Britain is on the cusp of a financial crisis. On Friday, the prime minister, Liz Truss, and the chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, comically parading false claims of their toughness, elected for the softest of economic options.
In a “mini-budget” – an obvious misnaming to avoid presenting elementary fiscal arithmetic required by law for a proper budget – they pretended to shrink the state’s financial claims while launching an unprecedented extra £411bn of public borrowing over the next five years as a “plan for growth”. Never in British public life has the gap between rhetoric and reality been so gaping.
