The Conservative response to the Budget has been criticised as a Halloween horror show, with shadow ministers attacking Labour's fiscal plans while facing reminders of their own party's record in government.
Shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith mocked Chancellor John Healey's Budget as a "rail-replacement bus service Budget". However, critics point out that Griffith was the "brains" behind Liz Truss's catastrophic mini-Budget, which wiped £300 billion off government bonds and made Britain a laughing stock.
Shadow Cabinet Attacks
Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, claimed Labour has "made everything worse" and "this is their mess and they need to own it". Her speech was praised by the Daily Telegraph, which described her as displaying "the irresistible energy of a woman whose time has come" and called it "the speech of a future prime minister".
However, the same newspaper's sister publication, the Sunday Telegraph, had previously praised Truss's Budget as "the best Budget I have ever heard by a massive margin". That Budget, which included £45 billion of unfunded tax cuts, led to a collapse in government bonds.
Truss's Claims
Liz Truss has also re-emerged to promote her latest book, in which she claims the UK would have become so rich if she had lasted longer than 49 days in No10 that the country would have launched "several missions to Mars".
The criticism comes as the government faces challenges from global instability, with the article noting that Washington and Moscow are run by "two semi-senile megalomaniacs", making economic strategy vulnerable to surprise military attacks.
