WITH the value of the pound falling faster than a slice of buttered toast determined to leave a stain on the carpet, I thank my lucky stars every day that we don’t have to deal with the chaos that would have been unleashed had the other guys won at the last election.
Thankfully, the strong and stable Conservatives are here to keep the economy on track and take the fight to the cultural Marxists. Or so the myth goes …
I’m not one to overreact to fluctuations in the value of the pound. Often, it seems like a banker stubbing their toe on a coffee table with sufficient force is enough to cause the markets to panic, never mind any genuinely progressive policy that threatens the power of the elite. But when the Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is out necking champagne with the financiers making a fortune from his apocalyptic mini-Budget, that’s a very different situation indeed.
“Fiscal responsibility” is as synonymous with the Tory brand as visionary futurism is with Elon Musk – and in both cases that has more to do with relentless marketing and brand management than any real, meaningful data.
Even a cursory glance at the state of Britain’s debt situation should put an end to the myth of successful Conservative economic stewardship, in much the same way that the newly revealed Tesla Bot shuffling on-stage like it’s trying to maintain what dignity it has left after an incident on the way to the bathroom should have done for Musk.
Having spent the last 10 years or so tugging at the loose threads of the British economy, the Conservatives have finally set the whole thing unravelling – and Liz Truss’s colleagues aren’t happy that the realities of their economic policies have been laid bare.
Since David Cameron’s election in 2010 – the beginning of the Conservatives’ near unchallenged reign over the past 12 years – public sector debt has spiralled from around £995 billion to well over £2 trillion – a number so breathtakingly high that it would take a worker on a median income in the UK upwards of 60 million years to pay it off if they were donating their full wage packet to wiping away the debt.
And with that unfathomable burden came austerity, the defunding of public services and the hollowing out of the welfare state. The Conservative party’s oversimplified portrayal of taxation and spending as equivalent to a household budget turned out to be as “sensible” as the £15bn worth of taxpayers’ money wasted on faulty PPE equipment during the pandemic. In a household budget, cutting spending means saving money – but the economy is not a household budget.
When you cut money for mental health services, the need for those services simply passes to another part of the healthcare system. When you cut investment, and jobs that would have generated extra tax, revenue disappears.
To treat the economy like a machine with a giant, single dial labelled “money, money, money” reveals a government that is either taking its monetary policy from a children’s book called My First Budget, or one that is more ideologically driven than economically so.
Austerity was a disaster for the UK, but so bereft of ideas are the Conservatives that they seem ready to pick it up, wipe off the blood of the poorest who died under the Conservatives’ reckless experiment the last time round, and give it another go.
The political right know that a lie repeated loudly and often enough can become a useful campaign tool, and successive Conservative Prime Ministers and Chancellors have used that to great effect to set themselves up as the sensible alternative to the “loony left” or “politically correct” or “woke” or whatever contemporary misrepresentative shorthand is being used to paint the left as a threat.
Yet it is under Conservatism that the UK has been left carrying more debt than ever between back-to-back crises and public services on the brink of collapse.
When Liam Byrne, the chief secretary to the Treasury under Gordon Brown, left a note for his successor reading “I’m afraid there is no money”, it handed the Tories the ammunition they needed to portray the opposition as reckless and untrustworthy on fiscal policy.
While a pretty misjudged parting shot, one that he has long regretted, Byrne’s note did follow an old tradition going back decades of leaving a witticism for the new boss; Tory chancellor Reginald Maudling’s quip of “Sorry to leave it in such a mess, old cock” to Jim Callaghan in 1964 followed in the same vein.
What note, I wonder, will Kwasi Kwarteng leave for his successor following his ousting? After all, the Tory plan to saddle future generations with even more astronomical debt to fund their tax cuts for the rich is a greater act of sabotage than anything Labour have so far managed to pull off.
Liz Truss’s administration has shattered the myth of economic competence that dates back long before the days of Boris Johnson pigheadedly hiding in a fridge from reporters, and reports of David Cameron hiding his Johnson in a pig’s head.
Truss seems set to double down, refusing over the weekend to confirm whether or not her Government will be cutting welfare and services to make up the shortfall in their hard-right budget.
In the words of Truss herself, she’s “not going to write future budgets” while answering questions from a reporter. The absolute picture of responsible economic management that she is, Truss seems content to overhaul the UK’s entire tax system for the benefit of the bankers and bosses without actually having considered where the money will come from, or what the consequences will be.
And there will be consequences.
