Channel migrants will choose France over Rwanda, says ex-home secretary

Lord Clarke, the former chancellor, has warned Jeremy Hunt against trying to “buy votes” with tax cuts at the Budget on Wednesday. 

The Conservative peer said the current Chancellor should instead focus on improving people’s living standards by helping the economy to grow. 

Asked what he would put in the Budget, Lord Clarke told Times Radio: “I hope I would set out to produce a competent, responsible Budget that looked to give us some hope of recovering over the next two or three years from the recession that we are in, the economic crisis that we are in, to get us back on the path towards growth and, with low inflation and that charts contemplating a rise instead of a slight fall in living standards we’ve been having for the last two or three years. 

“I am quite fed up of all this speculation in the newspapers, supposed briefings and gossip, about how we are going to buy votes through this tax cut, that tax cut. 

“What people want to be reassured about is that there is some prospect of our getting back to the kind of growth with low inflation that, as we know, steadily improves our public services and our daily way of life. 

“The main things to tackle are the things that are at the root of the recession and a failure to grow, significantly, for the last two or three years and that’s our lack of investment, our very poor productivity record.”