Truss has hit out at the shadow chancellor, claiming: "Nothing will change with people like him in charge"
Liz Truss is not happy about the shadow chancellor disowning her disastrous mini-budget.
Truss blamed Mel Stride’s criticisms of her infamous 2022 mini-budget, which included £45 billion of unfunded tax cuts, on him being “a creature of the system”.
In a speech today, Stride said that “mistakes were made” in the shortest serving Conservative prime minister’s mini budget, and that “fiscal credibility and responsibility was absent”.
Stride added: “The credibility of the UK’s economic framework was undermined by spending billions on subsidising energy bills and tax cuts, with no proper plan for how this would be paid for.”
The shadow chancellor vowed that the Tories will “never again” undermine their fiscal credibility.
On X, Truss hit back furiously: “In attacking the Mini Budget, @MelJStride sides with the failed Treasury Orthodoxy.”
She added: “Stride is a creature of the system.”
Truss continued to attack Stride, saying: “When he served alongside me as Treasury Minister, he always went along with officials – including on the Loan Charge and IR35, damaging the self-employed and SMEs.”
“He backed Sunak’s huge spending, but not my tax cuts which were smaller in size and would have increased growth.”
She concluded: “Nothing will change with people like him in charge.”
As one X user put it: “Has it actually never crossed your mind that with everyone from Cabinet colleagues, the Opposition. economists, charities, Unions, civil service etc challenging your ideology that actually it is you that was wrong all along.”
On Radio 4, presenter Nick Robinson repeatedly asked Stride if this meant he was apologising for the Truss budget. Stride dodged the question, and instead repeated “mistakes were made”.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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