Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has hit out at what he called the “grotesque chaos” of chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s sacking, as he accused Liz Truss of putting “party first and country second”.
Giving a speech in Barnsley after a day of upheaval in Westminster, Sir Keir said the damage caused by last month’s mini-budget was “unprecedented” as he repeated calls for a general election.
He pointed to the “grotesque chaos of a Tory prime minister handing out redundancy notices to her own chancellor”.
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“This lot,” Sir Keir said. “They didn’t just tank the British economy – they also clung on.
“Clung on as they made the pound sink, clung on as they took our pensions to the brink of collapse.
“Clung on as they pushed the mortgages and bills of the British people through the roof.
“They did all of this. All the pain our country faces now is down to them – and there’s still one person clinging on: the prime minister.”
Sir Keir added that, deep down, Liz Truss knows she cannot continue, while her MPs must know they have “no mandate for unfunded promises”.
“Whatever they say next, whatever they do, it boils down to one argument for them. It’s party first, country second and that is unforgivable.”
Sir Keir restated his calls for a general election, saying after four defeats “the prospect of serving our country no longer looks impossible”.
But he warned that if Labour gets into power, the damage done to the British economy by the Conservatives is going to make things “really tough”.
“We can’t take irresponsible risks with the country’s finances, we must be the party of sound money,” Sir Keir said.
He said that while Britain has faced financial crises before, “there are no historical precedents for what (the Conservatives) have done to our economy”.
Referencing former party leader Neil Kinnock’s famous 1985 conference speech, he said: “You can’t play politics with people’s jobs, with people’s services or with their homes.”
The speech came after new chancellor Jeremy Hunt signalled his plan to up-end the prime minister’s entire economic strategy, in an extraordinary rebuke of the pledges that brought her into office.
Mr Hunt told Sky News there were “mistakes” in the mini-budget and warned of tough times ahead.
“We won’t have the speed of tax cuts we were hoping for, and some taxes will go up”, he said.
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He also said that all government departments would have to “find more efficiencies than they were planning to find”.
Mr Hunt was appointed chancellor on Friday, an hour after his predecessor Kwasi Kwarteng was sacked after just 38 days in the job.
While his appointment was welcomed by some Tory MPs as “an experienced pair of hands”, others questioned why Mr Kwarteng was the one who had to go when he was pursuing policies Ms Truss espoused in her leadership campaign.
Some MPs have discussed replacing the PM with Rishi Sunak or Penny Mordaunt after she reversed a key policy to scrap the planned rise in corporation tax from 19% to 25%, WhatsApp messages seen by Sky News reveal.
Mr Kwarteng’s downfall was set in motion by the mini-budget on 23 September, in which he announced £45bn in unfunded tax cuts.
The mini-budget pushed the pound to a record low against the dollar, sent the cost of government borrowing and mortgage rates up and led to an unprecedented intervention by the Bank of England.
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