6 ms·

The shortest serving British PM was George Canning who was in office for 119 days(1827). And now she made history.

by IdealeZahlen 4y ago

samwillis 4y ago
George Canning died in office, he wasn’t pushed out for being a miserable failure who crashed the economy.
- mcv 4y ago
  According to the article: > 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.
  - gpderetta 4y ago
    paging cstross
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kamaal 4y ago
  >>a miserable failure who crashed the economy. Can somebody from the UK tell us what did she do that the economy crashed, in just under two months?
  - klelatti 4y ago
    Lost the confidence of the market for UK government debt pushing up borrowing costs for government and for others (as well as causing problems for pension funds who own that debt). 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.
    - usefulcat 4y ago
      > She did this by launching a series of unfunded tax cuts 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.
      - klelatti 4y ago
        Two things: - 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!
      - iwillbenice 4y ago
        > 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. 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.
        usefulcat 4y ago
        > 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". 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.
  - jjar 4y ago
    Announced a lot of unfunded tax cuts financed by borrowing - these have now been walked back on. The main issue was not really that she cut taxes, it's the unfunded borrowing to cover. Borrowing with the current high interest rates was always going to be risky and the market didn't have confidence that the cuts would lead to growth. This caused the value of the pound and of UK gov bonds (gilts) to plummet. Several large pension funds (which usually hold large numbers of gilts) were in danger of being margin called, which would cause them to have to sell gilts to cover the responsibility, which would drive down the price further, causing more sell offs. To prevent this the Bank of England (BoE) announced that they would be buying up to £65B of UK gilts - which calmed the markets and prevented a sell off (for now). But it has significantly worsened the economic outly for the country, buying your own bonds at a premium during a period of high inflation is a horrible position to be in. 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.
    - ableal 4y ago
      Thank you. That's a few weeks news in two paragraphs.
  - krisoft 4y ago
    Introduced a set of deep tax cuts. The markets reacted negatively to the implied increase in governmental borrowing. The pound had hit an all time low against the US dollar. This wiki page contains a good summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_2022_United_Kingdom_mini-budget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_2022_United_Kingdom_...
  - markvdb 4y ago
    Her government proposed an unfunded budget that caused a gilt market panic. Part of the mortgage market dried up. Variable mortgage rates exploded. Pension funds had to resort to emergency measures. The Bank of England had to intervene.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      I'd love to know why proposing borrowing to cover top-bracket tax rate cuts sends Britain spiraling into crisis but in America that is just how we do.
      - wbl 4y ago
        Because the UK in 2022 is not the US in 2017. One had high growths and low rate expectations. The other had high inflation raising rate expectations, so the borrowing cost more.
      - Apocryphon 4y ago
        Reserve currency of the world, baby!
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      Don't the groups in the gilt market, mortgage market, pension funds, etc., have lobbyists that would be able to communicate their concerns and fears ahead of time? For that matter aren't there Whitehall staff that could easily have said something? It all seems bizarre from the outside.
      - pjc50 4y ago
        There are all sorts of processes to say to her that this was a bad idea. She ignored them. It's a very Chernobyl kind of process: in order to run your experiment, first ignore all the safety alarms. And, of course, very Brexit.
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
        Why did the relevant Ministers, such as the lord Chancellor, Chancellor of the Exchequer, etc., sign off on it too?
  - barbecue_sauce 4y ago
    https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/uk-news/a-timeline-of-key-events-that-led-liz-truss-to-stepped-down-as-uk-pm-articleshow.html https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/uk-news/a-timeline-... September 23rd onward is pretty much how she ended up in this position.
alex3305 4y ago
WR! She should submit this to speedrun.com.
- pdpi 4y ago
  Is there an Any% category for government? I mean, her strategy did involve a crash.
boesboes 4y ago
She can put that on her resume 'Made history as British PM'. no further elboration haha

The shortest serving British PM was George Canning who was in office for 119 days(1827). And now she made history.

samwillis 4y ago

George Canning died in office, he wasn’t pushed out for being a miserable failure who crashed the economy.

mcv 4y ago
According to the article: > 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.
- gpderetta 4y ago
  paging cstross
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kamaal 4y ago
>>a miserable failure who crashed the economy. Can somebody from the UK tell us what did she do that the economy crashed, in just under two months?
- klelatti 4y ago
  Lost the confidence of the market for UK government debt pushing up borrowing costs for government and for others (as well as causing problems for pension funds who own that debt). 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.
  - usefulcat 4y ago
    > She did this by launching a series of unfunded tax cuts 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.
    - klelatti 4y ago
      Two things: - 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!
    - iwillbenice 4y ago
      > 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. 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.
      - usefulcat 4y ago
        > 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". 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.
- jjar 4y ago
  Announced a lot of unfunded tax cuts financed by borrowing - these have now been walked back on. The main issue was not really that she cut taxes, it's the unfunded borrowing to cover. Borrowing with the current high interest rates was always going to be risky and the market didn't have confidence that the cuts would lead to growth. This caused the value of the pound and of UK gov bonds (gilts) to plummet. Several large pension funds (which usually hold large numbers of gilts) were in danger of being margin called, which would cause them to have to sell gilts to cover the responsibility, which would drive down the price further, causing more sell offs. To prevent this the Bank of England (BoE) announced that they would be buying up to £65B of UK gilts - which calmed the markets and prevented a sell off (for now). But it has significantly worsened the economic outly for the country, buying your own bonds at a premium during a period of high inflation is a horrible position to be in. 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.
  - ableal 4y ago
    Thank you. That's a few weeks news in two paragraphs.
- krisoft 4y ago
  Introduced a set of deep tax cuts. The markets reacted negatively to the implied increase in governmental borrowing. The pound had hit an all time low against the US dollar. This wiki page contains a good summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_2022_United_Kingdom_mini-budget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_2022_United_Kingdom_...
- markvdb 4y ago
  Her government proposed an unfunded budget that caused a gilt market panic. Part of the mortgage market dried up. Variable mortgage rates exploded. Pension funds had to resort to emergency measures. The Bank of England had to intervene.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    I'd love to know why proposing borrowing to cover top-bracket tax rate cuts sends Britain spiraling into crisis but in America that is just how we do.
    - wbl 4y ago
      Because the UK in 2022 is not the US in 2017. One had high growths and low rate expectations. The other had high inflation raising rate expectations, so the borrowing cost more.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      Reserve currency of the world, baby!
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    Don't the groups in the gilt market, mortgage market, pension funds, etc., have lobbyists that would be able to communicate their concerns and fears ahead of time? For that matter aren't there Whitehall staff that could easily have said something? It all seems bizarre from the outside.
    - pjc50 4y ago
      There are all sorts of processes to say to her that this was a bad idea. She ignored them. It's a very Chernobyl kind of process: in order to run your experiment, first ignore all the safety alarms. And, of course, very Brexit.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        Why did the relevant Ministers, such as the lord Chancellor, Chancellor of the Exchequer, etc., sign off on it too?
- barbecue_sauce 4y ago
  https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/uk-news/a-timeline-of-key-events-that-led-liz-truss-to-stepped-down-as-uk-pm-articleshow.html https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/uk-news/a-timeline-... September 23rd onward is pretty much how she ended up in this position.

alex3305 4y ago

WR! She should submit this to speedrun.com.

pdpi 4y ago
Is there an Any% category for government? I mean, her strategy did involve a crash.

boesboes 4y ago

She can put that on her resume 'Made history as British PM'. no further elboration haha