What was it Angela Rayner said? Something about replacing her long, awkward silence with a series of short awkward silences?
Is there a context to this that makes it not completely demented?
Under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, there was a two week period where Parliament got to change its mind (i.e. because a new government was formed) before the automatic dissolution happened.
This was to replicate the fuzzy convention, which things like the Lascelles Principles tried to crystallize, that a loss of confidence shouldn’t result in an election in some circumstances where there’s another viable government in the House of Commons.
But, I was sure I read somewhere that she was going to STAND FIRM!
She needs to get Argentina to invade the Falklands again.
They may yet do something even sillier over the Northern Ireland Protocol: nothing like a Two Minutes’ Hate on the EU to gee up the troops (they think).
Is Kwasi Kwarteng doomed? Somebody has to take the blame.
She doesn’t seem to be living up to the usual definition of a truss, but getting tied up in something? Yes.
I largely agree, but I wouldn’t put Cameron in the same category as his successors. As I remember it, he governed reasonably well (tempered by the coalition, which I think was a good influence on government at the time) until he massively fucked up over Brexit - and then resigned in cowardly fashion (IMHO). Of course, at the time we didn’t know about Greensill etc. But it seems to me he did OK before ending in (catastrophic) failure - the others started as failures and got worse.
I would also say that the biggest political error the UK made was not in voting for Brexit, but in the way it was so badly mismanaged by May and Johnson.
Imagine if Labour had elected David Miliband rather than his less-electable brother Ed?
None of this might have happened.
Corbyn, Brexit, Johnson, Truss… none of it.
Don’t forget Truss and her important role in Brexit. As foreign secretary she went around the world in an effort to persuade other countries to agree world class trade deals to replace all that EU single market nonsense. The were certainly falling over themselves in their eagerness to sign up to Global Britain unchained. The trade deficit says it all. I am sure it played well to the party faithful. Pity Biden was so cool.
Under these Prime Ministers the reputation of the UK as a stable and reliable trading partner has been trashed.
More headless chickens. Once upon a time it was Labour Party conferences that were seething with rats-in-a-sack infighting…
Did she seriously just do a “Chaos is a ladder…” in her speech?
That is why in Britain we need to do things differently. Whenever there is change, there is disruption. Not everyone will be in favour. But everyone will benefit from the result: a growing economy and a better future. That is what we have a clear plan to deliver.
I see “anti-growth coalition” is being floated as a buzzword. I doubt it’s going to stick.
Also, what the hell was with the hands.
I find it interesting that you speak of such trade deals in glowing terms, “falling over themselves” was definitely a description which was used, but it should be added “to take advantage of a UK desperate for trade deals and giving up everything and anything”.
This in the end has sold pretty much all of the UK farming out, Australian and New Zealand meat of much lower standards can be imported cheaply into the UK, while the UK farmers have to keep to the higher quality standards (and would likely take years to lower the standards enough to match the competition). UK farmers, like the fishermen before them, have been royally screwed over in order to declare a victory to people too stupid to recognise a defeat.
At best she negotiated rollover deals same as the EU had. Which then locks the same farmers into food standards requirements they cannot lower if they want to sell to them.
The big ludicrous claim of the Australian trade deal is that it saved a few pence on “tim-tams”, an Australian biscuit nobody eats in the UK (apart from Ozzies I suppose).
Apparently also you need to look closely on the label in the supermarket nowadays, to see whether than Ecuadorian lime has been sprayed with carcinogenic pesticide banned in the EU. As if you know the horrible crap we’ve previously not been eating.
None of it holds up to the slightest scrutiny yet terms like “world class trade deals” seems to still be used here.
I suspect filmstar_en was being just the teensiest bit sarcastic at Ms T’s expense.
Yes, the civil servant who advised against the actions of the mini budget and consequences was sacked. They have plenty of economic advisors in the civil service who know what is going on, even now, given they’ve been in such reality denial for so long that they removed a lot of expertise.
The stock market remains 10% below what it was a month ago, the mortgage payments will be shooting up shortly (depends on how many were locked into fixed term ones, but such shifts are spoken in 2-3 times jump in mortgages), the currency plunge will have an effect on inflation, fuel prices, as has the drop in currency in general (they have set the new low on the currency, and now they’re celebrating they’ve reached a low from the mid 80s before that).
The pound is worth a good 20% less than it was six months ago, and with inflation at 10-20% and doing nothing about that the currency flight will continue. Falling currency and high inflation is a death spiral which needs dealt with when these fantasists are talking about mystical growth which will never recover.
That’s not covering the half arsed fuel cost policy which is a loan rather than a limit, six months too late, and lied about (it’s pretty vague what it is doing, and its not limiting total bills to £2,500, that’s some sort of average), which means the supposed 1% tax cut will be lost in energy bills which have quadrupled already before this supposed fix.
The economy may not have collapsed quite yet, but the gears are in motion and they drove off the Brexit cliff willingly before, and are hitting the “gas” for the next cliff hard.
Looks like the Truss’s speech at the Tory party conference has tanked the pound a good 5 cents, so it’s claimed.
Boris Johnson was very fond of proclaiming various British enterprises to be ‘world class’. It is boosterism and he was rather good at it. It went down well with the party and invites everyone to celebrate some subjective judgement on status without examining the details too closely. He was not a politician who dwelt too much on detail.
So it is with Truss. It do wonder whether there is anything about her that is original. She simply copies the style of other successful Conservative politicians, most notably Thatcher’s posturing. Thatcher famously employed the Saatchi to develop her style and messaging at a time when Labour was all about dressing down as if they had just done a shift in a factory. These days it seems to be the ‘fake it until you make it’ generation who imagine that simply being constantly in the public eye confers some kind of talent.
Truss did a ‘U’ turn on the high rate tax cut issue. That was very un-Thatcher like. But I think she has done it early enough to get away with it. Especially this early in a premiership. We are waiting to hear about the rest of her political program. While the Conservative party likes to lap up the right wing rhetoric, the MPs need something to sell to the voters. Many of them are very nervous that they will lose their seats in the next election unless something is done to reassure the voters in poorer parts of the country that their confidence in the Conservative party under Boris Johnson would ‘level up’ the country was misplaced. This is ‘One Nation’ Conservatism. The fear is that Truss may have swung too far to the right to appeal to the centre ground of UK politics and it will be lost to Labour.
The big issues in the UK are economic and no amount of rhetoric is going to soften the impact of energy and mortgage bills to be paid each month.
There is much more that can be done to stimulate the economy than hoping borrowing funded tax cuts for the better off will trickle down.
We are waiting for her to reveal the ‘cunning plan’.
Stock markets across the world are down in the last month. UK market cap. is down about 4%, not 10%. Besides, taking the transient value of the stock market as some kind of test of the wisdom of government policy is questionable. Employing it when market falls happen to coincide with the point one wants to make is pure cherry picking.
As for the pound, most currencies have fallen sharply against the dollar recently. The pound has fallen about 14% against the dollar in the last six months, not 20%. Against other major currencies, it is down 4 or 5%. Versus the Euro, for example, it is within the range it has occupied for much of the last decade and more.
The story here is mostly the strength of the dollar, due to Fed actions and the dollar’s status as a safe haven in times of crisis.
And the base rate, even if it reaches 6% or whatever people are projecting, won’t make everyone’s mortgage payments “shoot up”, as was suggested. It will mostly affect people with large outstanding balances and those coming off fixed rates, who are a fairly small proportion of all mortgage holders. Not “everybody” by any stretch.
That group may well find things tough, and if somebody has saddled themselves with a mortgage that becomes unaffordable in the event of (historically quite unremarkable) interest rates, I can see that it might be tempting to find someone else to blame. Yes, that someone could well be the government, so rising interest rates are not usually a vote winner, although savers like them.
But I’m not trying to let Truss and Kwarteng off the hook, merely offering a counterpoint to the hysteria. Truss has spent political capital that she hasn’t earned on what are quite radical proposals. Those saying Truss has no mandate for this may not be quite correct constitutionally, but politically they have a point. Unless and until she wins a general election (seems pretty unlikely right now) she’s in no position to do anything much except general stewardship of the government. She wasn’t even the choice of her own MPs. She doesn’t seem to understand that merely being appointed PM doesn’t instantly give you authority.
If Truss somehow does win the next election with a solid majority, only then would she be entitled to pursue her own agenda.