Posted Oct 2, 2022, 2:23 PM
A week after the presentation of her tax plan which sowed panic on the markets, the Prime Minister, Liz Truss, is trying, somehow, to regain control. As the annual Congress of the Conservative Party opens this Sunday in Birmingham, the newcomer to Downing Street defended the massive tax cuts granted by her government, for which the United Kingdom will have to take on more debt, and to higher costs.
“We should have prepared the ground better,” she told the BBC, acknowledging mistakes for the first time. But she once again ruled out amending these measures. “I stick to the tax package we announced and I maintain that we have to announce it quickly, because we have to act,” she added.
The government is criticized for having sidelined the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility), the office in charge of budgetary forecasts, which should have, for an announcement of this magnitude, published new projections of public debt and deficit. Liz Truss replied that the OBR would have taken too long to publish these forecasts.
“It’s not conservative”
The Prime Minister will face this week the members of the party, as well as the members of her parliamentary majority, at least those who have still deigned to go to Congress. Besides Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, the opponent of Liz Truss who had warned about the recklessness of his tax plan, will not go to Birmingham, as will his supporters, such as David Davis or Sajid Javid.
As for the heavyweights who have decided to be present, they do not always go there with the intention of doing him a favor. Michael Gove, a former member of the Johnson government, announced on Sunday that he would vote against these tax measures in the House of Commons. “Borrowing money to finance tax cuts is not conservative,” he said. To drive the point home, he criticized the abolition of the top 45% tax bracket in the midst of a purchasing power crisis, because it reflects “bad values”.
Punishment in the polls
After a disastrous week on the markets marked by the emergency intervention of the Bank of England, the Conservatives were heavily punished in the polls. In the voting intentions measured by Yougov, Labor took a 33-point lead over the Tories, at 54% against 21%. An even bigger gap than in Tony Blair’s historic victory in 1997.
“For Conservative MPs, such a lead can only create enormous shock and a sense of panic at the prospect of losing their seats,” said political scientist Tim Bale, a professor at Queen Mary University of London. Andrew Gimson, columnist for the ConservativeHome site, acknowledges that current events may herald a radical transformation, “like there is every 20 to 30 years in our political landscape”. “This whole storm may very well pass as well. Our political landscape is very unpredictable,” he adds.
Turn without democratic endorsement
While Liz Truss has arrived for barely three weeks, the institutes are starting to sound out the British on her possible resignation. Nearly 51% of those questioned are in favor of it, against 25% of people against and 24% who do not know. The whole difficulty for the Prime Minister is that she was brought to power by a few tens of thousands of conservative activists and that her economic turn was not approved by a democratic vote.
For Tim Bale, Liz Truss still has a way out if she backs down on the removal of the 45% tax bracket, the most controversial measure in her plan. “But she will find it difficult to make this U-turn, because she sees herself as an incarnation of Margaret Thatcher”, he analyzes.
