Liz Truss defends mini-budget and attacks Treasury and Bank of England

Liz Truss has used a broadcast interview to defend her 2022 mini-budget and renew her attack on the institutions she says blocked it. In the interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former prime minister said Britain is still in the grip of an unelected establishment and accused the Treasury and the Bank of England of groupthink and excessive unaccountable power.

She argued that in 2022 she faced a choice between a slow approach and bold action. She said the Conservatives were on course to lose the 2024 election unless they changed taxes, reined in spending and pushed measures such as fracking during the energy crisis. She rejected the charge that she went too far too fast, saying the government had already been playing it slowly for 12 years and that this was the last chance to get things back on track.

Truss also claimed that the Treasury controlled how fiscal numbers were reported and that OBR legislation stopped her from publishing an alternative independent analysis. She said she would have liked an independent forecaster to set out the case that keeping corporation tax low would raise money over five years. She pointed to flatlining growth, higher unemployment, higher taxes, a higher deficit and higher gilt rates as evidence that her approach had been justified. She said that if the mini-budget had not been sabotaged, the country would be in a much better position.

Looking beyond economic policy, Truss said the Treasury, the OBR and the Bank of England also shape immigration, net zero and Brexit policy. She argued that any future government wanting to cut immigration, scrap net zero or change EU-derived laws would have to deal with those institutions because OBR forecasts are used to judge the fiscal consequences of such decisions.

A studio panel afterwards debated her claims. One contributor criticised the decision to bypass the OBR, the scale of unfunded tax cuts and the surprise abolition of the 45p top rate, which was reversed within days. Another said the case for supply-side reform and lower taxes remained strong and that the past four years had been a controlled experiment showing poor UK economic performance. The panel also disagreed over the Bank of England's gilt market intervention and the cost of that operation.