Gove says he’ll back government’s mini-Budget after 45p tax cut U-turn
Michael Gove has said he will back the government’s mini-Budget in its current form, after Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng U-turned on their plan to slash the top rate of Income Tax.
The Tory big beast today said “there were lots of good things that they announced and some potentially interesting things”, after spending yesterday lobbying the pair to drop their cut to the 45p rate of tax.
Kwarteng said this morning to say that he was no longer slashing taxes for the highest income earners as it had “become a distraction from our overriding mission to tackle the challenges facing our country”.
“We get it, and we have listened,” he said.
Gove yesterday said the tax cut, and the plan to scrap the bankers’ bonus cap, were a “display of the wrong values” as a part of a series of attacks on the Prime Minister.
He also indicated that he would not vote for the measure in parliament, with other senior Tory MPs working behind the scenes to torpedo the policy.
When asked whether he would back the rest of the government’s fiscal plan, Gove told Times Radio: “Yeah, I think so on the basis of everything that I know. Again, to be fair to Kwasi, and to Liz, they will have an opportunity both this week, and also when parliament returns to lay out more detail in the growth plan overall.
“And I think, again, in fairness to them, there were lots of good things that they announced and some potentially interesting things. The detail of which we’ll all have to analyse and scrutinise. The debate over the 45p tax increase obscured that.”