Who’s against Truss and Kwarteng’s growth mania? Anyone with sense
Are you against growth, Liz Truss asks in her speech to the Tory party conference. What about your credentials as a disruptor? Can you say, with a steady hand on your trusty sword, that you have cut through anything more than a pat of butter in the past few years, let alone weeks?
Growth in all its guises should be positive for the economy. Growth promotes new jobs and incomes, says Truss. Disruption likewise. But when a government says it wants to build, build, build and at the same time achieve net zero carbon emissions, there are obvious contradictions.
There are also related conflicts between those who would pave over large parts of the countryside for the benefit of overseas investors looking for cheap distribution sheds and weak environmental regulations, and those who want more countryside and the kinds of 21st-century protections that block those who own capital from turning others’ lives upside down.
More immediate for the fledgling government is the need to please institutions with proposals that push in opposite directions. Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng must show the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) proof that their policies can put rocket boosters under the economy and at the same time persuade the Bank of England that their ministers have no intention of doing any such thing.
Kwarteng’s first move will be to tell parliament he is bringing forward his autumn statement from 23 November to the end of this month. This gives him a chance to persuade the Bank’s monetary policy committee that it should restrict any interest rate rise to 0.5% when it meets on 3 November.
The chancellor and his officials will spend this week and next trying to devise a programme that tempers his mini-budget by offsetting much of the
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