When Liz Truss won, I argued she would highlight the tragedy of identity politics because while ticking the diversity box of being a woman, she is a far right maniac who believes in hard free market bullshit…
Liz Truss is a free market acolyte who hated BoJos windfall taxes on obscene profits because she is pro corporate profit.
Ideologically she is Margaret Thatcher on meth combined with all the ill deserved smugness of Tony Blair.
She will be a disaster for the UK and her free market solutions will cause a crippling wave of unemployment at a time of 13% inflation and energy prices exploding beyond peoples ability to pay.
She is currently being touted as some kind of diversity champion because no one in her top 4 are white men.
This shallow analysis highlights the tragedy of identity politics where the representation of diversity eclipses all else.
…I pointed out two of her picks were insanely right wing…
Kwasi Kwarteng: free marketeer and Truss’s ideological soulmate becomes chancellor
An ideological soulmate of Truss from the free-market right, the Surrey MP is a relative latecomer to ministerial jobs – his first junior role came in late 2018 – but rose rapidly under Johnson to become a key member of his government.
Suella Braverman: home secretary set to take even harder line on migration
Braverman has pitched herself to the right of her predecessor – and is expected to move quickly to sideline ECHR
…their diversity provides no progressive insights to policy, because their wealth and privilege blot out class, (The same way a Parliament full of property owners never challenge homelessness in NZ).
I predicted…
My thoughts are their combined free market experiment will fail horribly in light of looming economic calamity and that the Party will hilariously return to Boris Johnson in terror as they face annihilation at the Polls, or directly after it.
…and look at what Kwasi did, implement an insane tax cut – FUNDED BY GOVERNMENT BORROWING and look at the result…
Britain sends investors fleeing with historic tax cuts and borrowing
Britain’s new finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng unleashed historic tax cuts and huge increases in borrowing on Friday in an economic agenda that floored financial markets, sending sterling and British government bonds into freefall.
Kwarteng scrapped the country’s top rate of income tax, cancelled a planned rise in corporate taxes and for the first time put a price tag on the spending plans of Prime Minister Liz Truss, who wants to double Britain’s rate of economic growth.
…you know shit be bad when the most right economic organisation on the planet screams, ‘bro, too much’…
IMF urges UK government to reconsider tax-cutting plans
The International Monetary Fund has launched a stinging attack on the UK’s tax-cutting plans and called on Liz Truss’s government to reconsider them to prevent stoking inequality.
In rare public criticism of a leading global economy, the Washington-based fund said Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget risked undermining the efforts of the Bank of England to tackle rampant inflation amid the cost of living emergency.
…when the IMF says, ‘too much’, it’s like Trump respecting consent.
The criticism of this madness by Truss has been never ending..
Pound’s plummet underlines schoolboy error by Kwasi Kwarteng
Chancellor added to market worries by pledging further tax cuts in full budget planned for later this year
The savage sell-off in the pound in east Asia overnight was further evidence – should any be needed – that confidence in the new Liz Truss government is rapidly draining away.
Sterling fell to its lowest level against the dollar, and despite an attempt at a rally in early London trading, the likelihood is that parity against the dollar will be tested before long. September tends to be the month for a sterling crisis – and so it has proved again.
…I knew Truss was a right wing free market lunatic, but not even I thought they would be insane enough to go through with tax cuts borrowed by the Government! It’s so bad the BoE is now back in the market buying 30 year bonds!
I think what Truss and her free market acolytes have accidentally unleashed are forces they won’t be able to control.
I think there will be anarchy in the UK this winter.
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.
If you can’t contribute but want to help, please always feel free to share our blogs on social media
Someone this horrifically neoliberal should be in a mental institution for their own safety, let alone everyone else. Truly a fine successor to Sir Anthony Blair and Baroness Thatcher.
Luxon is now furiously back peddling on his corner-stone policy ..tax cuts…
Apparently his tax cuts will be different from Liz Truss’s… same … but different….nose wrinkle …profuse forehead sweating..
And yet, a 40% top rate of income tax is still higher than we have, and they a CGT and an inheritance tax as well.
They have home ownership at 65.2%, ours is 64.6%.
How is it different to how we funded our covid response?
All of the world’s economies and how we fund it are poked. We are no different. Costs exceed income and they all are (New Zimbabwe included) punting on a blue-sky budget and economic rainbows and unicorns over the next decade.
Economically speaking all we are doing is adding more water while we circle the drain
Highlighting the UK and ignoring the rest because it is a centre-right is tribal, Liam Dann-level economic analysis.
Frank I guess one difference would be we didn’t cut government income at the same time, and our borrowing to fund the response came at a time when inflation was not an issue ( regardless of what the future impact was or wasn’t on inflation).
Semantics Wheely.
We are in the same position and doing the same thing – spending more money than we earn and relying on blue sky budgeted by hopelessly compromised Treasury and RBNZ and offering the same hopeless arguments regarding how we get out of this mess.
Learn to use Google,
The UK national debt was around 96.6% of gross domestic product (GDP) in August 2022, In NZ the country’s Government debt accounted for 33.0 % of its Nominal GDP in Mar 2022. I guess I could have looked harder so there is not 5 months difference although I doubt that there would be much difference.
If you can’t see the difference between 96.6% & 33% I have some land to sell you at low tide.
Come on Frank, the GBP has been in free fall and might even fall bellow the USD. Truss is a lunatic.
“All of the world’s economies and how we fund it are poked. We are no different. Costs exceed income and they all are (New Zimbabwe included) punting on a blue-sky budget and economic rainbows and unicorns over the next decade.
Economically speaking all we are doing is adding more water while we circle the drain”
— The hilarious part of that, Frank, is that you haven’t noticed which economic philosophies have delivered us to this impasse. Left wing philosophies haven/t been the ones in the driver’s seat over the past 40 years.
Well this particular Elizabethan age could be over in five minutes!
Maybe she might untruss Northern Ireland before she goes (now that it is 46% Catholic to 43% Protestant and the Irish passport is gaining in popularity post Brexit).
The folk on the Left said the same thing about Thatcher and were proven wrong in due course.
I’m no economist, but I suspect the globalist IMF is having a heart attack over this move because the UKs lower taxes will suck economic activity out of an already ailing Europe. The lower pound will also lower labour costs and boost productivity. Both of which will actually boost treasury revenue: Arthur Laffer lives!
Either way, pop the popcorn on and watch the show
You are right, the IMF are having a heart attack, they have already berated the UK.
Further to that, the pipeline incident has removed any chance of saving the European economy which includes UK from energy availability to produce and sell. And the price for that will make European exports uncompetitive. Big winner… China, they get all of Russia’s gas at a price even US domestic industry can’t match.
So really both IMF and UK are whistling Dixie.
Left EU after fighting to join in and dropping us in the oddments bucket for our dairy in ’75 just 30 years after being so glad of our help during WW2 and after as well. Great big blundering behemoth, learning steps from the Dancing Bear, the EU tango, but choosing now the striped monstrosity as a dancing partner. Terrible if she ends up a wallflower. Someone will come along to give her a whirl – she sure needs it before she flounces off into another social ellipism. The UK contains some of the letters of an apt description for it – leave you to choose which.
ellipsism – The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com › post › e…
ellipsism – n. sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out, that you’ll dutifully pass on the joke of being alive without ever …
Social maladroitness what? It wouldn’t have found favour with the Queen. God help King Charleslll and Queen Consort Camilla who will soldier on to some sort of future tangled and labyrinthine.
When the Queen saw the exit of Boris, and then had to rubber stamp the entry of Liz Truss, she lost the will to live.
And who could blame her.
Good one Paul.
Boris has never looked so good
Agree
She is going to lead the Tories to a historic defeat and i suspect she couldn’t give a fig.
I doubt the incoming labour party will be any better. They will go on a puritanical crusade against their own population over mean tweets and comments on skin colour instead of taking the financial institutions out back to the wood shed.
Liz made serious mistakes with whom she was acquainted with before she became Prime Minister, and now it’s showing in a fall in the value of their currency. It’s like John Key and asset sales but a bit in reverse.
Oh dear, fallen over at the first hurdle, hardly surprising given her political leaning. Rich, richer, poor, poorer. England of the 1800s…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/bsurface_01.shtml
To be fair lazy globalism, “free” labour markets and lack of transition from the expanded EU followed by the inevitable back lash of lazy referendum and a terrible solution that the public were mislead on, destroyed the British economy first.
The starting point to lazy labour flows when the EU expanded in 2004, which creates massive infrastructure problems in the UK and problems in their welfare system – lowering of wages and jobs particularly unskilled workers and encourage foreign investors to buy up property and develop in the UK….
“Contrary to early expectations, only three countries of the EU15 agreed to free their labour market instantly; among them the UK was by far the largest. France and Germany, considered in the pre-accession period as main targets for Polish migrants, quickly expressed their reluctance and decided to introduce a transition period; Italy, Denmark and the Netherlands, which at the time of negotiations were favourable to immediate and unlimited access to their labour markets, eventually adopted a partial solution (UKIE 2005). Ultimately only the UK, Ireland and Sweden opened up their labour markets immediately so that the whole potential flow of emigrants from Poland, which otherwise could have dispersed across 15 countries, was now directed to only three of them. As easily the largest labour market, the UK became the main target.”
http://www.ceemr.uw.edu.pl/vol-3-no-2-december-2014/articles/polish-emigration-uk-after-2004-why-did-so-many-come
Then they encouraged many ways in which foreign buyers could buy UK property and money launder cash.
How Tony Blair dodged stamp duty and 10 other Pandora Papers bombshells
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1500603/tony-blair-stamp-duty-pandora-papers-evg
Sadiq Khan condemns foreign investors’ use of London homes as ‘gold bricks’
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/25/sadiq-khan-condemns-foreign-investors-london-homes-gold-bricks-housing-policy
This sets up for phase 2, the back lash…. what happens when a former welfare country no longer bothers to have a sustainable health and social housing system for it’s nationals and various big business interests run campaigns that are misleading but are allowed to mislead the public?
The lazy Brexit referendum was born.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/brexit-by-the-numbers-who-voted-to-leave-the-eu-1.2960810
Quarter of Brexit voters say they were misled, poll finds
Remain would win if another referendum was held tomorrow, research shows
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-voters-poll-mislead-leave-campaign-nhs-claims-lies-remain-win-second-referendum-a7905786.html
As usual ‘cancel culture’ and politics does not actually have a viable plan but just marketing spin, that does not work out well in the real world for Britain, the EU and democracy.
Collapsing public support suggests Brexit is anything but done
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/08/collapsing-public-support-suggests-brexit-is-anything-but-done
UK Labour never sorted out their more taxes from workers and UK citizens while politicians and foreign nationals did not pay the same taxes, plus the 3rd way Thatcherism, stopped resonating with the UK public as they started to see the cost of living effects of it.
Thus created the right wing vote pull of ‘lower taxes’ which we see in NZ with the National party gaining power with just like the Tories.
Labour parties around the world, just keeps creating more taxes that only a small proportion of workers pay and that foreign nationals and the poor get subsidised on. Thus creating a situation where professionals and skilled workers get sick of more stealth taxes and leave or work less or the silent resignation. AKA now the UK have more skilled workers leaving for the EU just like many skilled NZ workers leave for OZ.
It was her name ‘Truss’. It has connotations of strength as in:
1 .a framework, typically consisting of rafters, posts, and struts, supporting a roof, bridge, or other structure.
But they were getting the second meaning :
tie up the wings and legs of (a chicken or other bird) before cooking.
“Alfred had already trussed and stuffed the geese”
At a time of political polarisation a leader arises who unites us all in opposition against them.
Neoliberals because of economic naivety, traditional left for tone deaf policies in a time of economic hardship and woke identitarians because the top 4 UK ministers are not woke and therefore white-male adjacent.
Next week far left and far right unite over how much they dislike Nancy Pelosi.
Maggie T had a North Sea gas field and lots of ‘fat’ to cut in the state sector to pay for her tax cuts. The gas has been sucked up, and the state has been slashed to almost nothing.
Comments are closed.