No.255 - Liz Truss: Pantomime Dame or Pantomime Fairy?
Dear James,
How many more of these pantomime performances are we going to have to suffer? Firstly they come striding up Downing Street, beaming and brimming with confidence before making their rousing speeches to the nation about unity and future prosperity. Then, a few years later, they return to the same podium growling with scarcely concealed bitterness to make their tearful goodbyes. First it was Cameron. Then Theresa May, then Boris. Cameron lasted six years and topped himself (and the country) by impaling Britain on the Brexit Referendum. May followed only to sink in the swamp of post-Brexit confusion and she was followed by the clown of clowns, the man on the Zip Wire, Boris Johnson. Of course, Johnson went out spinning his valedictum with classical aphorisms to suggest that he’s going nowhere. But for the moment, thank god, he’s gone!
Everyone knows that the elevation of Liz Truss (Liz who?) is just the latest scene in the Tory Party psychodrama. Your Party James is as divided as it has ever been. Unelected as PM and probably unelectable as a leader of a future government, Miss Truss has seduced your extreme right. This ageing demographic, locked into their ancient views of Britain’s place in the world, they probably see her as the ‘young filly’, delighting their fading libidos while spouting their favourite slogans.
Unless Liz is going to undertake massive U-turns in the next few weeks, Britain is heading into one of the most extreme right governments probably since the war. Liz Truss, the candidate from nowhere, has just been crowned and in the next few days, according to her hustings, is going to announce tax cuts costing £50bn, to set up a group of economic advisers to ‘counteract’ the conventional ‘Treasury’ view of the world and to simultaneously, and against her previous comments, to ‘handout’ £100bn to the most vulnerable in our society. The potential costs of this ‘largesse’ is enormous and must be added to the £70bn spent by Sunak on furlough and the £40bn on Covid. Isn’t it ironic, that a Prime Minister who believes in low taxes and small government is now presiding over the biggest government intervention in the nation’s economy since the second world war? The ‘big state’ is here to stay. The only question is how to organise it. Willingly, generously and with the best of intentions or resentfully, grudgingly with the most retrograde of motivations?
More worryingly of all however, is Miss Truss’s espousal of her own ‘anti-distributional’ theory of growth. By apparently glorifying the fact that cutting Sunak’s recent increase in National Insurance Contributions will give back about £7.00 to the poorest while giving back £1,800 to the richest, she believes that this will stimulate growth of GDP. This is one of the most regressive tax announcements since the war. All it does is reward wealth, penalise the poor and more firmly establish asset owners as the prime movers of our society. All the nonsense about incentivising investment and future growth is hogwash straight out of the mouths of Reagan and Trump. Hiding behind their trickle down theories and their misrepresentation of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ to justify their plutocracy, Truss and your right wing ideologues posture as defenders of the NHS, threaten to break International law and attempt to nullify parliament’s own Privileges Committee by using tax payers money to pay Lord Pannick to charge it with“unfair procedure” and a “fundamentally flawed” approach to its criticism of Boris Johnson’s recent attempts to mislead parliament.
Liz Truss will soon announce a cabinet of lackeys and throwbacks to Maggie Thatcher. They want a low-tax economy, small government with less focus on wealth redistribution. She doesn’t realise that the perception of unfairness is one of the main factors in the current wave of strikes around the country. In historical terms it has been the cause of much grief in our nation from the Peasants Revolt in 1381 through the Civil War and onto the Poll Tax confrontations of the 1990s. People resent top people - the CEOs, the dividend receivers, the landowners and others - who see their wealth increasing while theirs declines.
Liz Truss is a product of the people with whom she mixes. Once a CND Supporter, then a Lib-Dem then a Remainer, now an arch-Brexiteer, Liz does not seem to have a mind of her own. Her latest iteration is as a child of the extreme right so with Liz we can expect more diatribes against the EU, the unilateral scrapping of the Northern Ireland Protocol, more attempts to hobble parliament and more attacks on what they call ‘woke culture’, a culture seen by most thinking Brits as another name for decency and fairness between us all. Her economic policy is at best dangerous, risks inflation and little growth and is socially decisive.
Pantomime dame or pantomime fairy? I’m afraid that Liz Truss is neither, James. She is just the true heir to Boris Johnson.
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose!
BH - Your Concerned Constituent