I feel I should apologise to readers of this newspaper for my, admittedly conditional, support for Liz Truss. Not for her views, you understand, but rather for her tactical naivety.
I thought that she had become a true believer, you see. A true believer in a smaller state, and greater liberties for individuals, families, and businesses to grow the economy and create wealth for all to enjoy. A sentiment she repeated outside No. 10 last week before her trip to see His Majesty, the King, where she said everything I wanted to hear.
I genuinely believed that she had learnt from her past political mistakes: first as a Liberal Democrat and then as a Remainer. When Kemi Badenoch, my first choice of candidate for Conservative leader to replace Boris Johnson, was eliminated by the Party's MPs (more on that sorry shower later), Truss seemed to broadly support the core principles of freedom that I have articulated throughout the years in these columns.
Readers may recall my last column on the reforms in her then-Chancellor's 'fiscal event'. I felt that it was good on the tax-cutting side but much more detail was needed - urgently so - in terms of public sector spending restraint and a programme to boost the country's road, rail, and telecommunications infrastructure.
Although inflation is gathering pace, reducing household incomes, and acting as a brake to economic growth worldwide, there is no doubt that this country is more exposed to its ravages than most. More than 25% of all UK debt repayments are index-linked and so with inflation at 10% and rising, this should have been a priority.
Yet, the cornerstone of that mini-budget was the £10 billion-a-month bailout to cap energy prices over the next two years – an extraordinary increase in public sector borrowing with no hint of a repayment plan. Mind you, recent falls in wholesale gas prices may well mean that this will result in no cost to taxpayers.
The tax cutting elements for households and businesses were, by contrast, if anything, too modest to truly kickstart a period of sustained economic growth.
A truly libertarian Government would have looked at a more targeted approach with a clear taper to progressively reduce support as households and businesses started to adapt to higher fuel prices.
It was almost as if Truss, in the shock and awe of her approach, was trying to compensate for her earlier political misalliances. There was certainly a hint of the juvenile about her accompanying and ill-defined attack on the “anti-growth coalition” which needlessly antagonised sections of society that broadly should have been allies or at least neutral.
Well, she has learnt at first-hand the perils of being a prime minister in too much of a hurry.
The failure to discuss much-needed public spending cuts and a seeming disregard of the importance of allowing the Office for Budget Responsibility to analyse the figures, spooked the day-traders in the money markets.
Yet for all the economic pressures that speedily came to bear on the Truss administration, it was the lack of a political majority within the Parliamentary Conservative Party, just 31%, that did for her. However, Rishi Sunak, our new prime minister, only achieved 38% MP support back in July, increasing to just 42% amongst party members on the result in September.
With only a minority of MPs backing her before the vote was extended to the wider party membership, Liz Truss’s leadership was provisional from day one in the eyes of many Conservative MPs .
The problem lies in the ever-changing and frankly undemocratic procedures employed by Sir Graham Brady MP and his 1922 Committee to select the Party’s leaders.
The MPs, having removed Boris Johnson, who actually had achieved a democratic mandate three years ago, the 1922 Committee decided to offer the party nationally just two candidates from which to choose.
The only problem with this selection was that it was imposed on the Party membership by the bickering MPs. A better process would be to offer us the choice between any candidate that gained the support of at least 15% of MPs, selected on a first, second, third, etc., choice basis.
Now, with the MPs in full panic mode, having lost their nerve, under totally different rules, we have the failed candidate from last time around – Rishi Sunak – installed without any wider mandate whatsoever. How very ‘EU’ of the Parliamentary Conservative Party. It’s as if they are saying to the wider membership: “you got it wrong last time, try voting again … but this time, you don’t get a vote!”
I am a democrat. My freedom-loving philosophy is defined by free markets and democratic accountability.
I do not appreciate this charade. Sunak is no-one’s choice apart from a couple of hundred of MPs.
And that is why I believe that a General Election is the only honourable course of action. The sooner the Sunak regime puts its vision to the country, the better chance it has of defeating pale, stale Starmer’s Labour Party.
The longer democracy is ignored, the more likely that the electorate will be as unforgiving as the financial markets. And the more likely that the Conservative Party will be destroyed for a generation.
First published in www.suffolkfreepress.co.uk & www.dissexpress.co.uk on Thursday, November 3, 2022
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