Do Truss and Sunak’s spending pledges add up?

Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have only a few weeks to make their case before postal voting begins on 1 August. Sunak has vowed to be ‘the heir to Margaret Thatcher’ in a comment piece in the Daily Telegraph today, in which he promises to deliver a ‘radical’ set of reform, without expanding much on what that reform would look like. Meanwhile Truss joined BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning to double down on her plans to grow the economy, admitting that ‘twenty years of economic policy haven’t delivered growth’, even if the majority of this time has been under Conservative leadership.

But there’s a big economic elephant in the room: the crippling effects of inflation, and the limited scope of any future prime minister to get rising prices under control. The UK is unusual in having so much debt (about a quarter of it) linked to inflation – and on the old RPI index, which usually runs ahead of CPI.