Why is Liz Truss still in No 10 – and why hasn’t the chancellor resigned?

I read your article “Liz Truss has lost faith of markets and public, says Labour” (News, 30 September). The world watched in horror while the pound sterling was flushed down the toilet by the prime minister’s economic policy, enforced by her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng. It went unchallenged and spooked the financial markets and her own MPs, making our currency the lowest in half a century.

She has put the economy in danger by gambling the public’s money through her reckless action. The taxpayer and future generations will be paying for her mistake. It has caused higher inflation, higher interest rates, higher mortgages, higher borrowing, and raised the price of imports. The Bank of England had to intervene to stop pension funds from collapsing. Homeowners will become homeless as properties are repossessed, benefit payments will fall and poverty will rise. The public spending cutbacks put the NHS in danger of collapsing.

How was this supposed to help people struggling with the cost of living crisis and soaring energy bills? The widely criticised economic policy was solely to benefit the rich and has turned the UK into a tax haven for the wealthy – but the PM refuses to admit failure and reverse her mistake.

The government has failed us on all fronts and everyone has lost confidence. The government is personally responsible and there needs to be an emergency intervention before things get much worse. Most of the attacks and concerns are coming from Truss’s own MPs. This was a failed proposal from the start.

Why is she still in No 10 and why hasn’t the chancellor resigned?

Jeannette Schael

Tadley

The mini-Budget’s most surprising announcement, that the basic rate of income tax will be reduced from 20 per cent to 19 per cent from 6 April next year, will prove to be a disaster for charities. Why?

Because the majority of money received by charities each year comes through the Gift Aid Scheme, and the reduction in the rate of income tax will result in a reduction in the amount of Gift Aid received by charities. For every pound given to charity using the Gift Aid Scheme, the charity currently recovers an additional 25 per cent from the government. When the basic rate of income tax reduces from 20 per cent to 19 per cent, this 25 per cent will likely be reduced to 23 per cent.

What should charities do as a result? They may seek to use whatever influence they have to oppose the reduction in the rate of income tax. Or they must just grin and bear it, and encourage their donors to be more generous to make up for the shortfall they will suffer.

Dr James Behrens, barrister at Serle Court Chambers

London

After much thought, I have finally come up with a reason for the financial instability plan brought to us courtesy of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. The threat of being deported to Rwanda was clearly not working as a deterrent to migrants, so the only option was to make the UK a much less attractive place for people looking for a better life. Of course, this might also deter the foreign workers that the PM wants to encourage, despite a lack of Brexiteer enthusiasm at the prospect. Tricky job, governing the country, Liz.

Katharine Powell

Neston

It is difficult to understand why Conservative Party members now seem to be turning on Liz “Trust”. The mainstay of her campaign in July was a pledge to cut taxes in an economic model which would involve interest rates increasing to 7 per cent, as loudly predicted by her supporting economists such as Professor Patrick Minford.

She has subsequently kept her promise, and whilst this has turned out to be hell for most of us, it’s surely a win-win for her largely mortgage-free Tory “electorate”, who are seeing their taxes fall and the return on their long stagnating savings surge. What is their problem?

Colin Burke

Cumbria

I read Andrew Woodcock’s editor’s letter (”Modern Tories love to scoff at experts – the result is chaos”, 30 September) with interest and total agreement. Yes, it did start with Michael Gove’s cavalier comment that “we have had enough of experts” and as a result, this once sane – although not of my choice – party has morphed into this supercilious and arrogant entity.

To be fair, many of its MPs do not buy into this fatuous argument that basically, you don’t need an “expert” heart surgeon to perform open-heart surgery – you can do it yourself with a handy kitchen knife. I am being facetious, but this wholesale denigration of expert opinion is what has led to this latest economic debacle.

Woodcock is correct too, that this gung-ho trajectory did start with the infamous Brexit – and look where we are now: the proverbial economic waste material has hit the fan because the chancellor and the prime minister thought they knew better than the OBR and dispensed with its “expert” analysis.

So, Woodcock is bang on the money with his pertinent examples of this Conservative mantra, which is fast becoming its elegy.

Judith A Daniels

Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

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Tom Peck was in fine form with his piece “The wheels came off quickly on the Truss radio roadshow” yesterday (29 September). The truth of good satire bites hard. The Tory party now faces what can fairly be described as an existential threat and journalism of this quality explains why. From Johnson’s Brexit to the Kwarteng mini-Budget, the Tory government has been characterised by blatant lies. Uniquely, the Tory CV also includes the criminal partying away of their own laws during a deadly pandemic.

To give Truss her due, the impact of her “six days of economic carnage” more than marginally outdoes the Johnson “oven-ready deal” that still maunders on. A bullet to the head perhaps rather than the death of a thousand cuts? No amount of blather can hide the realities. If this is allowed to continue, for a substantial number of families there will be no unheated and pensionless home to return to with their food-bank “goodies”. The Tories go from appalling to worse. What would the country not give for an election now? Sorry, cannot be done: fixed-term parliament!

David Nelmes

Caerleon, Newport