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Shortly after making it into the final two for the Tory leadership race in July, Liz Truss sent out a message of thanks to her supporters with an oddly prophetic typo. “I’m ready to hit the ground from day one,” she wrote.
What was once just an amusing typo has turned out to be a well-kept promise. Even with Truss’ first two weeks in office being eclipsed by the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the new regime has already managed to inflict a surprising array of disasters on the country and itself. The so-called “mini-budget” delivered by fledgling finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng on Sept. 23 has been at the heart of the mayhem.
Kwarteng, a longtime Trus ally, is a free-market radical who, like Truss, believes that unfettered economic growth will cure the United Kingdom’s legion of social ills. It may have come as a bit of a surprise when the free market, in turn, had a radically negative reaction to Truss and Kwarteng’s proposals, which represented the biggest cuts in British tax in half a century.