Chancellor: I was ‘wrong’ on taxes during election

Transcript

00:00Now you specifically said you already knew everything you needed to know, yet

00:05on Wednesday you raised taxes by £40 billion. Why would a reasonable

00:11person believe a single word that you say in the next 15 minutes and that

00:17you'll stick to it? I was wrong on the 11th of June. I didn't know everything

00:23because when I arrived at the Treasury on the 5th of July, so just under a

00:29month after I said those words, I was taken into a room by the senior

00:35officials at the Treasury and they set out the huge black hole in the public

00:40finances beyond which anybody knew about at the time of the general election

00:45because the previous government hid it from the country, they hid it from

00:48Parliament and indeed they hid it from the official independent forecast of the

00:53Office of Budget Responsibility and so when I went into that budget last week

00:58I had to put our public finances back on a firm trajectory because we saw in

01:04the previous Parliament what happens when government loses control of the

01:08public finances and the first commitment we made in our manifesto was to bring

01:13stability back to the economy and that's what I did on Wednesday.