Liz Truss « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Liz Truss’

The Tories have diminished the role of Prime Minister

20/04/2024, 08:10:17 AM

by Kevin Meagher

I was born under Harold Wilson, started school under James Callaghan and left under Margaret Thatcher.

My 16-year-old daughter was born under Gordon Brown, started school under David Cameron, then Theresa May, then Boris Johnson, then Liz Truss and is set to leave under Rishi Sunak.

A stark 2:1 ratio in a single generation.

In the modern age, it seems PMs are like buses.

And this presumes Sunak will last until my daughter’s GCSEs in the summer.

He remains the potential victim of either an early general election defeat, or a last- minute putsch by his own backbenchers to replace him, in the hope of a final-second reprieve from the voters.

It’s not just that the Tories have broken the constitutional precedent that parties should only ever change their leader/ prime minister once in a parliament before seeking the reapproval of the voters, it’s that they have diminished the office entirely.

Look at their record.

Hubristic David Cameron called and then lost a referendum on our EU membership that was practically unlosable, destabilising British politics ever since.

Dumbfounded by Parliament and party, Theresa May was unable to divine a coherent way forward over the country’s decision to quit and was forced out by her own side.

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If it’s really ‘no more Mr Nice Guy’ from Sunak, why not remove the whip from Liz Truss?

30/09/2023, 09:10:15 PM

by Kevin Meagher

‘In the next few days, we will all see more of the new-look Rishi Sunak,’ the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg predicted yesterday, previewing the Conservative party conference which is about to start in Manchester.

“’Mr Safe Pair of Hands’ is gone – it’s ‘No more Mr Nice Guy’ now,’ apparently.

Truly, the sort of dismal, by-the-numbers briefing that PMs in trouble always make.

John Major amusingly claimed that when your back’s against the wall, you should ‘turn around and come out fighting.’

Croaky Iain Duncan-Smith was the quiet man turning up the volume.

We’ve been here a million times.

When you’re taking political blows, the inevitable relaunch always looks to project raw power.

The claim of decisiveness is usually inverse to the reality.

The true test of a leader is what they do, not what they claim. A brand – or rebrand – must be founded on substance.

So, in a spirit of ecumenism from across the political aisle, let me suggest how Sunak can transform words into deeds with one simple move.

Remove the whip from Liz Truss.

Madam 49 Jours appears to have de-iced from the political Siberia she was sent to last year – by her own colleagues and the international money markets.

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The poetry of a better world is beyond Rishi being Rishi

25/09/2023, 11:04:00 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Let Rishi be Rishi, say his advisers. Let him try to set up a dividing line with him and hard-working families on one side and Labour on another. Let him talk gibberish about seven bins and attempt to associate Labour with this. Let him make a solemn speech to the nation from Downing Street, supposedly about tough choices for a shared future, when only a changed government, making different choices, will save our future.

The veneer of competence, which Sunak brought to his office when succeeding Liz Truss, was wearing very thin by the speech’s end. This is the latest phase of his benighted reign. There was the relative calm after the chaos of Truss and Boris Johnson. There were the five priorities for 2023 – which, for Sunak’s misfiring administration, are much more stretching than they initially seemed.

Having not stopped the boots, the role of ULEZ in the Uxbridge byelection appeared as a rubber ring. Many Uxbridge voters who will be unaffected by ULEZ voted Tory in misplaced protest. The latest phase of the Sunak is even more firmly rooted in desperate dishonesty than earlier ones.

The 2030 target for electric cars was achievable – because of investment unlocked by clear and consistent regulation. Instead of applying a similar approach to the 2035 target for boilers, Sunak has watered down both targets. Creating a dividing line between himself and the businesses that, with the right regulatory backing, would make such investment, while claiming to stand-up for hard-pressed households.

What would really help such households is to rapidly push green technologies along the S-curve: “a well-established phenomenon where a successful new technology reaches a certain catalytic tipping point (typically 5-10% market share), and then rapidly reaches a high market share (i.e. 50%+) within just a couple more years once past this tipping point.”

We see market trends in green technologies that align with the S-curve. Wind and solar power generation, for example, is now 12% of the global total from less than 1% a decade ago, growing at 20% per year. By effectively banning onshore wind farms in England for the past eight years and botching a recent auction for a major offshore wind farm, the UK is failing to fully take advantage of this emerging era.

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Labour needs to battle through Long Corbyn to overcome Long Thatcherism

06/02/2023, 10:44:58 PM

by Jonathan Todd

The most common symptoms of Long Covid, according to the NHS website, include extreme tiredness, loss of smell, and muscle aches. It is Zoonotic: transmitting between species and from animals to humans. It also moves from the medical to the political.

“In 82 opinion polls since January,” lamented Denis MacShane on The Article in October 2020, “the Labour Party has only been ahead in one of them”. Despite Keir Starmer outperforming the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, “in terms of competence and coherence.”

“The party,” diagnosed MacShane, “is suffering with symptoms of “Long Corbyn” … The virus of hard leftist unelectability is not easy to eradicate.”

Liverpool had not won the league in 25 years when Jürgen Klopp was appointed manager in 2015. Past glories felt unlikely to be recaptured. Klopp urged doubters to be believers. His Liverpool became the first British team to hold the European Cup, European Super Cup, Club World Cup, and league titles simultaneously.

Three months after MacShane’s article, I paraphrased Klopp to argue that Labour doubters should become believers. The symptoms of Long Corbyn were at their height: extreme tiredness (years of Labour doorstep with little to show for it), misplaced sense of political smell (failing to sniff the weaknesses that clung to Johnson even at the height of his powers), our muscles ached from the strife and disappointment under Corbyn.

This context made eccentric my prediction of Labour victory. Things have dramatically turned.

All who doubted Labour now believe. Once tired activists, bouncing back from Long Corbyn, stride purposefully towards power. The whiff of Labour government permeates all corners of national life. My reasons for optimism have come to pass – and then some.

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The Uncuts: 2022 Political Awards (Part II)

31/12/2022, 04:48:53 PM

Comeback Of The Year: Keir Starmer

Starmer has spent the last two-and-a-half years quietly playing a long game. While never to everyone’s satisfaction – that would be unfeasible – he nevertheless has addressed most of the issues he had on the table back in the spring of 2020, even largely cleaning up the smell of antisemitism which the Corbyn years had left hanging over the party. Corbynites have left in droves; Momentum marginalised; and, perhaps most importantly, the backroom political pressure exerted by Unite has been dramatically reduced.

This is not so much to do with Starmer directly: a major factor has been the transfer of power between former leader Len McCluskey and his successor Sharon Graham; and also the financial and political impact of multiple investigations (including criminal ones) getting close to McCluskey and his cronies, effectively pulling the plug on the old money-machine which funded Labour’s entryist cabal for so long. But these things might also not have happened, had Starmer not secured a convincing win over the Corbynites.

Starmer has not been perfect, by any means. He has failed to be ruthless with his frontbench, with the result that it is still rather weak in political heft. And his vacillation on women’s rights has created a potential Achilles heel for Labour, which the Tories have already shown themselves keen to exploit. He is still failing to beat Sunak in “best PM” polling.

But Labour’s current strong showing overall under his leadership is an undeniable achievement, when you consider the nadir it faced just three Christmases ago, after the party’s worst defeat in three-quarters of a century.

He now needs to ensure he doesn’t throw it away, which is still eminently possible.

The Order Of Black Wednesday Award: Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng

The Order Of Black Wednesday Award is a special prize, awarded by Uncut for wanton, gratuitous attempted or actual destruction of the UK’s finances (for political historians, the award is named after the fateful Wednesday in 1992, when Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont and the then non-independent Bank of England conspired to make UK interest rates jump massively several times in the same day; in the end proposing to hike to 15%, before collapsing out of the ERM, the EU’s currency-pegging system prior to the euro. He resigned in disgrace shortly after and his party lost its reputation for economic competence; not to mention power, in a Labour landslide five years later.)

Close to being awarded during the Johnson administration for the final Withdrawal Agreement, it was felt however by the judges that, although the damage was significant and the policy management cack-handed, it was not of the order required.

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Power cuts, military superpowers in conflict, and Labour taking office in the midst of economic meltdown – could it be 1964 all over again?

13/10/2022, 10:41:59 PM

by Declan McHugh

The incredible divergence of political fortunes that has seen Labour open up 30-point poll leads has given rise to a growing belief that the Conservatives are heading out of government. That view isn’t confined to those on the Labour side. It is now widely held in the business community, the media and indeed in the Conservative Party itself. Tory MPs openly lament that their party is careering, inexorably, to a catastrophic defeat at the next general election. The parallel that many draw is with 1997, when Tony Blair led Labour to an historic landslide. But is 1997 the right point of historical reference? Or do we need to look back several decades earlier for a more apt comparator – all the way to 1964?

That year saw the threat of blackouts at home and the eruption of superpowers in armed conflict abroad. It also saw Labour end 13 years in opposition; a narrow election victory enabling Harold Wilson to become PM. With a majority of just four, his new administration faced major political challenges from the outset. But the bigger problem facing the Wilson government was the economic inheritance left by the departing Conservatives.

An ill-fated ‘dash for growth’ had left the UK economy in a nose-dive. So much so that when the outgoing Chancellor, Reggie Maudling, handed Number 11 over to James Callaghan, he cheerily told him: “Sorry old cock to leave it in this shape. I suggested to Alec [Douglas Home] this morning that perhaps we should put up the Bank Rate but he thought he ought to leave it all to you.”

The incoming Labour government was saddled with an £800m deficit that immediately triggered a series of Sterling crises. One of Callaghan’s first acts was to raise interest rates to 7%, leading the Building Societies Association to hike rates for new mortgages to 6.75%. Although the party won a bigger majority in the 1966 election, it was never in control of the economic situation. By 1967 the Wilson Government was forced into a devaluation that saw the pound reduced from $2.80 to $2.40. Hopes of investment in the ‘white heat of technology’ were crushed as the administration was pushed into a programme of austerity that brought it into conflict with unions and, ultimately, contributed to electoral defeat in 1970.

By contrast, the political and economic conditions in 1997 were far more favourable. Labour went into that election facing nothing like the electoral mountain that stands before it today. Although the Conservatives had won a shock victory in 1992, they had done so with a majority of just 21. The electoral arithmetic today is starkly different. Assuming Labour don’t make spectacular gains against the SNP, the party requires a swing from the Tories of more than 13% just to get a bare majority. To put that into perspective, Blair won a landslide with a swing of 10%; Attlee won a post-war landslide with a swing of just over 12%. So for Labour to win a majority of any kind it must surpass those two landmark victories.

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In all this chaos, Labour’s chance is now, at this conference. And we are still perfectly capable of making a pig’s ear of it

20/09/2022, 10:45:13 PM

by Rob Marchant

As every political journalist will tell you, this by-election or this conference is always the decisive one, the one which changes everything. Of course, it is a journalist’s job to make a story more interesting and engaging than it actually is. But in this case, that argument might just have a point.

Labour, under a leader nearly two-and-a-half years into the job, is in a decent place. Largely thanks to Boris Johnson’s long-overdue implosion and his replacement by a less-than-inspiring alternative PM, Labour is riding high in the polls. In normal times, he would be looking like a shoo-in for an election in two years’ time.

But these are not normal times, if anything has been remotely normal in Britain these last few years.

After Brexit, Covid and now a worsening economic crisis, we end up in the bizarre position of having changed both prime minister and head of state in the same week. The normally phlegmatic British public is now in an emotional place, with some perhaps even subconsciously reassessing this country, its place in the world, and what kind of a place we would like it to be.

In the midst of all this confusion, like an object randomly falling from the air, plops the 2022 conference season. No doubt, Liz Truss will be aiming to come out of it looking like a powerful, well-supported primus inter pares of an A-list team. This will be a challenge: as the Conservatives’ fourth leader during the last six years, the look is more like the dismal fag-end of a long period of one-party government. But it is up to Labour to make it so.

Turning to Starmer, we can see a creditable progress which has been made since the Corbyn nadir. The sixty-four million dollar question is, though, has Labour changed enough to be ready for government?

We might first look at history: last time Labour was out of power, it took twelve years to reinvent itself from its turning point, which we could reasonably claim to be Kinnock’s 1985 conference speech. Starmer has had just over two. So, if he has really managed the necessary turnaround, he has done it in double-quick time. Or rather, six times as quickly.

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It is the economy, stupid – but Labour needs a story of economic change

12/08/2022, 11:07:17 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Remember when the war on woke was going to keep the Tories in government till 2030s?

We used to hear more of this claim, a year or so ago. Lee Anderson was banning himself from watching the England men’s team nearly win the Euros. Tortoise was profiling anti-woke, power couple Munira Mirza and Dougie Smith. Brexit was an identity issue and others – such as, Anderson thought, taking the knee – would be stoked to retain the 2019 Tory coalition.

Since then, the economic challenges of Brexit (ask a trucker or holidaymaker queueing at Dover if Brexit is an identity issue) and the longer-term economic impacts of Covid-19 have crystallised.

Vaccine rollout powered a Tory victory in the Hartlepool byelection in May 2021 and a post-lockdown household spending surge. Meeting this demand has not always been easy. Long Covid diminished the UK workforce and global supply chains cannot be smoothly switched off and on – especially with China persisting with a damaging zero-Covid strategy.

These problems have been turbocharged by the war in Ukraine and associated energy sanctions on Russia – rapidly increasing UK inflation, now forecast to hit 13% during 2022.

Getting on top of the cost-of-living crisis – inflation outstripping wage growth, reducing the ability of households to afford their way of life – requires a restructuring of the UK economy much bigger than Tory imaginations.

Tax cuts and fracking is how putative PM Liz Truss says she will reduce energy bills. It is not much of an answer. Gordon Brown has some better ideas.

Truss has been critical of the Bank of England. The Bank is responsible for controlling inflation – but monetary policy in the UK is inadequate to seismic events in China and Ukraine.

Being a political teacher with a skill for explanation and making sense of complex issues is an essential qualification of successful PMs, according to Steve Richards’ engaging book on recent holders of this office.

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