CHANCELLOR Hunt has announced that the ‘fiscal statement’, which had been due to be delivered next Monday, 31st October, will now be delayed by over two weeks and instead be made on 17 November.
Hunt said that the night before he had discussed the delay with the governor of the Bank of England, who, he said, ‘understands’ the decision.
The Bank is set to announce a huge hike in interest rates on 3 November, resulting in a massive increase in monthly mortgage payments for millions of households.
Making clear the Tory government’s subserviant relationship to international finance, Hunt said: ‘It is most important that the statement is based on the most accurate economic forecast of public finances and for that reason the prime minister and I have decided that it is prudent to make that statement on 17th November, when it will be upgraded to a full Autumn Statement.
‘I discussed this last night with the Governor of the Bank of England, who understands the reasons for doing that and I’ll continue to work very closely with him.’
‘It would take a nurse 20,000 years to accrue the same vast wealth as that possessed by the new prime minister,’ Richard Burgon, Labour MP for Leeds East, pointed out during Tory PM Sunak’s first Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons yesterday lunchtime.
Sunak replied that he would ‘always support our hard-working nurses’.
Sunak made his first appearance at PMQs on the same day that Unite launched a strike ballot of 3,000 ambulance staff members, while the result of the strike ballot of 300,000 nurses is just one week away.
In his first question, Labour leader Starmer made a dig at Sunak’s wife’s tax history, asking if he will abolish non-domiciled tax status. ‘Why doesn’t he put his money where his mouth is?’ Starmer asked.
Sunak said that difficult decisions will have to be taken to restore economic stability and confidence and that the chancellor will set that out in the Autumn Statement in a few weeks.
He said he’s glad Labour has finally realised spending does need to be paid for, adding: ‘It’s a novel concept for the party opposite.’
Starmer responded that Sunak is pretending he is on the side of working people, but in private he says ‘something different’, referring to a video which emerged in the summer of Sunak in Tunbridge Wells boasting that he had diverted public money from ‘deprived urban areas’.
‘Rather than apologise or pretend he meant something else, why doesn’t he do the right thing and undo the changes he made to those funding formulas?’ Starmer said.
Starmer, in his final question, pointed out that Sunak is prime minister without winning a vote, that he was beaten in the summer leadership contest by Liz Truss – who herself was ‘beaten by a lettuce’