Trussonomics what’s not to like? Well…

I have a sneaking admiration for Liz Truss. Not for her economic policies – they make little sense – but for her cojones. She has taken on the tax and spend consensus and turned it upside down. All those hysterics on Twitter who claimed that Boris Johnson was “the most right wing prime minister in history” (McDonnell) will now see what a right wing prime minister actually looks like.

Slashing taxes on business, lifting bankers bonuses, cutting stamp duty, drilling in the North Sea and generally extolling the virtues of profits, which Twitter regard as the wages of evil. We’ve not seen anything like this since the 1980s. Indeed, not even then since Margaret Thatcher did not actually slash taxes on the eve of a recession for the very obvious reason that unfunded tax cuts have to be paid for in other ways. Ms Truss will have to meet the cost the hard way: by cutting public services and reducing the size of the state.

The pundit triumvirate of Torsten Bell (Resolution Foundation), Paul Johnson (IFS) and Martin Lewis of MoneySuperMarket have been sidelined, at least for now. Reduced to issuing lamentations on inequality for the benefit of the Today programme. Even sleepy Joe Biden woke up long enough to condemn Liz’s “trickle-down economics” which he insisted do not work. This is the idea that giving rich people tax cuts will make them create more wealth to be handed down in taxes.

Though Torsten Bell did initially break ranks. The social security think tanker did at least concede that Truss had raised an important issue: growth. You can’t have decent public services without it. That is because you need the taxes of well-paid employees. Given Britain’s dismal record on productivity over the last twenty years or so, this is actually the key economic issue, post Brexit.

Boris Johnson tried to address the productivity through his idea of Green growth. Boosting the economy by making Britain a powerhouse of renewable energy and carbon capture. One of his best lines was “Green is Good”. Liz isn’t having any of it. She obviously disdains the “green crap” and has decided that green is a bit meh.

The PM favours the hard knocks of pure, unadulterated capitalism, the Yellowstone approach to economic management. It will end in tears, of course, these things always do. But before the SNP start attacking Trussonomics as an alien imposition on socialist Scotland they should bear in mind one thing. Nicola Sturgeon also subscribes to at least part of the trickledown thesis, that loading taxes on the wealthy hits tax revenues. That’s why she didn’t restore the 50p tax band in 2015.