Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Tamas]

I am not following in detail, but as unimpressive and repulsive as Sunak is, how can Truss be the preferred choice for the party members? Are they really like Republicans, going with the biggest nutcase?

[Richard Hakluyt]

After they voted Johnson in I contemplated joining so that I would have a vote in their next shitshow election. Such a vote being in practice about 200 times more valuable than my actual vote. But the thought of Tory members contacting me, possibly even in person, was just too revolting.

Edit : in reply to the good Admiral.

[Tamas]

After they voted Johnson in I contemplated joining so that I would have a vote in their next shitshow election. Such a vote being in practice about 200 times more valuable than my actual vote. But the thought of Tory members contacting me, possibly even in person, was just too revolting.

Edit : in reply to the good Admiral.

I actually briefly considered membership for that very reason and discarded the idea for the same reason as well. 

[Sheilbh]

I'm not at all impressed with Sunak...he would be the guaranteed fail I think.

But Truss...there is still that concern that she is a complete lightweight nutter 

I thought this piece by David Gauke was interesting. I heard him on the Guardian podcast about this and he was far more positive about Truss than I expected given his politics:

Tory members are taking an enormous gamble by backing Liz Truss
The Foreign Secretary's political skills are underrated but her readiness to dismiss expert opinion is a risk.
By David Gauke

Having tentatively predicted that Liz Truss would become prime minister in the autumn, the likelihood is that this will now happen on 5 September. She has already overcome her biggest hurdle – winning the support of enough Conservative MPs to make the final two – and all the polling suggests she has a commanding lead with party members. Anecdotally, I hear much the same thing.

Truss is a bit of a mystery to many close followers of politics. She can be a poor communicator – the "pork markets" speech will not be forgotten by those who saw it – and her record as a minister is mixed, but she looks set to reach the pinnacle of British politics. She voted Remain but has reached the final two thanks to the support of the most die-hard Brexiteers. She was once a Liberal Democrat calling for the abolition of the monarchy but now finds her support on the right. She is accused of being both an inflexible ideologue and a flip-flopping opportunist. 

Before exploring this further, I have a confession to make that is unlikely to endear me to many New Statesman readers. I rather like her. On a personal level, I have always found her engaging, a bit quirky and with a teasing sense of humour. Contrary to the impression she sometimes gives in public, she can be very good fun.

Her political skills can be underrated. She can be perceptive – I recall her telling me about the UK's political realignment long before the idea became commonplace. In contrast to the current Prime Minister, she is not motivated by the desire to hold office for the sake of it but wishes to gain power because she wants to do things. She is hard-working and diligent. In general, she does have a clear sense of direction and set of values (small state, libertarian), notwithstanding her changed allegiances. 

I got to know her a little when we were both involved in an organisation called the National Association of Conservative Graduates in the late 1990s and our paths crossed again when competing for selection in a safe Conservative seat in 2003 (fortunately for me, the good folk of South West Hertfordshire Conservative Association chose the local candidate).

In government, we had many dealings when I was chief secretary to the Treasury and she was in charge of the Ministry of Justice – a troublesome department for the Treasury. She succeeded me as chief secretary and, after a brief spell at the Department for Work and Pensions, I found myself doing her old job at the MoJ (which continued to be a troublesome department for the Treasury). I generally found her a tough but fair interlocutor. She was certainly an enthusiastic supporter – on value-for-money grounds – of my desire to reduce the prison population.

It would be fair to say that her time at the MoJ was not a happy one. She was caught up in the row over the Daily Mail's "Enemies of the People" headline and she should have condemned it. In mitigation, she was under immense pressure from the then-powerful No 10 not to do so. She was in a weak political position and lacked an instinctive understanding of her responsibilities as lord chancellor. It damaged an already uncomfortable relationship with the judiciary and she is still bruised by the experience. It was a role for which she was not well suited.

There is a thread that runs through Truss's career – her youthful republicanism, her libertarianism, her desire to take on the education "blob" as a junior minister, her difficulties with the judiciary, her dismissal of concerns about a no-deal Brexit (about which we frequently disagreed in cabinet), her support for Boris Johnson, and her current criticism of both Treasury orthodoxy and the Bank of England. She is by both temperament and conviction a rebel, an anti-establishment figure wary – even dismissive – of authority and received wisdom. She sees herself – and here the echoes of Margaret Thatcher are unmistakable – as an outsider who is bolder and more ambitious than the risk-averse, defeatist, privileged, establishment men whom she finds so condescending.

If the polls are to be believed, it is what the party members are seeing as well. They want a leader who, through strength of will, will somehow deliver the enterprise economy she promises, take on the "liberal elite" and deliver the supposed benefits of Brexit. They want another optimistic insurgent.

One worry, however, must be that Truss's self-confidence may be misplaced. What if the Treasury is right about the risks of unfunded tax cuts? What if demographic pressures mean that public spending will have to rise? What if the EU cannot be strong-armed into repealing the Northern Ireland protocol? What if our long-term prosperity depends upon the strength and credibility of the institutions which she disparages? What if her policies do scare the markets? What if, after all, expert opinion on a multitude of matters turns out to be right and Truss's instincts turn out to be wrong? Stubbornness, in those circumstances, is no virtue.

Challenging received wisdom is one thing, but assuming that the experts are always wrong is another. The biggest risk of a Prime Minister Truss – and I think it is a very real and substantial risk – is that her determination is not tempered by realism and a willingness to listen to expert opinion. Conservative Party members admire her ideological clarity, but they are taking the most enormous gamble on her judgement.

I think there is an element of vibes about this that she's being seen as the crazy right-wing candidate while Sunak (austerity 2.0, prison hulks for migrants and zero building on the green belt) is the sensible moderate. But the key line in that piece that slightly warms me to Truss over Sunak is: "she is not motivated by the desire to hold office for the sake of it but wishes to gain power because she wants to do things".

Because that's not a sense I get from Sunak - I think because of politics or temperament May and Johnson were not great at actually doing things. I don't agree with her politics but I think of the two I would rather a PM who is trying to do something than someone who is just going to salami slice and block things.

And it's the typical bind - I think if Sunak is successful based on what he's talking about it means the Tories lose the next election but aren't humiliated and probably shore up the blue wall and there's not much difference if he's not very successful. If Truss is successful I think she'll have actually achieved something and we get another 5 years of Tory government, but if she fails it will be a disaster.

Not sure

Perhaps I am being old-fashioned but I also don't like non-doms and holders of green cards etc being government ministers. It displays a lack of comitment to the country. Whatever achievments or failures ministers are responsible for they should live with rather than swanning off to a preferred alternative country...glares at Clegg.

Yeah - I tend to think that it is probably better to base voting and participation in politics on residence more than citizenship - so I don't really think Brits abroad (after, say, 10 years) should vote in British elections. But I really like the Scottish approach that if you are lawfully resident here, you can vote in our election. The bit I'd add is and you pay your taxes/are tax resident

[Richard Hakluyt]

I suppose Gauke knows her far better than we do 

Perhaps her sometimes weird presentations are merely a feature rather than some fundamental key to her character.

I do think we need to do something, which is why I find Starmer so frustrating, but a program of change needs to be thought out and needs consistent support...I really don't think the Tories are up to doing anything difficult though. A couple of more years of drift then, which may even continue after the next general election 

[Sheilbh]

I suppose Gauke knows her far better than we do 

Perhaps her sometimes weird presentations are merely a feature rather than some fundamental key to her character.

Yes - although I thought this by Sam Freedman who was a Lib Dem spad in Education when she was a junior minister was interesting and, perhaps, rather more concerning:

Liz Truss

In a recent post on his substack Dominic Cummings wrote:
    "I gave Truss the nickname 'human hand grenade' when she worked at the Department for Education. She said this week it was a 'compliment' because she gets things done. No. It was because she caused chaos INSTEAD OF getting things done."

It was Nadine Dorries who said the nickname was a compliment, not Truss herself. But otherwise this is accurate. I was an adviser at the Department for Education for six months of Truss's time as a junior minister and Dominic did indeed coin the "human hand grenade" nickname, which has stuck. (He gives everyone nicknames. It's a skill. If we get enough subscribers one day I'll tell you his nickname for me....) And he's right that she caused chaos.

I didn't dislike her. She was personally cheery and polite. She really did want to improve the education system, and was genuinely interested in policy. She worked hard. In these ways she's nothing like Johnson who is a straightforward narcissist.

But she is chaotic and eccentric, with a manic energy. She grabs hold of random ideas and forces everyone around her to spend inordinate amounts of time talking her out of them. Everyone, from officials to the other Ministers, found her difficult to work with. If you'd told me then that one day she'd be favourite to be Prime Minister I'd have laughed you out of the room.

She was ideological but not in a consistent way. On childcare she wanted, and still wants, to massively deregulate the sector, removing quality controls. On maths education she was determinedly centralist, basically wanted to write the exam specifications, and setting out in great detail what schools should and shouldn't teach. She had very strange ideas about school funding, at one point she wanted to fund them on the number of hours they were open (to encourage longer school days and after school activities). It took several meetings before I could get her to see the perverse incentives this would cause. I took to avoiding meetings with her unless officials begged me to join.

As far as I can tell, from talking to people who've worked with her since, she hasn't changed. There's a reason most of her time in cabinet has been spent in jobs involving lots of pleasantries with foreign dignitaries, trips abroad, and minimal decision making. When Theresa May made Boris Johnson foreign secretary it was described as a "golden cage" – a prestigious job that kept him out of the way. When a big issue – like Ukraine – does arise the Prime Minister tends to become their own foreign minister, as we've seen with Johnson and his regular calls to Zelensky. Truss has held no big domestic brief and having her apply her methods to the whole Government agenda does not feel like a prospect for orderly administration.

One thing that everyone who's worked with Truss agrees on is that she's incredibly ambitious. Of course most politicians who make it to cabinet level are, but she's had a burning passion to be Prime Minister from a young age. As such she has been tempted into a Faustian pact with Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries duetting as the devil.  She's agreed to be the candidate of the right of the party, knowing that is her only way to win, but she is not in instinctive agreement with the list of MPs who've ended up backing her.

One of the big questions about the first few months of a prospective Truss premiership is how she'd manage this pact in Government. Would she fill the cabinet with Boris re-treads? Would she whip the party to absolve him of misleading Parliament (should the Privileges Committee find that he did, and he stays an MP after leaving office)? Will she pursue immigration, the evils of wokery, and the Northern Ireland Protocol with the vigour they demand?

My best guess as to her who chancellor would be is Simon Clarke, the current Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and someone who signed up to her campaign straight away. They seem broadly aligned on what an initial "emergency" tax cutting budget would look like. But they've also spoken of doing a new spending review which would kick off a whole series of rows with new ministerial colleagues and highlight cuts to public spending at a time when services are collapsing. It would also give Truss the opportunity to push various policy agendas (such as childcare deregulation) in the guise of spending cuts. It's a recipe for more chaos.

It's hard to tell how she'd deal with the level of scrutiny and pressure the job would entail. She's done relatively little media as foreign secretary and is widely seen as a very poor communicator despite voice coaching and a deliberate manner that is different from what she's like in person. You could imagine her getting an initial bounce just because she is likely to give the appearance of action, after a lengthy period of disinterest from Johnson. But it's difficult to see how she wouldn't fall over reasonably fast given her way both of making decisions and communicating them.

I do think we need to do something, which is why I find Starmer so frustrating, but a program of change needs to be thought out and needs consistent support...I really don't think the Tories are up to doing anything difficult though. A couple of more years of drift then, which may even continue after the next general election 

Agreed. I keep moaning about it, but I think a real problem is that they seem to be going through the motions of Kinnock/Smith/Blair and almost cosplaying how New Labour came to power.

There has been substantial and, I think, really important action on addressing anti-semitism in the party and trying to de-toxify it - which is, I suppose, the Kinnock bit. But whatever else you think about New Labour, there was a genuine project. Blair, Brown, Cook, Mandelson etc had done a lot of thinking about the country's position and issues, about the politics of the party and winning, and about what to do when they won office. I think it had real substance as well as spin, and it was almost aggressively of its time - it was not interested in the past but in Britain in the 90s. They really had an analysis and a strategy which is, I think, a large part of why they won. I don't get a sense that there's anything like that going on with Starmer, or if there is it's not being communicated coherently (which suggest to me they've not done the thinking yet).

It's not that they lack policies, they've got loads. It's the vision thing that's lacking that ties that together and gives us a sense of Starmer's diagnosis of Britain in the 2020s and where he wants to go. I'd make a partial exception for the Treasury because I think Rachel Reeves seems to have the most coherent policy offer and message.

In part I wonder if it's actually just a feature of Starmer. A large part of why he won the leadership, in my view, is because he's basically an inoffensive middle of the road Labour person with middle of the road Labour views which reflected back to most members. I think he's been far more ruthless than I expected (especially with the internal stuff), but I don't get why he wants to be PM or any sense of drive about that. He's almost just a generic Labour person who wants a generic Labour government - it might be enough to win this time, but I'm not sure how long that'll last.

[Tamas]

I suppose Gauke knows her far better than we do 

Perhaps her sometimes weird presentations are merely a feature rather than some fundamental key to her character.

I do think we need to do something, which is why I find Starmer so frustrating, but a program of change needs to be thought out and needs consistent support...I really don't think the Tories are up to doing anything difficult though. A couple of more years of drift then, which may even continue after the next general election 

Do you think there's actual support (which would survive the disadvantages/compromises required) for something more than drift among Labour voters though, not to mention the larger population? Honest question.

[Sheilbh]

Do you think there's actual support (which would survive the disadvantages/compromises required) for something more than drift among Labour voters though, not to mention the larger population? Honest question.

I saw Duncan Weldon on this and I think his framing is good - and I think it's true in the UK but (as so often) also the rest of Europe. I think the key issue on things like growth, investment, change etc is that for most of our histories as democracies it's been about building coalitions between interest groups - industrial, commercial, agricultural, capital and labour etc.

In the UK - and Europe - there is now effectively a "post-economic" voting block of people who are retired, or close to retirement, who are pretty insulated from economic cycles because of guaranteed pensions and asset ownership (which the British state has encouraged so people can be secure in retirement). That group are growing and they are more likely to vote. It's possible - and Theresa May did it I think - to win an election without even winning a plurality of working age voters (the cross over age went down in 2019).

I don't know how that necessarily interacts with growth, reform, change, climate etc - but I think it definitely does and that it matters. The entrenched, vested interests of the 20th century in the UK were labour and capital. Compromise was not possible and was rejected, so we get Thatcher who wins it utterly for capital. I think on infrastructure, on housing, on public sector reform, on energy transition - and probably on relations with the EU and possibly immigration (though not right now - and I can see a case of this going the other way) - the divide in the 21st century seems to be, in effect, between economic and post-economic voters/interests (and there is an extent that this is just a development of capital v labour - but capital is now more about extracting).

To fix it either Labour or the Tories need to make a pitch that appeals to post-economic or economic voters respectively, which I don't think either party is doing (I think what Johnson pitched around leveling up is going in the right direction but undelivered and not really fully thought through), or, as in the 20th century, one side will win utterly and crush the other. I think we see some of the weirdness this has on politics in young people (who broadly vote for the left) being more supportive of tax cuts than old people (who broadly vote for the left) - but that does make sense because working people pay more taxes and the welfare state really under-delivers for working age people, while older voters pay lower taxes and rely more on the state. I don't fully know how that interacts with other "re-alignments".

[Tamas]

Again a question coming from not following the details: is the tax cut fetish being underpinned by any explanation of why that is a good thing in the current environment, or its simply the case of "I am not a LibDem now, but a Tory, and Tories cut taxes. I'll cut taxes!"?

[Zoupa]

You already know the answer to that one.

[Richard Hakluyt]

I suppose Gauke knows her far better than we do 

Perhaps her sometimes weird presentations are merely a feature rather than some fundamental key to her character.

I do think we need to do something, which is why I find Starmer so frustrating, but a program of change needs to be thought out and needs consistent support...I really don't think the Tories are up to doing anything difficult though. A couple of more years of drift then, which may even continue after the next general election 

Do you think there's actual support (which would survive the disadvantages/compromises required) for something more than drift among Labour voters though, not to mention the larger population? Honest question.

I don't think there is, so the decline will continue. We are at about step 3 of an inadvertent 10-step plan to emulate Venezuela.

The selfishness of the elderly is important here, as the analysis that Sheilbh shows. Reminds me of Louis XV and his comment "Après moi le déluge".

We are in the transition to retirement in the Hakluyt household here; as that takes place our tax burden will fall precipitously and we will become increasingly well off....pointlessly so imo. To quote someone or other "That...Is...A...Disgrace!" 

[Josquius]

I do think covid and the shift to remote working might help tackle the elderly problem a little.

Key to their being such a problem is that they "own" such a large chunk of the country, loads of towns where almost everyone who wants to do something with their life has fled leaving behind a very grey town.

Get actual working people back into these places though and I really do believe it can help shift the vote. Both directly in these people voting and indirectly with their influence on others.

[Sheilbh]

Again a question coming from not following the details: is the tax cut fetish being underpinned by any explanation of why that is a good thing in the current environment, or its simply the case of "I am not a LibDem now, but a Tory, and Tories cut taxes. I'll cut taxes!"?

With her I think she's probably always been a tax cutter. Gauke said she is basically "a liberal" in her politics and I think she is on the libertarian wing of the Tories. I think if she stayed in the Lib Dems she'd have been strongly on the Nick Clegg/Orange Book side. Tory members are far less keen on tax cuts than Tory MPs so I think part of that was aimed at Tory MPs which is perhaps why it's mentioned less now.

So part of the way she explains it is just so the state takes less of people's income during a cost of living crisis - that is a very inefficient way of supporting people though. But in the debate she linked tax cuts to "radical reform", change, "taking a risk" (what she said she wished Sunak would do more) and "challenging Treasury orthodoxy".

Separately Tom Tugendhat has endorsed Truss. I'm seeing lots of very disappointed centrist-y people like Anna Soubry saying this must be craven ambition, and it might be. On the other hand, given that Tugendhat is chair of the foreign affairs select committee and probably leading China hawk on the backbenches, it's not exactly a surprise given the Sunak's views on that issue (until about last week). Similar to the Ben Wallace endorsement in that way.

Edit: Also various polls now showing that Sunak and Truss both do about as well as each other against Starmer - which is a huge blow to Sunak's campaign which has been based on being the only one who could win the next election. Similarly she's hugely improved her debate performance/public speaking in the course of this campaign.

But I also keep thinking of that focus group that people thought Sunak was a better communicator but too slick and they wanted someone they felt they could trust (especially after Johnson) which was more Truss than Sunak, given his fine and wife's non-dom status. And they also wanted someone who "understood/was in touch with people like me" - which, again, is a challenge for Sunak as he would be (maybe) our richest PM ever.

[Sheilbh]

Not great when, apparently, people want a PM who "understands people like me":

Mirror Politics
@MirrorPolitics
Rishi Sunak builds his own private pool as local swimming baths face closure

[Sheilbh]

Good news BNO scheme for Hong Kongers extended to all young people (born after the handover) who have at least one parent with a BNO passport. Hopefully anyone who wants out can get out.

Edit: And a reminder of what the UK could have won - Jeremy Corbyn speaking to a pro-Assad, pro-Putin Iranian funded network about Russia-Ukraine:
https://twitter.com/MayadeenEnglish/status/1554132326610878465?s=20&t=Ubas1lzOUhY1GBAA-stcyg

Of course that network is a choice, he's an ex-leader of the Labour party. He absolutely could speak to the BBC, Sky, the Guardian, Owen Jones, Novara etc - but this is who he is and what he cares about. The issue isn't just when he was leader either. His real interest in politics is foreign affairs and within the Labour left he was known as their "foreign minister" while McDonnell and Abbott were more interested in domestic politics. But it is just morally vacuous.

Edit: Also there's very broad consensus in the UK on Ukraine - but I wonder what would have happened if Corbyn was still leader. It might have been that this caused the scales to fall from some people's eyes - but I equally suspect we'd see lots of commentators and people online worrying about "Ukrainian nazis" and a Tory regime pushing us close to a nuclear war.