Kwarteng looks to steady ship by rowing back on debt plan

One of the things that comes across in the recent TV docudrama, This England, covering the first phase of Boris Johnson’s premiership and the tumultuous impact of the pandemic on the UK, is the poisonous atmosphere between the new Brexiteer-led administration and the civil service. In scene after scene, the beanie-hat-wearing Dominic Cummings (played by Simon Paisley Day) excoriates Whitehall officials, for – as he sees it – their endless failings, suggesting the British civil service not only indulges failure but approves, even celebrates, it.

Politicians here and elsewhere have an uneasy, at times testing relationship, with the civil service infrastructure that sits beneath them, there’s nothing new there. But Brexiteers have unleashed a war on civil servants that continues under Liz Truss’s administration. One of the first things Kwasi Kwarteng did on becoming Britain’s new chancellor was to fire the treasury’s top civil servant. Equally one of the things that spooked markets about his controversial tax plan was the way he blocked the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) from doing an assessment of it.

Another U-turn

Truss and Kwarteng are now trying to steady the ship after a disastrous start. Following a U-turn on income tax, Kwarteng rowed back again on Monday, saying he would bring forward his plan for balancing the government’s finances by almost a month to October 31st with the OBR’s assessment published at the same time, in a bid to reassure markets.

The move sets up a Halloween showdown between the new administration’s slash-and-burn economics agenda and the increasingly sceptical markets. Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, tweeted: “Trick or cheat? The Tory horror show rattles on.”

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The focus will be on how the chancellor intends to bring down government debt. One idea is to raise welfare rates in line with earnings rather than inflation, now running at 10 per cent. That would save the UK treasury about £5 billion (€5.7 billion) while delivering a cut – in real terms – in benefits. Senior Tories, however, fear such a move – after trying to deliver massive tax cuts for the super rich – could risk political wipeout at the next election. They are right to be worried.