There are few more fatuous acts in public life than a politician attempting to curry favour with voters by apologising for something for which they had no responsibility at all or opposed in the first place.
These acts are all the more preposterous when they fail to offer any serious analysis of the matter in question or gloss over inconvenient facts which would provide the public with a fuller and fairer account of what really happened.
So it was that we were treated to a brazen display of the genre on Thursday when Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride trooped along to the RSA (motto: “regenerating our world through collective action”) to trash my 2022 Growth Plan, otherwise known as the Mini Budget.
His aim, as briefed out to the media, was to accuse me of playing fast and loose with the British economy and of being the one solely responsible for the spike in the gilt market in the days after the Mini Budget.
It’s not the first time a senior Tory has sought to do this. Stride’s ally from the Rishi Sunak leadership campaign, Michael Gove, was at it in the pages of The Sun just a few days after they succeeded in forcing me out of office.
Yet it is figures like Stride and Gove who owe the British people an apology for their actions and appalling judgements in office that led to the Conservative Party’s worst defeat in history last year.
I have written previously about my rationale for the Growth Plan: I was seeking to turbocharge the economy and get Britain growing again by abandoning the failing economic agenda that Sunak had pursued as Chancellor.
His was an agenda that embodied the establishment orthodoxy: in favour of high immigration, because every new arrival into the UK will supposedly boost growth (though not, as it turns out, the all-important growth per capita); in favour of hiking taxation to a 70-year high because raising taxes will always bring in more revenue (except, as it has again been proven, excessive taxation actually causes changes in behaviour that result in less money coming into Treasury coffers); and in favour of embracing Greta Thunberg and the Net Zero agenda which has driven British energy costs to four times the level of the United States. The result was economic stagnation and declining living standards.
I was elected Conservative leader with a mandate to challenge that orthodoxy, but Stride and others in the party — along with their allies in Whitehall and Davos — were out to undermine me and my agenda from the moment that I beat their chosen man for the top job.
Stride did so from his berth as Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, decrying our decision not to have the Office for Budget Responsibility do an assessment of the Growth Plan. But even when judged against the OBR’s flawed calculations, my plans were chalked up as costing less than the spending spree Sunak pursued as Chancellor during the pandemic. However, Stride never called him out on that or asked for an OBR assessment of the impact of that eye-watering bill.
And then there is the role of the Bank of England and its institutional failures (Stride’s host at the RSA was none other than Andy Haldane, formerly Chief Economist at Threadneedle Street), which have not been questioned by Stride.
As Jon Moynihan has previously pointed out here, the Bank has serious questions to answer: about the announcement of a gilt sale on the eve of the Mini Budget; about its failure to raise interest rates earlier and in line with the U.S. Federal Reserve; and its failure properly to regulate pension funds, allowing them to take on excessive debt-fuelled exposure to government bonds through leveraged Liability Driven Investments (LDIs). Fraser Nelson has also been on the case this week with this timely post on his Substack.
Indeed, the Bank has since admitted itself that two thirds of the spike in gilt yields in Autumn 2022 was caused by Liquidity After Solvency Hedging (LASH) risk — risk created by pension funds with leveraged LDIs, as a result of the Bank failing to oversee these funds effectively.
So why has the Shadow Chancellor singularly failed to examine the role played by the Bank in causing the LDI crisis that sent gilt yields spiralling? Why has he never asked any pertinent questions of the Governor or his senior colleagues, preferring instead to use me as a scapegoat?
The truth is that the likes of Sunak, Gove and Stride are creatures of the system. I saw this first-hand when I sat alongside Sunak and Gove in Cabinet, who both advocated for higher taxes; and also when Stride and I both served as Treasury ministers. He always went along with officials – including on issues like the Loan Charge and IR35, which have seriously impacted the self-employed and SMEs.
They were comfortable enough with Sunak’s huge spending during the pandemic, but not my more modest package of tax cuts – which was not only smaller in size but specifically designed to boost growth.
They opposed my efforts to get the welfare bill down. I wanted to limit the rise in benefits to wages rather than prices – which would have saved £7 billion per year.
They wouldn’t get behind my plans to get Britain fracking, which would both help deliver energy security and lower bills for British families and businesses.
They happily went along with President Biden’s deeply unconservative minimum global tax plan – and Gove went so far as to endorse Kamala Harris at last year’s Presidential election.
Once I had been turfed out of office and they had installed their man in Downing Street, they went back to the same failed economic policies which, along with mass immigration, resulted in a catastrophic verdict for the Conservative Party at the ballot box. The electorate are still punishing the party, as evidenced by last month’s local election results.
So who should really be apologising to whom?
Mel Stride and his allies … should be repudiating the globalist, leftist agenda they pursued
Until Mel Stride and his allies admit the real economic failings of the last Conservative Government, the British public will not trust the party with the reins of power again. He should be repudiating the globalist, leftist agenda they pursued which has dragged our country down with the Conservative Party as collateral.
What is needed – and fast – is an acknowledgment of those failings and the need for wholesale reform of how our country is governed. Because nothing will ever change so long as the existing broken system and its acolytes remain in control.
