Liz Truss has launched a defence of her mini-budget last year, hitting out at the "woke" left-wing
PA
The former prime minister accused the Conservative Party of "allowing the debate to be framed and led" by the left-wing
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Liz Truss has launched an attack on Sir Keir Starmer, accusing him of planning to :copy and paste Biden’s policies onto the UK statute book"
Hitting out at "Bidenomics", Truss said: "Soon the U.S. will spend more money financing its debt than it spends on its entire defence budget."
She added: "Despite the fact that it is clear that the West cannot keep borrowing forever, the Labour Party have said they essentially want to copy and paste Biden’s policies onto the UK statute book.
"They’re calling their version of Bidenomics, ‘securonomics’ and the ‘Green Prosperity Plan’.
"It’s not a Green Prosperity Plan, it’s a Green De-Growth plan – just a new name for the failed subsidies and high taxes of the past.”
She also launched a defence of last-year's mini-budget, 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 recession".
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."
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.”
Defending last year's mini-budget, she said that calling her tax cuts "unfunded" is "not a fair description".
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.”
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."
As Prime Minister, Truss introduced a swathe of tax cuts, which spooked the markets and ultimately led to her resignation as Prime Minister.
She was forced to resign before they were implemented. Truss said that the negative reaction came from the "political and economic establishment", claiming that her policies "simply aren't fashionable on the London dinner party circuit".
Hitting out at those who forced her out, she said: "They weren’t implemented because there was a reaction from the political and economic establishment which fed into the markets – markets that were already destabilised by the Bank of England’s slowness to hike interest rates and the failure to regulate LDIs.
"I was effectively forced into a policy reversal under the threat of a UK meltdown."
She added: “Supply-side economics and a belief that the size of the state needs to be reduced – are ideas that no longer command widespread support or understanding.
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"The anti-growth coalition is now a powerful force comprising the economic and political elite, corporatists, parts of the media and even a section of the Conservative parliamentary party.
"The policies I advocate simply aren’t fashionable on the London dinner party circuit.”
