Thatcher ministers turn on Liz Truss over tax cut plans

theguardian.com:

Tory grandees who served in Margaret Thatcher’s final cabinet have warned that the former prime minister would never have approved of Liz Truss’s plan to slash £30bn off taxes funded by borrowing, as Rishi Sunak denounced his opponent’s plans as “immoral”.

With a bitter row over tax emerging as the defining issue in the race to succeed Boris Johnson, three members of Thatcher’s cabinet told the Observer that she would have taken a dim view of slashing taxes at a time of high inflation.This follows repeated claims that Truss has attempted to model herself on Thatcher in her attempt to win the leadership, which she has denied.

Chris Patten, Norman Lamont and Malcolm Rifkind all said that the former Tory leader would not have supported the tax-cutting plans. Patten said: “Margaret Thatcher was a fiscal Conservative who did not cut tax until we had reduced inflation. She was honest and did not believe in nonsense.”

Norman Lamont, a senior Treasury minister under Thatcher, said: “Mrs Thatcher strongly believed that cutting the deficit came before cutting taxes. She also believed that deficits were simply deferred taxation.” Malcolm Rifkind said that he was as “certain as I can be that she would be very unimpressed by funding tax cuts through increased borrowing, even if it wasn’t at a time of high inflation – but certainly when it is”.

“She believed that tax cuts should be funded either by economic growth that was already producing more revenue, or by cuts in public spending,” he said. “That’s what Thatcherism means. I think every single Tory, as well as lots of other people, believe in the desirability of tax cuts. But no Conservative would ever see it as an ideological imperative.”

Sunak, the former chancellor battling to defeat