“Politics latest: Liz Truss set to sack Kwasi Kwarteng”, reports the Times.
Liz Truss is poised to sack her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng and announce plans to raise corporation tax as she abandons key parts of her mini-budget in a bid to reassure the markets.
The chancellor is due to meet the prime minister shortly, with discussions under way in No 10 and No 11 before a public statement by the prime minister.
The government has been left with little choice but to abandon its plans after the markets priced in a reversal of its position, with sterling responding positively to a series of leaks.
The fact that the various Times reporters credited have risked looking very silly if Kwasi Kwarteng is not sacked leads me to believe someone high up has told them he will be.
I do not say this out of any great admiration for Mr Kwarteng, nor out of any great concern for Ms Truss’s reputation, but if she does fire him, she is a fool. Does she think they will back off once they have tasted blood?
Update: He’s out. Add whoever takes the job next to the list of fools.
What a shambles, so much for the Iron Lady 2 the sequel, she has a backbone of jelly, allied with the communication skills of the chef from the Muppets. The tory party really needs killing and a new start making.
I don’t understand how she became Prime Minister in the first place if she can’t even submit a budget proposal without ending up firing the Chancellor in the process.
She was done for the moment she U-turned the first time, on the 45p top tax rate. As soon as you throw something or someone to the dogs, they knows there’s meat to be got, and they will go after it.
It’s only a matter of time, now.
This is the mother of all clusterfucks. I have no words. Liz Truss will not be PM for long, and she will take the Conservative party with her.
I’d be embarrassed if I had ever thought she was likely to be a competent PM. Still, I didn’t think she’d be cocking it up this fast
The markets are doing badly because the corporate tax is TOO LOW? “Oh, I don’t want to invest in them, they’d be keeping too much of their profits”? I find myself recalling Lenin’s aphorism about capitalists and rope . . .
I must admit that I don’t understand the intense market reaction to the Budget measures. The scrapping of the 45% band would only have cost £2bn, small change at government spending levels.
Raising corporation tax will leave companies with less money to pay dividends to individuals and pension funds, to pay salary increases and fund R and D; all are important at the moment.
I may be wrong about dividends. They will be smaller but will have a bigger tax credit.
Can anyone any longer see any plausible alternative to a last-chapter-of-Atlas-Shrugged-style political and economic death spiral down to collapse, before the majority of Britons are persuaded to give up on the fantasy of an all-encompassing Sugar Daddy State, funded exclusively by taxes which somehow apply only to those richer than themselves?
Indeed. The Tory Blue Blairites have killed their party by not backing their PMs, demonstrating she was in office but not in power.
This happens on the same day the Guardian reports:
which, TO PUT IT MILDLY, is almost nothing compared to the harm of today’s news. However it suggests to me that UK politics right now is febrile.
The candidate in that election was strongly backed by one Keith Vaz. I think that was enough poison to do for the candidate.
Oh how utterly stupid, what a pity. Edit to add: Jeremy fucking Hunt? This is what she thinks will make a better chancellor, that spineless cretin who is almost universally hated?
The irony is that it would have been far better for her personally to have thrown down the gauntlet, refused to cave on any of it, and just have fought on – even if it meant threatening an early election which she probably would have lost. At least then there would have been a kind of Goldwater in ‘64 marker for future gains – lose the battle, but win the future of war etc. she’d probably have got a ton of love from free market inclined people who admired her stand. As it is now, she has nothing.
And… the new Chancellor is – as Alex points out – Jeremy Hunt. Lockdown Hunt. A man who has never shown any discernible interest in or understanding of economics. And this at a time when Britain is facing any number of economic challenges. And probably the worst enemy Truss could wish for.
It is hard not to despair.
But we have to fight on.
Liberty has been, generally, on the retreat in this country for 150s years (since the start of the 1870s) but that does not mean that the efforts of pro liberty people have been pointless, things could be a lot worse – and would have been without their efforts.
We must struggle to limit taxes, government spending and regulations – as much as we can. And we must warn against the terrible system of fiat money and Credit Bubble finance that is a mortal threat to the Western World.
Sir, I won’t have that! The Swedish chef was quite an engaging character, and I would strive to understand him, regardless of the difficulties.
To be fair to the former Lib Dem who is the King’s first Prime Minister, there is no sign that she is going to do get out of this mess by doing a Kenny Everett.
“It is hard not to despair.
But we have to fight on.”
Don’t change the habits of a lifetime. Enjoy the vindication of the collapse.
The appointment of Hunt is real cause for despair. He is an ambitious mediocrity who is utterly conventional and has been wrong about pretty much everything throughout his disappointingly long political career. I have some sympathy for Truss in spite of her gauche public performances; she should have been braver but the large cohort of Conservative MPs who supported Sunak and see Hunt and others like him as ‘safe pairs of hands’ have failed to give her the support that, as an incoming PM, she badly needed. They never gave her a chance.
In part Truss is a victim of the current Conservative system for electing a new leader which can, and in this case did, result in the members electing a person with relatively low support among MPs.
Go to the country. Campaign as a Thatcherite. Get Badenoch on board before the enemy can say raciss! Nothing to lose at this point.
One of the small consolations of a societal collapse is that the non-essential flufferies that the polity tend to obsess over during normal times are relentlessly pared away.
When things really hit hard, the number of your neighbors who are concerned with mean things being said on Facebook will take a big plunge.
It ain’t much in the way of compensation, but it’s not nothing.
It hard to believe a bunch of Tory wets who literally crapped themselves a couple of months ago at the thought of an actual Conservative like Kemi will suddenly have such a Damascene conversion.
About as likely as Liz using her 80 odd seat majority to finally implement the 2010 boundaries commission recommendations and at least partially remove the inbuilt advantage labour will enjoy at the next election.
She won’t and neither will they.
We, the electorate, are no longer part of the game. Just a bunch of sheep soon to be herded back into the eu pen which, at least in the medium term, is the gameplan.
I’ve seen it predicted previously that Covid, inflation, and war in Ukraine would cause identity politics/’culture war’ issues would lose resonance. If anything though, these three issues got absorbed into the culture war to varying degrees (with regards to Ukraine/Russia War, I mean how it is perceived and viewed in the west. I appreciate that in Ukraine it is obviously an existential issue), and the ‘non-essential flufferies’ are still being obsessed over. Perhaps a complete societal collapse, rather than the partial one we’ve been going through, will change things.
We will not be enjoying the collapse Mr Ed.
Not unless you have a bolthole in (say) Montevideo. No FBI or Covid lockdowns there.
We must fight on – to the bitter end, if bitter end it must be.
As the hard drinking Welsh poet put it “do not go gentle into that good night – rage, rage against the dying of the light”.