Never underestimate the power of failure.\u00a0 As the Liz Truss Disaster Show demonstrates, the next pitfall is probably just around the corner.\u00a0 The UK Prime Minister has shown, along with her distinctly oblivious Chancellor of the Exchequer, how to balls up the economy in the shortest timeframe imaginable.<\/p>\n
Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng\u2019s \u201cmini-Budget\u201d delivered on September 30, designed to evade the eagles at the Office of Budget Responsibility, was greeted with shock from the market boys and girls to the chattering classes.\u00a0 The Bank of England took it upon itself to exercise some sober restraint in the face of rampant fiscal recklessness.<\/p>\n
The ailing British pound received another battering on October 5 after Truss\u2019s speech at the Conservative Party conference.\u00a0 It had risen relative to the US dollar on October 3 in response to the decision to abandon the policy of removing the top 45p tax rate, only to suffer another precipitous decline.<\/p>\n
Her comically abysmal, half-hour speech<\/a>, delivered to party members increasingly unsettled by her recent performances, was peppered with ideological dross and economic denialism.\u00a0 Conservatism, she stated, was about \u201ca belief in freedom, in fair play and the great potential of the British people.\u201d\u00a0 She was \u201cnot interested in how many two-for-one offers\u201d a person bought from the supermarket or \u201chow you spend your spare time, or in virtue signalling.\u201d<\/p>\n What did interest her was attacking the \u201canti-growth coalition\u201d, a mysterious cabal that has it in for the British economy.\u00a0 They comprised Labor, the Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish Nationalist Party, not to mention the unions, the talking heads, the Brexit deniers, Extinction rebellion and \u201csome of the people we had in the hall earlier.\u201d<\/p>\n This was a coalition on the warpath, spreading its wings, busying itself wanting more taxes and restraining economic gain.\u00a0 And they would dare express such views in the BBC offices.\u00a0 To combat such forces, she offered an unconvincing, managerially massaged formula: growth, growth and growth.\u00a0 Explaining the decision to reverse the scrapping of the 45p rate of income tax as something of a distraction, Truss insisted that low taxes was the way to go.\u00a0 Stamp duty, the basic rate of income tax, and the corporate tax rate would be cut, while the rise in national insurance would be reversed.<\/p>\n In trying to sound chummier with voters, she went for the personal touch. \u201cI have fought to get where I am today.\u201d\u00a0 She had \u201cjuggled\u201d her career while raising her two daughters.\u00a0 She had \u201cseen people left with no hope turning to drugs\u201d and \u201cfamilies struggling to put food on the table.\u201d\u00a0 Interestingly enough, the period during which these things took place was one marked by divisive, ruinous Tory rule.<\/p>\n A peculiar touch came with recalling what seemed to be a particularly scarring incident.\u00a0 Poor Liz recalled \u201cas a young girl being presented on a plane with a \u2018Junior Air Hostess\u2019 badge.\u00a0 Meanwhile, my brothers were given \u2018Junior Pilot\u2019 badges.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t the only time in my life that I have been treated differently for being female or for not fitting in.\u201d\u00a0 Never fear, it made the psychologically wounded aspirant \u201cdetermined\u201d.<\/p>\n The awfulness of the dull display would have been more complete had it not been interrupted<\/a> by two young boisterous women from Greenpeace holding the yellow sign sporting the words \u201cWho Voted For This?\u201d\u00a0 This galvanised the conference attendees, who managed to turn on the protestors with envigored venom.<\/p>\n In the end, the words from Truss hardly mattered, their inconsequential sprinkles vanishing down the drainpipe of vacant rhetoric.\u00a0 There was no plan for generating actual economic growth.\u00a0 There was nothing to address the one fundamental problem<\/a> the UK faces: that it invests too little.<\/p>\n For Iain Martin, writing<\/a> in The Times<\/em>, it would have made little difference even if the speech had been the movingly equivalent version of the Gettysburg Address, or something like the Sermon on the Mount.\u00a0 \u201c[I]t would not have shifted the underlying reality.\u201d\u00a0 That reality entailed one unmissable fact: the new Conservative leader is simply not liked.<\/p>\n Senior market analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, Susannah Streeter, humourlessly observed<\/a> that Truss\u2019s mention of one word three times did little to sway things.\u00a0 \u201cShe may have hoped that her triple promise of growth would have calmed markets further but with nothing new to offer on the table, her words have not had the desired effect so far.\u201d<\/p>\n The Truss Disaster Show has even left a number of conservatives worried, even panicked.\u00a0\u00a0 According to Paul Goodman, editor of Conservative Home<\/em>, she has been left<\/a> with no good options.\u00a0 Sticking to her mini-Budget measures would guarantee defeat in the Commons, thereby eroding her authority.\u00a0 Abandoning them would have much the same effect.<\/p>\n The Spectator<\/em> has also been running a number of querying meditations and the decline and fall of the new PM.\u00a0 \u201cThere\u2019s something not entirely grown up about the Prime Minister,\u201d Lloyd Evans suggests<\/a>. \u201cShe has a permanent air of na\u00efve euphoria \u2013 like a bouncy new teacher taking the class on a jolly exciting trip.\u201d<\/p>\n Barely into her prime ministership, Truss has laid the basis for its demise.\u00a0 When she and her party return to Westminster, the sense of vultures circling will be palpable.\u00a0 While recent years tell us that polls are nonsensical excursions of fancy, rarely to be trusted, it is hard to sense that the current figures are off.\u00a0 Should they remain at their current levels, a massacre at the ballot box is in the making.<\/p>The post The Liz Truss Disaster Show<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Never underestimate the power of failure.\u00a0 As the Liz Truss Disaster Show demonstrates, the next pitfall is probably just around the corner.\u00a0 The UK Prime Minister has shown, along with her distinctly oblivious Chancellor of the Exchequer, how to balls up the economy in the shortest timeframe imaginable. Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng\u2019s \u201cmini-Budget\u201d delivered on September [\u2026]<\/p>\n The post The Liz Truss Disaster Show<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[305,30152,916,200],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829827"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=829827"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":829828,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829827\/revisions\/829828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=829827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=829827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=829827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}