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Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget was a reckless gamble

Kwasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss’s mini-budget is a fiscal and moral outrage, because it ignores the extensive negative evidence from previous attempts to boost growth by giving handouts to the rich (Kwarteng accused of reckless mini-budget for the rich as pound plummets, 23 September). It is also a constitutional outrage. Apart from a very small group of relatively rich people, no one voted for this radical policy change. Hopefully the British public will recognise this as a reckless gamble aimed at bolstering Truss’s election prospects. Recent history shows, however, that the public cannot necessarily be relied upon to make wise political decisions, so our outrage must be transformed into practical action to persuade voters that there is a viable, socially just alternative to this morally bankrupt government.
Prof Alan Walker
University of Sheffield

• Let’s not get too envious of the very wealthy who were so cosseted in Friday’s fiscal event. The reaction of the stock market was a 2% loss on the day (Pound falls below $1.09 for first time since 1985 following mini-budget, 23 September). Most of the rich will have some of their millions invested in stocks and shares. So they lost £20,000 of each million. I wonder how grateful they are for the chancellor’s reckless gamble?
Howard Fielding
London

• I’ve just been disturbed by the middle one (as Tim Dowling would have it) arriving home from his job in the City after an evening celebrating not just the reduction in tax rates for him and all his mates but the large amount of money they all made in the last few days shorting the pound. Huzzah!
Name and address supplied

• What a timid budget. If economic growth is to take off, the income tax bull must be grasped by the horns. All income tax for those on £50,000 or more must be scrapped forthwith. Only then will a vigorous entrepreneurial spirit blossom. The losers who earn less than this will be only too pleased to shoulder the burden and let the tall, job-creating poppies reach for the sky and get the wheels of commerce moving.
Ivor Morgan
Lincoln

• Keir Starmer compared this government’s economic approach to that of a casino. This is unfair to Britain’s casinos, which are prudent, well-regulated businesses with a precise knowledge of all the risks they incur. Trussonomics is more akin to the “find the lady” mobs in our inner cities who try to persuade gullible visitors they can get rich from the three-card trick.
Richard Heller
London

• The Treasury source who described Kwasi Kwarteng’s budget as containing “more rabbits than Watership Down” (UK in recession and further interest rate hikes probable, Bank warns Kwarteng, 22 September) should have remembered the film of the book, which traumatised my son. Although the reference was apt, given that the rabbits were fleeing from developers who brought in diggers to destroy their burrows.
Helen Briggs
Hertford

• I was amazed to see almost identical headlines in Saturday’s print editions of the Guardian and Daily Mail. The Guardian said “A budget for the rich”, while the Mail opined “At last a true Tory budget”.
John Platt
Whitworth, Lancashire

• It wasn’t a budget, it was a special fiscal operation.
Jeffrey Borinsky
London

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