Keir Starmer said he’d protect pensioners, then he cruelly snatched away the winter fuel allowance. He said he’d look after farmers, then he brought in the Family Farms Tax.

The Labour manifesto even said they wouldn’t raise taxes on working people. But at the budget last year, the Chancellor levelled a punishing jobs tax on businesses, councils, even schools and nursing homes.

The result is that businesses are culling staff and putting up prices to cope with Labour’s tax rises. Unemployment has risen nearly every month since Labour entered government, and inflation has almost doubled from what they inherited from the Conservatives.

The Prime Minister is now stuck in a doom loop that is making the cost of living worse for families across Britain. He is also operating entirely at the mercy of his left-wing backbench MPs. They didn’t let him cut the ballooning welfare bill, and they’re not going to let him cut other government spending.

It all adds up to one thing: tax rises are coming in the budget this autumn. The Government knows this, but they won’t be honest about it.

Last year, Rachel Reeves told MPs that she would unfreeze personal allowance thresholds because extending them would “hurt working people”. Now ministers can’t even say if this is still the Government’s policy.

Another freeze in tax thresholds wouldn’t only drag millions of working people into paying higher tax rates, it also risks dragging pensioners into paying tax on their state pensions for the very first time. Conservatives warned at the last election that pensioners would face a retirement tax under Labour, now it looks like we were right.

Keir Starmer could easily rule this out. But when I offered him that opportunity at Prime Minister’s Questions this week, he did what he always does and refused to answer.

The simple truth is we can’t just keep increasing taxes. Record tax levels are already making life too hard for people. Most pensioners are on fixed incomes – they deserve dignity in retirement not more uncertainty over their finances. Meanwhile businesses are closing and wealth creators are leaving the country in record numbers.

Britain needs to be a place that values the makers – the person who starts a small business and creates new jobs, as well as those who work hard to deliver our public services. We need to encourage investment in jobs and growth, not tax and suffocate it.

We also need real welfare reform: to help takers to become makers. This is something Labour are now clearly incapable of doing.

And we need a government that stops borrowing more and more, piling billions onto the national debt and leaving a toxic legacy for the next generation.

Only the Conservatives are talking seriously about doing these things. Labour just want to tax and borrow more. Reform are the same but with gimmicks and slogans.

People want to be told the truth, not given more false promises. Under my leadership, that is what the Conservative Party now stands for.

Kemi Badenoch is leader of the Conservative Party