A Chancellor’s Sunday media appearance before a Budget often serves as a ‘free pass’ – not because difficult questions aren’t asked, but because they can quite easily get out of answering by saying some polite version of: ‘you’ll have to wait and see.’ So instead of focusing on the upcoming Budget this Wednesday, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg decided to ask Jeremy Hunt this morning about his party’s long-term record. Those questions he had to answer. It wasn’t an easy task.
Kuenssberg presented Hunt with two tricky metrics: housing prices and average wages. The former, Kuenssberg notes, has skyrocketed, while average wages are failing to keep up with inflation. Many people (especially young people) she noted, will be feeling worse off. Hunt came back with a fairly long list of accomplishments over the past decade of Tory governments, including the creation of ‘the largest life sciences industry in Europe’ that developed a Covid vaccine, the ‘third largest technology economy in the world,’ and changes to the economy that meaningfully addressed climate change, which ‘reduced (Britain's) emissions more than any other advanced economy.’
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