Flashback: Truss promises ‘no new taxes’

Trussonomics is dead, long live Treasury orthodoxy. New Chancellor Jeremy Hunt unpicked the bulk of his next-door neighbour’s policy agenda on TV this morning, telling the nation that nearly all of the tax measures that have not started legislation would now be reversed.

Income tax will now remain at 20 per cent ‘indefinitely’, the free on alcohol rates has been scrapped with only the National Insurance and Stamp Duty breaks surviving. Hunt also confirmed that he will go ahead with Rishi Sunak’s planned corporation tax increase next April from 19 per cent to 25 per cent. 

It’s a dramatic break with Liz Truss’s promise in, er, August at the Tory husting that there would be ‘no new taxes.’ Truss of course was echoing the infamous words of George HW Bush who made the pledge in his 1988 presidential campaign but ended up having to increase them as part of his 1990 budget compromises.
Bush broke his word after less than two years; Truss broke hers after less than two months.