Conservative leadership frontrunner Liz Truss has been accused of showing “her true colours” in an 2009 paper promoting government spending cuts including slashing doctors’ pay.
Truss called for patients to be charged to see their GP and for doctors’ pay to be slashed by 10% in a controversial report she co-authored when she was deputy director of the Reform thinktank, TalkTV discovered.
Labour said Truss’s report from 13 years ago, entitled “Back to Black”, revealed that “the reality of her agenda is devastating cuts”.
In the document, the seven authors, including Truss, recommended:
- cutting £28bn in a year by
- introducing “user charges for GPs” and
- reducing the pay of registrars, consultants, GPs and managers by 10%.
- abolishing universal child benefit
- removing the winter fuel payment
- axing several major military procurement projects including the Royal Navy’s planned aircraft carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales
Truss’s campaign attempted to distance the Tory leadership candidate from the paper, telling TalkTV’s The News Desk: “Co-authoring a document does not mean that someone supports every proposal put forward. Liz is focused on her bold economic plan to boost growth, cut taxes and put money back into hardworking people’s pockets”.
Labour deputy leader, Angela Rayner, said: “Liz Truss’s track record shows her true colours. She is out of touch and out of step with the public. The reality of her agenda is devastating cuts that risk national security, punishing patients already facing record waiting times and cutting the pay of frontline workers. Her desperate attempts to distance herself from her own views now will fool no one”.
Obviously, to rabid Truss supporters, those proposals would seem perfectly reasonable but how her “vision” would "put money back into hardworking people’s pockets” is to say the least, tenuous … 