I posted this thread on Twitter this morning:
Yesterday was bad. It was, in fact, very, very bad. If Johnson was a disaster, Truss has set out to be worse. I very much doubt that any prime minister has set out to create so many conflicts from the outset of their premiership in the way that Truss has. A thread….
The portent of things to come came when Truss's senior adviser team was announced. Her economics advisers come from the Taxpayer's Alliance and the Institute of Economic Affairs. Both are secretive far-right think tanks.
They hate government. They assume that whatever government does can be better done by markets. They don't believe in the NHS. They think pension and care provision should be provided privately. They hate taxes. And now they are at the heart of government.
Another adviser also comes from the IEA. Truss has made clear her course. She will use her time in office to seek to dismantle the state. As a result she sets herself on a collision course with the civil service and the people of this country.
This, I am sure is not by accident. Truss is clearly intent on collision courses. Her first commitment as PM in her speech outside Number 10 was to build more roads. As a rebuke to the green lobby that took some beating.
She managed to beat it, however, by appointing Jacob Rees Mogg to be Business Secretary, with responsibility for the environment. The man is a climate change denier. It is almost impossible to imagine a worse appointment.
Except for Suella Braverman as Home Secretary, who hates migrants.
Or Therese Coffey to Health, despite her dubious track record on abortion issues.
Her sackings were also significant. She has reduced her support base to Johnson loyalists who sided with her against Sunak. It is an incredibly narrow base inside a Tory party that is already deeply divided, and more than able to sack those Prime Ministers they do not like.
She has also set herself on a collision course outside Westminster. Her boosterism, matched with significant spending pledges and promises of tax cuts means that she is on collision course with the Bank of England.
The Bank will read this as inflationary. They will be increasing interest rates as a result. An increase to 3% is now forecast by Christmas. The knock-on effect will be a bigger household budget crisis for some than that caused by energy. Mortgage costs will skyrocket.
That will impact rents too, unless of course this government follows Nicola Sturgeon in announcing a rent freeze, which is incredibly unlikely given its ethos.
Outside parliament, it is hard to see how any of this is going to sell well. An energy price cap at £2,500 will not look like a lot of help for many struggling households.
A fight on civil service pay - which the economic advisers Truss has appointed will want - will crush already underfunded public services and compound many problems in society.
The green agenda is in tatters and matters enormously to young people, unsurprisingly.
Mortgage rate increases will lead to a debt crisis. A banking crisis could follow.
And in all this there is no hint of support for any businesses, except banks and energy companies who are exploiting the current situation for all it is worth. The supposed march of the entrepreneurs that Truss and her cohort believe in is not going to happen.
Instead, the sound of closing doors on businesses heading for bankruptcy is what to expect. I wish I did not think millions will be unemployed. But I do. Truss clearly aims to match Thatcher on this issue.
And this will not be by chance. The IEA is a particular exponent of the idea of the zombie company, as they describe them, which they say only survives because of low interest rates and the implicit state aid that provides.
They have long wanted the economy rid of what they think to be the deadweight that these companies represent within the economy, believing they are holding back creative new opportunities for emergent enterprises.
They call the process they are set upon ‘creative destruction'. By creating conflict and collision courses it seems that Truss is intent on this destruction. But there will be nothing creative about it. That was never possible, anyway. There will just be victims.
Truss has brought the most right-wing government to office in the UK in the modern era. But it's important to note that its right-wing thinking focuses only on what it dislikes. There is no policy agenda within that thinking. Their belief is that need will be met by business.
They believe that out there in the economy are new businesses who have only been waiting for the destruction of government for them to emerge into the marketplace so that they can replace the services the government supplies now.
Some such scavengers will no doubt exist. The health care scammers will abound. Dodgy insurance schemes will be peddled. But this is not the environment in which innovation, risk, the needs of society and the constraints of the planet can be reconciled by the commercial sector.
Truss is, therefore, setting out to fail. Her appointments and priorities prove it. The collision course she is set upon is dangerous. The cost to us all of her choices will be enormous.
In this case we have to ask the question, what comes after Truss? A Labour Party beholden to the neoliberal agenda is not the place to find those ideas. Nor are the simple demands of Enough is Enough a cogent response, even if they are superficially appealing to some.
The time to create the agenda for a post-neoliberal world, where economic and social justice and a belief in the virtues of accountable democracy has arrived. That's where I will be going with my thinking now. We can do better than this. To survive, we have to.
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I expect others have pointed out “Therese Coffey to Health, despite her dubious track record on adoration issues.” Abortion issues? She said on SKY this morning she accepts what parliament voted for.
She changed
I heard her voice the other day making her speech and what I heard did not sound like a human being. There was no warmth or succour there. It reeked of self-satisfaction.
It was bizarre.
The Tories have actually reset to 2010 haven’t they? The worst possible outcome.
I hope you are right about their eventual downfall and I’ve said this myself but this morning I’m not feeling very positive at all.
Some newspapers are saying it is the most diverse cabinet in history… it is interesting how dogma influences perspective
Braverman, Kwarteng and Cleverly went to public schools
That is not diversity
Re tax cuts – am I correct in thinking company accounts are filed 9 months after reporting year end and corporation tax is not due to be paid until another 9 months after filing date ? So any tax cuts will not have any effect on the economy not now but many months into the future ? By which time many of those companies may have folded ?
CT returns due as you say
But large companies pay estimated bills quarterly
Fascinating if worrying read as ever, Richard, thank you. Looks like a typo on the Coffey paragraph. No doubt she does have issues with adoration (doesn’t seem to be much to adore there) but I suspect that should say ‘abortion’.
I did
Edited here
Agree with your last two paragraphs. Including your comment about the inadequacy of the labour party. Starmer needs to be replaced. ideas on who could replace him would be welcome.
I am not sure Labour is worth replacing – too much history of in-fighting to serve society any more
“I am not sure Labour is worth replacing – too much history of in-fighting to serve society any more”
So what is the alternative? ..a breakaway Party from Labour?..the Greens or SNP?
Scottish politics is a different issue
In England it may be the Greens
It may be a new party if Labour insists on being a party of capital
So, we are forced to keep the Labour Party? That’s depressing.
No….we can do better
I have to say I’m coming to the same opinion myself, and I’m a Labour member.
So many opportunities over the last decade to finish off the Tory party, so many times we have needed a strong opposition with ideas. We have needed a radical progressive set of policies but all we get are watered down Tory ideas. A party so fearful of the right wing press and so much in the shadow of market fundamentalism that all we get in inaction.
Marks out of ten for spelling please.
The problem with a new party is that the broad left is already divided into Labour, SNP, Greens and LD and that is why, despite these parties collectively having 55-60% support, the tories keep being in power. They don’t split (yet) – they even got rid of UKIP by subsuming their policies.
In a FPTP system – any new party needs to win outright first, probably in an electoral pact with other centre left parties, before introducing PR. Once that is done the tories are finished in their current far-right guise.
I’m a Labour party member who supports PR – like 80%+ of members – so am still hopeful we can push that through. Whilst I agree there are all kinds of problems within Labour I feel that it will be much easier for Labour to get that initial FPTP win than a new party because of its long history as an established party and any new party will further split the left vote in an election and so help keep the tories in power
I agree with a lot of what you say Richard, but not here. The fact is we are in a two horse race sadly and if we don’t tactically vote with the aim of getting a Labour led GOVT the Tories will get in again and again. The left have a history of setting up a new party when disagreements arise which has let the Tories off the hook again and again.
Labour bashing might be fun and even appropriate at times but we have no chance of creating something new within 2 years, how long have the Green Party been trying?
I don’t like it any more than you but realistically if we divide the Left even more we may as well chuck the towel in and give up.
I know all that
But labour is enabling Truss
What is the point in Labour in that case?
To provide a credible opposition, and our point should be to lobby Starmer to do just that not provide weaponry for the tories. A concrete example, I have posted links to this site before in discussions with right wing friends, and they have come back at me with pointers to “Liebore” “Starmer is a neolib” etc etc, which is difficult to argue against. That kind of arguement provides a lot of support for the “they’re all the same” why change?
Labour is neoliberal to its core right now
It is to the right of where the Tories were for long periods
The need is for an alternative
“But labour is enabling Truss..What is the point in Labour in that case?”
Is isn’t “enabling Truss” at all..it is letting the Tories implode, making itself credible and preparing to win in the 2024 General Election. That is the point of Labour!!!
No, the point of Labour is to make the world better for the majority of people and there is little sign it has many ideas on how to do that right now when it is sticking to a Tory balanced budget mantra
So our options would seem to be either the Tories, or because we don’t like Labour, the Tories. Well that’s just great.
Vote Labour by all means – but demand that they deliver PR too
Richard wrote “Scottish politics is a different issue.” Indeed and, while I share everyone’s concerns about the damage being inflicted by the Tories via Westminster, there surely has never been a better time for Scotland to get out of the UK despite inflation, world tensions etc. There is every possibility that the UK will collapse in time under the weight of government incompetence, but why get dragged down further by that incompetence in the meantime?
You know I agree Ken
@Simon Moss. You say Labour is waiting for the Tories to implode and, in the mean time, making itself more credible.
But what if the Tories don’t implode? Labour will need a lot more than mere credibility to win power in that case.
Credibility to whom? I can see that they may be making themselves more credible to those who would l like to see, of at least can live with, the poor, the sick and the underprivileged being treated with a little more humanity but would otherwise like to see the whole Neoliberal order remain intact. However, how big is this constituency? What is their chance of actually voting Labour?
if Labour has anything more to offer, anything that would make it credible to the vast number of people who have not benefited from Neoliberalism when the anticipated Tory meltdown happens, it is a very well kept secret.
It seems to me that now is the time to be pushing really radical ideas for the future of society and, If the Tories do actually implode it is imperative that someone does as the alternative will be a big policy void. What we need is not Neoliberalism Lite but no Neoliberalism at all.
Don’t forget that Napoleon’s admonishment “Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake” didn’t work out too well for him ip the end.
Another serving of disaster capitalism after 12 years of much the same thing which has been a litany of failure. Thatcher was able to engineer a credit and house price boom alongside raiding the state and oil revenues to provide tax cuts. There are no such rabbits for Truss to pull out of the governmental hat.
I am encouraged by Enough is Enough, however ill focussed, as an emerging popular movement of resistance alongside growing labour and citizen militancy such as Don’t Pay. I do not think Truss and this clapped out iteration of Tory ideologues is in a strong position to carry all before them especially if there is sufficient and growing pushback.
3 May 1981 Thatcher interview, last paragraph.
“What’s irritated me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years is that it’s always been towards the collectivist society. People have forgotten about the personal society. And they say: do I count, do I matter? To which the short answer is, yes. And therefore, it isn’t that I set out on economic policies; it’s that I set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.”
https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104475
Thatcher was a disciple of Hayek, she kept a copy of “The Road to Serfdom” in her handbag. By my reading, Hayek was an Austrian, loathed the Nazis, understood they were Fascists like Italy – but, significantly, posited that Nazis were [National] Socialists, Socialist governments were thus by equivalence demonstrated to be coercive and against liberty, and Socialism therefore quashed individual freedom.
Socialism was what Thatcher sought to destroy, Blair continued it by rewriting Clause IV, and Truss (who helped write it all down in Britannia Unchained), supported by a right-of-centre Labour Party, is going to try to finish the job.
I’m scared – that Socialism will need to be fought for again from founding principles. We’ve, as a country, forgotten the khaki election of 1945 and the wonders of that government. And I fear the UK is going to discover that a “government for society” is a free government, but the rule of oligarchs enforced by debt and poverty is truly serfdom.
I think it’s social democracy or am social consensus that we need, based on a social contract
I was at the IFS annual lecture last night, where Minouche Shafik spoke quite powerfully about the need to establish a new social contract – not least for expectations of education throughout life, and health and social care, and employment rights. (There is a book, of course.)
I didn’t agree with everything she said, but in the questions it was clear she did not agree with the Thatcherite maxim of “no such thing as society”, and saw a clear role for the state. Unlike, I suspect, several members of the current cabinet.
And she agreed that proportional representation would help to make government work better, actually delivering what more of the people want.
Welcome
Precisely.
The principles of a social contract are already there and have been there for ages.
They were part of the Debt Jubilee thinking in the near East and the Chinese Guanzi in the far East. It’s all about realising reciprocal kindnesses and obligations between rulers and the ruled.
Thatcherism totally broke that cycle and Labour and the Left has unwittingly contributed to it too.
It can be remade but it going to take a lot of work and I can tell you now that no one I can see in front line politic has the minerals or skill to bring it about.
I’ve put a link on Peace and Justice, the support group to your idea about nationalising the energy companies without compensation, as they are all bust. It was originally on Labour Heartlands, which is another group that doesn’t trust Starmer. Hope you don’t mind.
Feel free!
If anyone is interested, you can find a recording of the whole lecture, and the few accompanying slides, here: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/ifs-annual-lecture-baroness-minouche-shafik
[…] The article was also published as a blog here. […]
You can only hope that it is so bad it will fail much much sooner
All very true I’m afraid.
Jacob Rees-Mogg given responsibility for the environment! You couldn’t make it up. It would be like appointing Boris Johnson as head of a Ministry of Truth.
What made me laugh yesterday was the news that Truss may well fix energy prices at that £2500 level which you mentioned. Given her other plans, that alone will destroy many of the low paid or low/non taxpayers who will not benefit at all from her tax cutting agenda. We also know that like all Tories she will try to keep pay increases well below inflation as she is one of those that believes that inflation comes from excessive pay demands, so the low paid will be screwed further.
The only good thing to come out of yesterday is that the Tories are now scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to anyone with any talent to be a minister, let alone the Prime one. In fact, there is no talent. They are ideological purists of the right who would never get into power if we had PR. The concern is that all they need is about 35% of middle England to buy into their right wing delusion and they have it made in FPTP.
The Tory elected dictatorship is now complete.
Come on Labour, Lib Dems, anyone. STOP TAKING THE MATRIX (TORY) BLUE PILL. Stop playing the Tories game for them. They need confronting head on.
A truly terrifying fact that those off the scale IEA lobbyists-pretending-think-tankers are embedded as top advisors in number 10. Their genuine dedication to selling off the NHS, and ‘creatively destroying ‘ zombie companies at the heart of government…is unbelieveably horrifying.
I had wondered whether Truss’s ‘screeching U-turn’ on freezing energy prices at a cost of £100bn plus , showed she was more into keeping herself as PM, winning the election etc than about her ideology – what Raphael Behr in the Guardian calls her ‘pragmatism in pursuit of conviction’
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/07/liz-truss-power-markets-winter-strife
I had wondered whether she would quietly drop her stridency on NI protocol etc. – but difficult to disagree with you Richard, that however pragmatic she she may be – the new appointments (including climate deniers in charge of climate change) point to things being worse than Johnson and then some….
Again BBC – wall to wall Tory, ex Tories, anti-Tories, pro-Tories, ex Tory advisors, etc etc . Labour nowhere – not surprising as they have absolutely nothing to say.
Had I been consuming Peyote I would have been certain that Truss was a intergalatic evil lizard wearing a latex mask.
I think this song still says it all for me, at the state of our country. Released in 1989.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxbIU0X-lCI
Very good
I have not heard that for years
Another interesting take on the song. https://youtu.be/7MUFTWd5jEI
Thought your song was going to be World Party – Ship of Fools
“The time to create the agenda for a post-neoliberal world, where economic and social justice and a belief in the virtues of accountable democracy has arrived. That’s where I will be going with my thinking now”
Your 180k followers on twitter forms the basis for you to be the UK’s Ghandi.. good luck with that..