Jeremy Hunt: Liz Truss economic plans were ‘good thing to aim for’
Jeremy Hunt: Liz Truss economic plans were ‘good thing to aim for’
Exclusive: Leaked recordings reveal chancellor ‘trying to achieve some of the same things’ as former prime minister
'good thing to aim for'
Of course it is the end goal of the ultra wealthy to reduce their own tax burden and say it is good for the country.
Interpreting this sympathetically for a moment: Her aim was to give a much-needed boost to economic growth. That's also Labour's 'aim', per their manifesto. It wasn't a bad objective, but she deployed a terrible strategy and no discernible tactics.
That said, I fully expect - indeed, as a member of the Labour party, demand - that Labour will interpret this unsympathetically and run as many attack ads as possible saying 'JEREMY HUNT EXPRESSES UNCONDITIONAL LOVE FOR LIZ TRUSS'. After all, the Tories won't shut up about Starmer supporting Corbyn to be PM, and he never even was PM.
I would give her a bit more sympathy if she'd had the guts to let the OBR (or literally anyone at all) take a look at her budget proposal. If she legitimately thought that it would work, then there would be no reason to hide them from public scrutiny. But she did hide them from public scrutiny, which means she had some inkling that they would not be reviewed favorably.
It also doesn't help that she's shown absolutely no remorse feelings of responsibility over the fact that she crashed the economy, but as per the Tory handbook, it's always somebody else's fault.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Jeremy Hunt said Liz Truss’s economic ambitions were a “good thing to aim for” and her disastrous mini-budget hadn’t left an impact on the economy, according to two leaked recordings obtained by the Guardian.
In a sign of desperation the chancellor, who is fighting to hold on to his Surrey seat, separately told a local hustings event: “I speak tonight as Jeremy Hunt”, adding: “I’m not always going to take the government line.”
He reversed a number of the key measures in the budget in order to stabilise the markets, leading to him being described as the country’s de facto prime minister, and Truss was forced out 10 days later on 20 October 2022.
Speaking at a meeting of the Oxford University Conservatives on 9 May, Hunt was asked about his own pledges on low tax made in his leadership campaign and Truss’s claims to have been blocked by the civil service and other economic institutions, and whether he faced “the same kind of opposition”.
The recordings emerged as the chancellor came under fire for comments in a newsletter to constituents in which he wrote that tax cuts in the Conservative manifesto would be funded by savings from “an enormous back-to-work programme (which I announced in the autumn statement last year)”.
“The measures to achieve £12bn in welfare savings had not been announced at the time of the last OBR forecast so the entire premise of his [Starmer’s] latest press conference is redundant,” a spokesperson said.
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