"Frankly, if British Conservatives are not prepared to countenance tax cuts, spending cuts or other pro-growth measures, they might as well give up and let Starmer try his hand." [updated]

"For years now, the world economy has resembled a ludicrously high-stakes game of Jenga. Politicians and central bankers kept taking it in turns to remove blocks from the tower, adding them back to the top of the stack and congratulating themselves on their brilliance, wilfully blind to the fact that the structure was becoming ever more unstable....
    "Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng [were] doubly unlucky. While almost everybody else in Britain remained in denial, they correctly identified this absurd game for the con-trick that it truly was, warned that it was about to implode, and pledged to replace it with a more honest system....
    "What happened next is dispiriting in the extreme... In an understandable rush, Truss and her Chancellor moved too quickly and, paradoxically, given their warnings about the rottenness of the system, ended up pulling out the last block from the Jenga tower, sending all of the pieces tumbling down. Contrary to the Left’s propaganda, they didn’t crash the economy – it was about to come tumbling down anyway – but they had the misfortune of precipitating and accelerating the day of reckoning....
    "The idea, now accepted so widely, that the price of money must be kept extremely low and quantitative easing deployed at every opportunity has undermined every aspect of the economy and society. It has been a catastrophe, as Truss and Kwarteng have long understood, but the scale of the zombification of the economy that it has spawned caught even them by surprise.
    "There are now too many zombies, with too much to lose..."

~ Allister Heath, from his op-ed 'Britain's zombie economy is crumbling and the real culprits are getting off scot-free'

"Serious spending cuts are impossible. That is the melancholy conclusion we must draw from the événements of the past [weeks]. If a PM chosen specifically to cut taxes can’t do it, no one can. Britain will carry on becoming more expensive, less competitive and poorer, while we [Britons] guzzle more of the medicine that sickened the patient....
    "Several broadcasters have been lazily asserting that the markets didn’t like Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax cuts – which would be very odd if it were true. What the markets actually disliked, of course, was not the tax cuts, but the consequent rise in borrowing. That rise owed more to the energy price cap than to all the tax cuts put together ...
    "So why close the gap by raising taxes rather than by cutting spending? ... Liz Truss might have restored fiscal discipline in several ways.... Instead, she chose what the IFS calls 'probably the least growth-friendly option'....
    "Frankly, if the [UK's] Conservatives are not prepared to countenance tax cuts, spending cuts or other pro-growth measures, they might as well give up and let Starmer try his hand."

~ Daniel Hannan, from his op-ed 'If Conservative MPs can’t even cut taxes, they might as well hand over power to Keir Starmer'

UPDATE:

This seems relevant again this morning. James Carville, advisor to then President Clinton, musing in 1993: 

“I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”