Leaked Remarks Show the Tories Weighing Cuts Beyond the £47bn
Andrew Griffith, now shadow chancellor, told Conservative members last October that the shadow cabinet had discussed finding further savings in “every part of government”, beyond the £47 billion of cuts already announced. “The rate at which the economy is deteriorating, as well as our ambition to cut more taxes, means that we will have to find further savings,” he said. A party spokesman confirmed it will “go further” in Birmingham.
The £47 billion already on the table is made up mainly of removing welfare from all non-British and non-EU citizens, £8 billion from cutting 132,000 civil service jobs, £1.6 billion from scrapping almost all of Labour’s clean energy scheme and more than £7 billion from international aid. On Friday Kemi Badenoch added £4 billion to that: £2.5 billion more from aid, which would leave it at £1 billion a year, and £1 billion from culture, media and sport, with half the saving paying for 50,000 prison places. For scale, Labour’s own planned reduction, from 0.5% to 0.3% of national income by 2027, still leaves about £9 billion; £1 billion is a cut of roughly 90%. Mr Griffith’s own words were that there are “decisions made and signed up to by everybody to deliver that £47bn” and that “last week at the shadow cabinet, we talked about [how] we will need to go further”, framing it as “a moral mission to get our economy growing”. He was promoted in August, was chief operating officer at Sky before politics, and worked in the Treasury under Kwasi Kwarteng, defending the mini-budget as the markets turned. Mrs Badenoch told ITV Meridian on Friday that privatisation “was a success” and that she does not think “Andy Burnham running the water companies is the answer”. Watch the conference for the named savings.