Labour and the Tories plunged into an election spending arms race today as John McDonnell slammed his rival's promise of billions of pounds as a "miserable amount".
The Shadow Chancellor derided Tory plans as a "tragedy" and Chancellor Sajid Javid as a "climate change denier" as he defended his massive new £150bn fund for housing, care homes, hospitals and schools as "common sense".
And speaking ahead of unveiling Labour's campaign bus with Jeremy Corbyn , Mr McDonnell said now was the time to invest - with the twin emergencies of climate and poverty.
The pair gave rival speeches less than an hour apart in Liverpool and Manchester this morning with 35 days left to the general election .
Sajid Javid set out the Tories’ new spending rules - pledging to invest billions more in infrastructure and public services despite criticising Labour for doing just that.
The Chancellor ripped up the party’s fiscal rules and fired the starting gun on a spending arms race ahead of the election.
He claimed that the UK economy would thrive under Boris Johnson ’s Brexit deal - despite the fact the Government’s own forecasts predict the exact opposite.
Independent analysis predicts it would deliver a £100bn hit to GDP, £49bn in lost tax revenue and a £2,000 hit per person.
Yet he tried to have his cake and eat it by also deriding McDonnell as an "anti-vaxxer" - who wanted to abandon the medicine of austerity forced on Brits since 2010.
Hitting back today, John McDonnell blasted the Tory plans and said they were simply not enough money.
“What happened down the road a short while ago in the Chancellor’s speech I think was a bit of a tragedy," he said.
“Because what he did and what he did last night as well, it was almost as though he became a climate change denier.
“Last night in his correspondence with the Bank of England he removed climate change references that had been there previously.
“So in other words he tried to say to the Bank of England climate change doesn’t seem to matter.
"At the same time this morning he’s put forward a miserable amount of investment which basically means we will not meet our climate change target.
“We’re facing an emergency. He seems to deny it…. and he’s putting at risk future generations. That’s unacceptable."
Mr McDonnell faced criticism over his £150bn Social Transformation Fund - a five-year pot which comes on top of £250bn of borrowing already planned over 10 years.
He also did not say whether the plans would be affected if Brexit happens under Labour.
But he said his plans were simply "common" sense, followed on from Gordon Brown and said: "We stand in the best tradition of British socialism".
Praising Mr Brown and other ex-Chancellors he said: "All of them had a shared ambition with us which was to change the world."
He added: "Our scale of investment matches the scale of the emergency we now face - both climate change and social.
"If we didn't do this if we didn't step up to that mark, future generations would never forgive us."
And he did not rule out using the cash to push even higher than Labour's target to build 1million homes in five years.
Mr McDonnell also said the £400bn in both funds would not count towards borrowing targets in "fiscal rules" under a Labour government.
He added: “In terms of the levels of borrowing, there’s no shortage at the moment with the low interest rates that we’ve got, there’s no shortage of demand for government bonds across the world.
“The IMF the World Bank and others now say now’s the time to borrow to invest.
“If we don’t do that, we’ll be faced with continued levels of poverty.”
Earlier Mr McDonnell slammed Tory ministers who "think we're stupid" in the speech - and confirmed plans to set up a major Treasury unit in the north of England to spend the £400bn.
"There’s a rumour going round that it will be as close to Anfield as possible," the Liverpool FC fan joked - but didn't reveal where it would be.
Speaking in the city where he grew up, Mr McDonnell said his family was among a tide forced to move south for work when jobs at Liverpool Docks dried up.
And he compared Boris Johnson's rule to the 1980s when Tories said there was "no alternative" but to decline.
He denied he had a "rose-tinted" view of the past. But he said: "The Tories are always the same. In the 80s it was dole queues and sky-high inflation Now it’s zero hours contracts, Universal Credit and foodbanks.
"They treat us all with contempt. They think people are stupid. They think that with Brexit on the agenda, they think we’ll all forget about the last nine years and the prospect of another five years if they get back."
Mr McDonnell used the speech in Liverpool's Invisible Wind Factory - a nightclub dubbed a "cultural theme park" - to pledge to pump £150billion into regions left on their knees by nine years of Tory cuts.
The North will be one area to benefit, with a new Treasury unit moved there to spend the much-needed cash on schools, hospitals, social care and council homes.
Mr McDonnell pledged “an irreversible shift in the centre of gravity” away from London.
He said: “Power is coming home. Back to the people. We can only deliver the real change we need by putting power into the hands of communities of the people who know their local area best.
“Spent over the first five years of our Labour government, the Social Transformation Fund will begin the urgent task of repairing our social fabric that the Tories have torn apart.
“£150billion to replace, upgrade and expand our schools, hospitals, care homes and council houses. To deal with the human emergency which the Tories have created.”
The Mirror understands Labour plans to put around half of the money into housing with the rest on schools, hospitals and other key public infrastructure.
Spending in the North has fallen by £6.3billion in real terms – more than any other region of the UK – but has risen by £3.2billion in the South East and South West.
The latest annual State of the North report by the Institute for Public Policy North think tank found the North-South divide in pay, wealth and life expectancy are all growing.
It revealed two million working-age adults and one million children live in poverty in the area. Weekly pay has fallen by £21, or 3.8% in real terms since 2008. It has dropped 3.3% nationally.
Mr McDonnell’s cash pledge comes on top of Labour’s £250billion Green Transformation Fund, already announced, bringing total spending on the projects to £400billion.
The money would also be spent through Local Transformation Funds which would be overseen by nine civil service boards in each of the nine regions of England. Each board would hold a general assembly for the public to ask questions twice a year.
The £150billion pot will be raised through a big rise in borrowing, with the issuing of Government long-dated bonds and spent on capital projects that raise the productive capacity of the economy.
