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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).
I think Britain's leaders have no idea what they're doing. Dominic Cummings has been screaming about this for the last 8 years, initially in long, well-thought out essays and more recently in angry, over-capitalized tweets full of made-up technical jargon. He strikes me like a Lovecraft protagonist going mad at the true nature of the eldritch horror.
In this case, the pension funds had decided to leverage themselves on government bonds, using them as collateral to buy other things. When Kwasi issued a particularly blase announcement that they'd borrow even more money, investors freaked out. The price of government bonds dropped since the supply increased.
Since the price of the bonds fell, the pension funds started having to sell their assets, including said government bonds. There was a risk of a deadly spiral. But because it's not a real market, the central bank decided to use its own money (that it freely prints) to buy its own bonds and shore up the price, averting disaster for now. The UK economy is now significantly closer to being an 'emerging market', a place where the currency is really just a piece of paper.
This could and should have been predicted. Lee Kuan Yew wouldn't have done things like this - he was all about fiscal prudency, avoiding the accumulation of debt where possible. But the Brits clearly didn't predict the reaction to their tax-less, spend-more plan. I favour Cumming's diagnosis that the UK political elite lives in its own pocket dimension, only tenuously tied to reality by what the newspapers say, rather than any actual world-modelling ability. They didn't know that they couldn't just borrow more money, they didn't imagine that waging proxy war against Russia might raise energy prices in the UK, a part of the European energy/economic system. They don't understand what causes economic growth, they don't know how to make things happen quickly or efficiently. They don't know.
Dominic showed significant competence in his running of Project Leave. He helped get Boris a crushing majority and achieve Brexit. That he was unable to turn around the entire structure of the British establishment is an understandable failure. The whole swamp hated him and wanted him gone because he was threatening their power and security. That they could find some trumped up charge to poison his reputation with does not necessarily mean he's a failure, only that they are effective in wielding power from an overwhelmingly stronger position.
I think his predictive capacity is considerable. He warned about the danger of powerful diseases escaping inadequate biosecurity the year before COVID. He warned about the Russian army's deployment around Ukraine back in November 2021. He was instrumental in the shift from COVID 'let it rip' to 'do something' and probably improved the UK's response to COVID from catastrophic to very bad. Obviously, it benefits him to say that but I trust him over the rest of the media-Whitehall mob who turned Britain from the dominant world superpower into a US satellite and bungle seemingly everything they touch. At least he gets things right some of the time and can write convincing, thoughtful essays.
He WANTED to do serious structural reform to improve productivity, Brexit for him was about breaking away from EU regulations that make it hard to do anything. He was trying to escape the fundamental choice you posit, the choice which seems to be inevitable now. His argument was that the bureaucrats were mismanaging huge amounts of state spending (roughly 40-50% of GDP) with their incompetence. This whole crisis was partially caused by their plan for a 200 billion pound subsidy for gas prices, because they totally failed to achieve energy sovereignty before waging a proxy war against a major European energy supplier! How said subsidy will create more gas is unclear. Given the context, I believe his all-consuming hatred and disgust at the British establishment is well-merited.
With this he was clearly wrong. The UK results are very bad, even worse than for countries with less restrictions. Most lockdowns and school closures were pointless because it was elderly people who mostly died. If they had concentrated on protecting the elderly, they would have done better. But overall, even with that most countries overreacted.
The UK didn't introduce vaccine mandates unlike many other countries, so at least they did one thing right. But I doubt it had anything to do with Cummings.
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