What Liz Truss’s big speech is really about

Liz Truss will take to the stage this morning for her first major intervention on the economy since leaving No. 10 last year. A year on from the mini-budget which saw the markets panic – and her premiership come to an abrupt end not long after – Truss will use her speech at the Institute for Government to argue that her original diagnosis was the right one: that the status quo cannot remain. The former prime minister will point to the fact there is agreement across the political divide that the lack of economic growth is a problem.

Truss will lay the cause of the problem on ’25 years of economic consensus’ that have turned the UK from a free market capitalist economy into more of a ‘corporatist social democracy’ in which state spending accounts for 46 per cent of GDP. She will say:

‘The fact is that since the Labour government was elected in 1997, we have moved towards being a more corporatist social democracy in Britain than we were in the 1980s and 1990s’.