Liz Truss has launched a defence of her mini-budget last year, hitting out at the “woke†left wing and challenging Rishi Sunak to cut taxes at the Autumn Statement.
Giving a speech at the Institute for Government today, the former PM said the supply-side reforms introduced by her administration last October were the “only tool we had at our disposal†to “stave off recessionâ€.
The former PM accused the Conservative Party of “allowing the debate to be framed and led†by the left wing, adding: “Whether it’s the anti-capitalist arguments of the Occupy movement, the woke diversity policies or the statist environmental solutions, the left have been making the running.â€
She continued: “The discussion was about ‘sharing the proceeds of growth’ and talking about happiness and ‘General Well Being’ rather than GDP.
“The only question seemed to be how to distribute the pie, not how to ensure we had a bigger pie to share out.â€
Defending last year’s mini-budget, she said that calling her tax cuts “unfunded†is “not a fair descriptionâ€.
She explained: “It was clear that interest rates were going up and were going to have to go up further. They had been artificially low for too long and were rising across the world.
“Therefore, in order to dampen inflation and stave off a recession, the only tool we had at our disposal was doing all we could to fix the supply side of the economy – to expand its productive capacity. As far as I was concerned this was an urgent task.â€
Truss added: “Some people have described these as ‘unfunded tax cuts’.
“This is not a fair or accurate description. Independent calculations by the CEBR suggest that cutting the higher rate of Income Tax and the ‘tourist tax’ would have increased rather than decreased revenues within five years.
“So quite the opposite of being unfunded, these tax cuts could have increased funding for our public services.
“The CEBR also says that the cost of freezing Corporation Tax was much less than the Treasury suggested.â€
