Substitution Effects?

MPs supporting Liz Truss need to be asked by their constituency associations why they wanted Britain to have no agriculture.

Patrick Minford also wants no British manufacturing industry, although the Conservative Party membership might not mind that so much at least initially, and sky high interest rates, which would suit many of the voters in this Leadership Election down to the ground.

As myself the mortgage-free holder of a savings account, those voters are nevertheless unrepresentative in the extreme. Unless there is drastic intervention of some kind, then they are about to saddle this country, even if only for about a year, with a Prime Minister who was in thrall to a crank economist from the olden days.

When Rishi Sunak says that "not even" Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell proposed borrowing to pay for everyday spending, then he is well and truly doing the Politics rather than the Philosophy or the Economics. He knows perfectly well that nothing in the internal logic of their economic ideology could ever have arrived at that point.

Yet that is what Truss wants to do, in order to cut taxes at most for the mere six in 10 adults whose incomes reached the threshold, but no doubt only for people a great deal richer than that. Tax cuts before growth. Yes, really. Sunak was a bad Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he would be a worse Prime Minister. But at least he is not Truss.