At July’s General Election, Labour promised Britain change after 14 years of misery under the Conservatives. We got to work immediately, setting in motion major improvements to workers’ rights, housing, our railways, energy, and a multitude of other areas. 

This week’s Budget supercharged that agenda, with the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, setting out how we are going to fix the foundations of our economy and rebuild our public services, while protecting the payslips of working people across the country.

It was a historic moment. Not only was it the first Labour budget for nearly 15 years, and the first to be delivered by a female Chancellor in British history, but it also set the direction of our Government, and our country, until the end of the decade.

Given the current state of our National Health Service, I know that many people here in Suffolk will have been particularly pleased with an extra £25 billion resulting in the biggest day-to-day increase in spending since 2010. Our NHS might be broken, but it is not beaten, and this new funding will help it get back on its feet as we look to drive down record waiting lists.

Major new investment for education also reverses years of neglect. Within months of entering government in 2010, the Conservatives cut Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme. The RAAC crisis followed. Within months of entering government in 2024, Labour have committed £1.4 billion to rebuild our crumbling schools.

The additional £1 billion that the Chancellor gave to special educational needs provision is really critical, too. Whilst it cannot solve the deep and wide-ranging crisis in SEND overnight, it marks crucial progress on an issue that I have campaigned on locally for many years.

And these headline changes don’t even scratch the surface of how this budget will support working people here in Ipswich, Suffolk, and across the country. We saw the raising of the income threshold for carers so they have more money in their pockets, a huge increase in the National Minimum Wage to the highest level on record, and the unfreezing of income tax thresholds so working people are better off.

I know people will be pleased to see an extra half a billion pounds to fix our pothole-riddled roads, a freeze on fuel duty, and cuts to the cost of a pint in a pub too!

The extent of the Chancellor’s ambition is even more impressive given her dire inheritance. As Rachel Reeves stood up to speak in Parliament, the independent Office for Budget Responsibility released a breakdown of the black hole in the previous government’s spending plans, which, they said, meant that previous forecasts were now ‘materially different’.

The desperate situation left by the Conservatives meant that our country was given a stark choice. With Labour; fiscally responsible investment for the future while protecting the payslips of working people. Or, five more years of the same Conservative failure that crashed our economy, sacrificed our public finances for their own political ends, and left our public services in tatters.

The Chancellor made the right choices this week. By refusing to copy the Conservative playbook of unfunded spending commitments, or returning to their damaging austerity policy which has brought our public services to their knees, Rachel Reeves instead chose to use the Budget as a downpayment on the change people voted for in July.

Yesterday marked the start of a new era for our town, our county, and our country; with new foundations being laid to deliver a more resilient economy, stronger public services, and greater prosperity, shared by working people in every community right across Britain.

Jack Abbott is Labour MP for Ipswich