Kwasi Kwarteng says he feels ‘humility and contrition’ after U-turn on plan to cut 45p income tax rate – live

1. Live news updates: Pound jumps after Kwarteng's U-turn on axing 45p tax rate  Financial Times
2. Government makes major U-turn on plan to abolish 45% top rate of income tax after Tory backlash – live  The Guardian
3. Conservative Party conference live: Liz Truss scraps 45p tax cut in major U-turn  The Telegraph
4. Kwasi Kwarteng ditches 45p tax cut ahead of Tory party conference speech — follow live  The Times
5. Kwarteng abandons 45p tax rate cut after Tory revolt and markets turmoil  The Independent
6. View Full coverage on Google News

TUC accuses Truss of breaking promise not to return to austerity

Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the TUC, has accused Liz Truss of betraying a promise not to return to austerity. Referring to Kwasi Kwarteng’s declaration in his interview on the Today programme that he would not increase departmental budgets to compensate them for the impact of higher-than-expected inflation (see 8.28am), she posted this on Twitter.

In fact, Truss did not clearly promise no return to austerity during the Tory leadership contest. In July she said: “I’m very clear I’m not planning public spending reductions, what I am planning is public service reforms.” But promising not to cut existing spending plans is not the same as promising to increase them in line with inflation, and so in that quote she was only ruling out an actual spending cut, not a real-terms spending cut.

Other comments during her campaign implied that there would be real-terms cuts to departmental spending. This was acknowledged in an IFS briefing which said: “Liz Truss has promised to hold a new spending review, but it is possible that such an exercise could lead to lower, rather than higher, departmental budgets. She is, after all, promising more than £30bn per year of tax cuts.”

Truss also benefited from the fact that the implications of her plans for public spending received relatively little scrutiny during the campaign. During the hustings organised by the Conservative party, members asked very few questions about this, and Truss herself turned down interviews where she would have been subject to intensive scrutiny.

Nguồn bài viết Du học Đồng Thịnh | (+84) 96 993.7773 | (+84) 96 1660.266 | (+44) 020 753 800 87 | info@dongthinh.co.uk