Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget is unfair, unsustainable – and cannot succeed

Editorial: This is a mini-Budget funded by borrowing, which will stoke inflation, push interest rates higher, and eventually turn to bust

(Dave Brown)

Morality doesn’t play much of a role in politics, and never has, so it’s a little fatuous to object to the chancellor’s fiscal plans on purely moral grounds. Politicians tend to be more like bookies than bishops.

Kwasi Kwarteng certainly doesn’t seem to spend much time contemplating social justice; indeed, he explicitly renounces what he thinks has been an undue emphasis on “fairness” and distribution in recent times, with too little attention paid to growing the “cake” in the first place. Hence his audacious tax cuts for the already rich, at a time when poor and middle-income families continue to struggle with the cost of living crisis.

This is indisputably unfair, indeed obscene. It marks a clearer dividing line between the government and the opposition parties. Even with the welcome intervention of the energy price guarantee, gas and electricity bills are still set to double for households, with similar hikes or worse in prospect for businesses in the medium term. Britain is to be an even more unequal society.