Thursday 6 October 2022

Trussonomics - "like Lord of the Flies"

Truss’ new three-word slogan to unite the Tories - or at least keep her faction inside the party together - is ‘anti-growth coalition’. This is ‘the blob’ in a different guise perhaps, who knows? It is the enemy within favoured by dictators or politicians on shaky ground, as a means of distracting voters from one disaster or another.  Beth Rigby at Sky news called it an "imagined enemy" and I think that sums it up well.  Rigby is also right to say, whatever it is, the coalition ranged against her is going to cause a lot of difficulties.

The BBC's political editor Chris Mason described the 2022 conference as the most dysfunctional and divisive for years. A lot of Truss' real enemies within Tory ranks didn't even bother to attend.

But getting back to this anti-growth coalition. It's something right out of the Putin playbook, to accuse your enemies of your own actions. The only British government ever to deliberately pursue an anti-growth policy was the Conservative one elected in 2015, which went on to give us Brexit.

Cameron kicked it off by allowing members of his party to campaign for Brexit using any and every means, legal and honest or not, to persuade voters to support it. That was a mistake.  During the months-long debate, we had plenty of experts warning Brexit would impact GDP growth. The Treasury forecast in April 2016 that UK GDP would be reduced in the event of a negotiated bilateral agreement by between 4.6% and 7.8% by 2030. On a £2 trillion economy this is somewhere between £92 and £156 billion a year.

It was dismissed as scaremongering but it's proving to be an understatement if anything.

Nevertheless, when he got the chance, Johnson went ahead with almost the hardest possible form of Brexit anyway and we are now seeing the results of how disastrous that has been. 

In her speech, Truss singled out Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP, militant unions, vested interests dressed up as think-tanks, talking heads, Brexit deniers and Extinction Rebellion protesters as forming part of this 'anti-growth coalition"  Many of these warned against Brexit precisely because it would reduce growth.

Now she accuses them (and more or less everybody else who warned Brexiteers of the lower growth and other consequences of voting to leave the EU) of being anti-growth!  Amazing.  And her government is now stuffed with advisers from shadowy think-tanks with vested interests. It is one of the things government critics frequently point to.

To be clear, every British prime minister since Pitt has pursued policies to encourage economic growth. They haven't always succeeded for various reasons, external and internal, but I don't believe a single one ever adopted a policy that The Treasury had implicitly described as anti-growth before it was decided upon, nor spent as much time and money implementing it.

She told delegates in Birmingham that she had "three priorities for our economy: growth, growth, and growth" while leading a government insanely pressing on with a policy to reduce growth. It makes your head spin even to think about it.

This imaginary conspiracy against Conservatism, she claimed, always wants "more taxes, more regulation and more meddling."  This is as taxes as a percentage of GDP reach a 70-year high and British exporters drown in EU red tape in order to get products into and out of the single market.

Finally, have a read of this:

A quote from it:

"The brutality and chaos of what is now unfolding at the heart of government is most starkly described by one memorable quote from an unnamed cabinet minister, who said: “'It’s like Lord of the Flies.'

"Certainly, William Golding’s tale about a post-apocalyptic island under the rule of upper-class yobs who worship a pig’s head on a stick hardly feels like satire now."

The author is an anonymous civil servant.

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