Tufton Street - Cry Me A River

And so the day came for the Autumn Statement, that event which, this year, meant the current Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer cleaning up the financial mess bequeathed them by the mercifully short tenure of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, which had worsened the UK’s finances, meaning that taxes would have to rise, if only to restore the country’s credibility.

Jeremy Hunt (the former Culture Secretary) did not disappoint in bringing pain to many taxpayers, and indeed many taxpayers who work for our free and fearless press. It was another of those dead giveaway moments, in the same vein as the media class claiming that £85,000 did not put one in the top 5% as a means of attacking then shadow chancellor John McDonnell.

That showed how obscenely overpaid all those hacks and pundits were; the howls of anguish at Hunt reducing the top rate tax threshold show that those higher up the press pecking order are similarly overpaid. When the Daily Mail claims “TORIES SOAK THE STRIVERS”, it means people at the Mail, and other titles, who churn out piss-poor opinion pieces, will pay more tax.

Echoing the Mail line, and demonstrating that it is a title leaning heavily on its past reputation, the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph uses a quote as its main headline (Bill Deedes would have spiked that one), and tells readers “Welfare bill rises by £90bn as Hunt protects pensioners against inflation but clobbers workers with tax rises”. The Tel of old would never, but never, use a word like “clobbers”. Nor would it call pensions “welfare”.

But the press moaning about increased taxes for Themselves Personally Now was a mere Hors d’Oeuvres for the more substantial Entrée delivered by the denizens of Tufton Street and the surrounding area, those Astroturf lobby groups who would have been best advised keeping silent.

We know that the alphabet soup of right-wing Government bashers have thrown a collective mardy strop over Hunt’s budget as their pals, the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog, have dutifully relayed the pearls of very little economic wisdom to a wider audience, telling “Free Market Wonks Recoil At Hunt’s Tax Rises”.

The post includes priceless lines such as “The [so-called] TaxPayers’ Alliance Chief Executive John O’Connell slammed the Chancellor for whacking up taxes on working families”. As if O’Connell and his fellow propagandists know anything about those in our society who make a positive contribution to the economy, unlike himself and his pals at the TPA.

The whining was equally loud at the Adam Smith Institute, that museum of outdated economic thought that has fraudulently appropriated the name of the founder of economics: “Head of Research Daniel Pryor declared the statement ‘a return to managed decline’”. And then came the IEA.

There, The Great Guido notes “Director-General Mark Littlewood was similarly unhappy”. Well, excuse me for not giving a rat’s arse about Littlewood, anyone else at the IEA, or indeed anyone at the ASI or TPA. Because it was their advocacy - and especially that of the IEA - that landed the economy, and all of us, in deep shit in the first place.

What the Truss and Kwarteng interlude has demonstrated superbly is that the medicine prescribed by the Tufton Street mafiosi is utterly poisonous to real world economies. As the wider public becomes wise to this detail, they may not take too kindly to the press slavishly recycling all those press releases, all those claims of “research”, all those “reports”, all those talking heads.

It’s time to put the alphabet soup of right-wing Astroturf lobby groups where it belongs - in the bin. We will all be poorer thanks to their quack doctory.

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