Kwarteng warns Burnham: Bringing up the ghost of Truss and I didn’t work for Starmer so why should it work for you?

Kwasi Kwarteng has warned Andy Burnham that his strategy of blaming Liz Truss and himself didn’t work for Keir Starmer and won’t work for him.

Speaking on GB News he said: “We’ve been up this hill before, haven’t we? When Starmer and Reeves came in, they thought it would be a good idea to completely blame and bring up the ghost, the shadow of Liz Truss and myself, endlessly.

“Within 18 months, they crashed from 34% to 22% and then they went even lower. So clearly, if that was a strategy, that wasn’t working. And I think exactly the same thing will happen.

“We did this. I remember we went on about the winter of discontent for about 18 years. The problem is that the news cycle is much faster now, and people are feeling the hurt, and they want to see solutions.

“Blaming stuff that happened four years ago, 40 years ago, Margaret Thatcher, Liz Truss isn’t going to save him when there could well be a funding crisis in two months.

“And the last thing I’d say about the mini budget is that it was meant to be a growth strategy; you could see that we were trying to cut taxes to grow the economy. With this, this looks like a death by a thousand cuts.
“There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. There’s no growth strategy. They don’t even talk about growth. All they’re doing is taxing people to pay for benefits, as Pat McFadden said, and that’s not going to end well. And there’s no escape from that; it’s a doom loop.

“Last year, the government majority was 170, the same as it is now, and they couldn’t even pass a bill which was going to reduce the welfare bill by £5 billion. They couldn’t do it because their backbenchers essentially kicked off and prevented Starmer from doing it.

“The idea that Burnham, who is a crowd pleaser, you know, he’s a capable communicator. He’s not going to be able to get any welfare reforms through, and so we’re left with this same old tax and spend, as Kemi Badenoch said.

“And there’s going to be a lot more taxation. There’ll be a lot more spending, and that will just lead to being bust, bankrupt.

“I think there’s no credible growth plan. I think there’s no credible plan to reduce spending, and Andy Burnham and his advisers have been pretty open about having more taxes.

“We saw last summer Neil Kinnock talk about a wealth tax; they haven’t ruled that out. He hasn’t ruled out more borrowing. He hasn’t ruled out more general tax rises.

“And people are looking at this and thinking, ‘Okay, I get you’re trying to tax and spend, but how are you actually going to grow wealth in this economy?’ And the answer to that is they don’t have a clue. They never talk about that.

“I don’t want to be a prophet of doom or do down the country because I mean, I lived through it. I was in part responsible for a glitch like that, and it’s very uncomfortable. So I don’t want to predict that.

“But the path we’re on, where we don’t seem to be able to get much growth in the economy, and we can’t reduce spending, and we’re just increasing taxes to pay for welfare, essentially, that’s not sustainable.

“And in the end, the bond markets, the people who lend the government money, are going to kick off.

“I stood for Parliament in 2005 and the net [national debt] figure was £500 billion. 2005 wasn’t a million years ago, so the nominal debt has gone up six times.

“Now there are lots of reasons for that, but there’s been no attempt and that’s why we try to do the growth plan. We try to inject growth in order to deal with this, because you’ve got to grow wealth so that you can hold a rise more steady.

“But this is a shocking figure to think in 21 years the nominal value of the debt has gone up six times.

“We’re being punished more [by markets] and the reason is we don’t have a credible growth plan. Now we got crucified when I was in government because we went to growth, and arguably, probably rightly, the argument went that we went too far, too fast.

“At the moment, it’s like the frog in the the boiling pot. You know, things are just getting worse. The debt’s going up. The threat of taxes is increasing. There’s no attempt, no signal from the government they’re going to reduce spending or even curtail its growth.

“The one thing that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, to their credit, unbelievably, I’m going to say something nice about them, they did talk about growth.

“Now they didn’t have a clue how they were going to get growth. They didn’t have any policies that were going to increase growth, but they did say we’ve got to grow this economy.

“Burnham hasn’t. I don’t think he’s mentioned the word once. He might have done, en passant. You know, just as a sort of throwaway. But he’s got no credible coordinated plan to grow the economy.”