On 5 September 2022, following the disgraced departure of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss – a marginal Cabinet member widely disparaged for lack of discernible talent – assumed the duties of Prime Minister announcing a ‘bold new plan’ for revitalising the country's economic performance. She would last 49 days, becoming both the shortest-lived PM in UK history and one of its most spectacularly incompetent.

On the 23rd of the same month, close ally and newly minted Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng delivered a poorly trailed ‘fiscal event’, unaccompanied by the customary institutional oversight designed to offer independent confidence to capital markets wary of unfunded economic promises. On one hand, the Truss– Kwarteng plan aimed, quite reasonably, to shield households from sharply rising fuel bills consequent, in part, on the Ukraine invasion and Russian gas diplomacy, but also on long-standing UK failure to invest in a coherent, sustainable domestic energy security strategy. The cap, conservatively estimated to cost north of €115 billion, was to be funded through national debt rather than the alternative, unappealing to the presiding Conservative administration, of a windfall tax on excess energy company profits.

But their plan was much larger in scale. Promoted as a recipe for unleashing growth, it went to war on tax, viewed two-dimensionally as a dead-weight imposition on individual enterprise. Increases in corporate and capital gains tax, planned to replenish national coffers battered by pandemic spending, were rescinded. And new cuts to taxable income were announced both at the base and the top rate. The plan was received in the international markets, for want of a better term, like a bucket of cold sick – an economically illiterate attempt to revive discredited notions of ‘trickle-down’ wealth generation liberated from the ethical and practical concerns of distributive efficiency, and imbued with so aggressive an uninterest in the problem of inequality as to be unappealing even to the fabled rapacity of global capital (Dearden, 2022; Ghitis, 2022).

Although much attention was directed at Truss and Kwarteng's economic prospectus, this itself was only one component of a wider attempt to shift social, political and environmental policy further towards an individualist paradigm of small-state libertarianism – quietly smothering advanced ‘white paper’ policy work on health inequalities, and disavowing or disappearing public health strategies on obesity, smoking and exercise (Campbell, 2022; Wise, 2022);