After 14 years out of office, Labour’s first budget in a generation will see Britain lurch back to the dangerous tax, spend and borrow approach of the era of state-sponsored socialism.

These reckless policies will be imposed on us by a Prime Minister who doesn’t know who a working person is, while enjoying his own bespoke fat cat public sector pension pot and sponging off his rich political friends to get clothes for him and his wife, and his feeble Chancellor, who is forcing the elderly to freeze this winter and celebrating communists.

These are not just numbers on economists’ spreadsheets or figures bandied about in the media.

Her budget announcements mark the largest single hike in tax in living memory, and as the OBR confirms, will lead to higher inflation and prices and lower growth and private investment. These numbers have real world consequences on families and businesses as £40bn more in tax will be taken from the pockets of Britain’s hard-working families and out of the tills of the nation’s businesses.

Businesses are going to be forced to pay more to recruit and employ staff with National Insurance rates rising in a clear breach of a Labour manifesto commitment.

Members of this current Government have zero knowledge of the private sector or an understanding that entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of our economy.

These costs also come on top of the huge costs of implementing Labour’s new trade union friendly employment laws being forced through Parliament.

It’s not just businesses facing a growing tax burden.

Hard-working families will face higher taxes – whether it is through rises in Air Passenger Duty, Inheritance Taxes or the shameful way Labour will whack taxes up on family farms, as well as having to pay more through higher prices as Labour’s jobs tax is passed on to consumers.

This self-serving Labour Government’s devastating combination of new direct taxes and a raft of stealth tax rises will damage Britain.

In the pursuit of their dogmatic socialist ideals, this rotten Labour government is clobbering businesses and families not to fill the fantasy fiscal black hole they talk about, but to pacify their trade union paymasters and to blow hard-earned tax-payers’ cash on their left-wing pet projects.

The result will be a devasting flight of capital from the UK, disinvestment, implications for the wider economy on inflation and levels of employment and ultimately long-term damage to our economy as this Government’s actions show that Britain is closed for business.