Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, the runaway favourite to succeed Boris Johnson as Conservative (Tory) Party leader and Prime Minister next week, has promised “immediate help” with soaring energy bills – but refuses to outline specific policies.
Truss, a Liberal Democrat turned left-leaning anti-Brexit Tory turned favoured party leadership candidate of the pro-Brexit Tory right — somehow — is all but guaranteed to have beaten Rishi Sunak, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the party membership vote on who should replace Boris Johnson, which is now closed.
As leader of the political party which commands a majority in the House of Commons, provided there are no surprises, she will be invited to take Boris Johnson’s place as Prime Minister early this week — and immediately have a number of major national crises to face down.
The most acute of these is the energy crisis, driven by years of mismanagement with respect to ensuring domestic energy production and, perhaps most notably, gas storage, an obsession with unreliable net-zero green agenda alternatives to coal, oil, and gas power generation, and, most recently, the Russo-Western sanctions war, which has seen Russian gas imports greatly reduced.
Blackouts and even riots are already being predicted, and people saying they are small business-owners claim they are receiving eye-watering new estimates for their bills:
Writing in The Telegraph, a notionally right-leaning newspaper close to the Conservative Party, Foreign Secretary Truss says that “[i]f elected, I plan within the first week of my new administration to set out our immediate action on energy bills and energy supply.”
She goes on to say that Britain’s ruling class “need to take the difficult decisions to ensure we are not in this position every autumn and winter” and that she will “take the tough decisions to rebuild our economy” — but does not actually tell readers what her “immediate action” and “tough decisions” will entail.
Speaking further on the issue to the BBC, the Tory MP again promised she would “act immediately on bills” and also act on energy supply — a more long-term consideration — but again declined to reveal any specifics on the former, promising nothing beyond an “announcement” within her first week in office.
More broadly, she has promised tax and National Insurance cuts worth around £30 billion in an emergency budget, in an effort to stimulate economic growth — welcome news for British conservatives who have seen the tax burden increase to its heaviest in 70 years under the supposedly libertarian Prime Minister Johnson.
Truss stood her ground when pressed on whether this would benefit wealthier people more than poorer people, explaining that “people at the top of the income distribution pay more tax — so inevitably, when you cut taxes you tend to benefit people who are more likely to pay tax.”
“To look at everything through the lens of redistribution I believe is wrong. Because what I’m about is growing the economy — and growing the economy benefits everybody,” she insisted.
“The economic debate for the past 20 years has been dominated by discussions about distribution. And what’s happened is we’ve had relatively low growth”.
Her rival for the leadership, Rishi Sunak, is opposed to significant tax cuts.