Andy Burnham has refused to rule out increasing borrowing and raising taxes despite an ongoing market rout that has sent borrowing costs to their highest level in decades – including following Liz Truss’s ‘mini-budget’. The Telegraph has the story.
The Prime Minister insisted that his Government would be “grounded in fiscal responsibility”, but would not commit to keeping taxes and borrowing down.
Burnham’s first Prime Minister’s Questions session in the Commons was overshadowed by a market rout that sent borrowing costs to their highest in decades.
On Wednesday, during PMQs, Burnham said: “This will be a Government grounded in fiscal responsibility. It will stick to the fiscal rules.
“But at the same time, we will help reduce cost-of-living pressure on our constituents.”
Britain’s borrowing costs have risen at a rate among the fastest in the world, and interest rates on 10-year gilts, a benchmark for the Treasury, are at their highest since 2008.
Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative Party Leader, challenged Burnham to rule out both tax rises and increased borrowing at his first Budget on October 28th.
Badenoch said: “The markets are clearly worried that we now have a spendthrift Prime Minister who wants to say yes to everyone but cannot tell us where the money is coming from.
“He needs to pay for all his new promises, and he has a choice: higher taxes, more borrowing or spending cuts. Yesterday, he said change begins with honesty. So will he be honest and tell us is he preparing to raise taxes again, yes or no?”
Burnham replied: “I’ve already indicated my first moves were to cut tax, but I’m not going to do what any Prime Minister has done and that is write the Budget here. That would be [a] matter for my right honourable friend.”
The market stress of recent days is likely to leave Burnham up to £14 billion short when John Healey, the Chancellor, delivers his first Budget next month, hampering his plans for an increase in state spending.
Burnham attacked Badenoch for supporting Liz Truss’s misfiring mini-Budget when she was a junior minister in Truss’s short-lived administration in 2022.
However, the Tory leader pointed out that the cost of borrowing was currently “far more than it ever was” under her predecessor Truss.
“The reason why that Budget failed is because spending was announced before the money to pay for it, which is exactly what [Burnham] is doing right now,” Badenoch said. …
While government borrowing costs around the world have climbed sharply in recent weeks, on Tuesday, Britain suffered the biggest increase in bond yields of any country in the G7.
On Wednesday, the cost of long-term Government borrowing climbed to its highest level since 1998, further increasing the pressure on Britain’s public finances.
Worth reading in full.
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The “Prime Minister” badge is worth serious money after you leave. If you hold it for a short time, you get minimum grief for maximum payoff
A man of committment if ever I saw.
He’s simply following through on what he promised, which is to unravel the changes that led to growing prosperity in the 1980s. Before we know it we’ll be back to power cut rotas, industrial unrest, shorter working weeks and a begging letter to the IMF.
In Burnem’s wee brain he’s thinking – ‘hee, hee, hee, I’m gonna borrow as much as I want and then tell the markets to do one, after all what are they gonna do about it’. He’ll be spurred on by all his moronic supporters making his a super hero that saves the country.
This is what’s rattling around in his empty head while staring vacantly into space.
“We’re so pretty, oh so pretty,
We’re vacant”
I’m sick of him already and his “grawth in every postcode” phrase which means absolutely nothing. He even had the cheek to say at PMQs that he had delivered a “clear coherent credible plan for growth (that word again)” which sounds great …except that he hadn’t done anything of the sort, just more word salad.
#Me too.
Prime Minister Eyebrows is Britain’s Kamala (aka Word Salad) Harris and equally electorally illegitimate. Just ‘another one’ in a succession of implausible political grifters…
The only growth that’s guaranteed in every postcode is in the number of illegal migrants billeted there.
Surely the other option, cutting welfare by 10% or more is not even mentioned. Why not, there is more than plenty to cut. Until any gov’t cuts welfare, there is no getting out of the sinking ship disaster the Uk continues to find itself in.
At some point it will be prohibitive to borrow more money and the revenue collected from taxes will decrease.
Are we there yet? Because the only way forward I see requires deep cuts in spending. Since Cheeky Chappy Andy Burnham doesn’t care to upset people he is in a bad place – which means we are in a bad place.
So Truss had to go, but Burnham doesn’t? Did the Tory Party throw Truss under the bus?
In my opinion, it was the Blob that threw her out. They didn’t like her echoes of Thatcherism, with a smaller state. They didn’t like her energy policy either.
I am sure that didn’t help, but how much support did she get from the party?
That’s a good question. I felt at the time that her leadership campaign hadn’t really laid the ground for her policy announcements once in post. Perhaps the party was taken by surprise at the anti-globalist direction she had started to take?
The three pillars of Labour: spend; tax; borrow… rinse, repeat.
The problem arise when the lenders stop lending, then the IMF.
Yep, but will the solution be sequestration of savings and assets to pay bennies.
Net zero means the UK can never be profitable. All this talk is a total waste of time its continuity decline whilst these toddlers cling to the net zero blanket.
I didn’t expect to look back on Starmers time as PM with fondness for his insightful and decisive leadership.
I knew at the time he was a lying creep, but at least he was largely ineffective. As soon as it looked likely that he’d go, I started to worry that whoever took over would make things worse by achieving what they wanted to achieve, i.e. to take us further to the left. Sadly, that’s what’s happened.
Man’s a total cretin.