'The Mail couldn’t hide its glee at the unfunded tax cuts, which disproportionately benefited the wealthiest'

The Daily Mail, a newspaper which rather than holding power to account regularly acts as the propaganda arm for the Tory government has been ridiculed, with its former front pages which cheered on the disastrous mini-budget resurfacing as the crisis affecting Liz Truss’s premiership continues to deepen.

The Mail couldn’t hide its glee at the unfunded tax cuts, which disproportionately benefited the wealthiest with a headline on the 23 September which heralded the ‘biggest tax cuts in 30 years!’ The paper predicted that the cuts would ‘turbocharge growth’.

Instead, the exact opposite happened as the pound fell to a record low against the U.S. dollar and the markets went into turmoil. Bloomberg reported that in Liz Truss’s first month in office, at least £300bn was wiped from the combined value of the nation’s stocks and bonds as investors turned away from ‘British policy chaos’.

On the 24^th September, the Mail published a front page with the headline: “At last! A true Tory budget.”

The newspaper’s City editor, Alex Brummer, wrote: “The boldness and courage of Kwasi Kwarteng’s debut budget is seismic,” and predicted it would result in “lifting confidence and sparking a surge in consumption and investment”.

What it instead led to was the likes of the IMF urging a reversal in policy and the Bank of England having to intervene to prevent pension funds from collapsing.

Since then, Jeremy Hunt has taken a wrecking ball to the policies the Mail and others such the Institute of Economic Affairs championed, reversing many of them in his statement yesterday, leaving the prime minister’s programme for government dead in the water.

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

Comments are closed.