Tory leadership race: New poll gives Truss big lead over Sunak
Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss duelled over their tax plans today as a new poll gave the foreign secretary a commanding lead in the Tory leadership race.
A YouGov poll of Tory members put Truss on 62 per cent and Sunak on 38 per cent on the first day of a six-week campaign to become the next UK Prime Minister.
The poll found 40 per cent of members don’t trust Sunak, compared to 18 per cent for Truss, leading some to speculate that the ex-chancellor’s role in bringing down Boris Johnson will doom his chances of becoming PM.
Conservative members will choose their new leader after a series of hustings across the country, with the winner to be announced on 5 September.
Truss today announced she would start an immediate review into providing tax relief for stay-at-home parents and carers if she is made Prime Minister.
The foreign secretary said she would look at treating households as “single tax entities”, while also defending her plans to slash taxes by £30bn+ if made Prime Minister.
Leading economists and Sunak have claimed her tax cuts, which would be funded by borrowing, would further fuel the UK’s 40-year high inflation of 9.4 per cent.
The influential Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) today said that if Truss’ “tax cuts were indeed financed by additional government borrowing, rather than spending reductions, they would inject additional demand into the economy and further increase inflationary pressures”.
“It is difficult, though, to say by how much, and this would vary depending on the specific package of tax cuts,” they said.
Sunak has called her plans “something for nothing economics” that are “socialist” in spirit.
He told LBC today: “I think [Truss’ tax plans] would be inflationary. We’ve got a situation today where everyone knows inflation is running much higher than we would like.
“If the government goes on a huge borrowing spree, that is only going to make the situation worse and it will mean this problem we’ve got will last longer. If we don’t get a grip on inflation now it will make families poorer in the long run and I want to avoid that at all costs.”
Truss told the BBC that mainstream economists had been “peddling” the wrong theories for decades, and that her plans would in fact “decrease inflation”.
“Reducing National Insurance and reducing Corporation Tax increases the supply side of the economy,” she said.
“And the reason that we have inflation is it’s a supply shock combined with a slightly loose monetary policy over time.”
Sunak’s team told The Telegraph that he would not cut taxes before 2024 if elected as Conservative leader as inflation is likely to stay high until summer 2023.
It would come alongside a planned cut in the basic rate of Income Tax from 20p to 19p in April 2024.