Former Treasury minister hits out at Liz Truss’s ‘endless crazy tax cuts’ and ‘laughable’ public sector U-turn

‘The optics of that: Dear, dear, dear,’ says Lord O’Neill

A former Treasury minister who worked under George Osborne has criticised Liz Truss’s “endless crazy tax cut” plans and described her now abandoned regional pay proposals as “laughable”.

The scathing comments from Jim O’Neill — a crossbench peer and economist — comes after the foreign secretary dropped a major policy barely 12 hours after it was launched after facing a significant backlash.

The foreign secretary had proposed a £8.8 billion “war on Whitehall waste” that included plans to introduce regional pay boards for civil servants and could have led to cuts in public sector wages outside the southeast.