Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss lambasted Rishi Sunak on Sunday for having "harmful" tax policies. Another former prime minister, Boris Johnson, put pressure on Sunak about his strategy for Ukraine.
When Truss assumed office in September, she launched a dramatic tax-cutting scheme right away.
She had to resign from her position after just 44 days in office due to her intentions of scaring the markets and posing a threat to the pension business. As a result, she had the shortest reign as president of the nation ever.
In her first remark following her dismissal, she blamed the "strong economic establishment" and said that her replacement, Sunak, erred by rejecting all of her tax-cutting proposals.
She blamed the “strength of economic orthodoxy and its influence on the market” in an article for the Sunday Telegraph. She also said Sunak’s decision to raise corporation tax from 19 to 25% was “economically detrimental.”
“I am not claiming to be blameless in what happened, but fundamentally I was not given a realistic chance to enact my policies by a very powerful economic establishment, coupled with a lack of political support,” she wrote.
The IMF, which criticised Truss’s significant tax cuts at the time, gave Sunak a blow last week when it said the UK would be the only G7 country with negative growth in 2023. It partially blamed this on the UK’s “tighter fiscal and monetary policies.”
Sunak hasn’t been in office for 100 days yet, and even though he has calmed the markets, he isn’t doing well in the polls because of the country’s cost-of-living crisis.
Different parts of Sunak’s party are putting more pressure on him because Truss is back, and Boris Johnson is trying harder to get more military support for Ukraine.
During an unexpected trip to Washington this week, Johnson told Fox News that Sunak should send fighter jets and “give the Ukrainians what they need as soon as possible. Get this thing done. Forget about Putin.”
Johnson was also a strong supporter of Ukraine at the World Economic Forum meeting last month, which Sunak did not go to.
Johnson and many of his supporters still say that Sunak’s decision to quit as Johnson’s finance minister was why he lost power.
As a result, Truss and Sunak got into a nasty fight over who should be the next leader. MPs who supported the growth and helped her win that election are said to be getting back together, which could cause the prime minister more trouble.