Liz truss has already failed — but here’s how she could turn it round | thearticle

Poor Liz Truss: for her, things are going from bad to worse. Yesterday was pretty humiliating for the Prime Minister. Officials told her to rip up her tax plans, PMQs was humbling and then

she was hauled over the coals by her own MPs during a meeting of the 1922 committee. The new normal seems to be the Labour Party with 25 per cent poll lead over the Conservatives; this

hasn’t been seen since Sir Tony Blair’s heyday. A recent YouGov Survey has Sir Keir Stammer trouncing Truss on every key attribute: compliancy, decisiveness, trust, likeability. You name it,

she’s making him look good. The problem is, Truss got into power on the back of an economic plan which spectacularly blew up in her face when it was revealed by her Chancellor, Kwasi

Kwarteng, a few weeks ago.  International markets took one look at the “mini-budget” and ran a mile, pulling investment out of UK government bonds (gilts) with them. The Bank of England has

been doing a valiant job since, trying to paper over the cracks by printing money and using it to buying Government debt. But this has to stop at some point; the main job of the Bank of

England is to keep inflation under control and by definition, printing money is inflationary. Andrew Bailey, the Bank of England Governor, stated on Tuesday he was turning the money printing

machine off tomorrow. You can call into question the stark way he told markets, but you can’t argue that it had to be done sooner rather than later. The alternative would turn the UK into

an inflationary pressure-cooker. Truss and Kwarteng seem to have lost the memo that the Bank of England was buying them time, not clearing up their mess. There has been an embarrassing

U-turn from the Government on one of the more disastrous elements of the budget, but then, nothing, other than a promise to provide some figures by Halloween. There are no scapegoats for

this mess other than Truss and “Kamikaze Kwarteng”. Are there other underlying factors? Hell yes! Putin’s war in Ukraine and the massive shocks caused by rebooting the post-pandemic global

economy are pushing inflation up around the world. However, the UK is feeling these effects worse than any other nation in the G20, other than Russia, and much of that is simply down to the

economic mismanagement of Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street. Liz Truss cannot just continue pushing in the same direction. She has to act, now. First, she’s got to kick the Chancellor out of

Number 11. The economic policies which have so spectacularly backfired were hatched between Truss and Kwarteng, so it will be grossly unfair to make the current Chancellor the fall guy.

However, for the sake of Sterling, pension investments and the UK economy, she has to step away from the current hare-brained approach. The only way she can send a clear enough message to

the markets that she’s on this, is by firing the co-architect of the current disruption. Second, she needs a Chancellor who will go back to the Golden Rule and get national debt to below 40

per cent of GDP within the economic cycle. By all means put some Covid related borrowing into a walled garden, similar to war-time borrowing, but the Government has to get back to dull,

fiscal management and severing the addiction both the Johnson and Truss administrations have to borrowing. Third, there’s a developing list of what Americans call “pork barrel”

infrastructure commitments which the Government has committed to, all in the name of “Levelling Up”. A full audit of these commitments needs to take place so we can understand how many of

these schemes represent value and which are white elephants. Some projects, like HS2, will be too far gone to pull the plug, but Truss has to stop some of these bonfires of borrowed money

before her Government shoves more families onto the food bank heap. Fourth, get exports moving. UK trading is being hammered at the moment; ranging from businesses landing fish in Peterhead

through to financial services in the City of London. The only way to get the UK economy firing again, and take advantage of the battering the pound has taken, is to get the UK exporting.

There’s no way we’re going to get a free trade agreement with the US anytime soon. Any other trade agreement with an economic powerhouse will mean compromises. Membership of other

transnational trading groups, such as the Trans-Pacific trade bloc, simply isn’t going to provide the same opportunity as exporting to the EU. It’s time for Brexit to start delivering, not

exacerbating problems in the economy. It wasn’t meant to be like this. Jacob Rees-Mogg said in a Conservative Home article on 30th December 2020 that the Brexit deal “reflects what the

British people repeatedly voted for: a zero tariff, zero quota, free trading agreement with the EU”. This hasn’t come to fruition. This might be fault of intransient bureaucrats in Brussels,

or it might be that the EU ran rings around Lord Frost and Boris Johnson. Whose fault it is doesn’t really matter; what’s important is to regain access to EU markets without the current

bureaucratic nightmare of getting goods and services out of the UK. Fifth, the Treasury needs to be broken up into separate ministries of finance and development. The Treasury has become the

country’s banker, accountant, finance department and development agency. It’s too powerful. If this had already happened, the finance ministry would have blocked Kwarteng’s growth strategy

when it was first proposed as “bloody stupid” and we wouldn’t be in this mess. In two years’ time Liz Truss will be in danger of finishing a line of four Conservative PMs in fourteen years.

They all promised much, but squandered more. Cameron, May and Johnson will not be remembered so much for their achievements, but legacies defined by the way they got kicked out of Number 10.

The way things are going, Liz Truss will be remembered as the most spectacular failure of them all. She has got to do something radical. How about start a bit of clear thinking? A MESSAGE

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