The week Liz Truss ended up sinking the British Conservative Party

A poorly thought out and worse announced tax cut plunged the value of the pound sterling on Friday 23rd September.

Six days later, on Thursday the 29th, a survey by the YouGov company for

newspaper gave the Labor opposition an advantage of 33 percentage points over the Conservatives in a hypothetical general election.

The aroma of the end of the cycle that was breathed before the summer, with the rebellion of the deputies and ministers against Boris Johnson, has become the smell of decomposition and of

for himself during the week in which Liz Truss, the prime minister who premiered office on September 6, has begun to deploy its first government measures.

In theory, no one should have been fooled.

Truss won the Conservative primaries with a defiant and bravado neoliberal message: the UK economy had been dormant for more than a decade, bowing to a fearful and repressed economic orthodoxy.

It was time to “take courageous action”.

He promised a generous tax cut, despite the fact that inflation was unleashed, as in all of Europe, and common sense advised otherwise.

The turmoil caused for seven days by Truss and his finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, is due both to a problem of figures and to an explosive mixture of arrogance —both of them— versus mistrust —of the markets—.

When Kwarteng presented the new measures to Parliament on the first Friday - some 50,000 million euros in tax cuts and another 150,000 million in direct aid to households and companies to pay gas and electricity bills - he was unable to understand that a hole such an enormous public debt —nearly 7% of GDP— needed to be accompanied by an independent economic report indicating the effect that the new plans were going to have on the country's accounts.

The minister, like his boss, was not, however, willing to let reality cloud his economic vision.

(Britain Unchained), a pamphlet that defended the need to deregulate the British economy and reduce state intervention.

Basically, the neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher, rehearsed and discarded years later by experts, according to which a tax cut causes a spillover effect that distributes the crumbs of wealth to the rest of the country.

The toughest wing of the Conservative Party, the same one that fought tooth and nail to achieve a hard Brexit and a total break with the EU, lives clinging to that doctrinal ideal.

In fact, they are the same ones who reproached Johnson —his circumstantial hero— for not having had the courage to carry out the neoliberal project to the last consequences.

And those who now demand that Truss tie himself to the ship's mast and not give in to the pressure of the markets, the warnings of the experts or the fear unleashed among the conservative ranks.

“Liz Truss is taking on the economic

, that conventional view imposed by the international bully classes, like the IMF, the European Commission (...), or the editorial boards of the

and

, that horrible gang that thinks that the West must inevitably face stagnation and decline ”, David Frost, the Brexit negotiator with whom the EU was unable to advance a single millimeter, wrote this week for his fanatical anti-Europeanism.

Truss was not even the favorite among the Conservative MPs, but she ended up being chosen to replace Johnson by a handful of affiliates, 81,000, who decided who was going to govern a country of 67 million inhabitants.

Her rise to power coincided with the death of Elizabeth II.

During those 11 days of mourning, the prime minister assumed a sober and temperate institutional role that allowed the country to begin to know, in its most solemn facet, a policy far removed from the popularity that her predecessor had enjoyed.

As soon as the mourning ended, however, Truss began unceremoniously pushing her plans forward.

Both she and Kwarteng rejected the Office for Budget Responsibility's offer to prepare an independent report on the budgetary consequences of the measures, to defend their sustainability.

It is the usual, before economic measures of impact.

No one was going to spoil the party for them.

The consequence was resounding.

Immediately, the value of the pound sterling plummeted against the dollar, and it lost a lot of strength against the euro.

The markets did not buy the story that fewer taxes would generate more growth, and what they questioned was the credibility of the conservative government to manage the country's accounts responsibly.

British Prime Minister Liz Truss and Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng on September 23 during a visit to a factory. DYLAN MARTINEZ (AFP)

“Margaret always said it”

Kenneth Clarke, Economy Minister under Margaret Thatcher from 1993 to 1997, has recalled these days: “Fiscal discipline, like good management of the domestic economy.

That's what Margaret always said.

That was one of the strongest assets that a government had, because the people considered us competent in managing the economy.”

Truss's biggest critics in her own party have decided to shut up and wait in the face of the very real possibility that the prime minister will break the record by falling off the cliff within weeks of taking office.

Other relevant figures in the party ask her to make a change, to rectify it before it is too late.

“You can't create a low-tax economy by going into debt.

Basically, it is necessary to solve this schizophrenia.

It is impossible to have a reduced State, with low taxation, and at the same time enormous public spending”, warned George Osborne, the Minister of the Economy with the Conservative David Cameron.

It was he who imposed years of austerity, after the financial crisis of 2008. Austerity that translated into poverty and more inequality, a bill that the

have pending payment.

A word that Johnson abhorred and wanted to banish.

A possibility that reappears, because when the debt skyrockets, you have to cut somewhere.

“I am afraid that the only thing this economy minister is going to do is make things worse.

He doesn't want to rectify himself, and he will end up doing the worst he can do.

He is going to reduce social spending and public investment, and he is going to make it much harder for the UK to recover,” Greek economist and former minister Yanis Varoufakis told the BBC.

The unthinkable.

Someone as unorthodox as Varoufakis questioning the seriousness of the British Government.

He wasn't the only one.

The International Monetary Fund also burst onto the scene with a harsh and unusual statement in which it claimed not to recommend "broad and indiscriminate fiscal measures at this time (...) of high levels of inflationary pressure", and warned of an increase in inequalities .

Even US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen indicated that her country was "following events very closely" in the UK.

Aware that they need to start swimming if they do not want to drown, Truss and his minister have begun a gradual process of contrition, in which Kwarteng - some Conservative MPs have already called for his resignation - is, between the two, the one who bows his head the most .

On Monday, in a concerted action with the Bank of England, he promised that on November 23 he would present his budget plans, accompanied by the relevant report from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), in which the Government's will to continue reducing the level of public debt relative to GDP.

This Friday, Truss and Kwarteng, in an extraordinary move, met with OBR President Richard Hughes.

It was one more attempt to regain a lost sense of seriousness.

However, shortly after the institution announced that it would have the report on the new measures ready in a week, the government made it clear that it maintained its intention not to publish it (it is its prerogative) until mid-November.

"The medium-term fiscal plan [whose presentation has been announced for the 23rd of that month] will present a credible agenda to reduce the debt in the medium term, with new fiscal rules and spending discipline", he has written in the

this Saturday the minister, in his umpteenth attempt to transmit calm to the markets.

Meanwhile, Truss insists that he will not move one iota, because his economic project "is the right one for the country's interest."

The British Parliament resumes its sessions on October 11.

Three days later, the massive purchase of public debt that the Bank of England has announced to support the pound will end.

During that period of just two weeks, Truss will have to decide if she keeps her bet until the end or if she turns the situation around to try to save her new term as prime minister, and the electoral future of the Conservative Party.

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