If you’ve felt like living in the United Kingdom has felt sort of like a badly written political thriller movie recently you’ve got a good reason for such having crossed your mind. In September, Prime Minister Liz Truss helped institute what she called then a ‘mini budget’ that essentially amounted to a massive giveaway to the country’s highest earners (aka mostly the mega-rich.) The announcement, of course, sent markets including at home into a tailspin against the backdrop of already soaring inflation that the Bank of England has largely failed to fully address. Combined the two together you get the UK’s season from hell everybody saw coming. Dubbed ‘Trussonomics’ by investors and experts — the plan also includes cuts for corporate taxes but also unironically includes a cost increase for national insurance.
The ongoing economic crises actually first began when the disastrous Brexit situation was implemented and then never quite fully addressed. During the onset of the latest addition to the crises, Truss’s antics helped the pound plummet to its lowest valuation against the dollar ever recorded which stood at about $1.03.
To make matters worse following a media blitz, Truss and Kwarteng (the Chancellor of the Exchequer) stood by their efforts to help the rich and corporations rather than the common Briton. They both maintain that the plan and its ‘mini-budget’ (if you’ll even call it that) will help spur investment and advancement across the nation. However, what it is mostly set to do is to line the pockets of people places and things that absolutely do not need to be lined whatsoever.
Early on in Septembr, Truss abruptly fired Tom Scholar the long-standing permanent secretary to the Treasury. At the time she defended this action because she felt that Scholar was part of what she called ‘Treasury Orthodoxy.” Though it is anyone ‘s guess what the Prime Minister actually meant by this. Many saw Scholar ‘s firing as one of many of Truss ‘s likely political stuns going forward and a move that would deprive the nation of a respected ‘technocrat’ like figure. The move was also seen as a massive disrespect to the nation ‘s civil-service body.
Nobody told the Prime Minister the nation was already in a hot struggle that could’ve been avoided had proper leadership taken charge. She didn’t get that memo and now here we are.
The nation was already struggling before and as Truss came to power. Skyhigh inflation; bouncing back from the pandemic, stagnant wages, the host of issues including the hottest summer on record were ever so present.
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