Higher taxes will crush us at the polls, says top Tory

MINISTERS’ demands for ‘ unsustainable’ budget increases will lead to higher taxes and leave the Tories ‘crushed’ at the next election, Liz Truss warned yesterday.

Miss Truss, who is deputy to Chancellor Philip Hammond in the Treasury, said ‘un-Conservative’ spending would result in ‘higher and higher taxes’.

Her comments are reportedly aimed at Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson, who has asked Theresa May for a bigger defence budget in the wake of a planned boost for the NHS.

She told The Daily Telegraph that higher taxes would be a ‘ complete contradiction of the Brexit vote’.

Miss Truss said that with £29,000 per household currently spent on public services, her ‘instinct is we can get better value for money for that spending, rather than just upping the budget of every department’.

She added: ‘Government has a responsibility to its people to balance the books and keep taxes as low as we possibly can. We have a responsibility to make sure every pound pulls its weight.’

Miss Truss said Cabinet ministers were demanding ‘unsustainable, unaffordable and unConservative public spending increases’, before telling colleagues that ‘it’s not macho to demand more money’.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, chairman of the European Research Group of Eurosceptic Tory MPs, agreed with Miss Truss against increasing taxes.

He said that it was not ‘necessary’ to increase them and there was ‘no room’ for them to rise. Mr Rees-Mogg added that breaking the manifesto promise to keep taxes low would prompt voters to vote against the Tories.

Miss Truss’s comments as Chief Secretary to the Treasury come ahead of her speech on public finances at the London School of Economics tonight. She will say that her colleagues have ‘ not been clear with the public about the tax implications of their proposed higher spending’.

Discussing Brexit, she will tell the audience: ‘We know that people voted for Brexit because they wanted to take back control of their lives.’

Miss Truss’s friends told the newspaper: ‘Liz knows she has a fight on her hands.

‘But she thinks the party will be crushed at the polls if millions of younger people have to cough up more cash in taxes for services they don’t use. She’s staggered that others don’t see this’.

Miss Truss has also promised to review ‘over-regulated’ jobs such as plumbers, black cab drivers and even dentists and vets to help make it easier for members of the public to qualify. Her remarks expose the splits at the top of Government over how to raise more money for the Health Service.

She said: ‘I believe in a taxfunded NHS that is funded from general taxation – that makes sense. But what is incredibly important is that we don’t spend money that we don’t have.

‘We have had a big effort to get the deficit down over the last eight years – we don’t want to throw that away.’