Jeremy Hunt is right to focus on inflation but a return to austerity is wrong
Cut us a break
OUR fear for today’s Budget is that Jeremy Hunt could follow Liz Truss’s economic blunder with another, as grave but much longer-lasting.
We hope he proves us wrong.
The Chancellor and Rishi Sunak are right to focus on inflation — eating our wages and savings at a disastrous new rate of 11.1 per cent, a 41-year high.
They are determined to reduce that and balance the books after the mega-spending of the Covid and energy bailouts and Truss’s reversal of the National Insurance rise . . . all three policies, incidentally, backed by Labour.
Our worry, though, is that they are going the wrong way about it by plotting a return to austerity — with extra taxes adding to a burden already at a 70-year high, plus widespread cuts and the scrapping of all pro-growth projects not deemed indispensable.
Truss was reckless in her haste for growth but her goal itself was crucial to our future prosperity.
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Where projects may never be worth the expense, as with HS2, bin them.
But merely slashing every cost and hammering the public will not work.
Our competitors know that.
We are probably in recession already.
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Mr Hunt must not crush green shoots, in hoping to make the sums add up.
That way lies years of stagnation.
Terror nation
FOR years Iran’s wicked Islamist regime has spread its poison around the globe.
It funds and foments terror.
It supplies Russia with drones which rain death on Ukraine.
At home it executes those who protest against their oppression.
And MI5 says its tentacles have reached Britain, with hit squads plotting to assassinate dissidents or even UK citizens.
Iran’s rulers, in contrast to its people, are a cancer.
Yet on Monday England’s footballers must play theirs in our opening World Cup match.
Why?
Fifa should never have let Iran, under such extremists, launder its image in Qatar.
Enemy within
HOW can the Tories govern if anonymous civil servants plot to pick off Cabinet members one by one?
Almost daily, sources leak some supposed transgression to Labour, who speed-dial the BBC and friendly papers.
This week’s target is Deputy PM Dominic Raab, now the subject of bullying claims.
Labour’s Angela Rayner is not waiting for evidence.
She absurdly demanded his resignation yesterday.
To her, “Tory scum” are guilty until proven innocent and probably guilty even then.
Some of this sounds like idle Whitehall snowflakes confusing a tough boss, who demands higher standards, with “a bully”.
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But there is no doubt the leakers also just dislike the Tories and Brexit.
Their mudslinging, and undermining of policy, reeks of a pro-Labour campaign