Trussonomics at CPAC
The silly will make print and leave bursts of digital traces; the idiots will make history, if only in small print. One such figure is the shortest serving UK Prime Minister in living memory, the woeful, joke-packed figure of Liz Truss who lasted a mere 50 disastrous days in office. She was even bettered by a satirical, dressed-up lettuce, filmed in anticipation of her brief, calamitous end.
With such a blotted record, the vacuous, inane Truss felt that her experiences were worthy of recounting to the Conservative Political Action Conference, held at National Harbor, Maryland between February 22 and 24. The gathering, conducted since the 1970s and organised by the American Conservative Union, has become something of a mandatory calendar event for US conservative activists. Those from other countries have also tried to make a splash – keeping Truss company was the demagogic voice of Brexit, Nigel Farage, arguably the most influential British politician not to hold a seat in Parliament.
A self-believer of towering insensibility, Truss oversaw during her flashpoint stint in office mind boggling budgetary decisions. On winning the Tory ballot after the fall of Boris Johnson in 2022, she promised £30 billion in tax cuts via an emergency budget, reversing the rise in National Insurance and a range of energy-price guarantees. That these tax cuts – eventually amounting to £45 billion – were primarily skewed to benefit those at the higher end of the scale did not bother her. “The people at the top of the income distribution pay more tax – so inevitably, when you cut taxes you tend to benefit the people who are more likely to pay tax.” What logic; what reasoning.
With figures of such incompetence, responsibility for failure is always attributed to someone, or something else. In Truss’s case, blame initially lay with fellow comic villain and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, with whom she had taken a wrecking ball to the UK economy and the British pound. With Kwarteng, she had previously authored a dotty pamphlet “Britannia Unchained”, warning that Britain should not emulate the economic model of southern European countries, saddled with poor productivity and growth, along with hefty and inefficient public services.
The Economist tasted the irony of it all, seeing Trussonomics as typical of “Britaly”, a country “of political instability, low growth and subordination to bond markets.” A further irony was that the horrified market reaction to Truss suggested her inability to understand the very forces she prefers unleashed over the wickedness of big government and bureaucratic interference. Live by the free market; die by the free market.
What, then, to tell her New World colleagues? At first blush, nothing new. In April 2023, she had already made it across the Atlantic to speak to the Heritage Foundation, where she gave the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture. Monumental failure can undergo changes in transatlantic journey, and the conservative think tank omitted mentioning her spell of prime ministerial lunacy, impressed, instead, by her “long-standing” advocacy “for limited government, low taxes, and freedom, both at home and the UK and around the world.”
The speech was barbed, resentful and absurd, an attempt to channel a politician she resembles in no serious respect, bar certain Little England prejudices, with a smattering of superficially similar economic beliefs. Truss complained of “coordinated resistance from inside the Conservative Party”, “the British corporate establishment”, “the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and even from President Biden.” She grumbled of “a new kind of economic model” that was taking hold in the UK and US, “one that’s focused on redistributionism, on stagnation and on the imbuing of woke culture into our businesses.” Seen from another perspective, this “anti-growth movement”, to use Truss’s daft terminology, had been responsible for her demise.
In her CPAC display, we see an attempt to flatter Donald Trump, drawing from the well of Deep State rhetoric, and various scripted points about insecurity, immigration, terrorism, gender, “wokenomics”, “the power of the left and the power of those bureaucracies.” There are also some head-scratching remarks that lent a cartoonish feel to the mad bat: “you can’t triangulate with terrorists, you can’t compromise with communists, you have to fight for what you believe in.”
The speech is not entirely nonsensical, though Truss misses the significance of any pertinent observations. “What has happened in Britain over the past 30 years is power that used to be in the hands of politicians has been moved to quangos and bureaucrats and lawyers so what you find is a democratically elected government actually unable to enact policies.” While the estrangement of the elected from the elector, aided and abetted by unelected bureaucracies, is hard to deny, Truss is merely implying that an unaccountable dictatorship would surely be far better and representative.
To demonstrate the point, Truss raged against the Office of Budget Responsibility and the Bank of England who “sought to undermine the policies.” Again, the IMF, along with Biden, featured as targets. Again, ignorance of the free market and her ruin by its very dictates, was proudly displayed.
Decoding the Truss basket case of beliefs yields this question: Why were there such impediments to my mad realisation? It was far better, she proposed, to get “a bigger bazooka in order to be able to deliver. And I think we have got to challenge the institutions themselves.” A challenge is a good thing, but best bring a well thought out policy with you when going into battle.
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Andrew Smith -
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Frank Sterle Jr.
Return to home pageOne would suggest that it’s not ‘Trussonomics’, and the hint is ‘Heritage Foundation’, but ‘Kochonomics’ promoted by Atlas or Koch Network Network; see IPA, CIS etc.
Related is white Christian nationalist influenced CPAC, coming soon to Anglo ultra conservative i.e. Abbott’s, Trump’s, Bannon’s, Carlson’s, Mearsheimer’s, Sachs’ et al. favourite swamp, Hungary; channeling Tanton Network eugenics and anti-immigrant agitprop e.g. anti-semitic Soros conspiracy (outcome of Netanyahu’s GOP advisors for Hungarian PM ‘mini Putin’ Orban).
Not only do both Koch and Tanton Network share fossil fuel etc. donors in the US, with Christo fascist CNP Council for Nation Policy, the related Heritage, linked to Abbott’s employers, Danube Institute in Hungary (he has also presented in US like Truss) belies his public support for Ukraine while aid is blocked by the Koch linked Freedom Caucus.
Never Trumper conservative Bill Kristol on Heritage:
‘Heritage Foundation and Viktor Orbán are not simply against aid for Ukraine. They are against Ukraine. They hate Ukraine, because a) they’re pro-Putin, and b) they hate liberal democracy, especially one fighting to defend itself against a brutal dictator.’
https://x.com/BillKristol/status/1733892421895746022?s=20
Wheels with wheels while Abbott and his unregistered foreign agent advisor also visiting same Danube Institute, have never been challenged by Oz media?
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.
Who’d want to be living in that benighted country these days; past glories now merely nostalgic memories, empire thankfully no more, reduced to a rump of its former self, and its ~67 million citizens, squeezed into am area of ~209 sq km, cf. Victoria at ~227 sq km, all bearing the brunt of years of maladroit governance except for the 1% of the ‘upper class’, the generational aristocracy and the financial finaglers.
Privatisation madness during years of Tory rein now ensures that trains don’t run on time and services are cancelled, water supply is in the hands of inefficient businesses, faecal waste pollutes coastal waters, natural river & stream systems continue to accrue unsustainable levels of pollution, postal services efficiency is vastly reduced, not to forget the British Post scandal, schools suffer from lack of funding and infrastructural improvements along with many other examples.
This is what you get when you elect an unrepresentative mob of privately-educated twits into power, most or all of whom lack any real-world experience and perspective on responsible fiscal management for the benefit of all, the Brexit fiasco being only the last of a long list of egregious decisions that benefited few and imposed significant burdens on the many.
And so, as the madness continues and idiots like Truss et al drift further into the weird and whacky arms of the far-right schemers who would burn down the house rather than save it, what does the future hold for little Britain? The next election, all but guaranteed to return Labour to power, ought to be an opportunity to begin to set things onto a more reasonable and rational course. One would hope so.
Churchill’s “fame” is about W W 2 and symbols, for that was about ten percent of the old horror. The rest is barely civilised, much of his life aggressive egofixated garbage. On to Thatcher, the fierce old Attila the Hen. Recently, we got Boris the sick joke and then Ms, Truss, so hopelessy self deluding and learner of halfbaked lessons with scrambled paragraphs and no exams or supervision. After Sunak, what.., a self romancing Trumpite? The pink on the old imperial maps is now just a shrivelled bumcheek.
ummm… areas quoted above should of course be in the thousands not hundreds. Senior’s moment, pink cheeks.
Truss?
I recall old grandad wearing one in his eighties for, er, “leakage”.
I’m puzzled folk seem to find a spark of intelligence, I have looked and found none.
The British economy has been wrecked by self-aggrandizing idiots. Idiots who have sold out to multi-national corporations and the olde worlde greed of ‘aristocrats’.
From the Roman Empire I, through the Byzantines and ever onward through the various colonial imperia, the wrecking ball has rolled on to the tune of greedy familial aristocrats and the evil guile of their religious backers. Despite science, which they love to sideline (except for making better war machines), the global economies became increasingly febrile in the face of the designed-in ultimate failures of ecology and natural resources.
The UK continues to hang on to their scourging, xenophobic, racist embedments from the past, and it has brought it to its knees. The USA has also been so blighted, but has a better chance to turn its lumbering wrecking ball vessel around.
Around the globe, as the antediluvian chooks come home to roost, we see the idiots coalesce in a vainglorious attempt to revert to the squeezes of yesteryear. Funded by the failing fossil-fuelers and feckless oligarchs and mindless evangelists, one can but hope that via their ossified grey matter, they bring on their own aneurysms before they bring the planet to oblivion.
While boasting of and promising ‘balanced’ budgets, they callously omit the humane equation, as though very tight finances are of any good to the large portion (if not the majority) of those human beings who are struggling to make ends meet.
Assuming they even were genuinely balanced and not just creative accounting fudge-it budgets, smiling and spouting nonsensical platitudes that somehow simply by being in the black the budget will leave sufficiently ‘more money in people’s pockets’ in these financially very tough times is, at best, insensitive.
Meantime, to have genuine representative democracy there first needs to be a truly democratic electoral system for the citizenry. While the First Past The Post [FPTP] ballot may qualify, though barely at that, as democratic within the democracy spectrum, it is the Proportional Representation system thus governance that’s truly representative.
The FPTP electoral system too frequently puts and keeps the Conservative lot in office. And they sound similar to British-Commonwealth-er Canada’s kind: Fundamental human necessities are not really their concern.
Then again, according to ‘Calamity’ Jane Bodine — a fictional retired political consultant hired by an unpopular politician to help him win the Bolivian presidential election — in the film Our Brand Is Crisis: “If voting changed anything [in favor of the weak/poor/disenfranchised they’d have made it illegal.”