Liz Truss, tax cuts & Thatcherite economist Patrick Minford
The Chancellor has unveiled a financial package at the core of which is a cut in income tax from 2023. It’s a policy that harks back to the days of Thatcherism and her favourite economist Patrick Minford. Minford is also Liz Truss’s favourite economist.
Asked by Michael Foot in Parliament in the early 1980s which economists supported her policies she responded Alan Walters and Patrick Minford. She is reputed to have said afterwards that it was just as well Foot hadn’t asked for three.
Patrick Minford is still around based at Cardiff University and he remains a free market economist, a supporter of the ideas of Adam Smith and Ricardo on the capitalist economy. He was a supporter of Brexit and remains a Tory too. He is often named by Liz Truss as an economic authority.
In the eighteenth century as noted by E PThompson there was in many areas a moral economy which meant that the staples of life had a regulated fair price. There was still rich and poor and profit but excess was controlled.
As industrial capitalism developed underwritten by Adam Smith and the free market as Thompson recounted in the Making of the English Working Class, Parliament might as well try to regulate the wind as wages.
Truss plans to let the free market rip but with one key qualification. As Stuart Hall argued in his 1980s analysis of Thatcherism the counterpoint to that was a strong State. So Truss plans to abolish a raft of laws and regulations that allow working people to challenge the unrestrained free market.
It can still be challenged it will just be even harder. Patrick Minford will be applauding anyway
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