Waiting to meet with a mortgage advisor on Monday at lunchtime, I had a flick through X (formerly Twitter).
My timeline was filled with pictures of the huge queues Liz Truss was attracting at the Conservative Party conference at that time. She told a room full of admirers that government ought to focus on growth.
A miserable meeting later, I learned the extent of the growth in my monthly repayments.
Interest rates spiked in the wake of Truss’s barmy budget that introduced a swathe of unfunded tax cuts. While Jeremy Hunt would dismantle those policies once he got into the Treasury, rates have remained high and homeowners – the very people Truss’s idol Margaret Thatcher put front and centre of her political revolution – have been paying the price since.
I will literally be thousands of pounds down a year. That’s cash I could use to buy fun stuff to help fuel the economy, or put away so I don’t burden the state in later years. Instead, it’s going to the bank: the very people who blew up the economy in 2008 and set off the chain reaction we’re still reckoning with.
This is all largely due to the recklessness and downright stupidity of Truss and her chump of a chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and the damage they managed to inflict on the economy and the nation’s reputation in just a few weeks in office this time last year.
I rarely reach for the wisdom of Sex Pistol and philosopher clown Johnny Rotten but, in his immortal words: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
We need more pomposity pricking
In a Manchester meeting room at Tory conference, Truss was spouting the exact same philosophy that crashed the economy and landed somewhere between inadequate and insane upon contact with reality 12 months ago. Instead of receiving the acclaim of a room full of particularly out-of-touch Tories, Truss and her acolytes ought to be forced to look me, and the millions like me, in the eye and explain why we’re hundreds of pounds down per month through no fault of our own.
Aren’t the Conservatives supposed to be the party of personal responsibility? Truss, Kwarteng and her odious fellow travellers refuse to accept the blame for their blind faith.
How sweet it would’ve been to see Truss get the same treatment Laurence Fox got when he turned up for some routine rabble-rousing in south London last weekend. While Fox, a man whose opinions are so vile he managed to get cancelled from crackpot central GB News, was addressing a crowd of maybe a dozen or so supporters on the importance of free speech, a greater gathering of scores of right-minded people turned up to exercise their free speech and chanted “loser” at him. No violence, no aggression; a simple statement of fact that successfully undermined Fox’s posturing.
We need more of such pomposity pricking in public life.
It’s OK to deem certain people and views beyond the pale
For the return of Liz Truss speaks to a wider issue with our politics, and perhaps with society more generally. It’s ironic that it’s the liberal tendency that embraces relativism – the idea that culture and context inform true and false and right and wrong – and giving everyone a hearing, yet it’s the fringes that have taken advantage.
It’s right that we consider nuance and engage with viewpoints different from our own. But it’s also OK to deem certain people and positions beyond the pale, and to call them out as unacceptable, unhelpful or downright stupid.
Fantastic to see such strong support at conference for these conservative policies that will Make Britain Grow Again:
☑️ Axing the tax
☑️ Cutting the bills and
☑️ Building the homes #MBGA pic.twitter.com/SxOunLO9DC— Liz Truss (@trussliz) October 3, 2023
For example, when considering the history of the British Empire and its legacy, we ought to be able to accommodate insight from those who benefitted from it and those who were its victims, and recognise that the vast majority of folk involved or affected sit somewhere between those poles. But, when I found myself in a Belfast pub after George Best’s funeral with a Daily Mail correspondent who insisted “slavery wasn’t all bad”, I told him that was wrong and caught my cab to the airport forthwith. Some opinions just stink.
Liz Truss and her coterie, including the free market think tank types from the Institute of Economic Affairs who she took into government, had their shot and unequivocally failed. We ought to respect that they had firm beliefs and put them into action. They ought to respect that they proved their ideology foolish, embarrassed themselves, cost the country and, consequently, vacate the public stage.
God grant Liz Truss the wisdom of former secretary of state for war, John Profumo, who disgraced himself and spent the rest of his life trying to put that right
If they won’t go voluntarily, as appears to be the case, they ought to be dismissed. Instead, social media, headbanger channels like GB News and a political class jacked up on soap opera since 2016 inflates their standing and grants them access to an audience they have not earned.
God grant Liz Truss the wisdom of former secretary of state for war, John Profumo, who disgraced himself and spent the rest of his life trying to put that right via decades of quiet and valuable charity work.
As long as we indulge fools and failures, public discourse is degraded, politics is demeaned and we all end up paying a price.
James Millar is a political commentator, author and a former Westminster correspondent for The Sunday Post