Did Liz Truss really crash the economy?

 Whenever Starmer or Rachel are on the ropes, their default "get out of jail card" is to state that Liz Truss crashed the economy.

She was Prime Minister for 49 days, from 6 September 2022 to 25 October 2022.

That's nearly 4 years ago.  I know Labour havent got a clue about the economy but can something which happened 4 years ago and never got implemented really have caused such prolonged damage to the economy? 

It's clear Rachel's jobs tax, the huge inflation busting pay rises for public sector workers and big increases for those on minimum wage has been inflationary and caused a big increase in unemployment.  Surely this must be worse than Liz's damage?

So let's wind the clock back.  Crashing the economy implies economic output fell or GDP fell.

So let's look at the ONS numbers.

Q2/22 GDP = £686,335M (Before Liz was PM)

Q3/22 GDP = £687,029M (During her premiership)

Q4/22 GDP = £688,817M (After  her premiership)

So Q4 is higher than Q3 so surely if she had crashed the economy then the number would have fallen - doesnt seem to stack up.  The economy grew 0.26% in the quarter after Liz Truss. Growth?

So let's look at Labour. Since coming to power, their average growth per quarter has been 0.25% - fractionally worse than Liz Truss's "disastrous leadership". 

So Rachel launched the jobs tax 30th Oct 2024 to come into effect 5th April 2025.

The economy was growing at around 0.44% per quarter prior to the jobs tax.  Now growth has stagnated and since April 25 the economy has struggled to achieve 0.1% growth per quarter. There's a clear drop in growth since the introduction of the jobs tax.

So I would say Rachel has crashed the economy not Liz.  The numbers published by the ONS tell the real story.

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Well January 2026's GDP numbers are now out. There was optimism that we would see growth in January - maybe 0.2% (the optimistic target is still struggling to match Liz Truss's crashing the economy growth).  Certainly Rachel thought so because her smug spring statement was full of "I've fixed the economic foundations" and other meaningless rhetoric.   

So we had ZERO growth - and that's before the Iranian chaos.  

Expect things to look pretty dire for 2026. We may look back at January as the highlight of the year. However I suspect someone will manipulate the numbers and show rampant inflation as growth in GDP.....

We January growth was a big fat zero.

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