“Kwasi Kwarteng’s budget is a moment in history that will radically transform Britain”, columnist Allister Heath wrote quiveringly in the UK’s Daily Telegraph on September 23. If that sounds startlingly prophetic, reserve your judgment until you get to the end of the first paragraph:
This was the best budget I have ever heard a British chancellor deliver, by a massive margin. The tax cuts were so huge and bold, the language so extraordinary, that at times, listening to Kwasi Kwarteng, I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, that I hadn’t been transported to a distant land that actually believed in the economics of Milton Friedman and FA Hayek.
Less than a week later, the £45 billion tax cuts — which, in a real twist, primarily benefit the country’s highest earners — have sent shock waves through financial markets, the value of the British pound is plummeting off a cliff, and the Bank of England has had to intervene to restore some stability. This hasn’t stopped a certain section of the British press from defending UK Prime Minister Liz Truss with the same intensity and enthusiasm that Truss displays for pork markets.
Heath has stuck to his guns, arguing on Wednesday that Truss must “hold her nerve as the world tips into a calamitous recession”:
The PM must hold her nerve. Her vision is exactly right for managing the transition to a post-Brexit economy built on a sustainable expansion, rather than debt-fuelled mirages.
And The Daily Express, which gave the call (a mere three weeks ago) to “Put faith in Truss to deliver for Britain”…
… is now reporting on Truss promising “no U-turn from ‘the right plan'”.
And finally, a piece so daft it becomes kind of brilliant — Conservative peer Daniel Hannan (also known as Lord Hannan of Kingsclere because Britain is a parody of itself) argues it’s not the tax cuts causing these economic catastrophes, it’s the mere hypothetical possibility that someone other than Truss might be in charge some day. Obviously:
… what we have seen since Friday is partly a market adjustment to the increased probability that [Labour leader] Sir Keir Starmer will win in 2024 or 2025 — leading to higher taxes, higher spending, and a weaker economy.
Those journalists (if that word is adequate for their art) are really excelling themselves, but they draw on a long tradition. Humbert Wolfe wrote this celebrated epigram in the 1920s:
You cannot hope to bribe or twist
(thank God!) the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
Well, what can you say after reading something like that??!!
I thought that it was “mad dogs and Englishmen”. It seems that these days “mad Englishmen and dogs” would be a more appropriate way to describe what is happening in the U.K. Perhaps those heat waves they had over the northern summer has sent them all ‘troppo’?
Then again, perhaps an alternative explanation is that the ‘crazy disease’ that has afflicted the Americans for so long has finally crossed the North Atlantic Ocean.
God knows what it is but let’s hope that it does not find its way here.
P.S.
Perhaps we also need to remember that the U.K. is a country that still believes strongly in Kings, Queens, Princes, and Princesses and castles, and other assorted fairy tales (including free-market economics and the Church of England). So what else should we expect?
(I am just trying to be helpful with possible explanations for this madness. I hope people understand that. It is the altruistic side of me coming to the fore.)
Most right-wing commentators are just so far off the mark, aren’t they!
The comments from the left are quite apt, though. Marina Hyde and John Crace in the Guardian UK provide trenchant and very amusing commentary.
Marina Hyde is brilliant, not just as a critic, but as a writer. Clive James would be in awe.
If only there were Australian journalists half as good.
Yes she is. I long for an Aussie counterpart.
The forever missed ‘Mango’ Kingston has never been matched.
Pity about her sister, Gay Alcorn who went over to the Darkside long ago, now editor of the ailing Age.
Ditto: I read most of Hyde’s columns and they rarely disappoint or miss the mark. The writing is often hilarious and the following comments too.
It is very sad that the average punter who votes for conservatives politicians doesn’t realise that the economic theories pursued by the conservative side of politics that were advanced by Hayek and his disciple Friedman are designed to push the wealth of the world from the lower and middle classes to the uber rich upper classes, And the conservatives have been remarkably successful in doing exactly that since Thatcher and her mate Ronnie Ray-guns gave Friedmanite theories free reign way back in the 1980’s.
Are the journalists deluded, blinded by ideology, or pushing an absurd editorial line because they fear for their jobs in a dying industry?
Probably a combination of “all of the above”, Kel.
Reminds me of some of the headlines and articles every week in the Murdoch papers.
Parallel Universe stuff. And most of their readers lap it up.