The past 10 days have told us all we need to know about this Conservative government. First, they crashed the economy by handing unfunded, unnecessary tax cuts to those at the top, while undermining the very institutions that make the UK a safe place to invest. Now they’re doubling down on their failed approach.
This crisis started when the chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, stood up and delivered his mini-budget. The markets reacted immediately: sterling dropped 3.6% against the dollar while yields on five-year gilts increased by 50 basis points. The turmoil continued, leaving the Bank of England to take the unprecedented step of injecting £65bn into the economy to stop pension funds collapsing – just days after announcing they were winding down their programme of quantitative easing.
While the Bank of England’s actions stabilised the markets, the result of this government’s decisions will be higher inflation, higher interest rates and higher borrowing costs for taxpayers – leaving us all worse off.
Mortgages withdrawn. Pension pots decimated. Food and fuel prices climbing even higher. Hardly what I call responsible economic management. Now they want to claim it is a “global” problem. But that couldn’t be further from the truth: this is a crisis made in Downing Street. And all for what? A return to the failed idea of trickle-down economics, where you make the rich even richer and hope that somehow some of it trickles down to everyone else.
But there’s another problem, too. As a former Bank of England economist, I know how important our institutions are in providing the stability and certainty that strong, secure economies need.
The Tories have undermined the Bank of England, sacked Tom Scholar, the respected permanent secretary at
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