The shortest serving British PM was George Canning who was in office for 119 days(1827). And now she made history.
> The second shortest serving PM was George Canning, who served for 119 days after dying in 1827.
Sounds like the UK has had an undead PM.
Can somebody from the UK tell us what did she do that the economy crashed, in just under two months?
She did this by launching a series of unfunded tax cuts and doing so without an assessment of the impact on the UK's finances.
Another interesting difference between the US and UK. Republicans do this routinely in the US, and have done for many decades now.
The last Republican president who didn't do this was George Bush (the first one). After promising "no new taxes" during his campaign, he later agreed to do the fiscally responsible thing and raise taxes in order to offset spending increases. He was not re-elected. That was ~30 years ago, and to my knowledge no subsequent Republican president has made that mistake.
- The UK doesn’t have the $
- I think in this instance it was partly the fact that they didn’t seem to be interested in the fiscal position and didn’t publish an assessment because they thought it was bad - so the markets assumed the worst. Don’t think any U.S. president has gone quite so far - happy to be corrected!
That is an extremely charitable parsing of the events. The more accurate (realpolitik) version is Bush said the no new taxes quip, and Democrats subsequently laser-focused on making him (slightly) raise taxes, showing he is a "liar".
My take away is to learn not to promise overly optimistic outcomes when your political rivals have a significant stake in seeing you either be a success or a failure.
Edit: Not sure why this was flagged. Did not mean to come off as hostile or aggressive. Anyways, cheers.
These days I think a Republican president in the same position would be a lot more likely to refuse to sign it, even it if meant shutting down the government. But politicians (and voters) really were much less divided back then compared to today.
> My take away is to learn not to promise overly optimistic outcomes when your political rivals have a significant stake in seeing you either be a success or a failure.
Over-promising is the bread and butter of campaign rhetoric; candidates do it all the time (certainly in US presidential elections at least). If it was really that much of a problem in practice, you'd see more election winners who hadn't previously promised all kinds of things they have no chance of delivering.
The gov also declined to get the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) to check the impact of the plans. This is something the OBR does before every budget and it's very unusual that they didn't do this - even though it turns out they offered to before the budget was released. It didn't help that a lot of the taxes cut were targeted for high earners - It's hard to argue how cutting the top 45pc tax rate for earners over £150,000 and dropping a cap on bankers bonuses would help people in the short term (or dare. I say, the long), when the majority of people in the UK were struggling with the massively increased cost of living. It almost seemed as if the conservatives were trying to force through a list of long desired for tax cuts for the wealthy without the proper mandate (as Truss was only. elected by Conservative party members, rather than the general electorate) - and this made her gov monstrously unpopular.
This wiki page contains a good summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_2022_United_Kingdom_...
For that matter aren't there Whitehall staff that could easily have said something?
It all seems bizarre from the outside.
And, of course, very Brexit.
"This is financially a bad idea" has been ignored since Brexit, and it bit hard.
September 23rd onward is pretty much how she ended up in this position.