Liz Truss has won the Conservative leadership election this week and has become the new Prime Minister, the fourth Tory leader the UK has had since 2016. While I am relieved, bordering on jubilant, to see the back of the previous incumbent, I am less than confident that the new premier will be able to face the incoming challenges the UK faces with the right amount of capability.
During her leadership campaign, Truss more or less styled herself as the continuity Boris Johnson candidate, placing herself firmly to the right of her opponent, Rishi Sunak, on every single issue that came up during debates and hustings. If any more evidence was needed that she will try to be as Johnsonian as possible in order to appeal to the electorate, the first words to leave her mouth during both of her acceptance speeches were words of praise for her predecessor. Doubtless, she will attempt to carry the torch for Johnson’s failed policies and right-wing red meat feast into her premiership.
The answer she has provided for the most pressing issue facing every citizen in the UK, the cost of energy, is to cut tax, therefore easing the financial burden on families, and growing the economy at the same time. This plan, whilst it might sound effective on the surface, fails to recognise that the poorest families effected the most by the energy crisis do not pay a lot of tax due to low household income, and therefore will not feel the benefit of tax cuts as much as wealthier households.
Truss has also completely ruled out an extension to the windfall tax on unexpected and unprecedented oil and gas profits, allowing energy executives to maintain massive bonuses while the poorest Britons have to choose between freezing and starving this winter. The sentiment behind this decision seems logical on the surface; taxing excess profits in this way may set an unhealthy precedent of windfall taxes on large profits, leading to protectionist market practices and stymieing foreign investment and growth in the long term. However, the circumstances in which these profits have been generated, and the scale of the economic challenges looming necessitate an extension to the current levy. If energy company’s excess profits remain untouched, the Truss government will have to borrow substantial amounts to sustain their spending plans, adding to the UK’s national debt for future administrations, and taxpayers, to deal with.
At her first PMQs today, Truss showed how incredibly out of her depth she is as a political showman, at least compared to her predecessor. There was a strong showing from the backbenches cheering her on and asking nice, gentle questions, but as her ineptitude at the dispatch box is revealed in the coming weeks and months, those boorish cheers of ‘more’, and those sycophantic questions will become thinner, fewer, and further between. Kier Starmer had less meat to chew on with Truss than he had with Johnson, but she has yet to fully reveal her ineptitude, and her government has yet to become embroiled in characteristic scandal. The hypothetical gaping inefficiencies with her policies have yet to be shown in practice, and the cabinet of nodding dogs and yes-people that she has appointed have yet to demonstrate how out-of-touch they are with the gravity of the crises facing our nation.
Truss has been appointing her new cabinet within the first days of winning her premiership. Conspicuously, all of the high-profile cabinet positions have gone exclusively to MPs who supported her leadership bid, with all those who backed Sunak sacked from their posts. This was also a mistake made by her predecessor, who filled his cabinet with loyalists and Brexiteers who were incapable of providing a viewpoint that differed to his, turning the cabinet into a Johnsonian echo chamber. This was a serious break with precedent, as every PM before Johnson made sure to appoint ministers with differing points of view to provide a balanced cabinet capable of compromise. Johnson did not seek compromise as PM, and it seems that Truss does not either.
Among the high-profile appointments made today was Kwasi Kwarteng to the role of Chancellor, making him Britian’s first Chancellor of African heritage. A radical free-marketeer, Kwarteng moves to Number 11 from the post of Business Secretary, and shares Truss’s aversion to high taxes, even in moments of economic crisis as we are currently experiencing. He has supported Truss throughout her leadership campaign, and like Truss, has been a Johnson apologist throughout his time in his cabinet.
Suella Braverman has been given the job of Home Secretary, moving from the Attorney General position. Another staunch Johnson supporter and ardent Brexiteer, she has been an outspoken supporter of the controversial, potentially illegal, and certainly cruel Rwanda policy, and is a long-time member of the hard-line ERG Parliamentary committee. As Attorney General, she passed a law making it illegal for lawyers to tell ministers if their policies are in breach of international law, and has been described as “Priti Patel on steroids” by one of her colleagues.She is certainly one of the most right-wing politicians to hold a great office of state in recent years.
Other appointments include Thérèse Coffey to Health Secretary and Deputy PM, Liz Truss’s “political soulmate” who has consistently voted against increasing benefits for disabled people in line with inflation. James Cleverly to Foreign Secretary, a relatively inconsequential junior minister in the Foreign office under Truss while she was in the role, and is widely assumed to have been given the post so that Truss can still make most of the big decisions on foreign policy. Perhaps the most illogical appointment is Jacob Rees-Mogg to Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Secretary. A man who wants to “squeeze every drop” of oil and gas out of the North Sea, an ardent climate sceptic, with an almost medical aversion to new renewable energy proposals and a romantic attachment to fossil fuels, has just been handed the UK’s energy brief, at a time when energy prices are close to causing a humanitarian crisis in this country. Beggar’s belief.
While the Johnson government was more theatrical and populist, the Truss government will be less noisy, but more vociferously right-wing . Truss’s cabinet is the most ideologically charged that we have seen in twelve years of Tory governments. The bombast and showmanship of Johnson was absent from PMQs today, replaced with biting political differences between the two party leaders. Johnson and Starmer’s exchanges at the dispatch boxes could have been likened to a medieval battle-axe slugfest, whereas Truss and Starmer at today’s PMQs was more akin to an elegant fencing match. There was some real, educated debate on show today, a true clash of ideologies, something that the Commons has been missing of late. However, this does not reduce the fact that the policies currently on the table from Truss and her cabinet are dangerous in this current economic and energy climate, and if allowed to pass, will do serious damage to a nation already teetering on the edge of true humanitarian crisis.
As far as what I hope does not change, I hope Truss continues the UK’s support for Ukraine. Other than that, continuity, or a further shift to the right, will certainly mean exacerbation of current woes. The NHS needs more support than ever, and serious reform if patients are to be kept from dying in ambulances outside A&E, and wasting away in waiting lists. Compassion and altruism need to be introduced into our immigration system; we take far less than our fair share of asylum seekers compared to the rest of Europe, and sending desperate people to Rwanda does not convey the type of the nation we hope to be to the rest of the world. Brexit is not done, not by a long shot. If devolved government is to resume in Northern Ireland, and if a healthy relationship is to be maintained with the EU, then the commitments made in our withdrawal agreement must be kept, and a compromise reached that does not jeopardise peace in Northern Ireland. But as things stand, perhaps most importantly is that energy prices be brought to a sensible, affordable level by any means; extending the energy profits levy, capping price rises, investing in cheap renewables such as wind and solar, so that our pensioners stay warm, and our children stay fed this winter.
stay safe
/e