The last thing the country needs is another dose of austerity from the man who starved the NHS of cash for six years
Who’s in charge? The 400lb silverback called “the markets”. Sending for the zoo-keeper with a bucket of fruit seems to have calmed the beast for now, but £32bn-worth is not enough. The gorilla will be back in a fortnight, which will mean more of Jeremy Hunt’s promised “difficult decisions”, more taxes and more spending cuts. The worst is yet to come.
How did they do this to us? This party has taken the country through 12 years of economic calamity. Long before Truss, its all-pain-no-gain austerity caused household income growth to drop back: between 2007 and 2018 the UK fell behind the rest of Europe, with only Greece and Cyprus experiencing lower economic growth. Incomes in France grew by 34% and in Germany by 27%, while the typical UK income dropped by 2%.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
