Truss is committed to the small state and is something of a free market radical but it remains to be seen if she will be able to steer the UK out of troubled waters. (AP Photo)
New UK prime minister claims Boris Johnson’s legacy, inherits a country in crisis. The opposition may see her as an easier candidate to beat than Rishi Sunak
Written by Ali Khan Mahmudabad
September 5, 2022 8:30:13 pm
The race for 10 Downing Street has been watched with great interest around the world and especially in South Asia. Rishi Sunak, the Indian-origin Chancellor of the Exchequer was at odds with Liz Truss, secretary of state for foreign, commonwealth, and development affairs. Despite Sunak leading the internal elections and garnering the support of the majority of his colleagues in parliament, Truss, who visited India at the end of March this year, trumped him by winning the support of a majority of Conservative Party members.
Just before the announcement of Liz Truss as the new UK prime minister, the British pound dropped to the lowest level against the US dollar since 1985. In a way, this low is perhaps telling of what Truss will have to face in the coming months and years. A few days ago, in reply to being asked about what she would do about the UK’s economic woes she evasively answered that, if elected, she would act “within a week”. In her victory speech, the path as to how exactly she would stabilise the economy remained unclear as she promised to “deliver a bold plan to cut taxes and grow our economy,” Truss further said, “I will deliver on the energy crisis, dealing with people’s energy bills.” Sunak had primarily attacked Truss for assuming that tax cuts by taking on more debt and not reducing spending would lead to economic growth. Truss has been somewhat of a tax-cut crusader who firmly believed in Brexit and models herself on Margret Thatcher. Her image astride a tank in Estonia went viral and was compared to a similar photo of Thatcher from West Germany in 1986. However, the UK’s third female PM, whose mother took her to anti-Thatcher rallies, will not have much time to celebrate.
The UK faces stagflation — “recession combined with rapidly increasing prices”. Inflation rates were more than 10 per cent in July largely due to the increasing cost of living and particularly spiralling costs of energy, fuel and food. Just energy bills could spike more than 80 per cent. This is in no small part due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but is also partly to do with Brexit’s consequences and of course the pandemic. The UK imports almost half of its food and a majority of its oil and gas, which makes it particularly susceptible to global political and economic volatility. Inflation is expected to touch 13 per cent by the end of the year. The UK has a shrinking labour force and an ageing population with long wait times at the National Health Service. Its GDP mothballed in April 2020 due to the pandemic but only managed to recover partially, especially when compared to France, whose economy picked up much more rapidly post the initial years of the pandemic.
Quite apart from domestic woes, Truss will have an equally difficult challenge in trying to consolidate and unite the Conservative Party. She beat Sunak by 81,326 votes to 60,399, a 57 per cent-43 per cent victory, which was a closer contest than many analysts had predicted. However, as her victory speech illustrated, she is a continuity candidate. Her praise of Boris Johnson shows that she wants to cast herself as a leader who will pick up where he left off: “Boris: you got Brexit done, you crushed Jeremy Corbyn, you rolled out the vaccine, and you stood up to Vladimir Putin.” Truss added, “You are admired from Kyiv to Carlisle.” Sunak, of course, had raised the banner of revolt against Johnson and as a consequence had split the conservative party. Truss’ promise “to deliver” the 2024 elections might very well turn out to be a false hope as the Conservative Party trails behind the Labour Party in many opinion polls. Furthermore, the fact that the Conservatives have gone through four leaders in just over six years has led to a widespread belief that there is no unifying figure or set of policies which can bring victory in the general elections. For the Labour Party, it will probably be easier to campaign against Truss than Sunak and so her victory is probably, albeit secretly, also being celebrated across the aisle. Labour leader Keir Starmer congratulated the new PM and then said: “After 12 years of the Tories all we have to show for it is low wages, high prices, and a Tory cost of living crisis.” Tory is a colloquial term for conservatives and is often used by the opposition as a derogatory term. It is derived from the middle Irish tóraidhe, which meant outlaw or robber.
Truss, known in Conservative Party circles, as the “queen of Instagram” will now travel to Balmoral in Scotland to meet the very Queen whose position she wanted to abolish in 1994 during her days as a liberal-democrat. She moved a motion to abolish the monarchy at a Lib-Dem conference. The substantial changes over Truss’ personal political journey have made people sceptical of whether she will privilege power over ideology and image over substance, as some of her critics have alleged. Truss is committed to the small state and is something of a free market radical but it remains to be seen if she will be able to steer the UK out of troubled waters. Indeed, Truss also faces heat for her pugnacious statements on China, her bellicose attitude towards Russia and the impending trade war she might trigger with the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill. All in all, it looks set to be a bleak winter in the UK.
The writer is, Head of Department, Political Science at Ashoka University