If you ever doubt the power of wishful thinking, just read the business pages of the right-wing press. It’s not economics – it’s theology. Every headline a hymn to low taxes, every column a sermon on the righteousness of deregulation. The only thing missing is incense and a passing plate for hedge-fund donors.
These papers don’t analyse markets, they canonise them. The Telegraph, Mail and Express talk about “the markets” as if they were benevolent gods who bless the faithful and smite the heretics. When Truss crashed the pound, they didn’t question the creed – they blamed the congregation. It wasn’t the policy that was wrong, you see, it was our lack of faith.
Their economic commentary follows a sacred trinity: cut taxes, shrink the state, wait for miracles. When those miracles fail to appear, they reach for new devils – “wokery,” “red tape,” or Brussels. When the numbers don’t add up, they move the decimal point. It’s not analysis, it’s numerology.
Take Truss’s mini-budget – the moment when ideology finally met arithmetic and lost. £45 billion in unfunded tax cuts, cheered to the rafters by the Tory press as “a bold return to growth.” Within days, the pound was in freefall, gilt markets imploded, and pension funds teetered on the edge. The markets weren’t rejecting her politics; they were rejecting her sums. Yet the Telegraph and Mail insisted it was all a misunderstanding, as if the IMF, the Bank of England, and every bond trader on the planet had simply failed to grasp the subtle genius of Kwarteng’s spreadsheet.
It would be funny if it weren’t so expensive. The right-wing press cheered Truss because her budget was the purest expression of their faith – a Thatcherite séance conducted with the national credit card. They saw her not as reckless but as righteous. She was “doing what no one else dared” – which is true, in the same way that licking a plug socket is daring.
The irony is that markets, those same gods of the free-market religion, smote their disciple instantly. Sterling collapsed. Mortgage rates spiked. The IMF issued a polite but unmistakable warning that Britain had gone mad. And still the Tory press stood at the altar, chanting “growth, growth, growth,” as if repetition could make it real.
Fast forward to Labour’s first year, and the contrast couldn’t be starker. The IMF now calls Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules “credible.” Gilt yields are calm. Markets, after years of Tory chaos, have stopped flinching every time Westminster opens its mouth. It’s not glamour – it’s competence. And that, to the right-wing press, is heresy.
They complain that Labour has “lost its nerve” because Reeves refuses to spray borrowed money up the wall. They mourn the “death of ambition” because the bond markets are quiet. To them, prudence is cowardice and arithmetic is treason. They sneer at Labour’s steady hand even as the IMF quietly praises it for restoring Britain’s credibility.
But let’s be honest: the right-wing press has never been about economics. It’s about identity – nostalgia dressed as analysis. They pine for Thatcher not because of what she achieved, but because she confirms what they already believe. They forget that she raised taxes repeatedly and balanced the books with ruthless pragmatism. Their version of Thatcher is a folk tale – all handbag, no homework.
Meanwhile, papers that actually still employ economists – The Financial Times, The Economist, Reuters, even the New Statesman and Guardian business desks – offer a more sobering view. They analyse balance sheets rather than moral fibre. They recognise that fiscal responsibility and social stability aren’t opposites but prerequisites. You may not always agree with them, but at least they’re doing economics, not exorcism.
The Mail and Express, by contrast, exist to keep their readers angry and confused. The formula never changes: Labour’s War on Success, Taxing the Strivers, Britain Held Hostage by Bureaucrats. It’s less journalism than narcotic theatre – keep the faithful enraged, and they’ll never notice who’s actually been picking their pockets.
In truth, the editorial line of the right-wing press can be reduced to a single catechism: when the rich prosper, it’s enterprise; when they don’t, it’s socialism. The numbers are incidental. The outcome predetermined.
Britain’s fiscal debate has become a battle between arithmetic and ideology. Labour, for all its caution, is at least trying to reconcile the two. The Tory press, meanwhile, still dreams of perpetual motion – a world where tax cuts pay for themselves and the bond markets clap politely from the sidelines.
They mistake volume for vision, certainty for competence, and faith for fact. And that, in the end, is why their economic analyses will always read like scripture – authoritative, dramatic, and utterly detached from reality.
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