Kwarteng’s mini-Budget would only have been a modest departure from the post-1990 consensus
A myth is taking hold – a myth so preposterous that a moment’s thought shows it to be nonsense, yet so widespread that it is starting to have malign real-world consequences. The myth goes something like this.
“The Conservative Party has been taken over by libertarian ideologues. After decades of plotting in their Tufton Street think tanks, these revolutionaries finally got one of their agents into Downing Street in the shape of Liz Truss. Her budget delivered the free-market fundamentalism they had always dreamed of: smaller government, tax cuts, deregulation. But the real world could not be bent to fit with their dogmas, and the economy was shattered, leaving us all poorer. Now, other Tories must mop up after their mess.”
Hmmm. Look around you. Does Britain feel like a country that has been in the grip of libertarians? Taxes are higher than in any year since 1949. Every policy, from trade to government investment, is measured against the goal of net zero. The rich gas deposits under our feet are placed off-limits by a moratorium. Leftist lobby groups, including Migrant Help, Stonewall, Refugee Action and Hope Not Hate, receive state funding.
The money-printing that was supposed to be an emergency response to the 2008 crash has become semi-permanent. There are five million economically inactive people of working age during an acute labour shortage. State employees expect to be paid without leaving home, and the attempt to shift 91,000 of them from the revenue-consuming to the revenue-generating bit of the economy has been dropped.