Liz Truss has been elected Prime Minister by the votes of 0.12% of the adult UK population. This tiny sliver of the electorate is an old, white, male, right wing section of the establishment, as well as significantly more well-to-do than the majority of the population. This was an ‘election’ that may as well have taken place on another planet, as far as the overwhelming majority of the population is concerned.
Truss will become Prime Minister while Boris Johnson will be off to re-write history and create a whole new mythology around his premiership. He has had a good start, since he has been AWOL for most of the two months since his resignation on July 7.
In government, the record of Liz Truss was every bit as bad as the rest of Johnson’s ministers, no better than Priti Patel, Rishi Sunak, Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg or any of the whole shower. They have all meekly acquiesced, indeed have actively collaborated, in the most corrupt and venal government in modern history.
Truss loyally nodded her head to all the corruption
The Covid pandemic, produced a death rate in the UK higher per head of population that other countries of Europe. But above all, it was also a golden opportunity for the Johnson government to transfer tens of billions into the bank accounts of their friends, associates and Tory Party donors, in the form of very lucrative, and often useless, contracts. Who can forget ‘Test and Trace’ for a cool £37bn? Truss loyally nodded her head to it all. At no time in government has she deviated one millimetre from the Johnson gravy train.
As Environment Minister, it was as a result of Truss’s direct intervention that there were cuts in the testing of sewage discharge into the sea and rivers. She carries the can for the human excrement poisoning our beaches and rivers.
When she was Foreign Secretary, she was asked directly by a parliamentary committee to “name one human rights issue” that she had raised with any Gulf state. As she floundered and blustered, it was perfectly obvious that she had not raised any human rights issues at all. (See video, Liz Truss being fully mental here).
Truss may have beaten the single most wealthy MP in the House of Commons, in order to become Tory leader, but her premiership will continue in the same vein as Johnson’s: a government for the rich, of the rich and by the rich, with the added garnish of incompetence, corruption and lying.
Truss and her supporters in the Tory Party may be ringing the bells now, but in pretty short order they will be wringing their hands. As one political pundit has put it, she will be “walking into a hurricane” from day one.
Throughout the entire campaign, while most people were fretting and discussing the biggest hit on living standards in living memory, Truss played to a gallery of geriatric Tory members with the usual dog-whistle politics: ‘illegal’ immigration, trade unions ‘holding the country to ransom’, and against ‘handouts’ (that is to the poorest, not businesses). She made an ominous suggestion in one speech that the NHS “should not be put on a pedestal”, which is code for preparing for more cuts and privatisations.
Truss dodged difficult interviews on energy price hike
Although Truss has promised to deal with the national emergency in living standards, which is principally (but not exclusively) a crisis in energy prices, what has been notable is an absence of detail, even to the extent of avoiding interviews with the media, in case she was pressed too hard on policies.
Apart from a promise “in the first thirty days” to implement new and draconian anti-trade union laws (see article here) Truss also promised to increase defence spending to 3% of GDP, something that would cost the government up to £60bn. Even former minister Michael Gove described Liz Truss’s jumble of half-baked promises as “a holiday from reality.”
She has promised to immediately cancel the increase in National Insurance payments, even though this benefits particularly the most well-off. Indeed, according to an article in Sunday’s Observer, Truss was asked about calculations that showed her planned reversal of the NI rise benefitting top earners by about £1,800 a year, and the lowest earner by about £7. Asked if this was fair, she said: “Yes, it is fair.”
According to last Sunday’s Observer, the longer the Tory election campaign went on, the less popular Truss became, even among Tory voters. Their Opinium poll showed that at the beginning of August, 49% of 2019 Tory voters had thought Truss was “like a prime minister in waiting” by the end of the month, this had fallen to just 31%. Over half of the same polled group thought at the beginning of the months that she was “competent” but that fell to just over a third by the end of the month.
So there will be no honeymoon for Truss. “The new leader” the Financial Times commented, “will inherit a fragile economy. Britain is projected to enter a lengthy recession as the energy crisis bites, with real household incomes set for their biggest fall in generations. Inflation is in double digits and forecast to go higher” (September 2)
Public sector wages will still be held down
There have been suggestions in the media that Truss will bring forward measures to ameliorate the cost of living crisis with a £100bn spend on stabilising energy prices, as some headlines have it, “until the next election”. But with total public debt now standing at a staggering £2.5tr, Truss will be opposed in this by the Bank of England, much of big business and many of her own back benchers.
It is more likely that whatever measures Truss introduces to cushion the assault on living standards will have a limited effect, with no impact at all on food price rises, rent increases or the soaring costs of transport. The inflation workers are suffering at the moment, with the subsequent cuts in living standards, are endemic within the system. If something has to give, Truss will make sure that in the long run it will not be the rents, interest, or profit of the capitalist class. Whatever is given with one hand, will be sure to be taken away by the other.
One thing for sure is that there will be no cost-of-living increases in Universal Credit or other welfare payments and the wages of public sector employees will still be held back well below the rate of inflation.
The one policy for which Truss will find universal support among the mainstream Tory press and the boardrooms of big business, is a new clampdown on trade unions. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of workers are fighting to keep wage rises at least in line with inflation. There is generalised support for these strikes within the population as a whole, as the trade unions are seen as the only bulwark there is against swingeing cuts in living standards. According to an article in The Times last week, a poll showed that even a strike by nurses to protect their living standards would be supported by two-thirds of the public.
It is in response to this surge of strikes and the public support for them that Truss has promised a new raft of measures against the trade unions, threatening to take the UK back two hundred years to a period when strikes were virtually outlawed. As we have argued, the trade union movement must respond to this in kind. Any weakness on the part of the TUC or the trade union movement will only embolden the Tories further. Weakness invites aggression and faced with new draconian anti-union laws, the trade union leaders must have a militant, fighting response.
Over half the population favours a quick general election
Unfortunately, the miserable approach of the Starmer leadership to Liz Truss’s elevation to premiership will excite few workers. According to new polling by Ipsos, just over half of the population (51%) are in favour of a snap general election, with only one fifth opposed.
But in trying to stop Labour MPs appearing on union picket lines, Keir Starmer has shown himself to be completely out of touch with the mood, not only of Labour Party and trade union members, but of the population as a whole.
The measures that he and Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have brought forward to mitigate the effect of energy price rises are temporary measures that will provide a huge subsidy to energy companies at taxpayers’ expense and in any case, it is possible that Truss will steal the one set of policies that the Labour leadership have put forward.
The fifth of the ten pledges Starmer needed to be elected Labour leader, was: “Public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders”. That ought to be the basis of Labour’s policies today, as in the 2017 and 2019 general elections. If Labour is dragging itself a few percentage points ahead in the polls – when it ought to be twenty points ahead – it is despite Starmer’s grey and vacuous leadership and not because of it.
Enough is Enough is a rebuke to Labour leadership
Keir Starmer has sent out an e-mail to Labour members, saying “we must be ready for a general election”, but the Labour Party leadership and the trade union leadership have to demand a general election, and now.
The Enough is Enough campaign is already attracting thousands of workers at its rallies in places like Manchester and Liverpool. It has more than half a million signed up supporters and is generating the same level of excitement and anticipation as the Corbyn campaigns did between 2015 and 2017.
But the very existence of Enough is Enough and the success of its rallies are a rebuke to the Labour leadership. Many Labour members are asking, ‘why aren’t we doing this?’. Why aren’t Labour and the affiliated unions holding rallies, meetings and demonstrations to demand a general election now?
Labour’s response to Liz Truss becoming Prime Minister ought to be a militant and active fight to get her out. She has no mandate. She has nothing to offer ordinary households and the labour movement has to campaign to get rid of her.
Labour, the trade unions and Enough is Enough should be demanding:
A general election now!
A Labour government committed to “public services being in public hands, not making profits for shareholders”!
Support all workers striking for decent pay rises!
Socialist policies and an unqualified defence of workers’ living standards!
Note: this editorial is available as a PDF file, which can be used to produce a two-sided, A4 leaflet. For the PDF, e-mail editor@left-horizons.co.uk
