There’s plenty of competition for the title of 'Most Incompetent Government' but the current lot under Liz Truss is well up the list. The Tory Party is trussed up like a turkey and its goose looks well and truly cooked!

The tragedy is that the aim of KamiKwazi's mini budget was good. Taxes must be cut to kickstart growth and revive our economy. Sadly, his catastrophic failure to explain how this would work has set back this agenda for years.

Truss's incomprehensible decision to appoint Jeremy Hunt in Kwazi's place means we now have as effective Prime Minister a Remainiac, extreme pro-lockdown crank who came last in the recent Tory leadership contest! That's the last thing we need. It compounds the Tories' failure to deliver on Brexit and slash the stranglehold of EU regulations and red tape.

The tale of financial markets being spooked by 'unfunded tax cuts' is absurd. It's the scale of government borrowing to fund the lockdowns and now the unfunded energy package which did that. Indiscriminate fuel-bill payments will be made to every household regardless of income at a cost of up to £150 billion. 

The total tax package in the mini-Budget was estimated to 'cost just £43 billion. Of that, £24 billion by two things both supported by the Labour Party - the cut in National Insurance Contributions (£19 billion) and 1p off the Basic Rate of Income Tax (£5 billion). 

That leaves a mere £19 billion of extra 'unfunded' tax cuts, which is supposed to have caused financial panic. This is clearly nonsense, when set against total tax revenue of £915 billion last year and a projected government deficit of £165 billion next year.

Cuts in income tax and NICs incentivise work and enterprise. They tend to increase the size of the national income as it pays to work harder and invest more. It also makes tax avoidance less worthwhile. The 45p income tax rate raises a mere £2 billion and scrapping it would probably have led to more tax being paid - as happened when the 50p top rate was abolished. That led to an extra £8 billion in tax revenue. The paradox is that not cutting tax actually reduces the amount of cash which could be raised to spend on the NHS etc.

It's the same with the U-turn on Corporation Tax. Increasing it from 19% to 26% will be disastrous. This will move the UK from being one of the lower rates internationally into one of the higher. Companies in Northern Ireland will be taxed at 26% compared with only 12.5% in the Irish Republic - so expect a rash of companies to move from Belfast to Dublin. This will exacerbate the already disastrous economic effects of the Northern Ireland Protocol and lead to less tax revenue raised in the UK.

After 12 years of Tory government, UK taxes are higher as a proportion of national income than at any time since the Attlee Government in 1950. 

Let's not also forget the role of the Bank of England in this mess. Andrew Bailey has been useless as Governor - asleep at the wheel while inflation has been careering out of control. He has a duty to keep it below 2% but it is currently 9%. It has been rising above 2% since April 2021. The Bank should have started raising rates over a year ago and should have kept in lockstep with the US Federal Reserve. Even last month, when the Fed increased rates by 0.75% the Bank dithered and raised UK rates by only 0.5%.

The dollar has soared on the back of the Fed's decisive actions whilst the pound has weakened, adding further to inflationary pressures as many products (including oil) are traded in dollars.

Add to that Bailey's idiotic announcement that last week he was going to sell £40 billion of gilt-edged stocks to start unwinding QE. With interest rates rising, the price of government bonds falls. Selling more bonds inevitably reduces bond prices further and sellers rush to sell asap - causing bond prices to fall even further. This causes market interest rates also to rise further, making the problem even worse. Last week’s crisis in the bond market was provoked by the Bank's foolish decisions more than the Chancellor's tax plans. Instead of promoting stability, the Bank did the opposite.

This then led to crisis with pension funds. Regulatory rules require them to hold large quantities of 'safe' securities like government bonds. When prices are set to fall, the funds must bolster their solvency by converting some bonds into cash. Last week's rapid rise in interest rates meant that pension funds had to off-load bonds into a falling market and the Bank had to step in as buyer of last resort. Idiotically, Bailey announced an end-date (last Friday) for his support scheme. This caused panic and a fire-sale of bonds, pushing up interest rates still further and endangering the solvency of some pension funds.

The reality of last week's crisis is that it was primarily caused by the failure of the Bank of England to do its job. The background is also a decade of Quantitative Easing and interest rates at virtually zero. Add to this the toxic effect of two years of lockdowns, in which the national debt was doubled to £2.3 trillion, and you have the perfect storm.

The lockdown was a draconian and unnecessary act of self-harm by a panicked Johnson government. It wrecked the economy and the government's finances. The mini-Budget was a start in getting us out of the mess, but it was so badly handled by Truss and Kwarteng that the real cause and cure of our problems were completely obscured.

The U-turns will make things worse, not better. Truss's feebleness has been a gift to the Remainiac, globalist Blob who want to undo Brexit and carry on with the same anti-growth policies which for a brief moment it seemed we were about to escape.

Once again, the Tories have betrayed Britain. Never has there been greater need to smash the Westminster-Whitehall-globalist Establishment consensus. If the country keeps voting for the parties which administer poison, the patient will never recover. Protesting against the Tories by voting Labour or Lib-Dem means voting for more poison, only ten times worse. 

Only UKIP understands the true causes and has the cure for our ills.

Neil Hamilton

Leader - UK Independence Party