Liz Truss presses ahead with 'fairytale economics' that puts people's homes at risk – Scotsman comment

It is tempting to parody Liz Truss’s grasp of economics by imagining the Prime Minister as a character in the “fairytale” of unfunded tax cuts that former Chancellor Rishi Sunak warned us about, in which she embarks on a wonderful adventure to the bottom of the Downing Street garden to discover Theresa May’s lost “Magic Money Tree”.

The UK needs a Prime Minister who will make the cost-of-living crisis better, not worse (Picture: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

How else to explain her insistence that she is “absolutely” not planning to reduce public spending to fund tax cuts totalling £43 billion, while also expressing a vague intention to reduce government debt?

The problem is that none of this is remotely funny and the Conservative MPs who cheered their leader at Prime Minister’s Questions should urgently reconsider their backing of a politician who has already actively damaged the UK economy and persuade her to change course in the national interest.

According to Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill, her government’s fiscal announcements will “add to the inflationary pressure”.

That means ministers are making the cost-of-living crisis worse and also that the Bank will have to raise interest rates, increasing mortgage repayments for millions of people across the country.

The current rate of 2.25 per cent is expected to rise sharply next month, with some investors expecting it to hit six per cent by May.

However, according to Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg, it was not the Chancellor’s mini-budget that caused market chaos and a plunge in the pound’s value, but the Bank of England’s failure to raise interest rates in line with the US, an assertion at odds with events witnessed by the whole world as Kwasi Kwarteng outlined his ill-considered, disastrous and downright immoral plans.

Rees-Mogg’s surreal claim came with a veiled threat to a BBC journalist who dared to suggest the truth. “Jumping to conclusions about causality is not meeting the BBC's requirement for impartiality,” he said.

Many people in the UK were looking ahead to this winter with deep trepidation as the cost-of-living crisis grew, with concerns about having to make a choice between heating and eating. Now the catastrophic mistakes of the UK Government are threatening the very roof over their heads.

A home-owning society was once a central tenet of Conservatism, something our current leaders appear to have forgotten, so caught up are they in ideological fantasies that deny reality itself.