The video will start in 8 Cancel

What is really going on in politics? Get our daily email briefing straight to your inbox Sign up Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

Labour's Angela Eagle wound up the opposition response to George Osborne's shambolic Budget with a stinging assault on the Chancellor.

She slammed the Budget as “botched”, and said it had unravelled in just a few short days.

It came at the end of a long day of debate on the Budget, which saw the Chancellor forced to face the music from MPs as his financial statement lay in tatters.

Ms Eagle said: “It was a budget prepared for a Chancellor looking to further his own interests, and not the national interest.”

The shadow First Secretary suggested the motivation behind the Budget was Osborne’s ambition to replace David Cameron in Number 10, and the tax cuts for the rich were to curry favour with his own side.

“Omnishambles just doesn’t do it justice”, said Ms Eagle, noting that what was supposed to be a “safety first” budget had only served to tear the cabinet apart.

Here's Angela Eagle's scorching speech in full

Mr Speaker

Last Wednesday the Chancellor stood at that despatch box and delivered what he farcically claimed was: "a budget for the next generation."

What we actually got was a botched budget

A Budget which has disastrously unravelled in just a few days

It was a budget created by a Chancellor far more concerned with advancing his own interests than advancing the national interest.

We all knew that this was a budget which had to be seen through the lens of the Chancellors' own long cherished ambition to become leader of the Tory Party and Prime Minister.

We all knew that the chief interest the Chancellor was promoting, was his own.

So in an effort to curry favour with his own side he announced increases in tax thresholds and cuts to capital gains taxes. And he decided that cuts to disability benefits should pay for it.

Mr Speaker

He has presented a catastrophic Budget.

Omnishambles doesn't really seem to do it justice.

The Prime Minister had ordered him to produce a safety first budget.

Instead he has succeeded in producing a Budget which has torn the Cabinet apart.

Today we see a Chancellor at bay

On the run from attacks in his own party

And he's completely lost control of his own budget.

He's now so weakened he's accepting amendments on the tampon tax & solar panels because he knows he'd lose the votes and he daren't let that happen.

And he's had to reappear in the Chamber today to explain where it all went wrong.

It took less than twenty four hours before his triumph of Wednesday tuned into chaos at the weekend.

We have seen a Government in complete and utter disarray and a Chancellor who has only succeeded in shredding his own reputation.

Today we see the utter collapse of his authority

(Image: PA)

His popularity has halved since the election

And two thirds of people who voted conservative last May don't think he's up to the job of being prime minister.

His budget was rightly savaged as ‘deeply unfair’ – and that was by his own Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

Read more: Waiting for Universal Credit nearly ruined our lives

Backbench outrage grew as they realised that the huge cuts to disability support were being used to fund a tax giveaway for the well off.

We had "panic Friday" as the Prime Minister realised his own party was in revolt and ordered a hasty retreat on the Chancellors' biggest revenue raiser in the Red Book - £4.4 billion of indefensible cuts to people with disabilities.

Then a dramatic Cabinet resignation by the Work and Pensions Secretary who had reached the end of his tether.

On Manic Monday the cowardly Chancellor went missing sending out his hapless junior, the Financial Secretary to cover for him.

The Former Work & Pensions Secretary made clear his opposition in his devastating resignation letter when he said that cuts to disability benefits were:

"not defensible in the way they were placed within a Budget that benefits higher earning taxpayers"

But that was this Chancellors' choice.

The Rt Hon Member for Chingford & Woodford Green called the disability cuts the Chancellor presented last week as "morally indefensible"

(Image: Reuters)

The former work & pensions secretary has questioned the entire moral basis of the last 6 years of Conservative government. And weak assertions from the benches opposite that they are really really compassionate are revealed for what they really really are - hollow nonsense.

The former work and pensions secretary was also clear that he thought the Chancellor's welfare cap was unsustainable and he questioned the motives of his erstwhile Cabinet colleagues slamming this 'indefensible' budget he said:

"They are losing sight of the direction of travel they should be in. It is in danger of drifting in a direction that divides society rather than unites it, and that I think is unfair.”

It is still unclear in what form this Budget statement will survive. It now contains an abandoned £4.4 Billion disability benefit cut and an unspecified £3.5 Billion cut in public expenditure.

This is a Budget which continues to disintegrate before our very eyes.

(Image: Phil Harris/Daily Mirror)

Mr Speaker

This chancellor has given us a budget which is an economic failure, a moral failure and a political failure.

The OBR forecast accompanying the Budget formed a sharply deteriorating backdrop caused mainly by his own failures at home.

Productivity - revised down and down.

Growth - revised down and down.

Earnings revised down and are still lower in real terms than when the Chancellor took office.

And it’s the same for business investment; downgraded by two thirds this year alone.

But this is not really that forecast that most concerns this Chancellor. Mr Speaker, I don’t know if you are a betting man but over the weekend the odds on the Chancellor moving next door to Number 10 have slipped from a healthy 2/1 to a distant 4/1.

He's on the slide and fast.

This is a Chancellor who has an astonishing record of missing his own targets.

He promised to protect our triple A credit rating. He has failed.

He said he would eliminate the deficit by 2015. He has failed.

In his 2012 Budget he set out a target to double UK exports to £1 trillion by 2020. He has failed.

Admitting he will miss it by £357 billion.

In his last Budget the Chancellor established three targets he wished to be judged by in this Parliament.

First, he promised to keep social security spending below an arbitrary cap he imposed on himself.

He has - by his own admission failed and will fail every year of this Parliament. And that was even before he was forced to row back on the cuts to PIP.

Second, he promised to reduce debt as a percentage of GDP in every year. He will fail by the end of the month to meet his target and he only met it last year by flogging off public assets like bits of the Royal Mail.

Third, he has promised to have an overall surplus by 2020.

And that rule is now dangling by the thinnest of threads.

The red book shows that he only hangs on to meeting his economically pointless surplus rule by a series of tricks the joker would've been proud of.

And a promise to cut borrowing by an unprecedented £32billion in a pre election year.

Mr Speaker

These are fiscal gymnastics which would embarrass the dodgiest accountant.

It doesn't take a genius to see that this amounts to an economic plan which has lost all credibility in the country as he loses credibility in his own Party.

This Budget is also a moral failure.

(Image: PA)

It is a Budget with unfairness at its very heart from a Chancellor who is making the wrong decisions for our Country.

There are tax breaks for the better off

And to those who can afford to save huge amounts in tax free Isas

These are to be paid for by even greater cuts for the poorest and most vulnerable who have already been hit hard by his policies in the last six years.

Since 2010:

Over 1 million people have been forced to go to foodbanks and over 1 milllion benefit claimants have been sanctioned - often for utterly trivial reasons.

Dying people have been found fit to work, one woman in a coma was found fit to work. People have committed suicide.

Homelessness has soared, the bedroom tax has caused untold misery.

And the Chancellor has talked about workers and shirkers stigmatising all benefit claimants including those with disabilities. This has led to a discernible increase in hate crimes against them.

I hope the Chancellor is proud of that record. But it is clear that this is not and can never be called 'compassionate Conservatism'

Mr Speaker

This is a budget which planned to eliminate the deficit on the backs of the poor and some of the most vulnerable in our society.

The distributional analysis is as clear as it is stark.

The Poorest fifth will lose an average of £550 in 2020, while the richest fifth will gain £250

80% of the gains from the income tax changes go to the top half of the income distribution.

As the former Work and Pensions Secretary said of the disability benefit cuts on Sunday:

"It looks like we see benefits as a pot of money to cut because they don’t vote for us.”

None of this is morally justifiable.

Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now

Never again will this Government be able to claim that, 'we're all in this together.

Never again will they be able to don the mantle of 'compassionate Conservative' with any shred of credibility.

As well as an economic and a moral failure this budget is also a political failure.

This is a Chancellor who has mishandled tax credit cuts.

Pushed and lost on Sunday trading.

And he has now mishandled disability benefit cuts too.

He has made a pointless fetish out of running a surplus and still ended up with an £8 Billion hole in his budget arithmetic today.

This is a Chancellor who has lost control of his budget and lost control of his leadership hopes.

This is the Omnishambles Chancellor who has produced an immoral budget which is disintegrating before our eyes.