry by this rotten economic system. Nothing will change - we continue our uninterrupted plunge into the abyss. The country is drowning in debt. I don’t know how else to say this… We are BANKRUPT. We cannot afford any of this. Nothing. A crushing tax burden remains, small businesses are strangled and as employers we’re punished for creating jobs. For what? To fund millions of scroungers who can’t be arsed to work like the rest of us? Foreigners who turn up and expect housing, benefits, healthcare? When our tax goes up, THAT is what we are funding. Debt is now THREE TRILLION. We can thank lockdown for a large part of that. But please think about it. Three trillion. The scale is just unimaginable. Yet we get another Chancellor fiddling with the numbers while the country goes up in flames. Billions and billions and billions get added every month. It is GROWING. I don’t know how else to say this. The people governing us seem absolutely incapable of understanding one basic principle. Wealth is created by businesses and workers. NOT by politicians spending somebody else's money to win votes. NOT by the state. NOT by the public sector. I detest it. The British people, working mums and dads, are expected to work longer and harder to fund this corrupt charade - all while giant multinationals shift vast profits out of our country on the back of their work and bloated corporates extract outrageous contract profits from the taxpayer thanks to criminal public sector mismanagement. I challenge Healey or Burnham. Go and start a business. A cafe, a contractor, a small shop. Try being a sole contractor on the tools. Experience these taxes, the regulation, the stress. Have their families rely on sporadic invoices. Watch their earnings get siphoned off by a corrupt state. Let’s see how they get on. The system does not need reforming, or conserving - it needs smashing up. We need to rip apart, limb from limb, the failed assumptions that have governed British economic policy for decades. Cut the waste. Shrink the state. Slash the tax burden. Back small British businesses. Reward work. Restore the incentive to invest, build, employ and succeed. Get millions of healthy Brits OFF benefits. Give people a reason to work. BE UNPOPULAR. If healthy scroungers hate me for taking their benefits off them, good. Get used to it. It’s all that, on a scale never seen before, or the country will collapse further into a third world hellhole - only this time we’ll get the hyperinflation and total economic catastrophe in addition to the migrants. I refuse to leave a broken, bankrupt nation to my children and grandchildren. Restore Britain is offering a route out. It will be painful, more than anyone realises. But it is the only way.

Burnham is the best at #PMQs since Blair by far.

The Chancellor has just taken 70,000 more retail, hospitality and leisure businesses out of Business Rates. A welcome boost for our High Streets.

Breathing space for today, fresh hope for the future.

Saints boss Phil Dowson has 'no doubt' George Hendy will eventually get an England call after he wasn't included in the latest training squad northamptonchron.co.uk/sport…

🚨 WATCH: Andy Burnham watches The Celebrity Traitors on Gogglebox

'Come on now...' Ahead of Andy Burnham’s appearance on Gogglebox, @NickFerrariLBC asks: is the PM being ‘too blokey'?

For those mocking the PM for going on Gogglebox: It's for Stand Up to Cancer. For those mocking his tattoo: It's the Manchester Bee, done after the Manchester Arena Attack, where 22 died and 100's more were injured.

An unforgettable innings in Rawalpindi 🤩