Tory leadership contender Liz Truss has defended her plans to lower taxes, describing them as the best way to avoid a recession. Her rival Rishi Sunak "wants" to tackle inflation before cutting taxes, but has no plan how to do it. (He just "wants" but has no idea how to get it done.)

On a visit to Solihull, Liz Truss said lowering taxes would help ease the cost of living crisis.

She said she preferred this course of action over "giving out handouts" to help households hit by higher fuel bills.

Her rival Rishi Sunak wants to tackle inflation before cutting taxes, but gave no plan how to do it. He just "wants" .....whatever sounds good, but clearly has no idea how to get it done.

Ms Truss also took aim at Mr Sunak's failed economic legacy as Chancellor, after the Bank of England warned this week that the UK would fall into recession as it raised interest rates by the highest amount in 27 years.

She added: "Under the plans at present, what we know is Britain is headed for a recession.

"That is not inevitable, but we need to avoid that by making sure our economy is competitive, that we're encouraging businesses to grow and that we are keeping taxes low."

Her rival Mr Sunak said he would focus on getting a grip on inflation. But how? It seems he has no clue.

Responding to Ms Truss's comments, the former Chancellor said it is "simply wrong to rule out further direct support at this time".

"Her tax proposals are not going to help very significantly, people like pensioners or those on low incomes who are exactly the kind of families that are going to need help", said Mr Sunak, without offering them any help anyway.

He said he wants to "ensure" that the "people who really need our help do get the support that they need to get through the winter". But how is he going to get it done? How, as prime minister, is he going to solve the huge problem that he, as Chancellor, created?

Speaking at the leadership hustings in Eastbourne on Friday, he said the Tories can "kiss goodbye" to winning the next election if inflation is not brought under control quickly. But he does not have a practical plan to bring inflation under control. Not quickly, and not even slowly.

He highlighted a warning by the Bank of England that inflation could become embedded, as if he were not the Chancellor who was responsible for this problem in the first place.

The Bank of England has warned inflation - currently 9.4% - could peak at more than 13% and stay at "very elevated levels" throughout much of next year.

Mr Sunak said there would be "no hope that we're going to win that next election" amid "continuing rising prices".

That is strange. It is strange that the political party which led Britain into this current economic disaster should be talking of winning the next election as a "hope", not as a risk. Because that is the clear risk they took, knowingly, willingly .....and, from memory, even gleefully. Two years ago Tories embraced golden-boy Sunak's unprecedented 400 billion pound give-away as a masterstroke. (And, to be fair, Labour weren't far behind in hailing it as a latter-day miracle, even if it wasn't their golden-boy dishing it out.)

Well, the music's stopped. Because the bill's arrived. And it's time to pay the piper.

For sure, the current government bears sole responsibility for the economic catastrophe that has engulfed Britain during their rule. And equally for sure, this leadership contest doesn't really matter, because under the next leader - whoever it is - they will not find a solution to it. (Though Truss is at least making the right noises; whereas Sunak is still just sounding off, quite nicely, same as usual.)

But actually, Sunak's impetuous, mindless, Treasury-emptying giveaway isn't the root cause of the UK's financial problems. It's merely the latest and greatest, record-breaking instance symptom of it.

The root cause is that the political system in Britain - and everyone who is part of it - is designed to perpetuate the extraction of ever greater taxes from the public, purely to pamper those who control it, while providing a minimal level service to the brainwashed public which is just about shiny and sweet enough to keep them from outright revolution. This system is actually just the latest iteration of Britain's age-old screwing of its citizens from nicely-straightforward village feudalism, refined in the days of Empire as rapacious colonialism, brought home to our post-World War Two towns as enlightened but expensive socialism, and "re-imagined" for the connected cities of today's brave new world as "caring government".

(As usual, the French have a more elegant way to describe it: Louis XIV's finance minister Colbert - Sunak's equivalent - believed that “the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing." You can use that one, Rishi. You're welcome.)

Britain's political system is not a democracy, but in fact a bureaucracy. It is a bloated, bureaucratic monster where the hard-pressed, hard-working public is being bled dry to finance a huge apparatus of leeches, who contribute nothing real to Britain's security, economy or well-being. Where a vast swarm of public servants receive huge salaries and outrageous benefits, and gorge themselves on the taxpayers' flesh, in exchange for doing nothing for the public and everything for themselves. Where the greediest parasites at the top are hidden from public view by the multiple layers they have inserted between us and them. And where you can't see their blood-sucking hydra heads that you'd chop off (metaphorically speaking of course) if they popped up in your local pub.

The British public sector consists of thirty percent of public servants who are essential, useful and loyal to the public, and seventy percent of lazy, useless, vicious leeches who take credit for the wonderful work done by the virtuous thirty percent.

This is the real underlying problem of the British economy. And it is not going to be solved by putting a marginally more useful idiot in charge of the village, let alone the country.