• 3 weeks ago
Chancellor: I was ‘wrong’ on taxes during election

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00:00Now you specifically said you already knew everything you needed to know, yet
00:05on Wednesday you raised taxes by £40 billion. Why would a reasonable
00:11person believe a single word that you say in the next 15 minutes and that
00:17you'll stick to it? I was wrong on the 11th of June. I didn't know everything
00:23because when I arrived at the Treasury on the 5th of July, so just under a
00:29month after I said those words, I was taken into a room by the senior
00:35officials at the Treasury and they set out the huge black hole in the public
00:40finances beyond which anybody knew about at the time of the general election
00:45because the previous government hid it from the country, they hid it from
00:48Parliament and indeed they hid it from the official independent forecast of the
00:53Office of Budget Responsibility and so when I went into that budget last week
00:58I had to put our public finances back on a firm trajectory because we saw in
01:04the previous Parliament what happens when government loses control of the
01:08public finances and the first commitment we made in our manifesto was to bring
01:13stability back to the economy and that's what I did on Wednesday.

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