London:
British Home Secretary Suella Braverman on Tuesday accused her Conservative counterparts of plotting a “coup” against Prime Minister Liz Truss, forcing party leaders to make changes to her plan to remove the highest tax rate for the country’s highest earner.
On the sidelines of the ruling party’s annual conference in Birmingham, the India-born minister said Tory MPs should unite behind their new leader who has received a “serious mandate” from party members in “tiring” election results in the past. several months.
“I am deeply disappointed that members of our own parliamentary party staged a coup and undermined the authority of the Prime Minister in an unprofessional manner,” Braverman told The Daily Telegraph.
“We are one party, the Prime Minister has been elected. He has a serious mandate to fulfill. He talked about cutting taxes throughout the summer in a pretty grueling process. It does what it says on the box,” he said during a podcast for the newspaper.
His defense of Truss came a day after the government was forced to reverse a proposal to cut the income tax rate by 45p from next April, to prevent an uprising in party ranks.
Truss said the issue had become a “massive diversion” from his strong economic growth plan.
Braverman said he was disappointed that Truss and British Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng were stepping back from policy amid the next economic storm, but said he “accepted their excuse”.
At an event hosted by the Young Conservatives at the Birmingham Conference on Monday, the Minister also raised the prospect of reducing the number of foreign students coming to the UK to meet the country’s growing needs.
“We should be more interested in students. We’ve had a huge increase in the number of students coming to this country,” Braverman said.
“I think we’re getting to a point where we have to look at some of the courses people are taking in this country, some of the institutions, they’re not always very good quality. I think it’s a legitimate question whether this will serve our economic goals, and taking a smarter and smarter approach to student visa numbers is, in my opinion, completely consistent with our growth agenda,” he said.
His intervention comes at a time when India has overtaken China as the country with the highest number of student visas issued to study in higher education institutions in the UK.
According to the latest data from the Home Office, around 118,000 Indian students received UK student visas in the year ending June 2022, an 89% increase from the previous year.
The new minister, who took up his post in the Home Office early last month, said he would also seek other visa lines to “inject balance” into the country’s immigration system.
(This story has not been edited by blogdudemocrate.org staff and is created automatically from the syndicated feed).
