Very difficult to see how Liz Truss can be replaced, says John Redwood

FORMER Cabinet minister John Redwood has said it would be very difficult to replace Liz Truss as Prime Minister.

He said: “I don’t see how it happens. Constitutionally, it would obviously require the overwhelming support of all the MPs and the membership and the board, because we have a clear constitutional position.

“We have just elected a new leader, that leader had majority support of the party in the country and also had secured majority support of the MPs, by the time the membership campaign finished. And I think the party should give her full support and let her roll out her complete plans.

“What’s odd about this debate we’re having at the moment is that people are taking a set of tax proposals as the whole economic plan. We haven’t yet seen the spending side of the budget. We haven’t seen the borrowing consequences. We haven’t seen what the economic projections might look like, we haven’t seen all of the measures that are clearly needed to have a proper growth strategy, the investment partnerships, the changes or regulation, the support for given industry groups wished to have more of our own food that wish to produce more of our own energy, they will require a serious policy.

“So I would say to my colleagues, by all means encourage the Government to get all his plans out as quickly as possible and then we can have a proper debate about their impact and about whether we like them all or not.”

Speaking to Tom Harwood on GB News, he said: “The markets like as much certainty as possible, but they have to live in a very uncertain world. Of course, the Government needs to get a lot more information out there.

“I do think that the government needs to produce the spending side as well as the tax side and there needs to have some credible forecasts of what is likely to happen.

“The truth is that there is no good option from here because we are facing a global slowdown or recession, we’re seeing a trend to higher interest rates, higher mortgage rates and low bond prices around the advanced world as central banks seek to correct the mistakes they made in 2021, when they were too loose for too long and triggered big inflation.

“There has to be some adjustment to that. And so the the truth is that we either end up borrowing more, to do a package along the lines the Government wants to do, which is to offset some of the recessionary forces and not take such a big hit, or we borrow even more than that, because we put taxes up and we make the recession worse longer and deeper and then you will have an even bigger deficit.”

He added: “People entering this debate about the deficit and the borrowing need to be realistic, we are going to borrow more this year whatever happens and the argument is how much of the money should be used to offset the recessionary forces which are very strong globally and also the been unleashed in the UK by the Bank of England policy.”