Hunt’s Autumn Statement was surprisingly upbeat

Jeremy Hunt has just finished the most upbeat economic statement we’ve heard in a good while – certainly since the one from Kwasi Kwarteng that plunged the UK into economic turmoil. Today, the Chancellor was keen to impress upon MPs that the swathe of tax cuts he was announcing could only happen because of the repair job he and Rishi Sunak had carried out following the Truss premiership. There was a lot of self-congratulation: Hunt told the House of Commons that this was an ‘autumn statement for a country that has turned a corner, an autumn statement for growth’. The Tories want voters, somehow, to start thinking that they are the party managing to clear things up and make things less expensive.

The key announcements were what Hunt described as ‘the biggest business tax cuts in modern British history’ and ‘the largest ever cut to employee and self employed national insurance and the biggest package of tax cuts to be implemented since the 1980s’.