Spend too much time on social media, and you will find yourself under the impression that the measures Kwasi Kwarteng set out in the government’s Growth Plan are unpopular. It is a very easy mistake to make, but it is a mistake nonetheless. In fact, the public loves the plan’s largest spend item — only 11 per cent oppose the energy price guarantee — and, of £45bn worth of tax cuts, they support all but measures totalling £2bn. They like reversing the national insurance rise, and they like reducing stamp duty. They even like keeping corporation tax at 19 per cent.

Yet the Growth Plan is notoriously, hideously, aggressively unpopular. The government has found a way to spend countless billions, almost entirely on things people like, in a way that has left only 18 per cent of people happy and just 19 per cent believing they will be left better off. 

It has not been a communications masterclass. 

A simple explanation might be that voters like each tax cut, but dislike their combined effect on the tax burden. Yet less than a month ago an absolute majority of Britons wanted taxes to fall in aggregate, and just eight per cent shared Rishi Sunak’s faith in raising taxes. Far from the democratic outrage some believe the mini-budget to be, in intention at least, Liz Truss seems more in line with public opinion than almost anyone else. 

In reality it is less about policy and more about politics. Major cross-departmental reform proposals are almost bound to be about as popular as their least popular component. Those are the parts its creators are asked to explain — and once you’re explaining, you’re losing. 

Hence, whilst £43bn of the Growth Plan’s tax cuts might be what the public wanted, lifting the bankers’ bonus cap and spending £2bn scrapping the upper rate of income tax — no longer happening anyway — was more than enough to change the terms of debate altogether. “A £45bn tax cut, of which £2bn restructures badly-designed incentives for higher-earners, and bankers can now earn their giant bonuses in London where we can tax them instead of in Frankfurt where we can’t” is not a catchy summary. Labour’s “£45bn tax cut for the rich” is. 

Conveniently, there already is a windfall tax

That is the summary that has caught on, to the extent that even those who should know better have been confidently writing as if it were remotely accurate. Adam Tooze, the economic historian, described it as “a 45 billion pound tax give away for better-off Brits”. The Resolution Foundation went viral for drawing a graph that allegedly showed “the overall impact of all tax and benefit policies” to be a tremendous result for the top five per cent and either pointless or bad for everyone else, even though their graph only included a small selection of the tax cuts and completely neglected the energy price guarantee. I notice that few of even the most principled critics have been keen to reassess their early outrage in light of the Centre for Economics and Business Research arguing that the Treasury may have seriously blundered in overestimating the cost of the tax cuts by as much as 80 per cent. Nor did the recovery of the pound to $1.12 cause much reflection in Punditland.

A political defeat for the Conservatives, but a huge win for vibes-based theories of politics. 

Nonetheless, whilst it is both easy and fun to blame one’s opponents for one’s problems, that is ultimately an art best left to Lord Hannan. We Conservatives have been all too happy to play into Labour’s hands. 

Truss, for one thing, now says she “should have laid the ground better” in advance of the announcement. Which is clearly not wrong. But to think that was our only error would imply there was no better way of framing what the Growth Plan was — no hope of challenging the narrative that allowed a mostly popular series of ideas to cause this much blowback.

That seems hard to believe. Supply-side conservatives have tried to sell the Growth Plan in a language that, truth be told, only we would consider buying. It might appeal to Simon Clarke and me to hear that abolishing the 45p rate will give us “the simplest, most competitive tax code” on offer. It is no surprise that defence proved so powder-puff and inaccessible as to produce a potentially precedent-setting U-turn just a day later. It might appeal to Kwarteng to say that “we had to do something different” — whatever “different” may be. It might appeal to Truss to claim the plan will “reverse Britain’s managed decline”. But all of this is completely introspective. Hardly anyone else talks about fiscal policy in these terms. When we are proposing something that should be popular, we have absolutely no excuse for doing so ourselves. 

What would it mean to defend the government on the public’s terms, rather than ours? Most obviously it would mean not continuing to defy calls for a windfall tax, an idea so popular that even 82 per cent of Conservative members want one. Conveniently, there already is a windfall tax: it is called the Energy Profits Levy, and it will raise £5bn. That is enough to pay for all of abolishing the higher rate of income tax, reforming stamp duty and retaining the £1m annual investment allowance. It might not fit comfortably with our laissez-faire self-image, and it might not have been Truss’s idea. But neither of those things matter nearly as much as whether anyone will vote for us in two years’ time. 

In more grandiose terms, the most successful reformers find ways to link their agenda to the circumstances. Think of Lyndon Johnson, perhaps the most legislatively skillful U.S. President, and his framing of progress on civil rights as a debt that Congress owed to the memory of John F. Kennedy. In some ways Truss has been unfortunate to inherit No. 10 during a crisis. In other ways it could have been exactly what she needed. Above all, the energy crisis shows with unflinching rigour why Truss is absolutely right to want to abandon the near-termist, demand-side thinking of decades prior. 

The real fight is not with Europe — it is with Russia

The fact that our energy bills will be so high this winter — and the fact that the bailout was so market-shakingly expensive — owes a good deal to our housing stock being the oldest and the worst-insulated in Europe. Our houses get so cold as to pose serious health risks to their residents. We don’t have better homes to offer, like the rest of Europe does, because in large parts of the country it is effectively illegal to build them. The price we pay is quantifiable: gas bills in these homes will cost £1000 more this winter alone. Call it “build back warmer” or whatever else you want: this is what supply-side conservatism means in tangible terms. 

Or take Britain’s energy supply. There is a now-famous video of Nick Clegg opposing new nuclear power in 2010 on the grounds it would only begin to benefit us by 2021 or 2022. Darkly funny, granted, but in reality it is unfair to pick on him alone. Britain has built no new nuclear power stations in thirty years. Even now, staggering near-termism abounds: a major part of Sunak’s leadership bid involved keeping onshore wind illegal. Just this week, the Conservative MP Brendan Clarke-Smith tweeted a jubilant video celebrating the demise of part of a £400m solar power project. The empty field behind him will now remain empty. 

It is in opposition to this sort of thinking that we could be making a positive justification for supply-side-led economic growth. Some of us, quite rightly, care about the simplicity of our tax codes and our international competitiveness against Europe. The real fight of the moment is not with Europe — it is with Russia, and it is that fight that has so rapidly and unrelentingly exposed the flaws in our future-minded decision-making. 

If the Growth Plan were defended in these terms, growth would be taken to mean building up our energy independence and the infrastructure necessary to secure British families’ household bills against global shocks into the future. The plan’s scrapping of planned tax rises would play a smaller role, perhaps to the benefit of the pound, but it would reflect the need to contain the near-term economic consequences of our broken old way of thinking. We must do so in a way that brings taxation into line with what the public wants.

This would also mean delivering on the most challenging parts of Truss’s agenda. It is too soon to know whether the necessary reforms will come to fruition, or whether the legacy of the Growth Plan will be a mixture of misunderstood tax cuts and yet more inaction. The crucial details on supply-side reforms were left out of the plan, which in retrospect looks an error. Having the right ideas won’t be nearly enough: if they are sufficiently sweeping, they will not go through the Commons smoothly. Yet the Growth Plan was ambitious, and it was intended to be the major achievement of Truss’s time in office before the election. The intention to deliver on that ambition must — surely — be there. 

Given how ambitious and important the Growth Plan is, it is remarkable how timid our defence of it has been. It is as if we believe either that everyone thinks like a free-market economist and can be spoken to like one, or that nobody who isn’t a free-market economist could possibly be convinced to support it. Committing to the Growth Plan’s defence in more tangible terms than that will never prevent Labour from criticising it. But settling for either of those convictions and giving up on a serious defence is worse. Amid the energy crisis and its consequences, we could not ask for a more unforgiving and costly demonstration of why long-termist supply-side reforms are necessary. We may never get a political moment like this one again.