by Prime Minister Liz Truss during a press conference in the Downing Street briefing room, London. Picture date: Friday, October 14, 2022.
Liz Truss has blamed the “powerful economic establishment” for her disastrous time as prime minister.
In her first public comments since being forced to resign from Number 10 after just 49 days, she took aim at a wide range of political opponents and insisted that her plans to boost economic growth through tax cuts were correct.
In a 4,000-word piece for the Sunday Telegraph, Truss pointed the finger at Treasury officials, Joe Biden, the International Monetary Fund, Conservative MPs and the Office for Budget Responsibility for making his job impossible.
Truss’s time in office ended after the economic carnage caused by his chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget, which revealed £45bn worth of unfunded tax cuts.
It caused the value of the pound to plummet, interest rates to skyrocket and the Bank of England to have to bail out the UK pension industry.
While acknowledging that he was not “blameless” for the fiasco, Truss has made it clear that he has no regrets about the economic policies he pursued, criticizing the approach of his successor, Rishi Sunak.
She said: “I still believe that trying to stick to the original political recipe that I fought for in the leadership election was the right thing to do, but the forces against it were too great.
“I don’t claim to be innocent of what happened, but fundamentally I was not given a realistic opportunity to get my policies enacted by a very powerful economic establishment, coupled with a lack of political support.”
In a clear attack on Sunak, she made clear her opposition to the upcoming increase in corporate tax from 19p to 25p a pound, a policy he introduced as chancellor but which she unsuccessfully tried to overturn.
Truss said he wanted to be prime minister to turn things around rather than “manage decline or preside over our country’s slide into stagnation.”
Liz Truss set out her thoughts in an article for the Sunday Telegraph
Meanwhile, it also emerged that Truss, who is expected to make several media appearances next week, he is preparing to make a “hawk” speech on China later this month.
He will address a conference of international politicians in Japan, and his speech will be billed as focusing on Beijing’s threat to Taiwan.
The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), a campaign group seeking to coordinate international pressure on Beijing, is organizing the event. on February 17.
An ally of Truss He said the speech will be “hawkish”, adding: “It is expected to address Sunak’s decision to cast China as a strategic competitor rather than a threat.”
In November, Sunak said the “golden era” of UK-China relations was over, but described the nation as a “systemic challenge” rather than a threat.
