The Government has rejected calls to abandon last week’s mini budget despite the Bank of England being forced to intervene in the financial markets earlier today
Treasury minister Andrew Griffith has argued that “all major economies” are experiencing the same volatility as the UK and insists there will be no u-turns.
“We are going to get out there and deliver that plan,”
Pushed again on whether there would be a change of plan, Griffith says: “Get on and deliver that plan – that’s what I, the chancellor and my colleagues in government are focused on.”
“That is what’s going to allow consumers to benefit,” he says.
Labour leader Sir Kier Starmer has said that Parliament should be recalled
Speaking in Liverpool he told reporters: “The move by the Bank of England is very serious.
“And I think many people will now be extremely worried about their mortgage, about prices going up, and now about their pensions.
“The government has clearly lost control of the economy.”
He added: “What the government needs to do now is recall parliament and abandon this budget before any more damage is done.”
The head of the Think Tank Resolution Foundation Torsten Bell has described the current financial crisis as This is by far the worst unforced economic policy error of my lifetime
He added that The scale of the destruction it is bringing is hard to comprehend:
Higher import prices and surging mortgage bills,higher deficits risking big spending cuts to come, pension funds taking big losses on forced asset sales and likely lasting risk premiums for UK firms and The Governmemt
Meanwhile Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has said Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng may try to freeze spending on public services when he sets out his medium-term fiscal plan to get the public finances back on track.
“The difficulty the Government has got itself in is that it is cutting taxes so dramatically without any kind of plan of what it is going to do on public spending,” he told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One.
Ken Clarke, the Tory former chancellor, says Truss and Kwarteng “have made a catastrophic start”
He tells Sky News he hopes the mini-Budget is “torn up” but Kwarteng should not resign as Chancellor “We cannot have a different chancellor every other week”
