Katy Balls Katy Balls

What Liz Truss’s big speech is really about

(Credit: Getty images)

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’.

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