What happened when other chancellors tried a ‘dash for growth’?

Can Kwasi Kwarteng succeed where Maudling, Barber and Lawson failed, asks Sean O’Grady

Liz Truss and chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng visit a factory in Kent after the mini-Budget (Reuters)

Simply in terms of tax giveaways, Kwasi Kwarteng’s “fiscal event” was much more a mega-Budget than the “mini-Budget” it was billed as. In fact, this was the largest tax giveaway in modern times, one of the larger increases in public borrowing for non-investment purposes, and it also marked a philosophical departure from the general approach that the Coalition and Conservative governments have followed since 2010.

The Truss government has even been thinking aloud about ending “Treasury orthodoxy”, breaking the department up, and making the Bank of England pay as much attention to growth as it does, in principle, to inflation. Some of this thinking was reflected in the chancellor’s “Plan for Growth”. It was a bold and, in the hands of Kwarteng, a brash set of measures. Will it work?

History has some answers. There have been three previous notable examples of such a “dash for growth” – an attempt to use the public finances and the tax system to “unleash” the British economy, escape the habits of austerity and break the stop-go or boom-and-bust cycle. They enjoyed mixed success.