It’s taken a leadership race for the Tories to fess up: they’ve wrecked the economy

theguardian.com:

After years of division, the unexpected sudden arrival of unity should be cause for celebration. It has long been accepted by the government’s opponents that 12 years of Tory rule have been a disastrous combination of stagnation and decline, so it is to be welcomed that pretenders to the Conservative crown have now embraced these facts.

That Liz Truss has savaged the economic policies of the government she has served in since 2019 is notable enough, damning Rishi Sunak for plunging the country into a coming recession. But Truss’s critique is far more sweeping than that, damning “business-as-usual economic management, which has delivered low growth for decades”. Whether Truss is aware of this or not – she did, after all, get lost leaving the room during her campaign launch – this is a timeframe that includes the last three Conservative prime ministers. And she is on point: the average economic growth of the 2010s was only marginally better than the 2000s, itself the worst decade for growth since the war.

This is an important concession, because when he was steward of the British economy, George Osborne defended his slash-and-burn austerity on the grounds that “truly sustainable growth … depends on sound public finances.” But these cuts delivered only stagnation, because they suppressed tax receipts. The vandalism went further: a lack of investment in infrastructure and skills left a legacy of lower potential growth even after Osborne’s political downfall.

But Truss’s critique goes further. We would expect her to assail New Labour’s time in office, but by “decades” she surely goes beyond 1997, and she would be correct. After all, the average economic growth under Thatcherism in the 80s was 2.6%, the same as the much-maligned