Is Liz Truss Trying To Make A Comeback?!

If I were Liz Truss, so Britain's shortest-serving Prime Minister, I'd want to put my feet up and stay well away from the public view. There are other things to do in life. However, it's being reported that Truss may consider another crack at the top job. Kitty Donaldson is the UK political editor for Bloomberg and she tweeted this. Exclusive! While many in the Conservative Party had assumed Liz Truss simply wants to remain influential following her chaotic stint as Prime Minister, her ambitions are rather higher. She's thinking of running again to lead. Now that story seems to be based on three sources who said she could run, so it's not necessarily the case that she's about to launch a leadership bid. But whatever the reality is, Truss has been making an impact at Tory conference with a very well-attended speech. She was there to play the Thatcherite classics, mostly, and began by talking about business. We need to unleash business across Britain. We need people to want to invest in our country. We need businesses to be able to expand, to grow, to create new jobs, to create new ideas. That's why I'm calling upon the Chancellor at the autumn statement to put corporation tax back down to 19%. And frankly, if we can get it lower, the better. Because what we know is we know that when businesses are able to keep more of those funds, the future comes from. It's where the opportunities come from. It's where the jobs come from. And what we know is that at the moment, we're seeing businesses not locate in the United Kingdom. We saw AstraZeneca choose to locate elsewhere. We've seen small companies struggling with the level of tax and regulation. We've seen a flight out of Britain of high net worth individuals, third only to India and China, and in fact, ahead of Russia. Right now, corporation tax stands at 25%. A cut to 19% would take us back to last year's level. But it's unclear that that would make us more competitive than other major economies. Now, according to the OECD, Britain still has the lowest rate of corporation tax in the G7. And while it's true that AstraZeneca decided to build a factory in the Republic of Ireland rather than the UK, the rate of corporation tax there is just 12.5%, so one of the lowest in Europe. That means a return to 19% wouldn't necessarily have changed their mind. So should we be competing with small tax havens like Ireland or major economies like the rest of the G7? Well, Truss knows what she thinks. It doesn't seem like the correct answer to me. Truss also talked about cutting gas bills, recommending more North Sea exploration, and also fracking. It wasn't all repackaged factorism, though. She also had a message on housing. The fact is we haven't built enough homes and it's incredibly difficult if you're a young person to get on the property ladder. It's incredibly difficult to even rent a property in big cities like Manchester and London. It's just far too expensive. And whilst lots of members of parliament talk about building more homes, it's very difficult to actually get them to vote for reducing the regulation that's stopping the homes being built. It's all about protecting newts or installing a backbridge. That appears to be the priority rather than building homes. So I think we need to turbocharge the incentives. We need to incentivise local areas to build more homes through giving them tax breaks if they're prepared to get rid of that red tape. And I think we need to do it at a level so we are building 500,000 new homes every year. Now, I actually agree with Liz Truss there in part. I would love Britain to be building 500,000 new homes a year. I think we need to shed loads more homes. I also like that kind of ambition. Sweden built a million homes in, I think, a decade. And that's a very, very small country. So that was very, very ambitious. Relevant here, though, Sweden did it with social housing. And if you look at the history of Britain, we had mass house building in this country when we also had social housing. So in the 50s and 60s, we'd often have 300 to 400,000 houses built a year, a rate we haven't reached in about 30 to 40 years, right? And that was because half of it was done by the private sector, and then half of it was done by the state. So 200,000 social homes built a year in certain periods of the 50s and 60s, right? That's the kind of thing that Liz Truss won't talk about. If you just slash regulations, then what that's going to mean is probably quite a lot of low quality housing that all looks the same in the suburbs. If what you want is high quality housing that people want to live in, you do need some involvement from the state. Now, I'm not necessarily totally against planning reform. I do think that we need to reduce the power of NIMBYs in the home counties. But I think unless someone is talking about social housing as part of that mix and the state getting really heavily involved as part of that mix, I don't think they're serious. Of course, much like Fashion Week, the story here isn't only about what happened on stage, but also who was in the front row of the audience. And when it came to Liz Truss's speech, that included Nigel Farage. He posted this to his Twitter. This is the Great British Growth Rally starring Liz Truss. They will not get everybody into the room. There is a genuine buzz here. And these, of course, are Tory party members. They voted for her to become leader of the party and prime minister. And they weren't asked, of course, when she was removed. But even more importantly, it's the message. It's about helping small business, reducing taxes and actually getting growth, which is the only way we get out of this mess. I've got to tell you, this is more exciting than anything happening in the conference hall. Also in the front row for Truss's speech was former Home Secretary Priti Patel. And Patel hasn't ruled out a bid to be the Tory's next leader. And this weekend on Sky, she took a swipe at Suella Braverman. Suella Braverman said in Washington last week that multiculturalism had failed. In what way was that helpful to Rishi Sunak? Well, I think you'll have to ask her and ask Rishi Sunak, to be honest. I mean, she's given a speech. And I think, actually, I did hear what your political reporter said earlier on, Sam Coates. To me, this is very much, you know, making interventions, statements, but actually, Trevor, I think we have to be realistic here that that's not a substitute for delivery around changes to policy in government. Now, I don't know what the intention was around that. It might just be to get attention, to have the dividing lines that, you know, your previous commentators were mentioning as we go into a run up to a general election. Now, I can understand that. I can absolutely understand that. But you and I sitting here today, OK, we are the products of actual integration, multiculturalism, dynamic communities, people that love our country, want to contribute to our country, along with a hell of a lot of other people that have done exactly the same. And I think that's something we should be proud of in our country. Probably the first sensible thing I've ever heard Priti Patel saying. It takes someone as sort of right wing and vicious as Suella Braverman to make Priti Patel sound reasonable. And of course, Braverman is one of a number of current cabinet ministers thought to be angling for the top job if and when the Tories lose the next election. But she and Patel could face stiff competition. Bloomberg write this. Many Tories are working behind the scenes for leadership run if the election goes badly, according to interviews with more than two dozen conservative lawmakers, advisors and donors. There are at least 13 would be contenders to watch out for, said the people who spoke to Bloomberg on condition of anonymity. One member of Parliament said the subplot of Tory conference told in unsubtle speeches, fringe events and drinks at hotel bars was the battle for the future of the party. Another told Bloomberg that Sunak was already a lame duck. So lots of Tories are angling for position, but the person with the biggest spring in his step at Conservative Party conference isn't even a Tory. So you're here for the first time in since perhaps 1987, 1982. My first question is, are you here to rejoin the Conservative Party? No, would you like to share it with TV news? I think that my presence here highlights the divisions within the party, right? The battle that will happen, I suspect, after the next general election. I went to the CDO dinner last night, a Democratic organization. These are these are rebellious, rebellious group of Tories who feel the party's become unconservative, undemocratic. They're not really getting a choice to choose their own MPs as candidates, things like that. And, you know, I see what they're saying. I see what's the Breverman saying. And I do see in some parts of the Conservative Party things that I've campaigned on for 10 or 15 years now becoming mainstream, mainstream in a wing of the party, but not in the party as a whole. And frankly, I mean, let's face it. After 13 years, this is not a Conservative Party. It's a Social Democrat party. It's high tax, big state, high spend, open door immigration on the most extraordinary historic scale. And if they're not going to rediscover some sense of being a national party that believes in its people, they'll be out of office for 10 or 15 years. And it's interesting at the Conservative dinner last night you were at, you were referred to by Dame Priti Patel, who was making, if ever I've heard a leadership campaign speech. Yeah. And even though there's no vacancy currently, you stood up. The applause for you was deafening. The Tory party faithful still see you as their lost leader. They do. It's a really funny one. I mean, Andrew, I never shifted. My political opinions never went right or left. I didn't change from 1990. It's the party that's changed radically over these last three decades. Now, of course, I disagree with Nigel Farage that the Conservatives are now some sort of social democratic party in favour of open borders. They're obviously have pretty vicious border policy, especially when it comes to asylum seekers. And they're certainly not socially democratic. But she does seem to be right that when it comes to the grassroots and the future direction of the party, it has moved much closer to him over the past 30 years. Absolutely. And look, this is the thing that Nigel Farage was able to understand and to capitalise on, which is after the financial crisis, this idea of having an effectively neoliberal party, a very Thatcherite party was going to have a time limit on it. Now, it wasn't a time limit that expressed itself at the 2010 election. But in the 2015 election, David Cameron was forced into putting an in out referendum on the Conservative Party manifesto in order to assuage his rowdier backbenches. Past your mind back to the 90s and the 2000s, leaving the EU was a really, really marginal position, right? It wasn't something which most people, you know, really backed or believed on. But when this idea of leaving the EU became a vehicle, a holder for all sorts of dissatisfaction with the status quo, that was something that could really, really pick up steam. And that's something that Nigel Farage understood, that's something that Dominic Cummings understood. And it's something which made the Conservative Party, the party of the establishment, the party of capital, able to reinvent itself as a party of insurgency. And so I think when you're at this point in time, where what you've had is a kind of restoration of, you know, Cameroonism, right? Even though Rishi Sunak was a Brexiteer, you've got Jeremy Hunt installed as Chancellor of the Exchequer, you've got real anxiety about the size of the national debt, you've got real anxieties about levels of taxation, that's putting you a lot more towards David Cameron than you are with some of the more redistributive instincts of Boris Johnson. You've got a space opening up, because that kind of managerial technocracy doesn't have a massive social base out in the electorate anymore. And it certainly doesn't have a massive social base amongst the Conservative Party grassroots. And if there's one thing that Nigel Farage is, he's a very adept reader of that mood. And in terms of what that means for those of us who are on the left, I think we've got to ask ourselves a question. And that question is, what are the right going to do next? Because I think there are a lot of people who perhaps watch the show, who, you know, perhaps read The Guardian, who feel a little bit of a sense of relief that Keir Starmer is pretty likely to form the next government after the next general election. But as we've discussed, Michael, if that Labour government doesn't address some of those deep structural endemic issues within the economy, we're talking about runaway inequality, crumbling infrastructure, rising precarity amongst the workforce, a decline in the availability of housing, that sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo isn't going to go away. And you've got to ask yourself, how are the right going to capitalise on it, because they're already strategising it. Nigel Farage, you know, flashing a bit of ankle at the Conservative Party membership actuary party conference, that's just step one in his plan to capitalise on that dissatisfaction. So we've got to work out how and think about how our political strategies, how media strategies can offer some real answers and tell the truth and not just sort of fall back into xenophobia, comforting nationalistic myths, in order to, you know, appease people's need for meaning and purpose, when the government is rudderless, and the market has failed to deliver rising living standards.