IT should go without saying that it would be obscene if the Conservatives were to fund their £17 billion a year, mini-Budget giveaway on corporation tax in any way through further austerity, from a societal perspective.

However, with the Tories seemingly weighing up the notion of not raising welfare benefits in line with rampant inflation, it seems that this does need to be said.

The other thing that should be pointed out, and perhaps this might resonate more with hard-line Tories, is that heaping even more austerity on to the nauseating amount already racked up since 2010 will make the struggling UK economy even sicker.

Of course, the Tories have ignored such warnings before, and have proved very inept indeed on simple economic matters. The University of Strathclyde’s Fraser of Allander Institute and many other experts highlighted in no uncertain terms in the wake of David Cameron’s 2010 general election victory the extent of the drag on the economy from his administration’s planned austerity.

The Conservatives went ahead anyway, and the inevitable occurred.

It was, and remains, a matter of simple arithmetic. If you take money out of the pockets of those who need to spend most or all of what they have to live, this will subtract directly from aggregate demand and hamper the economy greatly.

The Conservatives, in spite of Mr Cameron’s claim that we were somehow “all in this together”, cut the main rate of corporation tax from 28% to 19% in stages, while slashing many, many billions of pounds a year from welfare benefits and squeezing savagely other key areas of public spending. They promised this would boost investment and create “a Britain carried aloft by the march of the makers” – it did not. It is not entirely clear what Mr Cameron’s “this” was. It seemed to be a reference to the Tories’ hyped-up view of the state of the public finances in the wake of the global financial crisis, one which their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, appeared to swallow.

Curiously, the Conservatives blamed the global financial crisis on Labour. This seemed to rather ignore the “global” aspect.

The “this”, of course, became much worse as a result of the Tory policies. Public sector net debt increased from around £1 trillion when the Tories came to power in 2010 to £1.8 trillion even before the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020. This very telling increase is a key indicator, among a whole heap of evidence, of the enormously negative economic impact of the Tory austerity.

Of course, the dreadful effects were much wider than the impact on the economy, with fresh research published this week highlighting the dismal toll of the Tory austerity.

This study, led by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health and the University of Glasgow and published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, reports an additional 335,000 deaths were observed across Scotland, England and Wales between 2012 and 2019, compared with what previous trends signalled. In Scotland, around 20,000 more deaths than expected occurred.

Statistical analyses demonstrate that previously improving mortality trends changed around 2011/2013 in both Scotland and England, following the implementation of austerity policies in 2010, the GCPH declared.

David Walsh, lead author of the paper and public health programme manager at the GCPH, said: “These figures are not only shocking but shameful. And we must remember that these are more than just statistics: they represent hundreds of thousands of people whose lives have been cut short, and hundreds of thousands of families who have had to deal with the grief and aftermath of those deaths. The tragic thing is that these deaths did not have to happen. In the words of the United Nations, in a society as wealthy as the UK, ‘poverty is a political choice’. The UK Government needs to understand the damaging impact of austerity and respond with policies that put us back on the path of improving, not worsening, life expectancy for all.”

The figures were published as the Conservative Party Conference was taking place in Birmingham.

This conference came hard on the heels of Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng unleashing mayhem in financial markets with his September 23 mini-Budget, with the Bank of England having to intervene in a major way to buy UK Government bonds after sterling plunged to a record low against the dollar and gilt yields surged.

The mini-Budget, with its huge tax giveaways dressed up bizarrely as a “growth plan”, raised fears in financial markets about the sustainability of the UK public finances.

The Chancellor’s largesse included the scrapping of the 45p top rate of income tax. This move has since been the subject of a U-turn, as it should have been, but the big, expensive other measures remain. And Mr Kwarteng’s reversal of the planned rise in corporation tax from 19% to 25% announced by former chancellor Rishi Sunak in his March 2021 Budget stands out as the move which is clearly unnecessary.

Mr Kwarteng signalled this would cost £17bn a year.

There has since been worrying noise seemingly emanating from the Conservative camp about public spending “efficiencies”. And there has been a most concerning lack of commitment to upgrade benefits in line with inflation, an increase that is absolutely crucial amid the UK’s cost-of-living crisis, and even more so given the huge blow to households from austerity implemented already by the Tories. For the avoidance of doubt, huge real-terms cuts in benefits are not “efficiencies” but rather represent brutal austerity.

The Tories decided that the independent Office for Budget Responsibility should not publish forecasts on September 23 incorporating the effects of the Liz Truss administration’s mini-Budget measures.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change think-tank highlighted its view that it was “likely the OBR would have foreseen a long-run boost to the economy of well below 0.5%” (by the late 2020s) from the reversal of the planned corporation tax rise. This is a tiny total increase over a very long period from an extremely costly tax move. And the TBI noted “the growth effect of this centrepiece measure of the plan for growth is unlikely even to achieve that scale”, observing Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey had been “telegraphing the Bank’s intention to offset the Government’s fiscal loosening with higher interest rates”.

Gerry McCartney, professor of wellbeing economy at the University of Glasgow, talked about the need for the Conservative Government to learn the lessons from the “devastating effects” of its austerity so far, as it debates where it goes next.

He said: “As the UK Government debates current and future economic direction, it needs to understand, and learn from, the devastating effects that cuts to social security and vital services have had on the health of the population across the whole of the UK. The Scottish Government must also do everything it can within its devolved powers to mitigate the effects of these UK Government policies and help protect people from the disastrous consequences.”

Mr McCartney and Mr Walsh are right – the UK Government does need to understand.

Sadly the noises that have been emanating from the Liz Truss administration recently, which give the impression that key movers and shakers within it are itching for further austerity to fund their corporate tax giveaways, signal the Tories either do not understand or do not care, or both. The further societal and economic costs will be huge if they do go down the appalling austerity path feared by many.

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