Liz Truss calls on UK to slash taxes to get ‘match fit to take on China’ as she warns the West to ‘get real’ about the threat posed by Beijing, Russia and other dictatorships
- UK needs to slash taxes to get a ‘match fit to take on China’, Lizz Truss will warn
- She will hit out at plans to implement a global minimum rate for corporation tax
Britain and the West need to slash taxes in order to get ‘match fit to take on China,’ Liz Truss will warn today.
The former prime minister will urge Western countries to ‘get real about the threat’ posed by China, Russia and other dictatorships.
Delivering the annual Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture, she will also warn that the Anglo-American economic model which helped the West win the Cold War is being ‘strangled into stagnation’ by a combination of high taxes and big government.
And she will hit out at plans to implement a global minimum rate for corporation tax, describing the move as a ‘global cartel of complacency’.
Her intervention comes just days after Emmanuel Macron and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen made a conciliatory trip to China.
Britain and the West need to slash taxes in order to get ‘match fit to take on China,’ Liz Truss will warn today
Ms Truss will take a thinly veiled swipe at the French president, saying that ‘too many in the West have appeased and accommodated these regimes’.
‘Putin and Xi have made it clear they are allies against Western capitalism,’ she will say. ‘That is why Western leaders visiting president Xi to ask for his support in ending the war is a mistake. And it is a sign of weakness.’
Ms Truss will use today’s speech at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC to warn of a new ‘global battle between free societies and dictatorships’.
She will say the West faces a ‘disease of ever-larger government’, with the size of the British state rising from 35 per cent of GDP at the turn of the century to 47 per cent today, and the US seeing a rise from 29 per cent to 35 per cent over the same period.
‘We have to ask ourselves, are we still match fit to take on China and to take on the whole concept of state capitalism?’ she will say.
‘The sad truth is that we have seen stagnation, redistributionism and woke culture taking hold in business and the economy in the UK and the US. It results in more tax, more subsidies, more regulation.’ Ms Truss will lament the West’s failure to stand up for core values such as free speech and free enterprise, saying that both the UK and the US have suffered from ‘self-flagellation, lashing out at the very things that made us great’.
Truss will also hit out at plans to implement a global minimum rate for corporation tax, describing the move as a ‘global cartel of complacency’
The former prime minister will urge Western countries to ‘get real about the threat’ posed by China, Russia and other dictatorships
‘We’ve allowed our opponents to own our institutions, crowd our campuses and fill our airwaves.’
She will warn that authoritarian regimes are taking succour from the West’s confusion, saying that those who ‘hate freedom have been gaining ground’.
And she will step up calls for the world to adopt a tougher approach to Beijing, saying that the West needs to ‘put economic pressure on China before it is too late’.
Western countries ‘need to make sure Taiwan is able to defend itself’ from a potential Chinese invasion, she will say.
Ms Truss’s comments go much further than Rishi Sunak’s policy of ‘robust pragmatism’ towards Beijing and will fuel Tory calls for him to toughen the Government’s approach. She will also step up the pressure on her successor over tax, saying that low growth, rising living costs and declining wage levels are ‘symptoms’ of a high tax society.
And she will directly criticise the Government’s decision to sign up to an initiative by the OECD and G20 to set a global minimum tax rate of 15 per cent. The move is designed to prevent multinational corporations avoiding tax.
But Ms Truss will argue that it risks preventing countries from cutting taxes to boost competitiveness. ‘It’s nothing short of a global cartel of complacency,’ she will warn.
‘This agreement on high taxes, which is basically an agreement on high spending and low growth, will damage freedom.’
