UK on 'highway to hell' after 'most unfair' budget in decades, says Labour's Jon Ashworth

Labour leader Jonathan Ashworth today accused the Tories of putting Britain on 'the highway to hell', despite pledging to help the over-50s return to the work.

The Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary has claimed the Government is 'writing off' hundreds of thousands of unemployed older people - and pledged to help them find jobs.

He feared a return to the lineups of the 1980s as the economy plunged into recession.

Speaking exclusively to the Mirror at Labor conference in Liverpool, he said: "I remember queuing at the unemployment office in the 80s with my dad.

"I remember the haunted look on people's faces - men who thought they were in their prime.

"For us, unemployment can never be a price to pay - it breeds despair, it excludes from society, it leads to despair.

“Yet right now the Tories are turning their backs on a generation that doesn’t have a job but wants help – just like they did in the 80s when they wrote them off ."

Jonathan Ashworth meeting a cyclist in Liverpool earlier today (

Picture:

Ian Vogler/Daily Mirror)

He thinks Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng's mini-budget last week - which scrapped the cap on bankers' bonuses and gave 660,000 people wearing trousers over £150,000 a year an average tax cut £10,000 - will fuel poverty and increase unemployment and inequality.

"I went for a run this morning listening to AC/DC - Highway to Hell. I thought, 'This is definitely where we're going after Friday's Tory budget,'" he said.< /p>

Marking the Chancellor's measures as the "most divisive, unfair and unjust Tory budget in living memory", he fumed: "All it's going to do is increase poverty and despair.

"It's staggering and it reveals the true colors of this Conservative Party and how right wing they are now, that they think the answer to growing the economy - to fixing their 12 year failed growth - is to lavish deep tax cuts on the wealthy.

"Here in Liverpool this week, you will see Labor speaking out for Britain saying we are on the side of ordinary working people."