Sunak supporters express alarm at tax-cutting plan amid market turmoil
The IndependentFor free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “For the good of our country, and the livelihoods of everyone in our country, I still hope to be proven wrong.” While free-marketeers within Tory ranks were buoyed by Mr Kwarteng’s £45 billion package of tax cuts set out on Friday, it had been labelled a “gamble” by some economists even before the chaos in the currency markets. On Tuesday, Mel Stride, a former Sunak backer and the Conservative chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, warned that the plan was putting “in jeopardy” the Tories’ reputation for financial competency. “Supply-side reforms that it’s looking at bringing forward to try and convince the markets that this push towards growth is something that is realistic.” He added: “I think we are where we are, it’s not where I would be in the first instance… the bit that I do have some issues with, I have to say, is unfunded tax cuts of the kind of order that we’re looking at here and that really I think is the part that has spooked the markets, because those tax cuts have got to be paid for.” Other senior Conservative figures had already expressed some concern about the unexpected package of measures. Former deputy prime minister Damian Green also told GB News “there’s more to conservatism than tax cutting” and said with a general election in two years things “have to happen quickly”.