Mark Carney delivered a brutal takedown of Brexit and Liz Truss’s government at a summit in Montreal.
The former Bank of England governor, who held the prestigious position from 2013 to 2020, accused those who campaigned for Brexit of wanting to “tear down the future”.
He also slammed Truss’s disastrous mini-Budget, in which she planned to borrow billions of pounds to slash taxes for the rich, saying she tried to create an “Argentina on the Channel” in reference to that country’s troubled economy.
Truss will use a speech at the Institute for Government think tank on Monday to defend decisions made during her brief spell in Number 10, calling it unfair to say she had pursued unfunded tax cuts.
But according to Carney, a renowned economist, she “grossly under-valued” the importance of “mission, of institutions, and of discipline to a strong economy” in doing so.
He also took a swipe at the decision to exit the European Union, saying: “For years, the rallying cry of the Brexiteers was ‘broken Britain’. But their solution – to ‘take back control’ – ended up code for tear down the future.”
“When politicians proclaim that our great democracies are broken, it’s not because they want to fix them, it’s because they want a licence to demolish.
“It’s a model, and it’s a repeated model, that uses a constraint to ‘starve the beast of government’ in the misguided view that slashing leads to growing.”
Related: Labour would seek ‘much better’ Brexit deal from Brussels – Starmer