The five remaining contenders in the Conservative leadership contest have intensified their attacks on each other’s policies in the latest TV debate before voting resumes on Monday (July 18).
Foreign secretary Liz Truss has hit out at former chancellor and current leader in the voting, Rishi Sunak, criticising his record of hiking taxes.
Truss said that Sunak’s continued approach of waiting to temper inflation prior to bringing in tax cuts would “choke off” growth rather than stimulate it, while Sunak said that Truss’ promises of cutting tax now amounted to “something-for-nothing economics”.
Sunak is a standout exception to all the other candidates in his approach to tax policy, which has come under repeated scrutiny since he launched his leadership bid.
Highlighting the National Insurance increase under Sunak’s tenure, Truss said that he had presided over taxes hitting their “highest level in 70 years”.
Truss added: “The fact is that raising taxes at this moment will choke off economic growth, it will prevent us getting the revenue we need to pay off the debt.”
Sunak defended his approach by referring to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, and how the money that went into getting the country through the health crisis had to be repaid.
Sunak explained: “There's a cost to these things and the cost of higher inflation, higher mortgage rates, eroded savings. And you know what? This something-for-nothing economics isn't Conservative. It's socialism.”
Penny Mordaunt, the trade minister who has received strong support from the grassroots of the party and has been second in the MPs’ votes so far, argued that households needed help now with rising prices and that her approach of introducing limited tax cuts would not exacerbate inflation.
She also added that she didn’t understand why the former chancellor could not get his head around the approach that she was advocating.
However, Sunak said that Mordaunt’s approach was “dangerous”, given that it abandoned his economic rule of borrowing only to invest and that loosening this public finance management was a significant risk.
The former chancellor also faced questions over the previous non-domiciled tax status of his wife, Akshata Murty, and the wealth of her family.
Sunak defended the journey he and his wife had been on to amass their fortune, calling it an “incredibly Conservative story” and indicative of the opportunity available to all in the UK.
Mordaunt used the debate to hit back again at criticisms of her record on trans-rights, after several newspapers and fellow Tories had hit back at her remarks on supporting gender self-identification when she was equalities minister in 2019.
Referring to a “number of smears going on” in the media, Mordaunt said: “I think this whole thing is unedifying.
“I know why this is being done. What I would say to you is, all attempts to paint me as an out of touch individual will fail.”
The trade minister added that she was the only candidate, as proved in the polls, who could tackle Labour at the next general election.
“I think there's a couple of things we need in order to win the next general election: one of them is me as the prime minister because the polling shows that I'm the only one that can beat Keir Starmer and take the fight to Labour,” she said.
Backbencher Tom Tugendhat suggested that this Tory leadership contest needed a fresh leader with new ideas, and that a continuation of cabinet ministers who served under Boris Johnson would only keep those who “lent credibility to the chaos” of his premiership in power.
Elsewhere during the debate, all the candidates ruled out offering outgoing prime minister Boris Johnson a role in their new cabinet, and none said that they would they seek an early general election should they be elected to Number 10.
All five also committed to the UK’s current goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
However, opposition MPs have accused all the candidates of being out of touch, with Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey suggesting that none have a credible “plan to get our country out of the crisis that they have caused.”
Furthermore, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has previously accused most of the candidates of peddling “fantasy economics”.
The next round of voting begins on Monday, with the 1922 Committee aiming to narrow the candidates down to a final two by Thursday (July 21). The result from Monday's round of voting will be announced at around 20:00 BST on Monday evening.
Photo by Bogomil Mihaylov on Unsplash
