Liz Truss’s economic plans are more anti-growth than those of her critics
Somewhere on the roads into north London, the suburbs turn into streets lined with the townhouses of the anti-growth coalition. As Liz Truss told the Conservative party conference last week, here live the “enemies of enterprise” who would hold Britain back.
Forget that financial markets were thrown into a tailspin by her plans for the economy, pushing up mortgage costs to eye-watering levels. Forget that Britain under the Conservatives is on the brink of a prolonged recession with the highest rates of inflation for 40 years. Here was the real culprit: the pundits talking Britain down.
The ambition of Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, to go for growth might well be a laudable one, given the intense pressure on households amid the cost of living crisis. But it should not be controversial to point out that the task is easier said than done.
Over the past decade Britain has fallen behind comparable rich nations, with stagnant wage growth and a failure to tackle deep economic divisions. In-work poverty is unacceptably high and bound to soar further this year, as wages fail to keep pace with inflation. After living costs are taken into account, average pay is no higher today than in 2007 before the financial crisis struck, in the worst period for wages since the Napoleonic wars.
Truss should know this better than most, as a minister in successive Conservative-led governments for the past decade. Back in 2011 her party warned: “We literally cannot afford to go on like this” – on the first page of the “plan for growth” published by George Osborne.
“If we do not wake up to the world around us, our standard of living will fall, not rise,” said the document, which attacked high taxes and regulatory barriers for holding back free
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