U.S. President Joe Biden has made another diplomatic blunder, publicly denigrating Prime Minister Liz Truss over her attempt to cut taxes.
Biden, 79, perpetrated the gaffe during one of his classic ice-cream-slurping photo-ops in Delaware, after being asked about Prime Minister Truss’s current difficulties in government.
The newly-minted British premier attempted to cut the top rate of income tax on earnings over £150,000 from 45 per cent to 40 per cent — where it sat from 1989 until the final month of the last Labour government in 2010 — but had to U-turn after a concerted campaign by central bankers, the establishment media, the political left, conservatives-in-name-only within her own party, and forces within “the market” hostile to so-called “unfunded” tax cuts.
She was also forced to sack her finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, and replace him with Jeremy Hunt — an anti-Brexit lockdown authoritarian with links to China, decisively rejected by ordinary Conservative Party members in a 2019 leadership contest.
Biden might have been expected to maintain a diplomatic silence on Truss’s domestic issues, given Britain’s status as an important NATO ally, but he instead chose to deride and patronise the British premier.
“Well, it’s predictable,” he jeered, ice-cream in hand, twisting the knife by adding, slightly incoherently: “I mean, it was… I wasn’t the only one that thought it was a mistake.”
Not content with this already highly irregular outburst, the elderly Democrat pressed on.
“I think that, uh, the idea of cutting taxes on the super-wealthy at a time when… anyway, I just think that, I, I, I disagree with the policy, but that’s up to Great Britain to make that judgment, not me,” said Biden, whose own net worth has been estimated at around $8 million. appearing to somewhat lose his train of thought.
While Britain’s leftist Labour Party seized upon Biden’s remarks with glee — lending weight to the perception that they were a partisan intervention in an allied country’s internal affairs — others in Britain not even necessarily supportive of the Truss tax plan believe the President significantly overstepped his bounds.
“I don’t care what your politics are. This is a totally inappropriate intervention in another country’s domestic politics,” remarked Tim Shipman, chief political commentator for The Sunday Times, for example.
“Just not done to an ally. Being right doesn’t make it right,” he added.