As King Charles III leads the monarchy into a new era, Liz Truss is determined to do the same for British politics.
Having already unveiled a massive package to help families with soaring energy bills, she’s now focusing her attention on growing the economy.
The process will begin on Friday with a mini-Budget reversing the recent national insurance hike and scrapping planned corporation tax rises. There are reports she may go further by cutting income tax.
These measures will put more money in people’s pockets, create jobs, attract investment and fuel competitiveness.
As King Charles III leads the monarchy into a new era, Liz Truss is determined to do the same for British politics. Having already unveiled a massive package to help families with soaring energy bills, she’s now focusing her attention on growing the economy
In a speech at the United Nations today, Miss Truss will announce her arrival on the world stage by exhorting the international community to stand firm against authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China.
She will argue that prosperity and security go hand in hand. Democracy can prevail only if the West has economic strength, she will say.
It’s a bold and defiant start to her career as Prime Minister – and firmly rooted in traditional Conservative thinking.
Some will say that cutting taxes will fuel inflation and drive up interest rates. But we already have the highest burden since the 1950s. The stale Treasury orthodoxies of the past two decades have failed miserably to deliver substantial growth.
As Miss Truss will say: ‘We want people to keep more of the money they earn. We believe that freedom trumps instruction.’
It’s an unashamedly Tory solution – and one that should make us all better off.
Wait for the right deal
On the face of it, ruling out any immediate prospect of a trade deal with the US would seem to be a serious economic setback.
As a new agreement was considered a prime post-Brexit objective, Miss Truss’s decision to put negotiations on ice has been greeted with predictable derision by the Remainer chattering classes.
In reality, however, it is a shrewd piece of strategic thinking.
There was next to no chance of getting a deal anyway while Joe Biden, an ardent Irish Republican, is in the White House.
Now at a stroke, Miss Truss has shown she will not be blackmailed by the US President, who has intimated that any agreement would be conditional on Britain kowtowing to the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
There was next to no chance of getting a deal anyway while Joe Biden, an ardent Irish Republican, is in the White House
But is delaying a deal really such a disaster? The EU doesn’t have one. Furthermore, we already have a massive trade surplus with America, based on financial and legal services which have never required a deal – and still don’t.
Meanwhile, Labour and the Lib Dems are crowing that not having an agreement amounts to failure. Yet they have consistently opposed one by spreading scare stories that the UK market would be flooded with cheap chlorinated chicken, and parts of the NHS would be flogged to US private firms. What hypocrites.
We will get our deal eventually, but the timing must be right and it has to be of mutual benefit. We should not take one at any price.
Sick ransom demand
Nye Bevan, the founding father of the NHS, said the only way he could get the British Medical Association to work for it was to ‘stuff their mouths with gold’.
More than seven decades later, has anything really changed?
The news that they are demanding £250 an hour for doctors working overtime to clear the Covid backlog will come as a body blow to patients waiting in pain for postponed treatment and operations.
This is less a pay claim than a ransom demand – with the patient as hostage.