“Every time a change is imposed, it causes disturbances.” The British Prime Minister, Liz Truss, has tried to convince the Conservative Party affiliates, gathered in Birmingham for their annual congress, on Wednesday that she knows what she has in hand, after almost two weeks of turbulence in which the markets collapsed. the value of the pound, and the internal rebellion in his own party in the face of tax cuts for the richest, cast doubt on his continuity in Downing Street. “Not everyone will be in favor of this change, but everyone will benefit from its fruit: a growing economy and a better future,” she has promised the members of a formation that has sunk in almost irreversible pessimism in recent days.
The prime minister took the stage to the rhythm of the song moving on up, that led to success in the nineties to the British group M People. “I go up, you go. Nothing can stop me”.
It had not been more than 10 minutes of a rigid and fearful speech, which barely drew applause from those gathered, when two female Greenpeace activists infiltrated the public began to shout at the prime minister. “Who has voted for the fracking [fractura hidráulica para la explotación de hidrocarburos]?” They chanted as they held up a banner that read: “Who voted for this?” The assistants, and the security team, have dragged out, and with bad manners, the two activists, silenced with boos and applause for Truss.
Not previously designed, the effect could have been better. Nothing mobilizes more Tories than the feeling of being them against the rest of the world. The prime minister, with a forced smile, but enough reflexes, used the incident to introduce the slogan with which she intends to save her troubled mandate: to fight the so-called “anti-growth coalition.” Like her predecessor, Boris Johnson, Truss has wanted to cling to a populist message against the elites, seeking unity and support from a Conservative Party fragmented by its controversial economic measures. “I will not allow the anti-growth coalition to force us to follow behind. Labour, Liberal Democrats, Scottish nationalists, trade unions, established interests masquerading as think tanks, talk shows, Brexit deniers, environmentalists from Extinction Rebellion or some of those who have come here today to shout. .. they prefer to protest to act, write on Twitter to make difficult decisions”.
That is, them against us. It has been one of the moments in which Truss has been able to transmit some energy to an audience given over to the defeatism of recent days.
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Truss has once again repeated that the withdrawal of the maximum rate of 45% for the highest incomes, which was forced by the protest of very relevant figures in the party, had been “a distraction”. “I have understood. I have listened,” said the British prime minister. But most of her tax reduction (personal income tax, corporate tax, Social Security contributions or asset transfers), which represents almost 50,000 million euros of public debt, is still standing. “Lowering taxes is the right thing to do, morally and economically,” she has defended. “The Conservative Party will always be the low-tax party,” she promised.
The problem with the prime minister, as reflected in her speech, is that she plays with the contradiction of criticizing everything done in previous years – years in which she was part of conservative governments – while trying to score all the medals of that same era. She promises an economy of minimal public interventionism and boasts at the same time of having injected direct aid to households and companies, to alleviate the energy crisis, of a dimension almost unknown in other European countries. “I am determined to try a new approach and break this long cycle of high taxes and low growth,” Truss said.
In his speech he even mimicked the slogan popularized in his day by Labor Party member Tony Blair, when he assured that his three priorities were “education, education, education”. In Truss’s case, it’s “growth, growth, growth.” But the applause started with that set phrase have been minimal, late and soulless, like those of a large part of those who have been heard throughout the speech. Only when he has promised that he will maintain aid to Ukraine, and that he will not tolerate a peace with Russia that involves the surrender of territory, has Truss sounded like someone convinced of what he is saying, and not like a politician who nervously looked from side to side to try to follow the sentences written on the screens of the teleprompter that he was reading.
Support to the Minister of Economy
Truss has had words of support for his finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, whose continuity has been questioned by many Conservative MPs. And like him, he also wanted to make clear his commitment to maintaining public accounts in a balanced way. “I also believe in fiscal responsibility, in extracting the maximum value from the taxpayer’s money, in a healthy economy and in a fit state,” he said.
But, above all, after years in which Brexit and Johnson’s own attitude led to a move away from the Tories of his natural electorate, Truss has tried to encourage his own by recovering conservative essences: “I love companies, I love entrepreneurs, I love people who take on responsibilities, start their own businesses and invest in the country’s economy.”
It has not been his words, however, that have reassured the markets, but the extraordinary intervention of the Bank of England, which launched to buy public debt last week. Truss lashed out over the summer, throughout the primary campaign, against the British monetary authority, questioning its independence. A month later, the speech is different: “The correct thing is that it is the Bank of England that independently establishes interest rates, and politicians should not interfere in this. We will work closely with the bank”, he has promised.
The prime minister has been dismissed with applause, and she still has almost a week before parliamentary activity resumes. The polls give an overwhelming advantage (up to 33 points) in voting intentions to the Labor opposition, and no Conservative now wants an early election that would spell the ultimate ruin of the party, after 12 years in power. In theory, Truss has two years to straighten the course of the country and show if his plans for change work, or if they are pure ideological smoke. What he has become clear to him this week is that he doesn’t even get 100 courtesy days from any new prime minister. There is already a powerful current within the party ready to keep a close eye on it and constantly threaten its continuity.
Hours after the speech, Mike Pickering, one of the founders of the group M People, wrote on Twitter: “I don’t want my song to be the soundtrack of so many lies”, and reminded Truss of another part of the letter: “You have made me damage. Your time is over. Get out of here. Pack your things.”
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