James Cleverly has backed Liz Truss’s plan to reverse the rise in national insurance - just months after voting for it.
The education secretary, who is backing Truss’s leadership bid, this morning said “it’s absolutely right that we allow people to keep more of the money they have earned”.
But last September, he criticised Labour for opposing the increase, which will raise £12bn and is aimed at clearing the NHS backlog caused by the pandemic as well as fund social care in the future.
After the Commons backed the plan, Cleverly tweeted: “Labour just voted against extra funding for social care and frontline NHS services. Wow.”
Truss, the foreign secretary, has pledged to reverse the national insurance increase if she becomes prime minister, as well as scrap the planned increase in corporation tax.
Speaking on Sky News this morning, Cleverly said: “What Liz has said is we need to go for an economic growth strategy and increasing the tax burden on businesses, which are inevitably going to be passed on to consumers, is not the way of doing that.
“We are already highly-taxed as a society and I think when there are inflationary pressures, when prices are going up, what we need to do is make sure we reduce the bit of people’s expenditure that we are in direct control of, and that is tax.
“It’s absolutely right that we allow people to keep more of the money they have earned. That money will help them meet the increasing bills that we are all seeing.”
When Cleverly’s U-turn was pointed out on social media, he tweeted in an apparent reference to the war in Ukraine: “It’s almost as if some significant geo-economic event has happened since the end of last year.”
However, the national insurance rise came in in April, two months after the war began