The Observer view on why Tory MPs must stop Liz Truss’s ‘reverse Robin Hood’ policies | Observer editorial
A reverse Robin Hood" was how the Radio Nottingham presenter Sarah Julian characterised the first major fiscal intervention of Liz Truss's premiership when the prime minister did an interview round with BBC local radio stations last week. They know a thing or two about Robin Hood in Nottinghamshire, and if Julian's characterisation of a government taking from the poor to line the wallets of the rich was apt at the time of the interview last Thursday, it has only become more so as ministers have dropped further hints about how Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng intend to try to make the books add up.
As we set out in this column last week, the inappropriately dubbed mini-budget" - it set out the biggest programme of tax cuts in decades - straightforwardly redistributes money from less affluent households to some of the richest people in Britain. Over the last decade, Conservative chancellors have cut back the tax credits and benefits that are so vital to low-paid parents and people with disabilities, even as they handed out generous income tax cuts that have disproportionately benefited more affluent families. Poorer households are consequently in desperate need of a financial boost to help them cope with rising energy, housing and food costs. Instead, alongside a package to freeze energy prices at a level equivalent to 2,500 for the typical household, Truss announced 45bn of tax cuts that would see people with income of 1m a year becoming 40,000 a year better off, without saying how she would fund them. The borrowing required to finance the cuts would saddle a younger generation with decades of debt repayments, and the anticipated increase in interest rates required to cool inflation as a result of this fiscal loosening will further hit lower-income households through higher mortgage repayments and rents.
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