Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Monday

3 Oct 2022

Steerpike

Watch: Truss defends 45p tax cut… after U-turn

Oh dear. It’s bad enough that Liz Truss has had to U turn on her 45p tax cut plan. But because she did it so late last night – at an emergency summit with Kwasi Kwarteng – it meant that Truss only did it after doing a round of ITV regional interviews, but before the embargo on the interviews. That means we now get to watch a series of TV clips of the Prime Minister defending a policy she has now abandoned. Naturally the ITV journalists have only been too happy to share today clips of these exchanges in which Truss, in full Maggie mode, confidently declares there will be

Andrew Tettenborn

How Liz Truss can wrongfoot Labour over human rights

Liz Truss’s government has taken a deserved pasting in the polls for its slapdash economics, but all is not lost for the Tories: the party is doing a good job of holding the line on some of its more enlightened social policies – not least on ensuring freedom of speech. Justice Secretary Brandon Lewis’s appearance at a fringe event yesterday was understandably overshadowed by other events. But his comments are too important to go unnoticed. Lewis told a Policy Exchange meeting he intended to fashion free speech laws to make clear there was a right to say what one thought, even if it offended others. The Justice Secretary also said that even

John Keiger

France and Britain are brothers in despair

Since Brexit, Britain and France appear to have drifted apart. Leaders from both countries have engaged in an on-off war of words. But despite these political fractures, Britain and France have actually come to resemble each other more closely than ever. It is now difficult to differentiate the economic, financial, social and political conditions that exist on both sides of the Channel. France and Britain face a wave of strikes over the coming months. After a lull over the summer, Gallic workers are once again walking out: public sector and railway worker unions staged a national strike for wage increases last week. Even moderate unions are now threatening mass stoppages if Macron continues his labour reforms. Meanwhile,

James Forsyth

Is Truss still prepared to be unpopular?

The U-turn on the abolition of the 45p tax rate marks the end of the first phase of the Truss premiership. Truss came in declaring that she was prepared to do ‘unpopular’ things, that she was going to smash through the consensus and put economics ahead of political optics. Her retreat on 45p signals the end of that period of government. She has retreated under sustained political criticism of, to use Grant Shapps’s phrase, the ‘tin eared’ nature of the cut. She has bowed to the optics. Now, the U-turn was better than the alternative: a rapidly growing rebellion. It was clear when Jake Berry’s threat to take the whip

Matthew Lynn

Will anyone ever be able to cut the 45p tax rate?

Well, that went well. Kwasi Kwarteng’s decision to axe the 45 per cent top rate of income tax triggered a crash on the financial markets. It then ran into so much opposition from the public and from Conservative MPs fearful for their seats that it had to be scrapped completely. Right now, it seems unlikely that any politician will want to revisit the subject any time in the next two or three millennia. Abolishing Christmas would be less toxic. If they do, however, one point is surely clear: the 45 per cent rate is here to stay. The only way any politician will ever be able to scrap it now is by

Steerpike

Penny’s four-letter jibe at Tory comms

It was Pendemonium last night at the Tory conference as Penny Mordaunt toured the evening circuit, following her recent leadership bid. Adoring fans met her at every turn, with one remarking to Mr S ‘she’s what we could have won!’ At the midnight reception for Conservatives in Communication, dozens swarmed the Leader of the House, rapturously hanging on her every word. And Mordaunt was clearly enjoying the attention, joking to the audience of hacks, lobbyists and spinners: It’s been a long day. What have we learned so far in conference? We’ve learned our policies are great but our comms is shit! That’ll go down well in No. 10. Asked ‘On

Isabel Hardman

Why would Tory MPs trust Truss now?

Most Tory MPs went to bed last night convinced that their party was heading for an almighty showdown over the 45p tax rate. In the bars and parties of the conference in Birmingham, both Conservatives who were loyal to Liz Truss and those who were less-than-loyal were confident of one thing: she wouldn’t fold quickly. ‘She’s got one thing left which is her reputation as someone who doesn’t turn,’ one backbencher said to me. ‘If she loses that then she loses that credit with the public, and my colleagues will stop trusting that they can go on the airwaves and defend what she’s doing.’ They are waking to a big

Katy Balls

Why Truss U-turned on the 45p tax cut

Twenty four hours is a long time in politics. Just yesterday, Liz Truss appeared on the BBC for her official set piece Tory conference interview to declare that she stood by all the measures in her Chancellor’s not-so-mini Budget – including, she said, her controversial plan to cut the top 45p rate of tax for the highest earners. After just one day into conference, Truss has decided to change course. This morning, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng has made a statement reversing plans to scrap the 45p rate of income tax – just 10 days after he announced it. ‘We get it, and we have listened,’ he said. In an interview with

James Kirkup

Things could be about to get worse for Liz Truss

It’s a cliche to report an air of unreality at the Conservative conference here in Birmingham. All party conferences are divorced from political reality, cut off from the rest of the country by steel fences and self-absorption. But this little bubble of self-referential noise feels even further away from normality than usual. Safe behind the fences and still, just about, comfortable in the familiar company of their colleagues and contacts, conference-goers (Tories and non-Tory visitors alike) risk failing to grasp just how much trouble the party, the government, and the country, are in. Start with talk of a fresh austerity programme, trimming between £20 billion and £40 billion a year

Sunday

2 Oct 2022

Isabel Hardman

Is levelling up dead?

Does Liz Truss really believe in levelling up? She doesn’t talk about it that much, and it wasn’t really a major feature of the ‘fiscal event’ recently (though given the way that’s gone, this might not be a bad thing). This evening Levelling Up Minister Dehenna Davison insisted that it really was still a thing. She told a Tory ‘fringe’* event that she didn’t understand why people were questioning its longevity, saying: Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen this emerging narrative that the government is dropping levelling up, isn’t having it anywhere near as much of a priority, and I honestly have no idea where that has come from,

Steerpike

Kemi attacks mass immigration proposals

To the Think Tent, home of the IEA and Taxpayers’ Alliance. Who would the free market thinkers be cheering this year, now that their heroine is running the country? To no one’s surprise, Kemi Badenoch was the star speaker, following her impressive leadership bid earlier this summer. Some wags suggest that Kemi’s campaign never actually ended, with the Tory rising star keen to boost her credentials as a right-wing tonic to the soggy centrist ails of recent years. And the newly appointed Trade Secretary did little to dispel such talk, with a crowd-pleasing speech that contained a pointed critique on the idea of using increasing immigration numbers to boost GDP.

James Forsyth

Why Kwarteng’s next fiscal event will have to be brought forward

In a tetchy performance on The Andrew Neil Show, Tory party chair Jake Berry repeatedly insisted that everyone would have to wait until the Chancellor’s unveiling of his fiscal plan on 23 November to find out whether or not there would be spending cuts and when the government believes it will hit its 2.5 per cent growth target. Berry’s performance, which involved repeatedly trying to answer a different question to the one he was asked, made it even harder to believe that this line can hold. If every minister interviewed for the next six weeks sounded like Berry did just now, then it would be a disaster for the government. The sensible

Nick Cohen

The silence that reveals everything about Liz Truss

The moorings that tie the rulers to the ruled are breaking in the UK. You can hear them snapping during the Prime Minister’s silences. On Sunday morning, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg asked Liz Truss a question any democratic leader should be able to answer. Truss and her Chancellor’s folly had sent yields on ten-year guilts up to 4.3 per cent. It had forced the Bank of England to announce an emergency £65 billion bond-buying programme. It had threatened pensions and the finances of mortgage holders. ‘How many people voted for your plan?’ asked Kuenssberg. Silence. A silence long enough for viewers to believe that concerns of democratic legitimacy had not

Steerpike

George Osborne: It’s ‘touch and go’ if Kwasi Kwarteng survives

George Osborne knows a thing or two about an omnishambles Budget. Having hiked taxes on pasties back in 2012, the then-chancellor was forced into a humiliating u-turn. So far, his successor Kwasi Kwarteng is holding his ground over his ‘mini Budget’. But how long can that last? Osborne’s verdict is that it might not be long before we get an answer to that question. ‘I think I underestimated the ability of the government to blow itself up in its first few weeks of office’ Speaking on the Andrew Neil show on Channel 4, Osborne said it is now ‘touch and go whether the Chancellor can survive’ after the catastrophic fallout from his unfunded tax

Katy Balls

‘I don’t think they can win’: Tories mull electoral doom

Conservative party conference in Birmingham has got off to a strange start. MPs and activists aren’t in open revolt but few have much that is positive to say about the situation the Tory government finds itself in. As one long-time activist put it to me on arrival: ‘I have been voting for the Conservatives for over two decades but now I’m not sure I can’ Truss’s problems are twofold With a string of polls suggesting that the party would face electoral annihilation were an election held tomorrow, Liz Truss’s honeymoon is well and truly over. One particularly downbeat fringe event took place this afternoon, titled: ‘Can the Tories win the

James Forsyth

Even Liz Truss’s closest allies are nervous

There is a slightly odd atmosphere at Tory conference in Birmingham. Those who should be striding around triumphantly are instead rather nervous. One of Liz Truss’s closest ideological allies was quick to stress to me that while they might have shaped the thrust of the new Prime Minister’s ideas, they weren’t responsible for their execution in the Budget by any other name. Strikingly, the abolition of the 45p rate of tax on the highest earners has very few friends. Even those who you would expect to laud the measure are at pains to say that they wouldn’t have done it now. Meanwhile, Michael Gove is touring the conference fringes making the case against

James Heale

Did Gove just torpedo Truss?

14 min listen

Michael Gove this morning said that Liz Truss’s plans to scrap the top 45 per cent tax rate are a ‘display of the wrong values’. It comes as Jake Berry, the Tory party chairman, confirmed that MPs who vote against the budget would lose the Conservative whip. Has Gove just ruined Truss’s conference? James Heale speaks to Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls. Produced by Max Jeffery.

Coffee House

Full list: Tories against the 45p tax cut

It’s day one of Tory conference and already the drumbeat of rebellion is filling the air. There was much to digest in last week’s mini-Budget but the measure that has attracted the most attention was the eye-catching plan to cut the top rate of tax from 45p to 40p. This morning Michael Gove attacked the measure on Laura Kuenssberg’s show as a ‘display of the wrong values’ but he’s far from alone in having doubts. Below is the The Spectator’s running tally of the Tory MPs who have gone public and voiced their concerns. James Cartlidge ‘Cutting tax for top earners while reducing benefits in a cost of living crisis

Katy Balls

Gove torpedoes Truss’s conference

Liz Truss’s supporters had hoped this year’s Conservative party conference would mark a moment of triumph for the new leader. Instead it opened with her arch-nemesis lobbing a hand grenade in her direction. Step forward, Michael Gove. Appearing on a panel on Laura Kuenssberg’s show this morning, Gove voiced his concerns with Truss’s economic plan which has spooked the markets. He criticised ‘the sheer risk of using borrowed money to fund tax cuts’ as well as the the decision to cut the 45p rate for top earners as ‘a display of the wrong values’. When pressed on whether that meant he would not vote for the measures, Gove replied: So,

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Truss defends her mini Budget

Liz Truss: ‘We should have laid the ground better’ Liz Truss joined Laura Kuenssberg in Birmingham as the Conservative party conference kicks off. In more ordinary times, a new leader might expect to bask in the warm glow of their recent election. However, there is no doubt that Liz Truss can expect considerable scrutiny this week, not least with the Conservatives now a distant second to Labour in the opinion polls. Unsurprisingly, the government’s mini Budget was at the top of the agenda, and Truss expressed some remorse at how the ambitious financial package had spooked the markets: Truss: I am committed to abolishing the 45p tax rate Truss confirmed she