Rishi Sunak has refused to commit to voting for a package of tax cuts next month if Liz Truss becomes prime minister, sparking fears among Conservatives that the party will be unable to unite after the leadership election. Mr Sunak has condemned Ms Truss’s economic policies as irresponsible and immoral, and some of his supporters have said privately that they could vote against her emergency budget.
Pressed on the issue on Wednesday, Mr Sunak declined to say if he would support the measures or risk losing the party whip by voting against it.
“I’m not going to engage in these things partly because acting like this race is not over isn’t right,” he told the BBC. “Governing is hard. Governing involves choices, it involves difficult trade-offs. Plans, whether they come from my opponent, or indeed the energy companies or anyone else, who seem to suggest that you can have absolutely everything you want, and you don’t have to make a difficult choice – that you can have lots of tax cuts, you can help people with the cost of living, borrowing doesn’t matter, inflation will take care of itself – if that all sounds a bit too good to be true, I think most people listening will think most things, when they do sound too good to be true, they probably are.”
Every poll of Conservative party members has shown Ms Truss to be in the lead, with some putting her ahead of the former chancellor of the exchequer by almost 30 points. The foreign secretary has promised to break with the economic orthodoxy she says has dominated Whitehall for decades by borrowing tens of billions of pounds to fund tax cuts she hope will drive economic growth.
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She has promised to reverse an increase in national insurance Mr Sunak introduced to fund clearing the National Health Service (NHS) backlog from the coronavirus pandemic. She created further controversy on Tuesday night when she suggested that the £13 billion earmarked for the NHS should be diverted to social care.
“Quite a lot has gone to the NHS. I would give it to local authorities. We have people in beds in the NHS who would be better off in social care. So put that money into social care,” she told a leadership hustings in Birmingham.
“We put the extra £13bn in and what people who work in the NHS tell me is the problem is the number of layers in the organisation they have to go through to get things done, the lack of local decision-making. That’s what people are telling me is the problem, rather than a lack of funding.”
Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said the health service was already under such pressure that it could not afford any cut in funding. “When the NHS is facing the biggest crisis in its history, the last thing it needs is a prime minister who has called for cutting its budget, charging patients to see a doctor and slashing doctors’ pay,” he said.
“There is no doubt that we need to recruit more care workers to ease the pressure on the NHS and ensure residents are well looked after. Labour will recruit and retain more carers by ensuring full rights at work, decent standards, fair pay and proper training as the first step towards building a national care service.”
