No.261 - Liz Truss is Politically Dead. RIP Trussonomics

Dear James,

Liz Truss is politically dead. Yesterday, on cue, Jeremy Hunt came onto our screens with the palour and demeanour of the kindly undertaker. Understated and yet with the stiffly upright posture of the lead mourner, he was perfect for the role. He told us that the Growth Plan of three weeks ago was dead. We were reassured. Without saying it, the implicit message was that the main instigator of that plan was also deceased and he was the right man to dress the corpse and bury the perpetrator. Jeremy Hunt would look good walking before the hearse in a top hat and cane.

Today, Hunt’s first act as our latest Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been to deliver to the incredulous world, the final, screeching U-Turn on all the latest crazed notions with which your government has littered the political world since 2015. Today in parliament he will make a fiscal statement in a cosmetic attempt to save Liz Truss. He will attempt to fill the £60bn hole in the nation’s finances by scrapping or delaying the 1p drop in income tax, by confirming the rise in corporation tax and by reducing the two year energy package to six months. The markets breathed a sigh of relief, the yields on government gilts fell slightly and the pound stabilised against the dollar. Unfortunately though, this will be only a temporary reprieve. The fundamentally dire  economic situation remains and that is just the economics. The biggest problem of all is the political one.

On the political surface, Hunt’s actions are purely an exercise in face saving for Liz Truss. She may remain on life support for a few more days but I suspect it will more likely be just a few more hours. Political rigor mortis has already set in for her and her ideologies. The Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute and the rest of this right wing cabal of economists and their fantasy politics must be holding their heads in despair. Even poor old Jacob Rees-Mogg must be quaking in his spats. They will blame ‘poor Liz’ of course and not their policies. They will blame the ‘city slickers’ and ‘rogue bankers’ while forgetting that their own ‘free market theories’ are at the root of the problem. Market reaction to Kwarteng’s ‘fiscal event’ three weeks ago was simply because the figures didn’t add up. It seems that our Chancellor-Before-Last couldn’t do basic arithmetic.

Below the political surface, however, much more is happening. The fever that took hold of the British political system in 2015 has been running amok ever since. It began with Brexit - that incredible self-harm done by a small and gullible majority of the nation in 2016 - and has run through to Truss’s British version of Reaganomics, and ‘supply side reform’ attached to all the libertarian nostrums of which we have heard so much of lately. We must not intervene in people’s private lives we were told. Let the obese be obese, it’s their choice. Let smokers discover the joys of death by inhalation, it’s their choice too. Now all that is being rolled back. Reality is once again, after so long, knocking at the door. The people are saying they want a system that works for them, not the delirium of the free for all, cowboy capitalism of the libertarian right that works for just the top 10%. The people want a public sector that is efficient, well funded and caring. The sooner that your Party James understands this, the better it will be for your chances of survival. To go banging on about a low, tax, high wage economy is a hiding to nowhere. Entrepreneurism can flourish in such a system as long as it is seen as fair. And the essence of creating fairness is to include as many people as possible in the decision making in such a system. For a class based system such as ours that will be a long journey but it’s better to start out now than never.

Today Jeremy Hunt reset the target of economic policy. The new mantra is ‘stability’. It is a total repudiation of Trussonomics. Gone is that old mantra of ‘You can’t tax your way to growth’. In comes, ‘Growth needs stability and certainty’. The new policy will at the moment save about £32bn of the £60bn black hole. There is much more pain to come.

But back to the political corpse. Liz Truss is still in office but no longer in power. All her policies, fantasies and hubris have been reduced to ashes, binned. She has not appeared in public since the disastrous Press Conference last Friday. This afternoon, Hunt will make his statement to the Commons. Will Truss be there beside him? If she is she will have to suffer the humiliation of her appalling situation. If she isn’t she will be branded a coward. Not an enviable situation. But there is a solution, James.

Mrs Truss should go before the nation today, apologise and then resign.

RIP Trussonomics and the Libertarian Right!

BH - Your Concerned Constituent

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