Liz Truss slams BBC for their fawning over Bank of England – saying finance chiefs must take blame for mortgage costs
LIZ Truss launched a brutal attack on the BBC for their fawning over the Bank of England - saying finance chiefs must take some blame for rising mortgage costs.
The ex-Prime Minister tore into the Beeb for their coverage on the fall-out of her disastrous mini-Budget as pension funds went into meltdown.
She also singled out ex-Bank governor Mark Carney who said she had delivered “Argentina-on-the-Channel” rather than a low-tax Singapore-on Thames.
Ms Truss hit out at news outlets for their analysis but targeted the BBC.
She said: “I don’t think there was an effective critique of the Bank of England and it really goes back to this point about institutions and politicians ending up having all of the responsibility, but not necessarily the power.”
The former leader hit back at claims she crashed the economy, laying the blame at the Bank, civil service and the media for their “groupthink”.
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She added: “Interest rates were going to go up anyway. I think the real failure was not to tell people, years and years ago, that interest rates were artificially low. That was the problem.”
Ms Truss was making her first major intervention since leaving office in a speech at the Institute of Government in central London yesterday.
She added that Mr Carney was “defensive” about his role in the 25-year economic consensus that has led to low growth in the western world.
She said: “I’m afraid there’s quite a lot of finger-pointing going on from people like Mark Carney because they don’t want to admit their culpability or the culpability of their central banking associates in this.
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“And I again think, of course politicians should be held accountable and responsible for what we do, but when there are people with significant power, you know, I don’t feel that the same questions are necessarily asked about them.”
Truss was forced out of office last October after the budget which included £45 billion of tax cuts triggered an economic crisis.
She hit out at what she brands the anti-growth coalition.
She used the intervention to question whether the government’s ambition to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 had “democratic consent”.
A ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars in 2030 should be pushed back, she added.
She took a swipe at Rishi Sunak for not aiding growth by bringing in major ‘supply side’ reforms such as planning or childcare reform or tax cuts in the past year.