It’s taken a leadership race for the Tories to fess up: they’ve wrecked the economy | Owen Jones

Don't take my word for it that the Conservatives are the party of low growth? Just ask Liz Truss and Tom Tugendhat

After years of division, the unexpected sudden arrival of unity should be cause for celebration. It has long been accepted by the government's opponents that 12 years of Tory rule have been a disastrous combination of stagnation and decline, so it is to be welcomed that pretenders to the Conservative crown have now embraced these facts.

That Liz Truss has savaged the economic policies of the government she has served in since 2019 is notable enough, damning Rishi Sunak for plunging the country into a coming recession. But Truss's critique is far more sweeping than that, damning business-as-usual economic management, which has delivered low growth for decades". Whether Truss is aware of this or not - she did, after all, get lost leaving the room during her campaign launch - this is a timeframe that includes the last three Conservative prime ministers. And she is on point: the average economic growth of the 2010s was only marginally better than the 2000s, itself the worst decade for growth since the war.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist