The first response to today’s Autumn Statement was, inevitably, bewilderment. Liz Truss’s “new era” of going for growth came and went in the blink of an eye and now we’re back in the austerity zone. Torsten Bell, my good friend at the Resolution Foundation, spoke for all the spun heads in the economics crowd when he aired disbelief at how we had veered “from ‘it’s time for biggest tax cuts in 50 years’ to ‘inevitably time for the biggest fiscal tightening since 2010’” in the space of just a few weeks. But I want to argue instead that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Just as, in grasping the ... (full story)