Liz Truss looks to be winning a decisive victory for cold-eyed conservatism. A victory for I went to the school of hard knocks and university of real-life conservatism. For I never asked for charity and worked for every penny conservatism. For public-sector workers are lazy and benefit claimants are scroungers conservatism. For get on your bike and get off my land conservatism. For no one ever said that life was fair and have you seen how many holidays teachers get conservatism.
Most people can be provoked by the waste of public money into thinking like that for some of the time. Liz Truss appeals to people who think like that all of the time. That is say, she appeals to the only people who matter in the UK today, a majority of the 150,000 or so members of the Conservative party, who look set to make her our prime minister.
Last Friday she said her response to average fuel bills hitting £4,000 by January would be to ‘do things in a Conservative way of lowering the tax burden, not giving out handouts’. She brushed aside attempts by her media handlers to suggest she did not mean what she was saying, and at the leadership hustings in Darlington last night reiterated her argument. ‘The first thing we should do as Conservatives is help people have more of their own money. What I don’t support is taking money off people in tax and then giving it back to them in handouts. That to me is Gordon Brown economics.’
With a willed ignorance of the world outside the Conservative bubble, Truss did not acknowledge that the millions who will shiver this winter pay little or no tax. According to figures from the Rishi Sunak campaign, that Truss has not challenged, a person working full-time on the national minimum wage will save £59 a year when she abolishes the rise in National Insurance she voted for only a few months ago. A person on median earnings of £26,000 will save £170. And a person earning £100,000 would save more than £1,000. She is explicit in her determination to prioritise the comfortable over the comfortless. To be fair, she will also abolish the green levies on fuel bills. Customers will not notice the saving, however, as the levies account for about 10 per cent of the average bill and the average bill will be doubling in a little over a year.
A Truss victory will be a victory for a conservatism we rarely see: conservatism with the mask ripped off
A Truss victory will be a victory for a conservatism we rarely see: conservatism with the mask ripped off. Truss will dispense with David Cameron’s soft words about building a ‘Big Society’ to protect the poor and sick. She will forget Theresa May and Boris Johnson’s commitment to levelling up. She will maintain that tax cuts for the wealthy will produce trickle-down economic benefits for the rest of society, even though they have only until October to trickle down and the UK is entering a recession where money will just be trickling away.
She doesn’t know and her allies are not warning her that victories are as dangerous as defeats. Winners have no excuses. They are the masters now and must carry the blame and responsibilities victory brings.
Readers intending to vote Liz Truss should look to the US right. Earlier this year it appeared as if it was marching to victory in the 2022 elections for the Senate and the House of Representatives. Joe Biden was an old, weak president, who had humiliated the US in Afghanistan and was presiding over an inflationary surge. In January, Republicans led by seven percentage points on the generic ballot (which asks which party should control Congress), an unprecedented advantage. Democrats are now ahead by seven percentage points, a 14-point swing.
Victory has damned the right. Since the 1970s, religious conservatives dreamed of overturning the Supreme Court’s ruling that American women had a constitutional right to abortion. In June the judges Donald Trump appointed made their dream a reality, and they didn’t see the danger.
It turned out that millions of undecided and Republican voters could blank out the noises the Republican party was making about abortion. Whatever the party said, they knew that it could not ban it. Now victorious Republicans can do what they want, and they are paying the price. In Kansas, a state that voted for Trump by an astonishing margin, voters turned out in the lazy days of summer in equally astonishing numbers to deny the Republican-controlled legislature the power to restrict abortion rights.
Panicked Republican strategists have no idea what to do. Either they alienate religious voters, whose support they have taken for granted for decades, or they alienate the broad mass of voters who support abortion early in a pregnancy.
We are still in the lazy days of summer. Maybe inflation, crime and Joe Biden’s infirmity will allow the Republicans to bounce back. Maybe Liz Truss is saying all this to win a leadership election and will U-turn when and if she reaches 10 Downing Street.
If she is not, her victory will have terrible consequences. Our first thoughts should be with all those who will suffer if they do not receive what Truss calls ‘handouts’ and what a decent person would call ‘help’. But the hard-faced Conservative party, its mask yanked off, its cold prejudices exposed, will suffer too.
To date no one can blame the British Conservatives for the price rises that are engulfing the world. The Conservatives did not make Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine. The war crimes and their economic consequences are Russia’s responsibility.
But if Truss isn’t lying, the Conservative government will be responsible for every pensioner, sick and disabled person the cold kills, every overwhelmed hospital, and every family that cannot feed its children. Be careful of what you wish for because no defeat is as bitter as the defeat victory brings.
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