UK PM clings on to power amid ouster calls

GBNEWS24DESK//

Britain’s new finance minister yesterday warned of looming tax hikes as he admitted to “mistakes” made in a disastrous budget that still threatens to bring down Prime Minister Liz Truss.

“Truss fights for survival,” The Times newspaper headlined a day after she forced chancellor of the exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng to carry the can for market turmoil sparked by their budget on September 23.

The Times, Telegraph and other newspapers reported that senior Conservative members of parliament were still plotting to unseat Truss, possibly within days, aghast at the party’s collapse in opinion polls since she replaced Boris Johnson on September 6.

New chancellor Jeremy Hunt indicated he would be tearing up the strategy that brought Truss to 10 Downing Street.

“There were mistakes,” acknowledged Hunt, a former foreign secretary who is seen as a Tory centrist.

“The prime minister has recognised that, that’s why I’m here,” Hunt told Sky News.

In one of his first acts on taking office late Friday, the new minister spoke to Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, who has had to stage costly interventions to calm febrile bond markets.

Tax cuts were the centrepiece of the ill-starred budget announced by Kwarteng and Truss.

But they were financed through billions in more borrowing, causing panic in financial markets, which has fed into higher costs for British households in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.

“We will have some very difficult decisions ahead,” Hunt said, warning that “all government departments” face spending restraint.

Hunt confirmed he would deliver a new fiscal statement on October 31.

But having abandoned the right-wing economic promises that won her the Conservative leadership election against rival Rishi Sunak, Truss faced mounting criticism that her political credibility was in tatters.

Former Conservative leader William Hague said Truss’s premiership now “hangs by a thread”, while ex-chancellor Philip Hammond said she had “thrown away years and years of painstaking work” to establish the party’s record for economic competence.