Mainly proposing to undo the protections put in place to prevent a second financial crisis, forcing out the senior civil servant in the Treasury and then refusing to let the OBR prepare a report on the mini budget, which was so bad that it almost collapsed the UK pensions market, putting forth plans to allow fracking despite even the main company involved in it saying that has zero chance of providing any useful amount of gas, massively increasing Government borrowing to protect the profit margins of oil companies and tanking the value of the pound.
Other than that, not much.
Well, ok, in order:
- If that's banker bonuses, I think we already discussed that. Fiddling about with this is virtue signalling to cover for the fact they haven't put in place the reforms in regulation that are needed to stop banks destroying the economy a second time. Unfortunately Truss isn't doing that, but I don't see anyone else having done it either.
- I rather like the idea of governments running policy, not civil servants. Civil servants are there to implement policy. I really don't care much if they want a change in personnel.
- The OBR was only established in 2012. It is a reasonable thing to have, but I recall that we coped with all sorts of budgets before then, so I don't see why it is now viewed as essential.
- The pensions market were over-leveraged in dodgy instruments and so over-exposed to sudden moves in the markets. Again, the fact that happened is a failure of regulation that no-one has addressed or is going to try to address. In any event, the cost of the BoE's intervention in the market was less than 4bn, not the 65bn widely quoted, and they got gilts in return, so it isn't exactly money thrown into a black hole.
- Fracking, whatever we think of it, was covered in her campaign, it was quite explicit that she intended to remove the ban.
- As the market price of gas falls, the energy price cap becomes less and less of a commitment. Obviously *something* really did have to be done here. And again, it doesn't deviate from what was covered in her campaign.
- The Euro and the Yen, among others, have fallen against the dollar by comparable amounts to the GBP recently. Is that Truss' fault too?
I appreciate a number of these things are *controversial*, and I don't agree with all of them in the slightest, but the reaction to them appears incredibly over-the-top.
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Primarily increasing borrowing to fund an untargeted tax cut.
If they want to introduce radical policies, they should put them to the whole electorate.
I find it hard to believe that most people care that much about fiscal prudence again all of a sudden, after we spent the last few years spending hundreds and huindreds of billions of pounds on a totally fruitless endeavour. This is a drop in the ocean compared to that, and at least it has some professed purpose, even if you disagree that 'Trussonomics' will work (I don't think it will myself, but there is some evidence that it might).
This appears to be in the spirit of the 2019 manifesto to me. Conversely, what very explicitly was breaching the 2019 manifesto was the increase in NI that Johnson and Sunak pushed through. Were people calling for a GE in response to that?
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That is disputed. Johnson claimed, in his leaving speech, he accomplished what he set out to do. He left her little right to do anything.
I think we'd agree that Johnson wasn't exactly being accurate in that statement though. Not least because, as I mentioned above, he raised taxes despite having very explicitly committed to not donig so.
Of course. This is an obvious example - do you think these Tory MPs are *ideologically* supportive of corporation tax rises (and if so, did they get lost and join the wrong party at some point?!) They're using it as a stick to beat Truss and Kwarteng with, and that's politics.
