You can rely on Liz Truss. To gamble with the nation’s future. To follow half-baked theories instead of good solid evidence. To be driven by ideology rather than the needs of the community. Never has the country been burdened with a more reckless scheme in a more desperate situation.
The Conservatives got to power on the back of a dangerous collapse in free enterprise financial markets that came within hours of destroying a functioning economy. It cost billions in funding from the public purse, and ten years of austerity to partially fix the damage. When we were all being asked to tighten our belts to help out, the Conservatives spent a great deal of time preaching a message of austerity and telling us about the importance of not leaving the next generation a mountain of unsustainable debt.
Fiscally irresponsible Conservatives
The party that started out making such a lot of claims about its fiscal responsibility now looks set to leave office with a flurry of un-costed giveaways to the wealthy funded by enormous extra borrowing. It is a very peculiar kind of conservativism that bets the house on a risky theory put forward by people with little connection with the real world of productive business and no interest in evidence-based economics.
If you’re paying a mortgage or renting from someone who does, then it might be your house that they are betting with. There aren’t many things that the vast majority of economists agree on, but one of them is what happens when government spends a lot of money that it can’t afford on tax giveaways and subsidies. It tends to cause the national currency to fall, interest rates to rise and inflation.
A far-right faction of the Conservative Party has captured power and is pushing through an agenda that not even the bulk of its own MPs think is wise. For years we’ve been told by that party that it is madness for government to subsidise prices. Now the energy bills of the very richest in the country are being paid by the government in a badly designed and untargeted subsidy scheme.
Uncosted tax breaks to benefit the rich
The cost of the energy subsidy for individual consumers is on its own expected by the head of the Institute of Fiscal Studies to equal £100bn in a single year. More than the entire budget spent on education. Then there is the cost of helping out small businesses. The cost of helping the NHS, schools, care homes and local councils to cope with rising bills is apparently much less of a priority. The dedicated people who are still struggling to deliver a service or to manage it have been supplied with a very supportive stream of fine words. But not enough serious extra money to cope with inflation running at 10%.
What money has been found for is tax breaks? Reducing tax rates and raising tax thresholds helps the rich far more than the poor. The creation of ‘freeports’ miles from the sea gives state handouts to the most reckless of developers who don’t want to follow normal regulations. Removing the cap on bankers’ bonuses gives some of the richest people additional income. In the form of a huge extra incentive to do one of the very things which caused the 2008 crash and caused so much misery. Uncontrolled market manipulators are back to being able to gamble with other people’s money, keep the bonus if the gamble works and dump the community with the bail-out bill if it doesn’t.
Trickle down economics simply doesn’t work
It is an inspired combination. Inspired by the crazy theory that if you use government money to make the rich even richer then the money will eventually trickle down to the poorest in society and benefit all. That theory has been pursued on and off since the late 1970s. The result has been a trickling up of money to the wealthy whilst real wages of working people haven’t increased.
Ask someone who has been teaching for the last ten years how much their real-term pay has increased and you’re likely to be given a quick lesson in the realities of trickle-down economics for them. Nurses, care workers, train workers, and even barristers are also likely to be able to give an honest account of how well this theory works in practice. Anyone on benefits is in for a very hard time.
As are the rest of us. A combination of falling real wages, lost export markets, rising food prices, high mortgages and inflation is bad enough. Add to that an out-of-touch government following the pet theories of the radical right and the future looks bleak.
No mandate for this extreme free-market ideology
This is a government that is full of self confidence and determined to implement a very radical agenda. Unfortunately, that agenda comes from the furthest reaches of the far right in the US and the confidence is utterly misplaced.
The lady is not for turning. She is for pushing home every last detail of the extreme free-market ideology that has enabled her to seize control of her party and to boss it over the country without ever putting these theories to the electorate.
This plan is so completely dodgy that the government dare not even call the measures they are announcing a ‘budget’, because that would mean civil servants would have to professionally and dispassionately cost the plan. The government is deliberately flying blind. Hitting and hoping.
It is ordinary people who are going to be hit hard. The only hope available is that we can kick her out of office in two years. A daft theory pushed by a team of fanatical believers can do an enormous amount of damage in that time.
