FORMER Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith has praised Rishi Sunak’s first outing at Prime Minister’s Questions but warned he has some difficult choices to make on the economy.
Asked how he rated the new PM, he told GB News: “He did pretty well, I thought, certainly in the show, as it were, of the street theatre of Prime Minister’s question time. I think he did well, actually.
“I thought that the Labour leader missed a few possible open goals and fumbled some of his words, so that helped him I think, but yeah, I think that the sense of desire for calm and a bit more unity, got everybody behind him.
“That always helps as well, having stood at the despatch box, when there’s nobody cheering behind you. It’s a pretty lonely place, I have to tell you.”
In an interview during Friday Morning with Esther McVey and Phillip Davies on GB News, he said: “On the other side, yeah, there are really big challenges now facing him, so that was easy street this week, really. It just gets more difficult, and the big issue is going to be the government is on a course to reduce spending, and possibly raise taxes.
“I have real concerns about a couple of those issues. One is that if you look at the recent Purchase Manager’s Index, the PMI index…and their forecast now – it is down into recession. That’s normally a few months before we actually hit that as an economy.
“What that tells you now is room for manoeuvre at the budget is very tight and quite limited.”
He added: “So for example, if he chooses to raise taxes, whilst he might in the short term get some revenue, in fact, in truth, he’s more likely to increase the deficit and push us deeper into recession.
“That’s a simple fact of life, because the higher the taxes are, the less business there’ll be, there’s less revenues, fewer revenues, higher deficit and getting out of that will be difficult.
“On spending cuts, he has departmental ones and I think he can get a fair and reasonable amount out of departments, which still have a long way to go since the amount of money that was given to them during Covid.”
He said: “But the one area he simply cannot think of going to at the moment is to try and cut the overall benefit charge which is due to come up in line with inflation next April, based on what the inflation rates are this September.
“Bear in mind that for a number of years now, benefits have gone below inflation, the last one is at least 3.5% below inflation, so they’ve already been squeezed pretty tight. I would look at most importantly, reviewing the whole sickness benefit benefit culture, which has got an extra 500,000 people on it since Covid and 1.6 million people languishing on benefits that don’t require any work incentive.
On the pensions triple lock, he said: “Well, we have a problem here don’t we, because…the Conservative Party made an outright pledge that this would not be changed, so it makes it difficult to start breaking manifesto pledges,
“The public does get to realise that the second thing is you can argue right now that they are the group that has the least flexibility to be able to change their income. They’re not like working age adults that can get to work or can do part time work.
“Most pensioners are a large chunk and beyond the idea of the triple lock, he could possibly look at age-related changes so that we know that people are living longer now, so you could say that at a later age, beyond sort of 68/69, people would have their full triple lock, others might have slightly less.
“There are options there which they can look at but in truth these are not easy options one way or the other. And so that’s what I say, getting people back to work is their biggest, biggest chance to actually reduce the overall costs and get people paying taxes which is critical.”
