Politics
The Invisible Hand that Rocks the Cradle
Who is Britain’s new Prime Minister Liz Truss?
Mary Elizabeth Truss is the daughter of a left-wing university maths professor and a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament member who took her on protest marches as a child.
But the apple has been rolling further and further from the tree ever since.
In her teenage years, Truss was a Liberal Democrat, a centrist party with liberal economic and social views. But, of course, the word liberal has radically different implications in either arena.
A more accurate description would be economically right-wing and socially left-wing. Oh, the word games we play.
During this time, she advocated for the abolition of the British monarchy but has since dismissed such childish notions.
And she recently rose to prominence, banging the drum for a confrontation with Russia while dressed up as Margaret Thatcher.
The threat of nuclear annihilation presumably causes a phantom twitch in the loins of the sheltered baby boomers who voted her into office. Must remind them of their youth.
But before we continue, let’s dwell for a moment on that process.
When a Tory Prime Minister becomes sufficiently embattled, their cabinet, likely all snakes writing to get into their position, can resign in unison. Forcing a situation where convention dictates they must step down.
You might be under the impression this would automatically trigger a general election to, you know, democratically elect the new Prime Minister. Not in Britain, the ‘Birthplace of Parliaments’.
Instead, there is a leadership contest within the party. MPs whittle the field of candidates down to two, and then the party’s membership chooses between them.
As a result, Truss was elected by an overwhelming mandate of 81,326 votes (or 0.1% of the UK population) in a process Vladimir Putin described as “far from democratic”.
The exact number of party members is a closely guarded secret, but it’s estimated to be around 150,000. And they’re older, whiter, wealthier and more male than the rest of the country.
But beyond the viral moments, who is she?
Most people, if they had heard of Truss before, would be familiar with one of her viral gaffes.
Best known is an excruciatingly awkward speech, which included this clip about pork markets.
But recently, we also saw her struggle to find her way out of a press conference in a small room.
As she walked straight toward the camera, she was intercepted by a handler who shepherded her from the room.
She might feel like the spiritual successor to Theresa May, dubbed the May Bot, toward the end of her tenure.
But they represent different wings of the party. Former Brexit secretary Steve Baker said we’ve thoroughly vetted her.
But who are ‘we’?
That would be the European Research Group or ERG. A faction within the Conservative party. Some describe them as a party within a party.
Either way, they’re likely the rat piloting Truss’ ‘can I speak to the manager’ hairdo in this knock-off Ratatouille remake.
She’s stacked her cabinet with ERG members such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, also known as the MP for the 18th century — who better to take over as Energy Minister than an avid climate change denier?
What about her policies?
Truss came out strongly against “handouts” recently despite a cost of living crisis, with energy bills expected to balloon 280% by 2023, only to U-turn in the face of public pressure.
She also set out a misguided tax-cut plan that gives next to nothing to the poorest, but the benefits ramp up as you climb the income scale, which she believes is “fair”.
So her constituency is in no doubt, but where do her policies come from?
The new PM has deep ties to several benignly named think tanks, such as the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) and the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS).
What’s their game?
Let’s start with the IEA; and one of its earliest adopters, Enoch Powell.
An infamous figure in British politics, Powell’s free market fundamentalism is overshadowed in the public consciousness by his racism.
In his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, he prophesied that if Britain allowed mass immigration from her former colonies, “in 15 or 20 years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”
Powell was quickly ejected from the party after this proclamation, but Margaret Thatcher defended him in The Times, describing him as a “fine academic mind”.
Incidentally, Maggie founded the third organ on the list, CPS.
Robbie Shilliam — International Relations professor at Johns Hopkins University — says Powell, not Thatcher, was Britain’s first neo-liberal politician.
And that we should associate the economic philosophy with eugenics rather than social Darwinism.
He says it’s about “enhancing the reproductive possibilities” of what Powell saw as desirable Anglo-Saxon traits, such as ‘orderly independence’ and, by implication, allowing dependent pollutant traits to die out.
What he means by ‘orderly independence’ is the ability to support one’s family while knowing one’s “place in the patriarchal class and racial hierarchy”.
Shilliam says rather than being an atavistic relic, Powell was, in a sense, ahead of his time and laid the intellectual foundations for both the Thatcherite project and Brexit.
Following the money
Though primarily funded with dark money, we do know the IEA received donations from ExxonMobil and BP. In addition, both they and the ASI received the patronage of Big Tobacco and an array of climate change denial funders.
Truss is so tight with the IEA that she founded their parliamentary wing ‘FREER’ in 2011 and hired their former comms director to run her campaign.
As a result, twelve of her pledges are lifted directly from these organisations.
They include, perhaps unsurprisingly, an IEA plan to tackle the cost of living by introducing a windfall tax on excess profits — not on fossil fuel companies’ record returns — on renewables.
Her other policies hatched in the IEA include curtailing unions’ right to strike, ending the UK’s net-zero commitments and deregulating child care.
What else is she planning other than entrusting children to the invisible hand of the market’s embrace?
There’s also lifting the fracking ban, allowing AI to diagnose patients and scrapping the cap on energy prices altogether.
The latter is reminiscent of a failed experiment by Charles Travelyn, who refused to control the price of bread during the Irish Potato Famine.
Then again, Trevelyn believed the famine was a plague sent by god to punish the lazy Irish, so perhaps the policy was more successful than it appeared.
After all, Shilliam traces neo-liberalism’s genealogy back to Victorian-era eugenics.
Nevertheless, the close ties lead critics to describe Truss as nothing more than a “puppet” of these neo-liberal think tanks.
It also emerged recently that her campaign took £100,000 from the wife of an ex-BP executive.
So it should be no surprise that she isn’t funding her energy price cap plan by taxing the energy companies or, god forbid, partially or fully nationalising them.
Instead, the price will continue to rise, the public will pay twice as much as last year, and the rest will be paid.. also by the taxpayer indirectly.
Yes, she’s essentially capping the price at £2,500, then borrowing the difference — an estimated £150 billion and transferring it to the energy companies.
I swear there’s a word for that; it’s right on the tip of my tongue; it’s… fine. It’s all fine.
What about her record in government?
She was embarrassed by Andrew Neil when he pressed her on how many of the 200,000 new starter homes promised in 2014 had been built. Truss claimed she didn’t have the figures. The answer was zero.
While in charge of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, she allegedly cut £235 million from its budget, which doubled the amount of raw sewage dumping.
The fallout from this decision was a brown border around part of the country’s coastline after heavy rain recently overloaded the decrepit infrastructure.
Then as Foreign Secretary, she rode around on a tank for another Thatcher throwback photoshoot — nearly started World War III — then walked under a large cardboard box propped up with a stick by her Russian counterpart.
Truss told Lavrov Britain would never recognise Moscow’s control of Rostov and Voronezh. Two regions within Russia.
One of her first acts in office will be to classify China as an official threat.
Oh man, is it too late to move to South America?
Well, what about her colleagues? What do they say?
One Tory described her as “very odd”.
But erstwhile Brexit svengali Dominic Cummings went further, calling her a “human hand-grenade”. And “about as close to properly crackers as anybody I’ve met in parliament”.
So what’s next for the British Isles?
Critics may say Liz Truss is a tragic cocktail of unqualified, incapable and inept. Or call her Britain’s stupidest ever Prime Minister.
Comedian Joe Lycett trolled her on a BBC politics programme, saying:
“The haters will say that we’ve had 12 years of the Tories, and we’re sort of at the dregs of what they’ve got available.
“And that Liz Truss is sort of the backwash of the available MPs. I wouldn’t say that because I’m incredibly right-wing. But some people might say that.”
But the Daily Mail front page disagrees, hailing her first speech in almost biblical terms. The “left-wing Twitterati” finally stopped crowing. The deluge ended. The clouds parted, and Truss proclaimed, “Together, we can ride out the storm.”
So who can say?
Despite her political journey spanning multiple factions, the throughline is devout neo-liberalism.
That’s the one constant as she’s blown with the wind from Lib Dem to Conservative, from Remainer to Brexiter.
However, it seems likely that political expediency and the exigencies of the moment may trump ideology for Truss if it means staying in power.
Are we all going to die?
Perhaps.
I hear Argentina is nice this time of year…
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