The former Prime Minister hit out after Rachel Reeves attempted to blame HER for Labour’s tax rises
Former Prime Minister Liz Truss delivered a furious response after Chancellor Rachel Reeves attempted to the blame planned new tax hikes on the previous Tory Government. Ms Reeves claimed the so-called mini-budget, delivered when Ms Truss was in Number 10 back in 2022, explained why new tax rises would be needed next month. But the ex-Prime Minister said: “What a load of utter bollocks.”
Speaking to the Daily Expresso news show, Ms Truss said the Chancellor was in “a massive hole of her own making” and was now “the most unpopular Chancellor on record”. She also said that the UK’s financial problems went back 30 years – with people now fleeing the country because living standards had fallen.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves and former Prime Minister Liz Truss (Image: PA)
Ms Truss told host JJ Anisiobi: “Let’s be honest, this country has not been doing well for 30 years. We have not had industry grow, we have had people leaving the country because they can’t make money here, people’s incomes haven’t really risen, if you take account of inflation, for over a decade.
“This is stuff from Labour is desperate. They realise their policies don’t work and that their whole critique of the Tory government is wrong. They said that Tory government didn’t spend enough money but actually the Tory government spent too much money and put up taxes too much.
“Most of our problems go back to the Blair era – making the Bank of England unaccountable, all the regulation Blair put on business, all the public spending Grodon Brown did. And the big failure of the Tories was not to deal with that.
“So Rachel Reeves is in a massive hole of her own making, and she is just casting around for people to blame.
“This is why she is the most unpopular Chancellor on record and Keir Starmer is the most unpopular Prime Minister, because people aren’t stupid.”
Ms Reeves has admitted that tax and spending changes are being considered ahead of her Budget on November 26 – on top of increases to National Insurance announced in her previous Budget last year.
She is widely expected to use the Budget to increase taxes once again, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimating she needs to find £22 billion of tax rises or spending cuts to meet her self-imposed fiscal rule.
But she has attempted to shift the blame, telling a recent Sky News interview: “Austerity, Brexit, and the ongoing impact of Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, all of those things have weighed heavily on the UK economy,”
Speaking on Monday, the Chancellor said: “Growth will be a big part of that Budget story, in a way that, frankly, I think growth has been neglected as a tool of fiscal policy in the last few years.
“But we are looking, of course, at tax and spending to ensure that we both have resilience against future shocks by ensuring we’ve got sufficient headroom, and also just ensuring that those fiscal rules are adhered to.”
