LONDON, Oct 19 (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Liz Truss apologised to the House of Commons on Wednesday for reversing large parts of her proposed tax cuts and said it was now right to “get on with the job.”
“I have been very clear that I am sorry, and I have made mistakes,” Truss told parliament as she faced questions from lawmakers.
“But the right thing to do in those circumstances is to make changes, which I’ve made, and to get on with the job and deliver for the British people.”
Truss said on Wednesday she was committed to increasing state pensions in line with the level of inflation, but she declined to give the same reassurance for welfare payments and foreign aid.
Truss has been forced to hunt for deep spending cuts after the prime minister’s now-scrapped economic programme shattered investor confidence in Britain’s government and sent borrowing costs surging.
Truss’s new finance minister, Jeremy Hunt, dismantled Truss’s economic policy on Monday, and said then that he could not commit to raising state retirement payments in line with inflation in April as had been expected.
Asked if Truss had ditched the policy, known as the triple lock because it increases publicly-funded pensions by the highest of earnings, inflation or 2.5%, she told the House of Commons on Wednesday she remained fully committed to it.
“We have been clear in our manifesto that we will maintain the triple lock, and I am completely committed to it, so is the chancellor (finance minister),” she told parliament.
Asked if the same reassurance could be given for welfare benefit payments, Truss said the country had helped the poorest by providing energy subsidies and that it would always help the most vulnerable.
Asked about the country’s foreign aid budget, Truss said more details would be set out in due course.
Britain cut a long-standing policy of spending 0.7% of economic output on foreign aid during the pandemic, reducing it to 0.5%.
Truss sought to reassert authority over her fraught party on Wednesday with Conservative enforcers telling lawmakers they had to support her fracking policy as a vote treated as a test of confidence in the government.
Truss is trying to shore up support from within her party after she was forced to scrap her vast tax-cutting plan, leading some Conservative lawmakers to call for her to be replaced as leader just weeks after she took office.
She has admitted her radical economic plans had gone “too far and too fast” after investors dumped the pound and government bonds.
However, with mortgage rates soaring and official figures showing inflation back to a 40-year high, Truss, who was elected by Conservative members on a promise of tax cuts and maintaining public spending, faces a struggle to convince the public and her party she could address the cost of living crisis.
Polls indicate Conservatives are some 30 points behind the opposition Labour Party, and her own ratings are calamitous.
“What I’m not convinced by … is that going through another leadership campaign, defenestrating another prime minister, will either convince the British people that we’re thinking about them rather than ourselves or convince the markets to stay calm,” foreign minister James Cleverly told Sky News.
But, speculation about the prime minister’s future continues to grow, with media reporting that rebellious Conservatives are weighing up who should replace her, not if she should go.
“I think her position is becoming increasingly untenable,” Conservative lawmaker Steve Double told Times radio. “We’ve seen a complete reversal of just about everything she stood for in her leadership election campaign. I think many of us are asking exactly what does Liz Truss now believe and stand for?”
Truss will face parliament later on Wednesday for her usual weekly question and answer session, and later the main opposition Labour Party will seek to hold a vote on an outright ban on fracking, after the government last month lifted a moratorium in England that had been in place since 2019.
Conservative ‘whips’, responsible for enforcing discipline among members of parliament, sent a message to their lawmakers saying the vote would be treated as a “confidence motion in the government”.
