On What The Rise Of Liz Truss Signals For Us

True, the writing is a bit florid, but the following passages capture a few of the psychological realities that have been dawning for some time:

Very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which [we] have lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions…. But, most important of all, we have regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable.

That being the case, surely someone – usually the government – must be to blame if a few troublesome ripples begin to appear on our personal millponds. For most of us, politics is a spectator sport, until suddenly it isn’t. Our writer covers this aspect pretty well, too:

The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion [were] little more than the amusements of the daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.

After all, such amazing comforts had been brought to our fingertips by the wonders of globalised trade:

The inhabitant of London [can] order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep…”

As you may have guessed, this isn’t a description of life in 2022. Weirdly, though, it could be. All of the above passages were written in 1919 by the economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was talking about a war in Europe that began 108 years ago, and how it had disrupted what people in the Edwardian era had believed to be the normal, permanent way that things were, and always should be.

The rise of Truss

Flash forward a hundred years from Keynes and Britain is once again at a tipping point. The United Kingdom’s latest Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss – the fourth one in seven years - is facing a Britain that after 12 years of Tory misrule seems to be falling apart at the seams. Truss got the job by pandering to the most extreme factions among the 200,000 Tory party members given the power to elect Britain’s leader, who will now decide how a country of 70 million people is to be ruled.

At this point in the public revulsion cycle with the Tories, even Jeremy Corbyn could probably beat Truss if an election was called tomorrow. When voters finally get their say in about 18 months time, Keir Starmer should win the next election in a canter, although one should never under-estimate the ability of the British Labour Party to blow a sure thing.

This video does a great job of conveying (a) how bad things currently are in Britain (b) the levels of public anger, and (c) how ill-equipped Liz Truss is for her new job. In fact, the steep decline in the quality of Tory leaders from what was already a low base – David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss – reflects the country’s plunge from being the fifth richest country on earth to where the state of its public services and general economic decline now puts Britain in the“emerging nation”category.

Briefly… Britain’s public health system is collapsing, its education system has been traumatised, the rubbish is piling up uncollected on city streets, and energy prices are due to double in the next few weeks, and treble by January. Reportedly, many British families cannot afford to cook their food. Lord knows how they will manage to stay warm throughout the coming winter. Meanwhile, energy companies are raking in obscene profits: yet Truss (so far) has been refusing to impose a windfall tax on them, because in the “aspiration nation” that she inhabits, you can’t tax your way to growth. However, letting old people freeze to death in houses they can’t afford to heat is a price she seems willing to pay. More expiring than aspiring.

Acting local

Arguably, that’s the relevance for New Zealand of the Truss ascendancy. She is a portent of what we might expect from a change of government here. There’s an awful familiarity to the solutions that Truss is offering to the problems facing Britain: tax cuts, targeted reductions in welfare spending, further privatisation of welfare delivery, a further rolling back of trade union rights, a crackdown on youth crime…

Such policies are almost identical to what a National/ACT government has been proposing here, if elected. We’ve all been there before. That approach was tried during the nine years of the last National government. They have been tried over and over again for 12 years in Britain under successive Conservative administrations. The terrible outcomes are now evident to all. Why on earth would we willingly subject ourselves to these quack remedies all over again?

Footnote: You may be wondering why society is falling apart in Western democracies when – for all of its defects at home and in the colonies – society was relatively stable during Victorian/Edwardian times. Keynes had a few thoughts about that as well. In 1919, Keynes pointed out that capitalists had saved and built things of wider social value during the era between 1870 and 1914. Yes, they had accumulated vast wealth – but they had also built roads, the railway system, and commercial enterprises that offered mass employment and a dream of social mobility. Trickle-down economics worked at the time, to a limited extent.

What had made this possible? A few colourful robber barons to the contrary, the captains of commerce in that bygone age believed in the virtue of saving and of deferred gratification. They did so not out of altruism, but because this was seen to be the moral, desirable and necessary way of ensuring the survival of capitalism for them, and for the children who would inherit their wealth. Keynes explains:

This remarkable system depended for its growth on a double bluff or deception. On the one hand the labouring classes accepted from ignorance or powerlessness, or were compelled, persuaded, or cajoled by custom, convention, authority, and the well-established order of Society into accepting a situation in which they could call their own very little of the cake that they, and Nature, and the capitalists were co-operating to produce.

As for the captains of commerce:

On the other hand, the capitalist classes were allowed to call the best part of the cake theirs, and were theoretically free to consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that they consumed very little of it in practice. The duty of "saving" became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion…And so the cake increased; but to what end was not clearly contemplated. Individuals would be exhorted not so much to abstain as to defer, and to cultivate the pleasures of security and anticipation. Saving was for old age or for your children; but this was only in theory. The virtue of the cake was that it was never to be consumed, neither by you nor by your children after you. The new rich of the nineteenth century were not brought up to large expenditures, and preferred the power which investment gave them to the pleasures of immediate consumption.

And the outcome of this double deception? A more sustainable form of capitalism, domestically at least, if not so much out in the colonies or within the Raj:

In fact, it was precisely the inequality of the distribution of wealth which made possible those vast accumulations of fixed wealth and of capital improvements which distinguished that [Victorian/Edwardian] age from all others. Herein lay, in fact, the main justification of the Capitalist System. If the rich had spent their new wealth on their own enjoyments, the world would long ago have found such a régime intolerable.

That seems to be what is so very, very different about the worldview shared by the likes of Liz Truss, Christopher Luxon and David Seymour. Wealth tends to be seen by them as personal property, and thus devoid of any sense of social obligation, or of even a basic recognition that this wealth may have been gained – partly at least – through the advantages of privilege and patronage. Today’s wealthy elites have little compunction about engaging in conspicuous consumption, since they believe their own spin that this wealth has been the byproduct of individual effort, innate ability and divine provenance. Generally speaking, it has been no such thing.

Such individualised attitudes to wealth accumulation and conspicuous consumption are socially de-stabilising, as Keynes correctly diagnosed. They are unsustainable, no matter what law and order punishments are devised for those who rebel, or for those who feel they have no place in a society that tolerates (or even venerates) such levels of social inequality. If that is the kind of society we want, we will be free to vote for it next year. Yet Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have given us a nightmare vision of the future, so we can’t say we weren’t warned.

Calling England Home

The speed and extent of Britain’s decline – even Brexit aside- has been remarkable. Briefly post war, Britain had offered a precarious home to migrants from the Caribbean and Africa, people who had earned this access in return for Britain’s exploitation of their natural resources and labour. Here’s Linton Kwesi Johnson’s classic track about life among the precariat under Margaret Thatcher, the Tory icon routinely cited by Truss as her role model:

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