Post by Frank Owen’s Paintbrush on Feb 5, 2023 13:44:15 GMT
Yesterday Liz Truss published a 4,000 word essay for the Torygraph about her record-breakingly short stint as Prime Minister. To call it a myopic, economically-illiterate, conspiracy-riven exercise in self-delusion would be an understatement.
I can't go through it point by point because that would take all day, so I'll just highlight some of her most absurd claims and self-deceptions.
One of the most ridiculous aspects of her screed was the headline claim that she was brought down by Britain's supposedly left-wing economic establishment!
She's talking about a country that's been locked into hard-right neoliberal economic dogma since 1979, and which has spent the last 13 years pursuing an absurdly damaging austerity agenda of wage repression, deliberate infrastructure underinvestment, social security vandalism, and ruinous public service cuts, against a backdrop of lavish tax cuts and handouts for the mega-rich.
But somehow this destructive radical-right austerity agenda wasn't nearly enough for Truss, to such an extent that she rails against Cameron, May, and Johnson for not having gone far enough!
She looked at Britain's austerity-driven problems like low pay, low growth, low investment, low saving rates, the productivity crisis, and Britain's frighteningly large trade deficit, and concluded that the main problem was that her predecessors hadn't been hammering the austerity self-destruct button hard enough!
Truss also takes a swipe at Rishi Sunak for not keeping Corporation Tax at the artificially low rates that preceding Tory Prime Ministers reduced it to.
She's so deluded that she can look at the ongoing corporate looting of the UK economy, and conclude that these profiteering corporations should still be paying lower taxes on their profits than workers pay on their wages!
She attacks her own Tory MPs for getting cold feet about her austerity-on-steroids agenda, as the economy collapsed around them as a result of her squeeze Kwarteng's deluded and disastrous mini-budget.
She was expecting them to change their tune from Johnson's deceptive "levelling up" bullshit about investing in Britain, to pushing an even more radical and destructive austerity agenda than Cameron and Osborne.
It's no wonder they baulked when her economic delusions crashed into reality, spooking the markets and causing economic chaos.
She whines that bodies like the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility are too negative and pessimistic, but then slams them for for not warning her about the specific risk that her barkingly right-wing agenda could cause so much chaos that it'd drive Britain's pension funds to the brink of insolvency!
She's not denying that her extremism almost collapsed the pension funds, she's crying that nobody warned her that this was one of the specific things that might happen.
The cognitive dissonance is astounding. She's whining that there was too much "pessimism and scepticism" about her radical right agenda, yet she's also complaining that she wasn't specifically warned about one of the many negative outcomes, as if she wouldn't have just dismissed it as unwarranted scepticism, like she did with all of the other warnings she was given about the negative consequences of her economic radicalism.
She also takes aim at Joe Biden and the IMF, as if international concerns about her economic extremism were some kind of conspiracy against her economic genius!
For decades the IMF has enforced neoliberal reforms like privatisation, social security cuts, and handouts for the mega-rich all across the world, so if even they were warning that your economic agenda was too radically right-wing, most people might accept that they'd tried to go too far, but not Truss. Apparently it's all a big conspiracy because nobody in the world was smart enough to appreciate her economic genius!
As for Joe Biden, what was he supposed to say on the subject of Britain's self-inflicted economic meltdown? Is it any surprise that he decided to juxtapose the success of his "Build Back Better" investment plan with the spectacular failure of Truss's scheme to lavish handouts on corporations and the mega rich at the expense of the rest of the British economy?
Truss claims that she understands that she's "not blameless" and that "soul-searching has not been easy", but all of her blame-shifting and self-deception in the rest of her delusional diatribe show no signs that either of these things are remotely true.
Even now she's unwilling to admit that that last things Britain needed after a decade and a half of stumbling from one crisis to another was another punishing dose of austerity and another massive programme of handouts for corporations and the mega-rich.
And the only way she can maintain the absurd delusion that she was right, is if literally everyone else (the OBR, the Treasury, the Bank of England, the IMF, the markets, her predecessors, her successor, her own Tory MPs ...) are all part of some sinister leftist conspiracy to prevent her from bringing about her glorious new dawn!
I can't go through it point by point because that would take all day, so I'll just highlight some of her most absurd claims and self-deceptions.
One of the most ridiculous aspects of her screed was the headline claim that she was brought down by Britain's supposedly left-wing economic establishment!
She's talking about a country that's been locked into hard-right neoliberal economic dogma since 1979, and which has spent the last 13 years pursuing an absurdly damaging austerity agenda of wage repression, deliberate infrastructure underinvestment, social security vandalism, and ruinous public service cuts, against a backdrop of lavish tax cuts and handouts for the mega-rich.
But somehow this destructive radical-right austerity agenda wasn't nearly enough for Truss, to such an extent that she rails against Cameron, May, and Johnson for not having gone far enough!
She looked at Britain's austerity-driven problems like low pay, low growth, low investment, low saving rates, the productivity crisis, and Britain's frighteningly large trade deficit, and concluded that the main problem was that her predecessors hadn't been hammering the austerity self-destruct button hard enough!
Truss also takes a swipe at Rishi Sunak for not keeping Corporation Tax at the artificially low rates that preceding Tory Prime Ministers reduced it to.
She's so deluded that she can look at the ongoing corporate looting of the UK economy, and conclude that these profiteering corporations should still be paying lower taxes on their profits than workers pay on their wages!
She attacks her own Tory MPs for getting cold feet about her austerity-on-steroids agenda, as the economy collapsed around them as a result of her squeeze Kwarteng's deluded and disastrous mini-budget.
She was expecting them to change their tune from Johnson's deceptive "levelling up" bullshit about investing in Britain, to pushing an even more radical and destructive austerity agenda than Cameron and Osborne.
It's no wonder they baulked when her economic delusions crashed into reality, spooking the markets and causing economic chaos.
She whines that bodies like the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility are too negative and pessimistic, but then slams them for for not warning her about the specific risk that her barkingly right-wing agenda could cause so much chaos that it'd drive Britain's pension funds to the brink of insolvency!
She's not denying that her extremism almost collapsed the pension funds, she's crying that nobody warned her that this was one of the specific things that might happen.
The cognitive dissonance is astounding. She's whining that there was too much "pessimism and scepticism" about her radical right agenda, yet she's also complaining that she wasn't specifically warned about one of the many negative outcomes, as if she wouldn't have just dismissed it as unwarranted scepticism, like she did with all of the other warnings she was given about the negative consequences of her economic radicalism.
She also takes aim at Joe Biden and the IMF, as if international concerns about her economic extremism were some kind of conspiracy against her economic genius!
For decades the IMF has enforced neoliberal reforms like privatisation, social security cuts, and handouts for the mega-rich all across the world, so if even they were warning that your economic agenda was too radically right-wing, most people might accept that they'd tried to go too far, but not Truss. Apparently it's all a big conspiracy because nobody in the world was smart enough to appreciate her economic genius!
As for Joe Biden, what was he supposed to say on the subject of Britain's self-inflicted economic meltdown? Is it any surprise that he decided to juxtapose the success of his "Build Back Better" investment plan with the spectacular failure of Truss's scheme to lavish handouts on corporations and the mega rich at the expense of the rest of the British economy?
Truss claims that she understands that she's "not blameless" and that "soul-searching has not been easy", but all of her blame-shifting and self-deception in the rest of her delusional diatribe show no signs that either of these things are remotely true.
Even now she's unwilling to admit that that last things Britain needed after a decade and a half of stumbling from one crisis to another was another punishing dose of austerity and another massive programme of handouts for corporations and the mega-rich.
And the only way she can maintain the absurd delusion that she was right, is if literally everyone else (the OBR, the Treasury, the Bank of England, the IMF, the markets, her predecessors, her successor, her own Tory MPs ...) are all part of some sinister leftist conspiracy to prevent her from bringing about her glorious new dawn!
