Does Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget offer any solutions to Britain’s crises? Our panel decides

theguardian.com:

Imagine if Labour blew up the rules to balloon already soaring inflation, borrowing without knowing the cost, spending on evidence-free pet projects to benefit its own favoured core backers while falling into recession. Cue collapse in markets, a run on the pound, flight of capital, interest rates soaring, foreign raiders snatching UK companies, collapse in consumer confidence: actually, that’s happening.

In the looking-glass world of Trussonomics, it’s borrow like there’s no tomorrow to reward bankers with bonuses, the rich with huge 5% top tax cuts, second homeowners with stamp duty cuts, with nothing much for the middle or the poor. The Conservatives’ trick through the ages was to persuade ordinary voters that what serves the rich serves “the economy” and ultimately them too – the nonexistent trickle-down Joe Biden just excoriated. But that took deceit and pretence: Cameron’s “big society”, Johnson’s “levelling up”.

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s lack of guile is their one virtue. Fairness is not on their menu and they say so: deliberately accelerating inequalities is their “growth” plan straight from the eccentric rightwing pamphleteers. So far, they’ve had no poll bounce. Will tax cuts yield enough to outweigh alarm at a denuded NHS, care and public services? Shock and awe looks bold, but watch it blow back on them.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

The Conservative party has reinvented itself once again. In this fiscal event, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have undone much of the work of the Tory party over the past few years. It’s hard not to read his pledge to “turn the vicious cycle of stagnation into a virtuous cycle of growth” as an attack on the last 12 years of Tory government.

For all the talk of a