The Chancellor has awoken to a slew of bad headlines today following his decision to row back on a 2015 Tory manifesto pledge and raise National Insurance for the self-employed. In an attempt at some damage limitation, Philip Hammond has been doing the usual post-Budget media rounds this morning.
Alas his interview with Sky News didn’t go quite to plan. Challenged repeatedly on the broken Tory manifesto pledge, an uncomfortable Hammond was accused of being a liar:
Sky News: Were you lying when you stood on that vote, was the manifesto wrong — or have you just decided to renege on it?
PH: The manifesto presented a package of measures and we implemented those measures through legislation straight after the general election. And we explained at the time how we intended to do that, nobody raised any objections, nobody tabled any amendments in Parliament. The Labour party said the Conservative party had delivered on the manifesto pledge on national insurance.
So this has come up really for the first time, nobody raised an issue before about the fact that this applied to Class 1 NI contributions.
Given that Hammond himself admits that the policy will not raise ‘huge amounts’, Mr S suspects the Chancellor will now be wondering why his SpAds failed to raise an issue over the measure — which is turning out to be very problematic indeed.
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