LIZ Truss has refused to apologise for the impact of her disastrous mini-budget and claimed that interest and mortgage rates would have “gone up anyway”.
The former Tory prime minister, who only served 49 days in office, criticised the media, the “political and economic establishment” and others for the state of the economy, and defended the mini-budget.
Truss also accused a journalist who said she had “crashed the economy” of using a Labour attack line, during questions following her speech to the Institute for Government on Monday.
Her speech came a year after the £45 billion worth of tax cuts outlined by her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng sparked an economic crisis.
She opened her address by stating she was having a “rather more relaxing” September than the previous year, a move condemned by SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn who said it showed “they’re laughing at us”.
But Truss doubled down on her decisions and said that “unfortunately” many of her policies were not implemented as she was forced to resign after a huge public backlash.
She urged the UK Government to cut taxes, shrink welfare spending and raise the retirement age, while declining to express regret about the consequences of the doomed economic plan that she insisted would have only made a “marginal difference” to the deficit.
Asked by Bloomberg political editor Kitty Donaldson if she had “no sense of humility” or apology to make over the increase in mortgage rates imposed on the British public, Truss said: “The point I made earlier is that those rates were going up anyway.”
The former prime minister instead claimed the “political failure” was not communicating that inflation and mortage rates had been “artificially too low for too long”.
“In fact, rates have gone higher since the mini-budget than they were during the time of the mini-budget and this has not been a point reflect by the media at all,” she claimed.
“I mean I admit that the communication wasn’t as good as I would want it to be, we were in a fairly unusual situation of a leadership election, a period of hiatus, very sadly the late Queen died, so there were difficult circumstances.”
Truss claimed that while she “wished things had turned out differently” the tax cuts she introduced were not “major”.
“They would have made a fairly marginal difference,” she said.
“In fact the level of the deficit, but what they were is about showing a new direction for Britain, and that's what I wanted to do.”
Both Truss and Kwarteng (below) both left office after the fallout from the mini-budget last year, leading Rishi Sunak to take over the job of Prime Minister and Jeremy Hunt to fill the position of Chancellor.
Truss said her government felt pressured by the Bank of England into committing to a “counterproductive” U-turn on her tax plans. Truss admitted she had never heard of the liability driven investment (LDI) pension funds that were hit by her mini-budget until after the economic crisis struck.
“On the LDIs, there clearly wasn’t enough information,” she said.
“So the fact that we were completely blindsided by LDIs … I literally hadn’t heard of what an LDI was until the following Monday, which was quite a large part of what happened in the market.”
The former Tory prime minister also criticised the BBC and other media organisations for failing to analyse the crisis and said there wasn’t an “effective critique” of the Bank of England.
She told the event that she felt politicians were given a tougher time, particularly on the BBC, than those in charge of institutions, such as the bank.
In a jibe at civil servants, Truss also claimed there was a “lot of institutional bureaucracy in the way” of delivering on what she believed “people had voted for”.
After one of the numerous plugs for her upcoming book, Truss added: “And even during the leadership election campaign, and maybe this did not make me popular with the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) and the Bank of England, I pointed out that there was an orthodoxy in Britain about economic policy and I tried to challenge that orthodoxy.
“And I didn’t find a massive level of support, frankly, from those institutions.”
Sunak (above) reportedly did not watch his predecessor’s speech, but Downing Street defended his stewardship of the economy.
The PM’s official spokesman said both Hunt and Sunak “are committed to growth”.
During the event, Truss twice dodged questions about whether she will withdraw her resignation honours, as Labour called on the Prime Minister to block her list.
