Super-rich celebrate as ordinary folk suffer

The UK’S long-term borrowing has risen to a 20-year high and in an emergency intervention the Bank of England has been forced to step in with a £65 billion bailout, buying UK government bonds to protect pension funds. An intervention which it is hoped will settle the financial markets, bolster the pound and give, as former treasury minister Lord O’Neill of Gatley says, “breathing room, for the government, to seriously figure out what on earth it is trying to do”

He’s not wrong, however, given the horrific meltdown that’s taken place within the financial markets since last Friday's mini-Budget. I wouldn’t be confident giving Liz Truss and her equally inept chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng another day, let alone seven weeks, until Wednesday, November 23, the day when Kwarteng aims to introduce yet more tax cuts and reveal details of their new fiscal rules, to fix the very fine mess they have created.

The Truss rush mini-budget should have settled market nerves, stimulated the economy, bolstered consumer confidence, created fluidity and helped protect jobs by shoring up businesses. Unfortunately, it did none of these things.

Announcing his fiscal plans, without having them independently checked by the fiscal watchdog, the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), was an act of extreme folly by Kwarteng. It spooked the markets and sent out a strong signal that the government didn’t have a clue how much this budget was going to cost. Not reassuring them, and of course the panicked public, when the pound unsurprisingly slumped and the UK economy went into freefall, was incompetent arrogance.

As Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves correctly pointed out: "This is a crisis made in No 10 and the direct result of the Tory Government's reckless actions, which includes tax cuts for the richest 1 per cent”.

The highest earners were again reaping the benefits, with Kwarteng scrapping the top 45p income tax rate on earnings of more than £150,000 per annum. Our bankers could now also bank on making even more money, as the Chancellor removed their bonus cap. A particular source of anger for myself and anyone who tried to earn a crust during the banking crisis, a truly tumultuous time when the bonus-busting, bailed-out banks plunged the country into recession, and then turned on their loyal customers to claw back their losses

Bankruptcy and insolvencies went through the roof, divorce rates soared and the lives of thousands of hard-working people were ruined – and all because of the voracious and salacious greed of this bunch of charlatans. Now Kwarteng was rewarding them. Talk about not reading the room? Utterly shameful.

There was nothing in this budget for the ordinary working man or woman, the meagre reductions in income tax and national insurance will be swallowed up by the cost-of-living increases, energy costs and interest rate hikes. The cry from industry to reduce VAT rates, a move which would have stimulated the economy was ignored, as was the plea for a rates relief package. Sadly, the mini-budget was a trickle-down joke, that 99% of people wouldn’t get.

In the dying days of the wretched Tory leadership battle, the former golden boy of the Conservative party, ex-chancellor Rishi Sunak, desperately tried to win back support from the party membership by ruthlessly attacking the economic competence and fiscal grasp of his opponent, Liz Truss.

He declared her plans so wild and reckless that “they risk a full-blown sterling crisis; of the sort we have not seen since the 1970s.” and with amazing foresight warned: “That there would be a run-on sterling, the gilts market will be in freefall, and that the FTSE will tumble.”

Terrifying portents of doom, an apocalyptic vision of the future, but sage words of wisdom which with hindsight many now wish the Tory membership had listened to before choosing the country’s new leader.