Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have made a declaration of class war
She makes Margaret Thatcher look like a moderate and Ronald Reagan seem positively wet. Liz Truss has embarked on an ideological project so extreme that the de facto budget announced by her chancellor today amounts to a declaration of class war. It was a reverse Robin Hood: taking from those who have least, lavishing gifts on those who have most. It is morally indefensible, economically reckless and so politically risky as to suggest a death wish.
Trussonomics rests on a simple article of faith: that by rewarding the already wealthy, life will improve for everyone else. Trickle-down economics, they called it back in the 1980s, and it didn’t work then. Now it’s back in a form more stark, more extravagant, than even its most ardent apostles ever dared contemplate.
The generosity towards the amply blessed was breathtaking. Kwasi Kwarteng’s totemic move was the removal of the cap on bankers’ bonuses – as if the number one problem confronting Britain today was that bankers aren’t rich enough. It’ll be Cristal magnums all round in the City, obviously, but Labour HQ should also raise a glass: they’ve just been handed an attack line that cannot fail. The Conservative predecessors of Truss and Kwarteng had no principled objection to letting bankers receive telephone-number bonuses, but held off because they knew the optics were so screamingly awful. The new duo has no such restraint.
And so they have delivered the biggest tax cuts in half a century, outstripping the landmark Nigel Lawson budget of 1988 – and their largesse is aimed squarely at the top. Kwarteng decided it was those in the highest tax bracket who needed help, so he abolished the top rate altogether. That will hand an average £10,000 to the highest-earning 600,000
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