Former British prime minister Liz Truss delivers the 2023 Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy institute in Washington.Liz Truss has hit the political comeback trail with a lecture denouncing the “cost of government crisis” and “woke culture”.
On Wednesday, the Conservative former prime minister was speaking in the US and delivering the Margaret Thatcher Lecture for the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation.
Truss, whose premiership lasted 49 days, left Downing Street after her September mini-budget measures helped tank the pound.
Despite her unfunded tax cuts panicking the markets, Truss has continued to go into bat for a low tax-leading-to-high growth policy platform.
In her speech, she said she did not understand “quite how hard” it would be to change the culture of government to something more in line with what she is now advocating, acknowledging “last autumn I had a major setback”, but adding “I care too much to give up on this agenda”.
She said her plans faced “co-ordinated resistance” from her own party, the “British corporate establishment”, the International Monetary Fund and US president Joe Biden.
'Last autumn I had a major setback, but I care too much to give up'
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In a US speech, Britain's shortest serving PM Liz Truss hints she won't be walking away from a career in politics https://t.co/f2Avm1gINUpic.twitter.com/m4xCUXyjw3
She went to hit out at “the left” which has “weaponised people’s concerns about the economy and environment”, adding that terms using such as “fuel poverty” and the “climate emergency” are being used to “justify policies which are anti-growth and socialist”.
“Maybe rather than a ‘cost of living crisis’, what we’ve actually got is the ‘cost of government crisis’,” she added.
She used her speech to criticise the size of the state in the US and UK, and warned they are becoming “social democracies by the backdoor”, describing a “culture where too many people and too many businesses expect a bailout”.
She told the audience: “The sad truth is what I think we’ve seen over the past few years is a new kind of economic model taking hold in our countries, one that’s focused on redistributionism, on stagnation, and on the imbuing of woke culture into businesses. I call these people the anti-growth movement.”
“There are also the people who live in the (Washington) beltway, or they live in London, they live within the M25, and they’ve been enjoying quite a nice life,” she said elsewhere in her speech, adding “they don’t want to see the status quo changed. All of those people are part of the resistance to the change we need to see”.
