Boris needs a sophisticated recipe to save the economy – and himself – The Telegraph

Brexit was meant to be a new beginning for the Tory party, but by making trade with Europe more difficult and costly, it has so far only added to the countrys travails.

Instead, Britains new-found freedoms busy themselves with apparent trivia, such as a return to imperial measures and the reimpositionof the crown on the side ofpint glasses. None of these things helps the economy and, by further inflaming Britains culture wars, may even be mildly negative.

Whatever happened to the supposed Brexit freedom of abolishing VAT on gas and electricity bills? There could scarcely be a better time to avail ourselves of it, yet that promise too has been left by the wayside.

Rather than looking to a newly invigorated future, we find ourselves drowning in nostalgia, as if returned to the well-meaning but ineffective back to basics posturing of John Majors last administration, where the imagined comforts of warm beer and the gentle sound of leather on willow were shamelessly invoked to deflect from the gruesome reality of political and economic decay.

It should be obvious by now, even to the carelessly optimistic Johnson, that economic policy is failing disastrously. Rather than seeking to address underlying weaknesses and fault lines in the UK economy, on both the monetary and fiscal fronts it only compounds them.

A complete rethink is required that turns conventional thinking on its head. It would be a big move and one fraught with danger to abandon the current inflation targeting regime in favour of something more suited to current economic challenges, but it is as plain as a pike staff that this 25-year-old sacred cow of economic convention no longer works as it is supposed to.

The only reason for keeping it going is the potential damage to international confidence and credibility that might result from kicking against it. But you dont knowingly keep using an unsafe bridge simply because everybody expects you to.

Just how wrong does the Bank of England have to be before someone shouts the emperor has got no clothes? The failure is as much in the framework as the execution. Its no longer clear that the simplistic targeting of a 2pc inflation rate through a nominally independent central bank now a global obsession that bizarrely originated from tiny, little New Zealand makes any sense.

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Boris needs a sophisticated recipe to save the economy - and himself - The Telegraph