Living In The Past

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I refer tonight to the head and sub lines of a byline in The Daily Telegraph ten days ago by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng: he of the Trussonomics mini-budget that sent the world markets into a flat spin within minutes of its reading:

My Budget was not perfect – but Labour’s is a Marxist nightmare

I fear higher taxes, fewer incentives and greater state control will be the inevitable result of the process Reeves has set in motion


Apart from his obvious, complete ignorance of the history of socialist thinking [let alone economics itself] - Marx having moved on after the Communist Manifesto of 1848, changing his interpretation of economics consistently over time as circumstances and history itself altered: surely a pre-requisite of progressive thought? - Kwarteng simply falls into the trap of following blindly the tropes that the Tories have feebly relied on for generations, now. Except that he just isn’t listening to or watching what is actually before him.


Anyone who characterises the Reeves’ budget as ‘Communist’ I’m afraid is either just plain thick, or being deliberately disingenuous and toeing a party line so stale as to qualify as an archaeological find. Add in the irony of such a short-lived and disastrous Chancellor offering advice to the current incumbent, a former economist at The Bank of England, and I think you get my drift. As an Old-Etonian male, he must really dislike the vision of a state school educated woman, far better suited and qualified for the job than he. I think he is the exemplification of where the Tory Party is right now. It is not the Labour government, as he would have it, stuck in the past [of The Communist Manifesto]; but rather the stultified right of his own party.


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