From 8m ago
The new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, is on Sky News this morning discussing his plans for the position.
He says the Liz Truss administration has made “mistakes” and warned there are “difficult decisions ahead”.
He says:
I want to do the right thing for British people.
It’s a big honour to do the job that I’ve been asked to do by the prime minister but I want to be honest with people: we have some very difficult decisions ahead.
The last few weeks have been very tough but the context of course is coming out of a pandemic and a cost-of-living crisis.
And the thing that people want, markets want, the country needs now, is stability. No chancellor can control the markets.
But what I can do is show that we can pay for our tax and spending plans and that is going to need some very difficult decisions on both spending and tax.
He adds:
There were mistakes. It was a mistake when we’re going to be asking for difficult decisions across the board on tax and spending to cut the rate of tax paid by the very wealthiest.
It was a mistake to fly blind and to do these forecasts without giving people the confidence of the Office of Budget Responsibility saying that the sums add up.
The prime minister’s recognised that, that’s why I’m here.
Keir Starmer has called for a general election now regardless of whether Liz Truss is ousted by the Conservatives, saying the government is “completely at the end of the road” and Labour is preparing for power.
In an interview with the Guardian, the Labour leader said Truss had driven the economy “into a wall” while “trashing our institutions”, and changing the prime minister again without allowing the country to vote would not be acceptable.
However, Starmer said he had told his shadow cabinet not to be complacent about the party’s 30 points-plus poll lead, and that Labour was “not going to sit back” but fight for every vote.
He said people were “looking to Labour for the answers to the next election” and the party needed to carry on putting in the work to win the contest, rather than assuming the government’s incompetence would cause the Tories to lose.
“For the good of the country we need a general election.”
Read the full interview here:
Good morning. Liz Truss has been prime minister for 39 days but her political future remains far from certain following a 24 hours in which she sacked Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor, appointed Jeremy Hunt as his replacement and abandoned a flagship policy.
The announcement that corporation tax will rise next year (as planned by the previous government) rather than remain at 19% was intended to calm the markets following weeks of turmoil brought on by the mini-budget. Yet experts warn the new chancellor may still need to find ?40bn in spending cuts to make the prime minister’s current policies viable.
As my colleagues report, Truss said said staying in her position as prime minister would help to “reassure the markets of our financial discipline”, but the cost of government borrowing rose and the pound fell following her press conference announcing the changes.
Senior Conservative MPs are plotting how to remove her from office, with some mulling whether to publicly call for her to resign in the coming days. One former cabinet minister said they thought it was “50/50 whether she will make it till Christmas”, adding: “If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of her now then I would, but the problem is the mechanism.”
Labour, meanwhile, is calling for a general election whether Truss stays or goes. Speaking to the Guardian, the party’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer, said:
Change in personnel at the top of the Tory party is not the change we need. We need a change of government.
We are in the absurd situation where we are on the third, fourth prime minister in six years and within weeks we have a got a prime minister who has the worst reputational ratings of any prime minister pretty well in history.
Their party is completely exhausted and clapped out. It has got no ideas, it can’t face the future and it has left the UK in a defensive crouch where we are not facing the challenges of the future because we haven’t got a government that could lead us to the future.
For the good of the country we need a general election.
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