As was cited in an article during the leadership election, I backed Liz Truss as PM in 2016, was hopeful that she would be appointed to the Treasury under Boris Johnson, so therefore emphatically backed her campaign this Summer. The vision of this country that the Prime Minister holds is one that is one of hope, growth, opportunity, prosperity, patriotism, support for our Armed Forces, and most importantly, challenging the orthodoxy that put us here in the first place.
The latest Twitter bleating is that the scrapping of the 45p tax bracket has assisted in the fall in the value of sterling. This view, in part, has been backed up by the unnecessary intervention by the IMF. An organisation that seemingly forgets that New Zealand has a top rate 1p lower than the UK, with Dublin 3p. An organisation that now seeks to involve itself in politics and getting things wrong. This was clearly exemplified by the intervention by Christine Lagarde during the Brexit vote. They were wrong then, and they will be wrong again.
Many have sought to call for the Chancellor’s resignation or for him to U-turn on his fiscal proposal. The simple reality is that if he does, this new reset that the PM has set course upon will be dead. The decision by the Chancellor to state that the Bank of England’s independence was ‘sacrosanct’ was one of his few errors, and it’ll be something that will come back to bite him in the future.
The critics of this bold vision for growth seem to forget that the alternative is a prolonged recession, higher taxes, zero growth, stagnant productivity, and a country kept on life support by artificially low interest rates. It is telling that the only part of this entire proposal that Keir Starmer has rejected had a price tag of £2bn. The reality is that we have a Bank that has failed to tackle inflation, the unravelling of quantitative easing, and an enormously expensive energy package of up to £150bn. One, I may add, that is the most generous out of all our European counterparts.
The hope that I have with this new administration is that they are not ruled by optics, or popularity, or even opinion polls, but reality. Some in our party seem to think that opinion polls, two years away from polling day, have signed the death knell of not just our PM, but our party. Need I remind them that when David Cameron was 15 points behind Ed Miliband in 2013, and a government minister informed Lady Thatcher of this, she replied, “That’s not far enough at this stage”, taking the view that to do things that were right did entail unpopularity until people noticed that it was working.
Our economy is essentially a housing bubble, with a health service attached. Needless do I have to say it, but a price collapse in housing is a good thing. There is a part of me that believes we should totally rip up the rule book and abolish the Green Belt, majorly reform the health service, and go further with tax cuts, and others may be more cautious. However, the orthodoxy of three PMs, four Chancellors since 2010 has proved one thing, business as usual is not an answer to our economic woes.
If the Prime Minister sticks to her guns, which I hope and I believe she will, next year we will have cut inflation, see a return to normalcy on interest rates, and see annual GDP growth north of 2%. In contrast to European nations, such as Germany, which continue to see inflation rising. This plan is good for jobs, enterprise, public spending, and a record to prove to the public ahead of the election. We have committed regicide on two of our leaders in a row, let’s not make the mistake of doing so with a third, and let’s believe in this great nation, and what we can achieve, if we are bold, ambitious, and brave.
