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Daily Record
Politics
Peter Davidson

Jeremy Hunt to deliver huge emergency statement today amid economic turmoil

Jeremy Hunt will set out billions of pounds of savings to stabilise the public finances in an emergency statement later today.

The Treasury said the move - following talks over the weekend between the new Chancellor and Prime Minister Liz Truss - was designed to "ensure sustainable public finances underpin economic growth".

Following his statement, Hunt will address the House of Commons later ahead of the publication of his full medium term fiscal plan on October 31. The move will be seen as an attempt to reassure the financial markets after weeks of turmoil in the wake of former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng 's £45 billion mini-budget tax giveaway.

Following his surprise appointment on Friday, Hunt effectively tore up Truss and Kwarteng's previous economic strategy to cut taxes in an attempt to boost growth.

Instead, he warned that taxes would have to go up while spending would rise less quickly than had previously been planned. Among the measures announced by Kwarteng expected to be ditched are his promise to bring forward a 1p cut in the basic rate of income tax to April.

The measures come as Truss continues to fight to hold on to her leadership, with three Conservative MPs already breaking ranks to call on her to go.

Crispin Blunt, Andrew Bridgen and Jamie Wallis all called on the Prime Minister to quit on Sunday, while other senior figures within the parliamentary party expressed deep unease with Truss's leadership but stopped short of calling for her to go.

Blunt was the first MP to demand her exit, telling Channel 4's Andrew Neil Show on Sunday: "I think the game is up and it's now a question as to how the succession is managed."

It came at the end of another extraordinary weekend in British politics, that even saw US President Joe Biden intervene to call Truss's economic vision a "mistake". Hunt, who carried out something of a media blitz on behalf of the Prime Minister over the weekend, insisted that she was still in charge even as he diagnosed the need for a tough package of tax rises and spending cuts in order to steady the UK economy.

Penny Mordaunt also offered the Prime Minister her full support, using a piece in the Telegraph to warn that the UK "needs stability, not a soap opera".

She told colleagues that the "national mission" is clear but said it "needs pragmatism and teamwork". "It needs us to work with the Prime Minister and her new Chancellor. It needs all of us."

Meanwhile, former transport secretary Grant Shapps - who has reportedly been floated as a potential successor to the Prime Minister - wrote in The Times that the party needed to "bin the infighting and ideology" but did not explicitly back Truss.

"We as a party have two years to get ourselves out of this hole, and it's a deep hole when it comes to public confidence," he said.

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