Friday will see the much-anticipated ‘budget event’ in which the new chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, will outline the details of freezing the government’s energy awards and tax cuts promised by Liz Truss in her Tory leadership campaign. The Resolution Foundation estimates that, on average, the richest tenth of households will benefit from these measures by around £4,700 a year, while the poorest tenth will receive £2,200. Adding insult to injury, news broke towards the end of last week of Kwarteng’s push to remove the existing cap on bankers’ bonuses, a legacy of our EU membership. As with Truss’ hostility to a sweeping windfall tax on big energy companies, here was more evidence of her government’s basic intention: to “go ahead with growth” by favoring rich and powerful people and interests, in the hope that doing so could boost the UK. production. Clearly, this approach leaves little room for the patchwork of politics, rhetoric and half-formed intentions known as leveling up. That agenda was already in tatters: even as Boris Johnson kept talking about some fantastic rebalancing of Britain as his grand mission, transport plans centered on the north of England were scrapped and cut, Whitehall programs that replaced EU funding for the UK regions. it turned out to be a shadow of its predecessors, and the long-awaited white paper on leveling turned into a non-event due to Rishi Sunak’s refusal to back it with any new public money. But since Johnson’s downfall, raising the bar has been pushed aside even as a vague idea. Much to no one’s surprise, Truss’ first speech outside Downing Street made no mention of the term. The Department for Lifts, Housing and Communities is now the responsibility of low-powered Tory minister Simon Clarke. In the real world, comparatively small-scale projects funded by £4.8bn of dedicated leveling capital are now threatened by rising inflation – and late last week, the Financial Times reported that both local councils and its Whitehall, “there was no expectation of extra cash from central government”. So far, one of the few glimpses of regional inequality thinking between Trump and its allies has been a vague suggestion that “certain areas” be turned into low-tax, deregulated business zones — a rekindled version of an old and failed idea. . and a far cry from the earlier leveling of promises for infrastructure, improved education and all the rest. Under Johnson, his flat-out failure could be attributed to a lack of consistency and skill. But in Truss’s case, the idea’s sense of hitting a wall is the result of ideological beliefs highlighted in her first major television interview. Four days before the Queen died, she appeared on the BBC’s new Sunday program with Laura Kuenssberg, where she was asked by the host why she was prioritizing tax cuts that would greatly benefit the people at the top. Truss graciously conceded the point. “But to see everything through the lens of redistribution, I think that’s wrong,” he continued. “Because what I care about is growing the economy, and growing the economy benefits everyone.” Truss knew the importance of what he was trying to explain, even if Kunsberg was nowhere to be seen. “This is a really important point,” he insisted. “The economic debate in the last 20 years has been dominated by discussions of redistribution. And what happened is we had relatively low growth … and that held our country back.” On the surface, this is a very strange view of the last two decades: was that period really so “dominated” by a debate about fairness and inequality that it drowned out the economy? Even in the New Labor era, senior politicians tended to keep quiet about such things: Gordon Brown’s redistributive policies, let’s not forget, happened largely in secret. Moreover, since David Cameron and George Osborne took office, austerity has ensured that inequality – particularly in its regional manifestations – has become much, much worse. So who or what was Truss’ target? What he really lamented, it seems to me, was the turn Tory politics took after the Brexit referendum. Theresa May and Johnson may have reaffirmed their debate over UK inequality by insisting they did not intend to take money from areas at the top of the wealth and income rankings. However, they spoke of their focus on disadvantaged people and places and claimed they could use the state to start reshaping the British economy. In February this year, the then acting secretary, Michael Gove, contrasted the level rise with “trickle down economics” and said that if the free market was left to its own devices, “then what you see is inequality going up”. This is what Truss and her allies have seemingly come to avenge: as Thatcherite true believers, they believe that even the most intolerant interventionism can lead to disaster (hence her initial rejection of the energy relief ‘leaflets’). crisis) and that ultimately Inequality is just another word for what makes capitalism so dynamic. Her Tory colleagues see this core of her beliefs very clearly. “It has an agenda, it’s quite ideological and it’s very conservative,” says Osborne. “We didn’t get that with Boris Johnson or Theresa May.” That last point is true. The fact that Truss’ two predecessors said they would move away from post-Thatcher Toryism was, in fact, a big reason why the political allegiance of former Labor backbenchers began to falter in 2017, leading to the fall of the so-called red wall of two years later. Delusional as it may seem now, many people in such places had voted to leave the EU in a spirit of hope, and May and Johnson then did their best to convince them that their optimism was not misplaced. Now we are suddenly in a very different political climate. What, you can’t help but wonder, is Truss’ message to voters who live in areas still commonly labeled ‘left’? That they should get all their hopes up, do what they can to get through tough times and be happy if some sugar rush in financial services boosts national income by one per cent? If this remains her government’s approach, millions of people will know exactly what they are dealing with: the end of any long-held hope that raising the bar would mean anything, and a return to the faith that secured them in the first place.
