Hammond calls Labour 'political version of Jurassic Park'
The Chancellor attacks Labour in a speech at the Tory conference, but the Opposition says his address was a waste of breath.
Monday 2 October 2017 16:16, UK
Philip Hammond has laid down the gauntlet to Jeremy Corbyn, calling on the Labour leader to "bring it on".
The Chancellor claimed Mr Corbyn's "Marxist policies" would "inevitably lead us back to where Britain was in the late 1970s".
But shadow chancellor John McDonnell hit back, saying his opposite number's speech was a waste of everyone's time because he is "clinging to an old economic model that fails the many".
The Confederation of British Industry was also unimpressed, with Director-General Carolyn Fairbairn labelling Mr Hammond's address "strong on diagnosis, but weak on action".
Mr Hammond told the Conservative party conference in Manchester that the Opposition had become "a party taken hostage by a clique of hard-left extremist infiltrators, people who despise Britain's values and talk down our country".
Labour's recent conference in Brighton had shown a "resolutely negative agenda of failed ideas dredged up from a bygone era, threatening not only our economic progress but our freedom as well", the Chancellor claimed.
Branding the party "a political version of Jurassic Park", he told delegates: "They say politics is about the clash of ideas, so we say to Corbyn: bring it on.
"Let them put their arguments, let them make their case, we will take them on and we will defeat them."
Despite heavily criticising Labour, Mr Hammond said the Government needed to tackle the problem of low pay and listen to the concerns of young voters, many who are acknowledged to have turned to Mr Corbyn's party.
In a bid to "hear the concerns of a generation that feels excluded from the opportunities their parents enjoyed", Mr Hammond confirmed plans to invest £10bn in the Help To Buy scheme as well as £400m to improve transport infrastructure in the North of England.
Mr Hammond said the solutions on offer from the "wicked and cynical" Labour leader were "superficially simple".
And he said the argument advanced at Labour's Brighton gathering - that the capitalist economic model which has been at the forefront of British politics since the days of Margaret Thatcher has failed - was an opportunity for the Tories.
The free market economy is still "the best system yet designed for making people steadily better off", Mr Hammond said, adding the British economy remained "fundamentally strong".
Brexit was an "immediate challenge" to this, the Chancellor continued.
"The process of negotiating our exit from the EU has created uncertainty, so investment has slowed as businesses wait for clarity," he said.
"So before we can reap the benefits of our strong economic fundamentals and the investment we are making in the future, we must remove this uncertainty."
In a remark viewed as a rebuke of some of his more gung-ho colleagues around the Cabinet table, he said members of Theresa May's top team should not "downplay the difficulties nor underestimate the complexities" of exiting the EU, "one of the most challenging tasks ever undertaken by a peacetime government".