Afternoon summary
Liz Truss is expected to attempt to hold a mini-budget and travel to the leaders’ summit of the UN general assembly in New York next week in the days after the Queen’s funeral.
Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank, has said the government will have to come up with a better version of the energy price guarantee next year because the one announced by Truss last week is “incredibly expensive” and “totally untargeted”. In an interview with Times Radio he said:
It’s extraordinary that they didn’t publish a cost with the announcement. This could actually turn out to be the biggest single fiscal announcement in my lifetime, because this could cost £150bn.
Now, how much it costs in the end is, of course, enormously uncertain, because it depends on what happens to gas prices going forward. And it depends on how long this policy is in place.
One of the things that I really hope is that they’ve got teams of people working next year on thinking of something better for next winter because whilst this might be necessary this year, it’s incredibly expensive.
It’s totally untargeted. It gives large amounts of money to people who don’t need it, and it means that we’re not facing the price signal that there is less gas out there. And yet we’re being massively subsidised to use gas. So if it’s possible to come up with something better, which is better targeted, then we really ought to be doing it.
Simon Case is expected to keep his job as cabinet secretary under Liz Truss after previously having been expected to be ousted.
The EU has offered to reduce checks on goods crossing the Irish Sea into Northern Ireland to a “couple of lorries a day” in an effort to bring the UK back to the negotiating table in the Brexit dispute.
The King is in St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh where a service is taking place to commemorate the Queen. Later he will be in the Scottish parliament to receive a motion of condolence from MSPs. This morning he spoke to MPs and peers at Westminster, after receiving addresses of condolence from them. There is full coverage on our separate live blog.
Updated
This is from the New Statesman’s Jeremy Cliffe on the politics of the new King. He is commenting on a tweet plugging an interesting pro-Charles article at Middle East Eye by Peter Oborne and Imran Mulla.
A new divide is emerging on the British right between the communitarian perennialism of Charles III & his acolytes and the Hayekian libertarianism of PM Truss & her Tufton Street hinterland. Will be fascinating to see how the two interact. https://t.co/zlwTuxpBRx
— Jeremy Cliffe (@JeremyCliffe) September 12, 2022
