Last weekend a senior London banker suggested that No.10 has been taken over by a Doomsday Cult. This cult has been around for a long time, rallying around the seductive idea that tax cuts will restore UK’s economic fortunes. Let’s explore this further . . At root finance minister Kwarteng’s mini-budget is yet another rehash of the weird and wonderful notions of guru Arthur Laffer, who attract politicians of a certain persuasion (i.e. intellectually lazy, self-interested rich ones).

A foundation stone of ‘Trussonomics’ is the notion of national ‘competitiveness’, the idea that growth will be stimulated by providing the owners of Capital with ‘Supply-side’ incentives to invest in Britain rather than elsewhere. These incentives take the form of tax cuts, reducing worker protections, lowering consumer protections and abandoning any pretence of safeguarding the environment. A further incentive is to remove democratic accountability by creating Charter Cities.

An unnoticed aspect of British imperialism is that the British Monarch is also Head of State of many prominent tax havens, including Bermuda, BVI, Cayman, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Jersey, and so on. Shortly after Elizabeth II was crowned, the Bank of England quietly consented to City of London-based banks handling dollar deposits outside the Federal Reserve’s regulatory reach