Business secretary claims presenter breached impartiality rules fiscal event being blamed for chaos by most financial experts
Good morning. Liz Truss will later today take PMQs for only her second time as prime minister. On her first appearance, four weeks ago, she was praised for being refreshingly direct, answering questions that her predecessor would have swerved. She was also very forthright about her faith in low taxes, and how she believed this was the only route to growth. Today, after a month which has seen successive statements and comments from the government alarm the markets and jink the pounds, we will probably get a much more circumspect Liz Truss.
What will be particularly interesting is whether she gives any indication that she has a strategy to calm the turmoil generated by the mini-budget. It seems unthinkable that she might just abandon all or most of the mini-budget (even thought some experts think this is the only move that would be guaranteed to restore market calm.) But yesterday a senior Tory backbencher proposed exactly that. “Rowing back on tax cuts as a possibility has to be on the table because, if you can’t make the rest of the equation work, then the alternative is to go out with something that the markets are just not going to buy, and that will be a very difficult place,” said Mel Stride, chair of the Commons Treasury committee in an interview.
Hold on. You suggest something is causal which is a speculation. What has caused the effect in pension funds, because of some quite high-risk but low probability investment strategies, is not necessarily the mini-budget. It could just as easily be the fact that the day before the Bank of England did not raise interest rates as much as the Federal Reserve did, and I think jumping to conclusions about causality is not meeting the BBC’s requirement for impartiality. It is a commentary rather than a factual question.
Business secretary claims presenter breached impartiality rules fiscal event being blamed for chaos by most financial expertsGood morning. Liz Truss will later today take PMQs for only her second time as prime minister. On her first appearance, four weeks ago, she was praised for being refreshingly direct, answering questions that her predecessor would have swerved. She was also very forthright about her faith in low taxes, and how she believed this was the only route to growth. Today, after a month which has seen successive statements and comments from the government alarm the markets and jink the pounds, we will probably get a much more circumspect Liz Truss.What will be particularly interesting is whether she gives any indication that she has a strategy to calm the turmoil generated by the mini-budget. It seems unthinkable that she might just abandon all or most of the mini-budget (even thought some experts think this is the only move that would be guaranteed to restore market calm.) But yesterday a senior Tory backbencher proposed exactly that. “Rowing back on tax cuts as a possibility has to be on the table because, if you can’t make the rest of the equation work, then the alternative is to go out with something that the markets are just not going to buy, and that will be a very difficult place,” said Mel Stride, chair of the Commons Treasury committee in an interview. Hold on. You suggest something is causal which is a speculation. What has caused the effect in pension funds, because of some quite high-risk but low probability investment strategies, is not necessarily the mini-budget. It could just as easily be the fact that the day before the Bank of England did not raise interest rates as much as the Federal Reserve did, and I think jumping to conclusions about causality is not meeting the BBC’s requirement for impartiality. It is a commentary rather than a factual question. Continue reading…