Liz Truss and Jeremy Hunt have a few days to put together the basis for a credible plan for managing the UK’s finances. Their meeting at Chequers, the traditional country retreat of prime ministers, on Sunday, is the first substantive discussion they will have to sketch an outline of the policies that will be revealed in two weeks’ time on 31 October.
In a BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg, the new chancellor gave a flavour of the shift in policy he was planning: “We’re going to have to take some very difficult decisions both on spending and on tax. Spending is not going to increase by as much as people hoped, taxes are not going to go down as quickly as people thought and some taxes are going to go up.”
That is one way of putting it. But it is not just a question of difficult decisions. It is a matter of credibility. The government has to put together a set of tax and spending policies that will enable the country to pull through not only this tough winter, but also what will at best be a year of very weak growth in 2023, and at worst, a full-blown recession. This has to be done against a background of international distrust and domestic dissent.
