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Notes -
Not sure if this is exactly Culture War, but I think if anybody can tell me what the heck is going on, you lot can š
Okay, so the UK has a new monarch, a new Prime Minister and in the past couple of days, a new budget. And now it looks like a new financial crisis.
Can anybody explain to me, in the manner that Chesterton describes Arnold, with "a smile of heart-broken forbearance, as of the teacher in an idiot school, that was enormously insulting" what has caused this kind of meltdown? I'm cribbing from The Guardian, which is trying to explain what is the problem, but my big difficulty is that I don't understand why the Bank of England had to do this. How did the British economy get to the state that the pound is dropping like a metaphor in Amazon's "The Rings of Power" and the currency apparently would have been worthless?
And why is anybody surprised by the tax cuts? They're a Tory government, the first thing they do when they get into power - or when a new PM is hoping to take over - is announce swingeing tax cuts for the better-off (along with swingeing cuts in public spending). So why is everyone now going "Oooh, that's a bit dodgy"? The only surprise for me is that it's Kwasi Kwarteng who is the guy in charge of the Budget instead of Rishi Sunak, but I suppose Rishi - being disappointed in his expectations to succeed Boris - has decided to spend more time with his family('s billions).
My understanding is that the issues with the British economy are structural and go back to the Blair government, which mostly rode a boom in financial services while sowing the seeds of our current issues. Britain is by this point, highly deindustrialized and heavily indebted, with poor infrastructure and an aging population, an economy built on cheap labour and a harsh regulatory environment. This is the result of decades of overconsumption and underinvestment by both the private industry, average people, and government. The longer the fall, the harder the landing, and Liz Truss is simply reaping the result, as much due to animal spirits as any particular decision. Her tax cuts are not particularly radical - they're more or less a return to the taxation levels of Blair. But fiddling with tax levels is only going to shift money between the UK population and the government. It is not going to make the country as a whole (population+government) any richer or poorer, it's pure redistribution.
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