Liz Truss

A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner
by Chris Atkins
Published 6 Feb 2020

It feels as close as you can get to being dead without actually dying. I’ve always wanted to know what it would be like to attend my own funeral, and I guess this is the next best thing. 18 July Theresa May has been anointed as prime minister, and she unveils her first cabinet. Liz Truss is promoted to Justice Secretary, taking ultimate responsibility for the nation’s prisons.1 This surprises everyone, not least Liz Truss herself, who walks into Downing Street looking as if she knows as much about prisons as I did when I entered Wandsworth. Truss announces that she will continue the reform programme that was the brainchild of her predecessor, Michael Gove.

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The dense screw doesn’t twig that the Annexe must have an illegitimate streaming service, and instead chips in with his own opinion: ‘I prefer the Lannisters’ storyline; that dwarf is bloody funny.’ 17 September Liz Truss, the new Justice Secretary, has just made her first appearance in the House of Commons. A friend sends me a scathing report from politics.co.uk: ‘Prison reform looks dead in the water under Liz Truss … She waffled and giggled but rarely got close to answering the question. It was painful to watch … Asked whether there are too many or too few people sent to prison, Truss’s eyes widened like a scared rabbit … What about prisoners – as at HMP Wandsworth – spending up to 23 hours a day locked idle in their cells?

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I’m reminded of the infamous Ghost Army in the Second World War, which fooled the Germans with inflatable tanks and rubber aircraft. Ruben suddenly appears looking distraught. ‘I’ve just heard that Liz Truss isn’t visiting Trinity. She isn’t even meeting any prisoners.’ Looking round at this shower, I can’t say I entirely blame her. I remove my purple shirt and join the other Listeners going to the weekly meeting. We’re led to the mains and briefly locked in a pen by the centre. I’ve never seen the place so deserted; it’s as if all the inmates have been dissolved in bleach. Governor Bickers and Liz Truss suddenly appear behind us, and I jump back in surprise. The visitors seem equally shocked at encountering some real prisoners, and Bickers hustles them away.

Politics on the Edge: The Instant #1 Sunday Times Bestseller From the Host of Hit Podcast the Rest Is Politics
by Rory Stewart
Published 13 Sep 2023

I employed 300 people in Kabul, including thirty foreigners, and not one had been to my school. Outside this office, Cameron had launched a campaign to bring in women and people from working-class and minority-ethnic backgrounds to be MPs – people like the British Asian public affairs professional Priti Patel, or the state-educated think-tank director Liz Truss. He would promote them fast so that he could announce, proudly, to the media that his Cabinet was the most diverse in history. Nor did he ever miss a chance to insist that ‘diversity makes government better’. And yet his real inner team, and his closest friends, with whom he developed policy, were drawn from an unimaginably narrow social group.

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Beside him was a moderniser who believed that constitutional issues were irrelevant, and that Conservatives should build over the green belt. To my right a colonel’s son in an Airborne Division tie, with the easy open face and broad shoulders of a man comfortable carrying a Bren gun, was sitting beside Liz Truss: the daughter of a pacifist left-wing maths professor and teacher, who had once made a speech for the abolition of the monarchy. All applauded equally. When George Osborne stood, he looked pale and tired. Raising his hands in front of his chest, long fingers and thumbs stretched wide to their limit, he told us that his plan was to eliminate ‘the structural deficit’ within one parliament.

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He meant the ‘team players’. Or so at least it appeared to my jaundiced eye. ‘I divide the world,’ Cameron liked to say, ‘between team players and wankers: don’t be a wanker.’ A team player was someone who parroted the party line with fervour, never rebelled, and was never abashed. His younger promotions – Priti Patel, Liz Truss, and Matt Hancock – took this to a vertigo-inducing extreme. The older women, such as Amber Rudd and Anna Soubry, with adult children and long careers before Parliament, were blunter, even funny, about some issues in private. But in public all these high-fliers from my intake were fanatically supportive of David Cameron.

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell
Published 23 May 2023

Allegretti, A. (2022a) Ministers warn of scammers posing as energy bill support scheme. The Guardian. 1 October. www. theguardian.com/money/2022/oct/01/energy-bill-supportscheme-scam-alert Allegretti, A. (2022b) Gordon Brown urges Liz Truss to ‘show up’ for workers struggling with bills. The Guardian, 7 September. www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/07/gordon-brownurges-liz-truss-to-show-up-for-workers-struggling-with-bills Allen, P., Konzelmann, S.J. and Toporowski, J. (2021) The return of the state: Restructuring Britain for the common good. Newcastle: Agenda Publishing. Alstadsæter, A., Johannesen, N. and Zucman, G. (2018) Who owns the wealth in tax havens?

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Brown, G. (2022a) Kwasi Kwarteng may have U-turned, but huge spending cuts are still coming. The Guardian. 4 October. www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/04/liz-truss-kwasikwarteng-chancellor-u-turn-tax-cuts-public-services-benefits Brown, G. (2022b) Britain’s charities have done all they can to help desperate people. What will Truss do? The Guardian. 7 September. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/ sep/07/britain-charity-help-liz-truss-government-cost-of-living Brown, M. and Jones, R.E. (2021) Paint your town red: How Preston took back control and your town can too. London: Repeater Books. Browning, C. (2017) Corporation tax: could we have raised more?

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London: Intergenerational Foundation. www.if.org.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2019/01/Escape-of-the-Wealthy_Jan_2019_final-1.pdf Electoral Calculus (2022) Regression Poll September 2022. www. electoralcalculus.co.uk/blogs/ec_mrppoll_20220928.html Elgot, J. and Stewart, H. (2022) Liz Truss U-turns on plan to cut public sector pay outside London. The Guardian. 2 August. www. theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/02/liz-truss-u-turns-plancut-public-sector-pay-outside-london-tory-leadership Eliasoph, N. (1998) Avoiding politics: How Americans produce apathy in everyday life. Cambridge: Polity. Eliasoph, N. (2012) The politics of volunteering. Cambridge: Polity.

Planes, Trains and Toilet Doors: 50 Places That Changed British Politics
by Matt Chorley
Published 8 Feb 2024

In 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, energy prices again spiked and politicians again panicked about whether to launch an advertising campaign to tell people how to save money on their bills. Graham Stuart, the climate minister, declined: ‘We’re not a nanny state government.’ Ironically it was Jacob Rees-Mogg, the only member of the government to have gone campaigning with his nanny, who was in favour of the idea as business secretary but was overruled by Liz Truss. In the end she lost power before the homes of Britain did. 9 Margaret Thatcher’s bathroom, Brighton Friday, 12 October 1984 A piece of paper saved Margaret Thatcher’s life. After a long day and night working on her party conference speech, the prime minister was about to go into her bathroom on the first floor of the Grand Hotel in Brighton and prepare for bed.

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He never fully recovered, and after soldiering on with an inflammation of the lungs, likely pneumonia, he lasted as prime minister for just 119 days before he died on 8 August 1827. Yet his impact on British politics did not end there. John Bew, a professor of history and foreign policy at King’s College London who went on to advise Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak in Downing Street, has hailed Canning as the ‘torchbearer for the “liberal Tory” tradition’. When he became prime minister he split his party, with several Tory Ultras like Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington refusing to serve under him. Canning, a moderate, reached out to those in the opposition Whigs to join his cabinet, arguably sowing the seeds for the Conservative split and the emergence of the Liberal Party decades later.

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Among those who had passed, Pitt, Fox and Liverpool gained their place in history through their actions and longevity, and Perceval for the manner of his demise, but Canning became reduced, rather unfairly, to a footnote, a punchline and a pub quiz question. His record as the shortest-serving prime minister remained unbroken until Liz Truss’s brief stint almost two centuries later. Canning did, though, get a statue in Parliament Square, where he now stands alongside fellow prime ministers Lloyd George, Churchill, Peel, Palmerston, Derby and Disraeli. It might be a while before Truss joins them. 18 Frome memorial hall Thursday, 25 April 1929 ‘We are not a party created for the production of stunts,’ the prime minister told the throng in Frome, without actually being in Frome, which you might argue was quite some stunt.

Routes to Rejoin
by Stay European
Published 3 Oct 2021

thejournal.ie, 15 Mar 2021 Poll finds majority favours holding a Border poll in next five years, Irish Times, 24 January 2021 Chapter 8 UK agrees historic trade deal with Australia, Department for International Trade press release, gov.uk We’re urging Government to keep promises on trade commission ahead of Australia deal, RSPCA, 20 May 2021 UK-Australia trade deal could complicate post-Brexit solution in Northern Ireland, officials fear, Politico, 15 June 2021 UK and CPTPP nations launch formal negotiations, press release, gov.uk Boris approves ‘£200,000,000’ flagship to boost Brexit trade, Metro, 30 May 2021 Liz Truss urged to reconsider trans-Pacific free trade pact, New European, 7 April 2021 Published letter from Emily Thornberry MP to Liz Truss MP, 6 April 2021, emilythornberry.com UK applies to join trans-Pacific trade group, Financial Times, 31 January 2021 Conclusion Gordon Brown says he will not give up fight to reverse Brexit, Guardian, 10 June 2021 97 About Stay European Stay European is a UK-based grassroots campaign working to regain the rights British people lost through Brexit – in any way that we can.

The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline
by Russell Jones
Published 15 Jan 2023

I still read the Financial Times and check the BBC for UK news and football. I travel to London every couple of months. I teach political economy in the US, and I am as well versed in the genre of ‘UK decline’ as the next man. But I can honestly say that nothing in my past or in my studies prepared me for the shock of Liz Truss. I mention her because – despite not featuring much in Russell’s book, mainly because he wrote the book before she became prime minister – in many ways she ‘bookends’ Russell’s narrative rather well. I had heard her name on Radio 4 in parody and comedy, and when she became prime minister I watched the infamous ‘cheese speech’ on YouTube to catch up.

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The next week she met the Queen, who promptly died, which made me reflect further on the British predicament. Imagine starting with Churchill and ending with Truss? What a metaphor for decline. The problem with metaphors, though, is that while they illuminate they do not explain. How did the UK end up with Liz Truss as prime minister? Indeed, if you travel backwards in time, the past decade or so has been a veritable rogues gallery of less than successful politicians. But was it really any better in the 1990s and 1980s? Was I simply jaundiced by the mendacity of the current crew in comparison to the more subtle foibles of prior decades?

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Brexit could only be delivered by the pure showmen: Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and their billionaire backers. Once Brexit had been delivered in its ‘oven-ready’ but indigestible form, and after the country was subsequently battered by a pandemic that eventually brought down the showman-in-chief, the last woman standing was up next to bat. That is how, and why, the UK ended up with Liz Truss. But aside from the comedy, and the handy proof that Truss provided that bond markets really can screw you up if you try hard enough, there lies another deeper lesson with Truss. That is that when all else fails, the UK does ‘the politics of nostalgia’ better than anyone else. As Russell once again shows us, if the period from Heath to Callaghan represented the end of an era, it was an era when most people, most of the time, got better off and their life chances improved.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics
by Peter Geoghegan
Published 2 Jan 2020

Steve Bannon would develop a friendship with Boris Johnson, even claiming that he helped compose the foreign secretary’s resignation speech in July 2018.53 Writing on the Young America’s Foundation website in January 2019, Donal Blaney claimed that “treacherous ‘Conservatives’” were preventing Brexit and warned of the prospect of violence on the streets.54 The demise of the Young Britons did little to temper the growing transatlantic influence on sections of the Conservative Party. In 2012, a quintet of rising Tory stars including future cabinet ministers Dominic Raab, Liz Truss and Priti Patel laid out their neo-imperial vision of a “buccaneering” Britain in a polemical anthology, Britannia Unchained. As with their US counterparts, these young libertarians saw government regulations as shackles that had left “the British… among the worst idlers in the world”.55 Once the chains had been slipped, Britain could once again ride the global high seas to prosperity.

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Speaking on a visit to Australia as foreign secretary in 2017, Boris Johnson echoed his idol Winston Churchill’s praise for “the special genius of the English-speaking people”. Talk of ‘Global Britain’ increased markedly after Johnson became prime minister. Fox’s successor as international trade secretary, Liz Truss, toured the world with a red, white and blue umbrella (and a personal photographer at the taxpayer’s expense62). John Bew was appointed to the influential Downing Street Policy Unit. Bew, a distinguished historian, had previously led a project called Britain in the World at Policy Exchange, another London think tank funded by anonymous corporate donors.63 Even the reality that London would be subservient to Washington in a post-Brexit union was blithely accepted.

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Freer has more than a dozen Tory MPs on its roster.82 Freer is run by the IEA out of the IEA offices, with an IEA phone number and a website registered by the IEA. But technically it is separate from the parent organisation. It is not registered as a charity and so is not subject to the same restrictions on political lobbying and partisanship. At Freer’s launch in the summer of 2018, Liz Truss took inspiration from chart toppers Destiny’s Child.83 “In the merits of capitalism, Beyoncé said it best: ‘All the honeys, who making money, throw your hands up at me’,” the future international trade secretary declared. Among those looking on were Michael Gove, Dominic Raab and Shanker Singham.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

Thatcher’s Tories have abandoned the European single market she was once instrumental in developing, and have simultaneously abandoned many other economic orthodoxies, toying with more active industrial policies and ‘Buy British’ slogans – a new attitude that Boris Johnson in an unguarded moment happened to summarize as ‘fuck business’. His short-lived successor, Liz Truss, who famously declared that large-scale imports of cheese were ‘a disgrace’, tried to invoke the Iron Lady, albeit through her boldness rather than her policies. Instead, Truss railed against the ‘consensus of the Treasury, of economists, with the Financial Times’ that budgets should be balanced and went on to doom her premiership with a massive, unfunded package of energy subsidies and tax cuts, which markets refused to finance.

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It is always popular when someone promises us the world, bailouts and free stuff. But it just does not work. Still doesn’t. There are no free lunches, and wealth has to be created before it can be distributed. Sooner or later you always run out of other people’s money, as Thatcher put it, and if you print more then sooner or later you’ll ruin its value. And, as Liz Truss learned, sooner or later you’ll run out of Thatcher quotes to defend everything-to-everyone budgets that just don’t add up. Debts pile up and inflation rises, and you are going to have to start thinking instead about how wealth is created. That will not stop new generations of politicians from repeating these mistakes.

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As the English social liberal John Stuart Mill put it: ‘To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbours.’6 However, a government also has to tax people for the services it provides. Borrowing to pay for public expenses is just a way of delaying taxation, which also adds uncertainty for everyone involved, including for lenders. If lenders begin to doubt that a government will be able to repay them – as they did after Liz Truss’s UK budget in November 2022 – they run for the doors, interest rates surge and shock waves go through the economy. Economists Andreas Bergh and Magnus Henrekson conclude that the research points to a negative correlation between the size of government and growth. An increase in the size of the public sector by 10 percentage points is associated with a reduction in the annual growth rate by between 0.5 and 1 per cent.7 That growth means the most for those who have the least.

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire
by Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson
Published 15 Jan 2019

Tory in charge of Universal Credit fails to turn up to emergency debate on bungled rollout’, Daily Mirror, 24 October, http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/wheres-david-gauke-tory-charge-11400282 48 Press Association (2018) ‘Government faces £1.67bn bill for underpaying disabled benefits’, Powys County Times, 17 October, http://www.countytimes.co.uk/news/national/16989630.government-faces-167bn-bill-for-underpaying-disabled-benefits/ 49 Bowcott, O. (2017) ‘Lord Chief Justice attacks Liz Truss for failing to back Article 50 judges’, The Guardian, 22 March, https://www.theguardian.com//politics/2017/mar/22/lord-chief-justice-castigates-liz-truss-for-failing-to-defend-judges 50 Chambre, A. (2017) ‘Liz Truss says she would now back Brexit’, Politics Home, 11 October, https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/foreign-affairs/brexit/news/89727/liz-truss-says-she-would-now-back-brexit 51 Mason, R. (2013) ‘Edward Snowden NSA files: Guardian should be prosecuted, says Tory MP’, The Guardian, 22 October, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/22/edward-snowden-guardian-should-be-prosecuted-tory-mp 52 Cole, H. (2017) ‘Defending the indefensible: Theresa May backs Attorney General Jeremy Wright after he lands public with MASSIVE bill by losing Brexit case’, The Sun, 24 January, https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2697011/theresa-may-backs-attorney-general-jeremy-wright-after-he-lands-public-with-massive-bill-by-losing-brexitcase/ 53 Smith, M., Blanchard, J. and Bloom, D. (2016) ‘Highest-earning Tory MP claimed £1 on expenses for cheap bin bags’, Daily Mirror, 13 May, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/highest-earning-tory-mp-claimed-7959693 54 McSmith, A. (2016) ‘Geoffrey Cox: Tory MP has expenses claim for 49p pint of milk rejected by Commons’, The Independent, 14 January, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/geoffrey-cox-tory-mp-has-expenses-claim-for-49p-pint-of-milk-rejected-by-commons-a6813131.html 55 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Lewis#Expenses 56 Dunt, I. (2012) ‘The Ten Worst MPs on Twitter: 8 – Damian Hinds’, Politics.co.uk, 15 May, http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2012/05/15/the-ten-worst-mps-on-twitter-8-damian-hinds 57 Wilby, P. (2018) ‘The European Research Group is the Tory group more powerful than Momentum’, New Statesman, 4 February, https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/02/european-research-group-tory-group-more-powerful-momentum 58 Montgomerie, T. and Pancevski, B. (2017) ‘May drafts Gove in to Brexit war Cabinet’, Sunday Times, 3 November, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/theresa-may-drafts-michael-gove-into-brexit-war-cabinet-p6g0rdzz0 59 Hope, C. (2012) ‘Exclusive: Cabinet is worth £70million’, Daily Telegraph, 27 May, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9290520/Exclusive-Cabinet-is-worth-70million.html 60 Weaver, M. (2015) ‘British slavery reparations Q&A’, The Guardian, 30 September, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/30/british-slavery-reparations-qa 61 Belltoons.co.uk, 21 November 2015. 62 BrexitCentral (2017) ‘Brexit News for Wednesday 6 September’, http://brexitcentral.com/today/brexit-news-wednesday-6-september/ 63 Hope, C. (2012) ‘Exclusive: Cabinet is worth £70million’, op. cit. 64 Watkins, J. et al. (2017) ‘Effects of health and social care spending constraints on mortality in England: a time trend analysis’, British Medical Journal Open, pp. 7, 11, http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/7/11/e017722 65 Lambert, V. (2014).

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When questioned about the slow Brexit progress on Newsnight, she said, in a line noted for its intellectual paucity, that broadcasters should be ‘a bit more patriotic’. She is married to a hedge fund manager. Leadsom was presumably still being patriotic when she joined the ‘Gang of Five’ who in November 2018 were demanding changes to May’s ‘final’ withdrawal agreement. Liz Truss [26] was appointed as Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor in 2016. She was highly criticised by the Lord Chief Justice for her (anticipated) failure to visibly support the judiciary after tabloid newspapers referred to the High Court of Justice with headlines like ‘Enemies of the People’.49 In 2017, she became Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians
by Isabel Hardman
Published 14 Jun 2018

Two Tory MPs, Jack Lopresti and Andrea Jenkyns, had an affair that Lopresti was forced to reveal to his wife after a tabloid newspaper told him it would be reporting the story, complete with pictures of the pair canoodling together at a railway station and wearing matching Christmas jumpers. David Cameron was furious at the time, muttering that it was no one else’s business, though his party took another affair that cost one participant his marriage rather seriously: Mark Field MP had a nine-month affair with Liz Truss before she was an MP, which led to her local association trying to remove her as a parliamentary candidate. But the Tory whips consider all these incidents their business: in autumn 2017 they were revealed to be giving Theresa May regular updates on what they called ‘the ins and outs’. Apparently the prime minister would roll her eyes before expressing frustration that her colleagues couldn’t just get on with the job.

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Bright and expert these MPs might have been, but they behaved according to the principles of a bill committee that we learned about earlier in this book. Ben Gummer, then the Tory MP for Ipswich, grilled one witness on ‘how many barristers travel first class on the railway’ before trying to work out if he agreed with a witness from another organisation about alternative cuts. The Tory MP Liz Truss made the very important point that the British legal aid bill was much higher than other countries with similar legal aid systems, asking: ‘Is the British system not pretty generous in terms of the eligibility for legal aid and the scope that is being proposed under this Bill?’3 This was later followed up by her colleague Damian Hinds.

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He is hardly the only leader who has made a mistake. It’s not just ministers, though, who don’t need to fear the long-term consequences of bad legislation. Even when a reform is widely accepted to be a mess and those who approved it are still in Parliament, they are rarely asked to account for what they did. Liz Truss, for instance, did a good job on the public bill committee for the legal aid reforms, and even served as Conservative Justice Secretary. But she hasn’t had to answer for her actions in approving some of those cuts, partly because she was performing her role in the way that every other member of a governing party who is put on a bill committee does.

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight
by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears
Published 24 Apr 2024

The journalist Adrian Wooldridge describes the depressing experience of opening the annual newsletter from the Oxford college he attended to read its ‘self-satisfied litany of “all Balliol” marriages and “all Balliol babies” ’.36 Of course, not everyone who studies or studied at Oxford is cut from the same cloth. For every David Cameron, George Osborne or Boris Johnson who dressed up in royal-blue tailcoats with ivory lapels as part of the Bullingdon Club dining society, there was a nerdier Jeremy Hunt or Ed Davey. They were followed by Liz Truss campaigning for the Liberal Democrats and against the monarchy and Rishi Sunak running a university-wide society for playing the stock market. There were the Miliband brothers – pick David or Ed – or an Andrew Adonis, donning Marks & Spencer jumpers to think serious thoughts. There was the very religious Ruth Kelly, who briefly dated the elder Miliband, and James Purnell, who was at the same college as Yvette Cooper who got married to Ed Balls, a Norwich City fan at a different college.

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If we don’t have that, we actually end up in a very, very dark place.’84 Perhaps in politics, too, there are signs of a more reasoned debate about the future, or even that the Establishment is bringing a measure of stability to chaos. A humiliated Jeremy Corbyn quit the Labour leadership in 2020 with his supporters still railing against a deep-state conspiracy against him. Johnson was ousted from Downing Street two years later in what some of his die-hard fans described as the ‘Revenge of the Blob’. His preferred successor, Liz Truss, was forced to resign after just forty-four days after losing the confidence of the markets, or what she later called ‘a very powerful economic establishment’.85 In the aftermath, Keir Starmer became leader of the Labour Party and Rishi Sunak of the Conservatives. Unusually, both had successful careers outside Parliament, one as a barrister, the other as a banker.

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Curthoys, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 442. 79 Naomi Harring, ‘Cutteslowe Walls’, Oxford Mail, 6 September 2018. 80 Bernard Richards, ‘Oscar Wilde and Ruskin’s Road’, The Wildean 40 (2012): 74−88. 81 https://www.ox.ac.uk/research/engage-with-us/local-community/part-of-oxford/economy 82 ‘Chancellor welcomes New VC of Oxford Irene Tracey’, University of Oxford, 10 January 2023. 83 ‘New Vice-Chancellor ready to fire and wire’, University of Oxford, 10 January 2023. 84 Nicola Woolcock, ‘Oxford has let down transgender students, vice-chancellor says’, The Times, 3 October 2023; Canqi Li, ‘In conversation with Prof. Irene Tracey’, Oxford Student, 12 June 2023. 85 Tim Ross, ‘Revenge of the Blob’, Politico, 9 July 2022; Camilla Turner, ‘Liz Truss’, Sunday Telegraph, 5 February 2023. 86 Henry Mance, ‘Is Britain Tiring of the Culture Wars?’, Financial Times, 15 July 2022 and https://doc.cdn.yougov.com/vf1ghxf7kh/YG%20trackers%20-%20Trust.pdf 87 Keir Starmer, Speech in Buckinghamshire, 12 December 2023. 88 Steve McQueen interview with David Olusoga, ‘These are the Untold Stories of our Nation’, Sight and Sound, 13 November 2020. 89 Meg Russell and Jack Sheldon, Options for an English Parliament, London, Constitution Unit, 2018. 90 Shanti Das, ‘Rapper AJ Tracey: why I’m launching fund to help Black students at Oxford’, Observer, 16 October 2022. 91 Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green, Vaxxers, London, Hodder & Stoughton 2021. 92 See https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/oxford-university-astrazeneca-vaccine-uk-flag-union-jack_uk_5fbfdd14c5b68ca87f827a0e 93 ‘Oxford and Cambridge University colleges hold £21bn in riches’, Guardian, 18 May 2018. 94 Sebastian Shakespeare, ‘Wafic Said’s £3.3m shot in the arm’, Daily Mail, 11 November 2020.

Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside
by Dieter Helm
Published 7 Mar 2019

J., Alien Plants, London: HarperCollins, 2015. 15 On Kingsbrook and the RSPB contribution, see www.rspb.org.uk/our-­work/conservation/projects/kingsbrook-­housing/. 16 His poem ‘Slough’ (1937) famously bemoans ‘the mess they call a town’. 17 See again Shaun Spiers’s excellent exposition of postwar planning ambitions. Spiers, S., How to Build Houses and Save the Countryside, Policy Press, 2018. 18 Liz Truss, as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, for example, stated that it is ‘either building on the Green Belt or Corbyn’. Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss speech to the London School of Economics, ‘Liberation nation: how to free the economy and reinvent the state’, 26 June 2018. 19 See a description of the Welsh example in Bateman et al., Applied Environmental Economics: A GIS Approach to Cost–Benefit Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken
by Secret Barrister
Published 1 Jul 2018

‘Prison officers stage unofficial walkouts in England and Wales’, BBC News, 8 July 2016, http:­//­www.bbc.co.uk­/­news­/uk-3673­7016 57. ‘Liz Truss’s £9-per-hour prison officers won’t produce safe, human prisons’, Guardian, 3 November 2016, https:­//­www.the­guar­dian.com/­comment­is­free­/2016­/nov­/03/­liz-tru­ss-pri­son-offi­cers-pri­sons-staff-pri­soner 58. ‘What is going wrong with the prison system?’ 26 January 2017, BBC News, http:­//­www.bbc.co.uk­/­news/­uk-3859­6034 59. ‘Prisoner numbers will not be cut to achieve a political “quick fix”, Liz Truss to warn’, Telegraph, 13 February 2017, http:­//­www.tele­graph.co.uk­/­news­/2017­/02­/13/­pri­soner-num­bers-will-not-cut-a­chieve-poli­tical-quick-fix-liz/ 11.

Greater: Britain After the Storm
by Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis
Published 19 May 2021

If you’re rich, your neighbours are more likely to be in the same boat than in the past. The same is true if you’re less financially stable. There’s less mixing. Poorer neighbourhoods are more cut off socially and geographically from the sources of economic prosperity, making it harder to bridge the gap.98 Liz Truss MP has recognised this and the Government Equalities Office is one of the first parts of Whitehall to be moved closer to the people it serves. #12 Equality Is No Laughing Matter Unsurprisingly, much of the debate about equality is centred on gender. One of the cul-de-sacs is single-sex discussions.

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Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, (the late) Sir Ken Robinson, Sarah Robinson, Jacqueline de Rojas, Jo Ruxton, Matthew Rycroft, Dominic Sandbrook, Suzanne Sangster, Sir Anthony Seldon, John Paul Schutte, Peter Shaw, Imogen Sinclair, David Skelton, Jonathan Slater, Libby Smith, Dame Cilla Snowball, Alex Stephany, James Stephens, Admiral Rob Stevens, Baroness Philippa Stroud, Will Tanner, Ellis Taylor, Julian Thompson, Bill Thornhill, Brig Gen, USAF (Ret.), Kenneth Todorov, Pamela Tor Das, Liz Truss, Francis Tusa, Andrew Tyrie, Daniel Wemyss, Hillary Werronen, the Rt Hon. Lord David Willetts, Andres Wittermann and Faril Yeo. An independent group has been established to discuss and promote the ideas raised in this book. Please see Gogreater.org. INDEX Acheson, Dean 1 Adebowale, Victor 1 age and government debt 1 and social mobility 1 and view of democracy 1 and voter preference 1 and voter turnout 1 Ames, Elizabeth 1 Anderson, Michael 1 apologising 1 Arctic Monkeys 1 Association of British Insurers 1 attitude, importance of 1 Audit Commission 1 Barber, Michael 1 Barry, Charles 1 Barwell, Gavin 1 BBC 1, 2, 3 Beam 1 Bell, Torsten 1 Belt and Road Initiative 1, 2, 3 Benn, Tony 1 Best Countries report 1, 2 Beveridge, William 1, 2 ‘Beyond Business Rates’ (Centre for Cities) 1 Biden, Joe 1 Big Society 1 Blair, Tony 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Blake’s 1 2 Blind Veterans UK (BVUK) 1 Blink (Gladwell) 1 Blue Peter 1 Boyle, Danny 1 Brexit see EU referendum Brit(ish) (Hirsch) 1 British characteristics apologising 1 complicated rules 1 crown of 1 double entendres 1 etiquette 1 euphemisms 1 fairness 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 frugality 1 inventiveness 1 love of underdogs 1, 2, 3, 4 ‘make do and mend’ 1 nostalgia 1, 2 pluckiness 1, 2 pubs 1 queues 1 recycling 1 sense of humour 1 similarity to United States 1 sports rules 1 suspicion of sudden change 1, 2 British Election Study 1 British Medical Association (BMA) 1 British Social Attitudes Survey 1 British strengths/weaknesses celebration of 1 colonial past 1 compassion 1 constitution 1 creativity 1 environment 1 fairness 1 financial resilience 1 generosity 1 global leadership 1 health and well-being 1 international trade 1, 2 inventiveness 1 opportunity 1 potential 1 racism 1, 2 role in world 1 safety 1 social fabric 1 tracking of 1 trustworthiness 1, 2, 3 wealth 1 Brokenshire, James 1 Brook, Sam 1 Brown, Gordon 1, 2 Bubb, Stephen 1 Business Growth Fund 1 Cameron, David 1, 2, 3, 4 Camus, Albert 1 capitalism and climate change 1 and data 1 and democracy 1 efficiency of 1 forward-looking nature of 1 German model of 1 and globalisation 1 Japanese model of 1 and mutuality 1 regulation of 1 Caplin, Nick 1 Capra, Frank 1 Carry on films 1 Castañeda, Juan 1 Centre for Cities 1 Centre for Public Impact 1 Centre for Social Justice 1, 2 Centre for Towns 1 Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas 1 charitable giving 1, 2, 3 charities 1, 2 Charities Aid Foundation 1 Charity Commission 1 Charles I, King 1, 2, 3 China authoritarianism in 1 and Belt and Road Initiative 1, 2, 3 British trade with 1 challenge to dominance 1 competitiveness of 1 comparison with United States 1 control of data in 1 debt in 1, 2 environment in 1 inequality in 1 inflation in 1 infrastructure in 1 inventiveness in 1 mistakes about 1 natural resources in 1, 2 population of 1 reasons for success 1 trustworthiness of 1, 2 view of democracy 1, 2 China Daily 1 Chorley, Matt 1 Civil Service World 1 climate change 1, 2, 3 Clinton, Hillary 1 coalition building 1 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 1 Collier, Paul 1 Collins, Tim 1 colonial past 1 Commonwealth Fund 1 ‘Community Capital’ (Centre for Social Justice) 1 community-led regeneration 1 community-led services 1 Community Life Survey 1 compassion 1 complicated rules 1 Confederation of British Industry 1 Connolly, Billy 1 Conservative Party 1 constitution 1 Cooper, Cary 1 Cooper, Christabel 1 COP (Conference of the Parties) 1 2 Corbyn, Jeremy 1, 2 Covid pandemic and cultural change 1 and domestic violence 1 productivity during 1 and queueing 1 and social care 1 and social divisions 1 and technical change 1 Coyle, Diane 1 creative industries 1, 2, 3 Cribbins, Bernard 1 cricket 1 crime 1 Croft, David 1 Cromwell, Oliver 1 croquet 1 Crown Prosecution Service 1 cultural identities 1 Cusick, Raymond 1 D10 alliance 1, 2 Daily Telegraph 1, 2 Dalai Lama 1 Damazer, Mark 1 Damper, Carole 1 Darrow, Paul 1 data in capitalism 1 for planning 1 Davie, Tim 1 debt 1, 2 democracy 1 and age 1, 2 and capitalism 1 China’s view of 1, 2 challenges to 1 diversity of 1 and EU referendum 1, 2 and parliamentary majorities 1 and planning 1 problems with 1 support for 1 in United States 1, 2 and voter turnout 1 Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy 1 Department for Education (DfE) 1 devolution of financial powers 1 disabilities 1 Doctor Who 1, 2 domestic violence 1 double entendres 1 Early Bird, The 1 EC Roberts Centre 1 economic growth 1 Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index 1 Economist, The 1 education 1, 2, 3 Edward the Confessor 1 Edwards, Eddie ‘The Eagle’ 1 Eisenhower, Dwight 1 elections see democracy England: An Elegy (Scruton) 1, 2 Enham Alamein 1 Entrepreneurial State, The (Mazzucat) 1 Entwhistle, George 1 environment in Britain 1 in China 1 equality and business 1 in China 1 complexity in solving 1 as continuing issue 1 gender 1, 2 and health 1 and inclusion 1 language of 1 and leadership models 1 and legal system 1 as minority issue 1 and minority perspectives 1 and modernisation 1, 2 as political issue 1 and racial discrimination 1 and social mobility 1 Equality of Experience Survey 1 etiquette 1 EU referendum bitterness of campaign 1 and democracy 1, 2 and Parliament 1, 2 as public priority 1, 2 and trustworthiness 1 fairness 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Farage, Nigel 1 Fawkes, Guy 1 Federation of Small Businesses 1 Fehr, Jacqueline 1 Ferguson, Niall 1 films 1 financial resilience 1 Financial Times 1 flags as symbols 1 football 1 Forbes 1 Forbes, Steve 1 Forgotten Veterans UK (FVUK) 1 Fox, Kate 1, 2 fraud prevention 1 freedom of speech 1 frugality 1 Full English ritual 1 gender equality 1, 2 generosity 1 George, Robert P. 1 Germany 1 ‘Giving a Sense of Place’ (Charities Aid Foundation) 1 Gladwell, Malcolm 1 Global Competitiveness Index 1 Global Creativity Index 1 Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) 1 Global Innovation Index 1 global leadership 1 Global Resilience Index 1 Goleman, Dan 1 Gomes, Renata 1 Good Life, The 1 Goodhart, David 1, 2 Goodwood Revival 1, 2, 3 government see also Parliament business culture in 1 community-led 1, 2 complexity of 1 corporate involvement in 1 debt of 1 devolution of financial powers 1 and economic growth 1 and expenditure rules 1 fraud prevention in 1 and Green Book 1 institutions of 1 and investment levels 1 local government 1 local taxation 1 and localism 1 responsibility in 1 size of 1, 2 and social value 1 state involvement 1 third sector role 1 volunteering support 1, 2 Grant, Adam 1 Green Book 1 Green Investment Bank 1 Greenway, Andrew 1 Guardian, The 1, 2, 3 Guerin, Orla 1 Halfon, Robert 1 Hayek, Friedrich 1 health 1 Hill, Benny 1 Hirsch, Afua 1 Hobson’s Choice 1 home ownership 1 homelessness 1 homophobia 1 honours system 1 HOPE Not Hate 1 household sizes 1 House of Lords 1, 2, 3 House of St Barnabas 1 How Capitalism Will Save Us (Forbes and Ames) 1 How to Run a Government: So that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don’t Go Crazy (Barber) 1 Hoyle, Lindsay 1 human rights 1 Hundred Year Marathon, The (Pillsbury) 1, 2 Hutton, Barbara 1 immigration and EU referendum 1 pull factors 1, 2 inclusion 1, 2 India comparison with China 1, 2 and democracy 1 inequality see equality inflation 1 Institute of Economic Affairs 1 Institute for Fiscal Studies 1 Institute for Government (IfG) 1, 2, 3, 4 Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) 1, 2 Integrated Communities Action Plan 1 international trade 1, 2 inventiveness in Britain 1, 2 in China 1 investment and developing world 1 role of government 1 IQAir report 1 Isaacs, Jeremy 1 It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum 1 It’s a Wonderful Life 1 Jackson, Tim 1 Jacques, Hattie 1 James, Clive 1 James, Sid 1 Japan 1, 2 Javid, Sajid 1 Jenkins, Simon 1, 2 Johnson & Johnson 1 Johnson, Boris 1, 2 Johnson, Robert ‘Woody’ 1, 2 Jones, Carwyn 1 Joseph Rowntree Foundation 1 Kamall, Syed 1 Kendal, Felicity 1 Keynes, John Maynard 1 Kinnock, Neil 1 Labour Party 1, 2, 3, 4 leadership models 1 Lean, David 1 legal system 1, 2, 3, 4 Lester, Richard 1 Lilla, Mark 1 Little Platoons (Skelton) 1 Littlewood, Mark 1, 2 Livingstone, Ken 1, 2 local government 1 London 1, 2, 3, 4 London Eye 1 McConnell, Jack 1 McGuinness, Martin 1 Made in Scotland (Connolly) 1 Major, John 1 ‘make do and mend’ 1 Marshall, Tim 1 Martin, Fiona 1 Masty, Stephen 1 Maude, Francis 1 May, Theresa 1, 2, 3 Mazzucato, Mariana 1, 2 Meades, Jonathan 1 Meyer, Erin 1 Mill, John Stuart 1 Mitchell, Austin 1 modernisation and coalition building 1 and equality 1, 2 and ethics 1 free market system 1 honours system 1 of infrastructure 1 of institutions 1 need for 1 of Parliament 1, 2, 3, 4 as political mission 1 Money Charity 1 Mouse on the Moon, The 1, 2 Mowlam, Mo 1 Mpanga, George (George the Poet) 1 Murray, Al 1 Nagpaul, Chaand 1 National Centre for Computing Education 1 National Crime Agency 1 National Health Service (NHS) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 national identities 1 National Literacy Trust 1 National Security and Investment Bill (2020) 1 News of the World 1 ‘No Quick Fix’ (Centre for Social Justice) 1 Northern Ireland 1, 2 Northern Powerhouse 1 nostalgia 1, 2 OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) 1, 2, 3, 4 Office for Civil Society 1 Office for National Statistics (ONS) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Olivier, Laurence 1 Olympic Games (2012) 1 Once and Future Liberal, The (Lilla) 1 One Foot in the Grave 1 Only Fools and Horses 1 Onward 1, 2 Opinions and Lifestyle Survey 1 opportunities in Britain 1 Order of the British Empire (OBE) 1 Osborne, George 1 Pagel, Christina 1 Paisley, Ian 1 Panayiotis, Michael 1 Parliament see also government and character of nation 1 diversity of MPs 1 electronic voting 1 and equality 1 expenses scandal 1 House of Lords 1, 2, 3 inefficiencies of 1 majorities in 1 and modernisation 1, 2, 3, 4 pay and privileges of MPs 1 procedure in 1 public perceptions of 1 qualifications for being an MP 1 as representative of nation 1, 2 traditions of 1 trustworthiness of 1 work of MPs 1 patriotism 1 Paxman, Jeremy 1 Perry, Jimmy 1 pessimism 1 Pick for Britain campaign 1 Pickles, Eric 1 Pillsbury, Michael 1, 2 Pinker, Steven 1 Plague, The (Camus) 1 planning and coalition building 1 data for 1 and democracy 1 and modernisation of institutions 1 and modernisation of Parliament 1 need for long-term 1, 2 tracking strengths 1 pluckiness 1, 2 police and crime commissioners (PCCs) 1 ‘Politics of Belonging’ (Onward) 1 Portcullis House 1 potential in Britain 1 poverty 1 Power to Change 1 Prescott, John 1 Prisoners of Geography (Marshall) 1 productivity 1 Prosperity Without Growth (Jackson) 1 public priorities 1 pubs 1 Pugin, Augustus 1 queues 1 Race Disparity Audit 1 Race Forward 1 racism/racial discrimination 1, 2, 3 Raffles, Stamford 1 recycling 1 refugees 1 Renke, Sam 1 responsibility in government 1 risk management and compliance 1 and trustworthiness 1 Robinson, Arnold 1 Rowling, J.

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back
by Guy Shrubsole
Published 1 May 2019

Labour’s shadow housing minister, John Healey, has proposed changing the 1961 Land Compensation Act to allow councils to buy land at existing use value once more. A host of organisations, from housing charity Shelter to conservation group CPRE, now support the principle of ‘land value capture’. Some free-market Tories, of course, remain highly sceptical about anything that affects the absolute rights of private landowners: Treasury minister Liz Truss tweeted that she found Labour’s modest proposals on land value capture ‘deeply sinister’. But more sensible Conservative MPs – like Nick Boles, Neil O’Brien and Bim Afolami – seem to understand that without radical reforms to the housing market, the party will lose the support of young people altogether.

…

more than fivefold Richard Partington, ‘Landowners reap benefits of soaring British land prices’, Guardian, 5 December 2017. Labour’s shadow housing minister Robert Booth, ‘Labour plans to make landowners sell to state for fraction of value’, Guardian, 1 February 2018. deeply sinister Tweet by Liz Truss MP, 2 February 2018: https://twitter.com­/trussliz/status/959346122790768640­ more sensible Nick Boles MP has backed land value capture and reforming the 1961 Land Compensation Act in chapter 3 of his online book Square Deal (February 2018), http://www.squaredeal.org­.uk/square-deal­-for­-housing­/.

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem
by Tim Shipman
Published 30 Nov 2017

Those on the ‘never use’ list in a so-called ‘Brexit election’ included Brexiteers like Liam Fox, Andrea Leadsom and Chris Grayling, who spent the campaign doing regional tours, described by one aide as ‘trying to organise a bunch of cats in the middle of a firework display’. Others banished to media Siberia included Justine Greening, the education secretary; Liz Truss, the justice secretary; and David Lidington. Hill’s sheet decreed that Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, should be confined to ‘canvassing’. It is curious that ministers responsible for the public services were banished from the airwaves in an election where Labour was fighting austerity cuts in schools and hospitals.

…

‘Theresa refused to even talk about post-election reshuffles because she thought it was inappropriate, it took things for granted, she wanted to concentrate on the campaign, so that was just never on the cards.’2 But ministers kept reading that they were going to be sacked and regarded Hill, in particular, as drunk on power. A Downing Street source said that week, ‘They slag off Liam Fox. They don’t want Justine [Greening] there. They want to move Liz [Truss].’ In story after story, Hammond read that he was to be replaced by Amber Rudd. Colleagues say Timothy had also entertained the idea of breaking up the Treasury and replacing Tom Scholar, the permanent secretary. ‘Nick had big plans,’ one said. ‘They had a longstanding belief that the Treasury had too much control, ever since Theresa was in the Home Office with George [Osborne] announcing policies in her area.’

…

She briefly considered asking William Hague to return as deputy prime minister but then gave Damian Green, the work and pensions secretary, Ben Gummer’s job in the Cabinet Office with the added title of ‘first secretary of state’, a post which Hague had held under David Cameron. Green had been at Oxford with May. His wife, Alicia Collinson, had been May’s tutorial partner. The prime minister was circling the wagons with people she trusted. There were promotions too for David Gauke, who replaced Green, and David Lidington, who took over as justice secretary from Liz Truss, who in turn replaced Gauke as chief secretary to the Treasury. Green, Gauke and Lidington were all sober, intelligent, low-key Remainers. More importantly, none of them had designs on May’s job. To placate the Eurosceptics, May played the only ace in her back pocket. With almost all the changes made, the call went out to Surrey Heath where Michael Gove had just finished lunch with friends.

The Politics of Pain
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 2 Oct 2019

The most potent of them is a feeling that it was just not right for England to be a normal European country, that there is something amiss with an arrangement in which it appears to be just one prosperous, privileged Western European democracy among all the others. As the chief secretary to the Treasury and ardent Brexiteer Liz Truss tweeted in April 2019, ‘We are not an ordinary country. We’re an extraordinary country.’ The ‘ex’ in Brexit also stands for ‘exceptional’, and what is exceptional about Britain is that it won the Second World War but almost immediately lost an empire. It is to the strange consequences of these closely related aspects of its modern history that we must turn for an explanation both of Brexit’s imaginative appeal and of its inability to function as a real political project.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

These crises acted as magnifying glasses, illuminating holes in America’s social and economic infrastructure. They also italicized the failure of markets to self-regulate, requiring massive governmental interventions on the part of the U.S. Fed and central banks around the world. As for the spectacular fall of the former British prime minister Liz Truss—who resigned after just forty-five days in office—it read like a farcical morality play about the hazards of hubris and ideological blindness. In defiance of economic realities and the welfare of the public, Truss and her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng—both hard-core believers in trickle-down economics and free-market fundamentalism—announced sweeping unfunded tax cuts for the rich (worth some £45 billion).

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

When it’s coupled with the LARPing elements born on 4chan, it turns global politics into a game with you as its hero. In a sense the idea that there’s an elite running the show is something almost of us believe to some extent – not least because it’s at least partly true. In the UK, for example, only 7 per cent of people are privately educated, but 59 per cent of Liz Truss’s first cabinet were. Top journalists and top politicians are often married to one another. The ultra-rich know and socialise with each other – PayPal founder and billionaire Peter Thiel knows billionaire and former PayPal CEO Elon Musk, who socialises with Google founder Larry Page, and so on. But the reality of it being a small world at the top is transformed into a conspiracy theory that they are actively conniving and running the show as a cabal of some sort.

Vassal State
by Angus Hanton
Published 25 Mar 2024

It is through the same bureau that Theresa May hired out her services and earned more than £500,000 of speaking fees in the first year after leaving office – largely lecturing to American audiences, including JPMorgan. That particular New York bank has followed a policy of engaging recently retired leaders: it employed Tony Blair once he left office. Liz Truss, too, found support for her economic views from the US Heritage Foundation, which is part of a global network of libertarian free-market think tanks. They promote tax cuts and deregulation, as she did in her infamous mini-budget. More recently, Boris Johnson, who only gave up his US citizenship in 2016, went on a well-paid 2023 US speaking tour, visiting Texas, Washington and Las Vegas.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

We need to free it for us all.’ It sounds like a case for nationalising the internet. Every time I utter this phrase, I’m aware it sounds like something only the most doctrinaire Mao-book-carrying, blue-serge-suit-wearing communist would say. When Labour’s 2019 manifesto called for free broadband, there was apoplexy. When Liz Truss said at the Tory conference in 2018, ‘Jeremy Corbyn wants to nationalise the internet,’ she did so secure in the knowledge that the room would be scandalised and appalled, even if half the delegates in the room were probably still on AOL dial-up and use block caps in their emails. She wailed like Cassandra.

Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
by Brett Chistophers
Published 25 Apr 2023

‘That idea disappeared very quickly as soon as the market conditions changed, and once you saw a little bit of inflation coming up’, Daniela Gabor told the New Republic’s Kate Aronoff. ‘Now’, said Aronoff, ‘grandstanding about fiscal prudence is back.’15 Such grandstanding reached a new pitch the following autumn: plans announced by the short-lived UK government of Liz Truss to introduce substantial, unfunded tax cuts and energy-consumption subsidies saw gilt investors throw a fit of pique, which commentators widely interpreted as evidence that the bond markets had resumed their disciplinary stance and needed to be obeyed. The reality is that, across the Global North, governments have for several decades been widely, if unevenly, withdrawing from the ownership and funding of housing and other essential infrastructures, and for all the hoopla about the state suddenly being ‘back’, Covid-19 changed that trajectory not one jot: not in Australia, not in Europe, and certainly not in the United States.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It
by Owen Jones
Published 3 Sep 2014

In 2005, four years after helping Seddon to found the pro-privatization think tank Reform, Nick Boles entered Parliament as a Tory MP, becoming a member of David Cameron’s shadow cabinet. His colleague was Andrew Haldenby, one-time head of the Political Section at the Conservative Research Department, who went the other way, joining the staff at the Centre for Policy Studies, the think tank founded by Thatcher and Keith Joseph. Another Reform deputy director was Liz Truss, elected a Tory MP in 2010, and co-author of Britannia Unchained, a book damning the British as ‘among the worst idlers in the world’, and demanding a new assault on workers’ rights. In 2013, Seddon, a keen backer of NHS privatization, would leave Reform to become David Cameron’s new health advisor.

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus
by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott
Published 18 Mar 2021

Outside, a neon clock was projected onto the building’s wall, counting down to 11 p.m. and the end of 47 years in the European Union. Johnson grabbed a gong and banged it with great gusto at 11 p.m. ‘There are very few moments in our lives that really can be called an historic turning point, and this is it,’ he told his guests, who included Hancock, his chief adviser Dominic Cummings, trade secretary Liz Truss and the chancellor Sajid Javid. Turning to Cummings, he said: ‘It was he, I seem to remember, who came up with the famous phrase that we should “take back control”. It was also Dom that came up with the other three-word epigram, that the policy of the government should be to “get Brexit done”. And I want you to remember that you were here tonight, after 11 o’clock, when finally, we got Brexit done.’

How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life
by Ian Dunt
Published 15 Oct 2020

It was the first time a liberal institution had stood its ground in the wake of the referendum result. The reaction was instantaneous. The Daily Mail newspaper published photographs of the three judges who heard the case under the headline: ‘Enemies of the People.’ The upmarket Daily Telegraph ran the headline: ‘The Judges vs the People.’ The Lord Chancellor, Liz Truss, whose role was to protect the independence of the courts, refused to condemn the coverage. The death threats started arriving. Rhodri Philipps, the 4th Viscount St Davids, offered £5,000 for anyone who would run Miller over. ‘If this is what we should expect from immigrants,’ he said, ‘send them back to their stinking jungles.’

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?
by David G. Blanchflower
Published 12 Apr 2021

There has been much consternation at the time of writing that the UK government has provided helpline phone service for those with questions, billed at 55 pence (about 75 cents) a minute from a mobile phone. Claimants who haven’t received their benefits have to call to say they have no money but haven’t the money to pay for the call.24 Government minister Liz Truss, the second-in-command at the UK Treasury, defended these charges in a car-crash interview by saying, “Well, I’d encourage people to visit the Job Centre, go in and get the advice.”25 Loopstra and Lalor (2017) found that nearly 2 in 5 people who used food banks were awaiting a benefit payment, with most of these waiting up to six weeks, though a fifth were waiting seven weeks or more.