'A budget that harms everyone except the rich.'

@PSuss1 And right libertarian ideology that ignores all past evidence and all future economic models....

KamiKwasi is about right. 🤣

@Burnley123 will be interesting to see if the markets stay stable long enough for the November statement. BoE buying £65bn gilts over the next couple of weeks, instead of selling as was planned, is quite a u-turn ...what could possibly go wrong? 🤷‍♂️

@PSuss1 Actually the markets would be much happier if the government had shown that it had plans for reducing public expenditure. It’s the combination of tax cuts, temporarily increased public expenditure because of the energy price guarantees, and no longer term spending plans that has spooked people. Of course, reducing tax rates doesn’t necessarily reduce tax revenue - sometimes the reverse happens.

@MartinII Is there anything left to easily cut? Doing that won't be easy politically or economically. That is before we get to the moral question.

@Burnley123 There’s plenty. I’d start with overseas aid, which does more harm than good. More locally, my council and others in London are busy on low traffic schemes - digging up roads, making them one way, pedestrianising them etc. Good or bad according to your point of view, but certainly non-essential.

Of course, there are also areas where there’s a case for expenditure increases, some of them big ones, such as defence. The general point is that the government needs to show that it has a strategy for spending, and so far it has completely failed to do so. Whatever one thinks of the substance, the government’s presentation, or lack of it, of its policies has been appalling. People have complained about the PM being invisible until today, but where is the Chancellor?

@MartinII The presentation is poor but then bluster can only hide so much. We've been through a long period of austerity following 2010 which has left councils and the NHS desperately underfunded .

Of course everyone can point to a few individual spending decisions that they disagree with. The cost of low traffic schemes and overseas aid is dawrfed by this mega tax cut.

Market investors are savvy because they have jobs and reputation in the line so they have to be. It comes down to the fact that they don't believe that Kwateng's plans are credible or plausible. Since I posted this, the BoE has had to spend big sums buying govt bonds just to prevent a total collapse in value. Such a huge rupture can't be just put down to bad PR alone.

This is not a left critique. The left critique says that these plans are immoral. The markets sat that they are highly impractical. Both critiques are completely correct.

@Burnley123 I certainly agree that it’s not just a question of presentation. But the lack of sensible presentation reinforces the substantive objections. Many people, not only on the left, regard the policies as immoral because they seem to benefit the rich at a time of recession and inflation. Of course their purpose is not to benefit the rich for themselves but to benefit everyone by enabling the rich, and business, to stimulate growth. But that argument hardly gets a hearing, and as you say few people believe it is plausible.

What has certainly changed is the political weather. For the time being at least almost everyone, Tories included, regard voting Labour as a safer option than voting Tory - note how support for the Libdems has collapsed in this week’s polls. As a betting man I would have a few quid at a good price on Truss being fatally wounded at next week’s conference. Not likely but not completely inconceivable.

@MartinII I appreciate the honest analysis.