Liz Truss has been Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for a little over a month now. And, well… I don’t think it’s been a great month for her.
Right off the bat, Truss had plenty of plans for her country. Most importantly: taxation. She fiercely opposed it, promising to go through with a long list of tax slashes. Most principally, she proposed removing the top tier of income tax, which would mean saving for those who make 150,000 pounds or more a year (or $168,000). This was her primary policy agenda, and she supported it fiercely - shooting down a proposed profits tax on British energy firms. “We cannot tax our way to growth,” she argued. She also publicly defended her tax cuts.
Until her proposals were reversed.
By one of her employees, it seems.
Mere hours after Truss defended her policy towards top tier income tax, that same proposal was scrapped by the UK Finance Minister. He had been due to make remarks defending the policy change as well, before he reversed it. Liz Truss only made her announcement after the finance minister, which suggests that she may have not been fully on board. After all, this was a key aspect of her campaign to attain her new post as PM. But it gets worse.
Truss has now completely changed her stance on taxes, and is now moving to increase corporate tax. This sudden change has left her credibility in utter tatters, and I’m not surprised. Her main policy agenda on which she has built her career, once akin to the free-market evangelism of Margaret Thatcher, has been completely flipped! Her party - the UK conservative party - agenda has been reversed, and is now enacting policy favorable to their rival party, Labor. Ouch.
A UK opinion poll reported by Reuters revealed that, even in her own party, over half of voters are calling for her resignation. A third even say they want the former prime minister - who was ousted after a scandal - to return.
Despite this massive setback, despite having to sit in parliament and watch her policies be torn to shreds, Liz Truss promises to fight on. She apologized that she went "too far and too fast" with her policy agenda, but that she was "sticking around." She went so far as to pledge she would still be around to lead her party through the next election.
And so far, she doesn’t seem to be letting up. She’s already committed to another big policy - raising the defense budget to 3% of the nation’s GDP.
If I’m being honest, though, this seems like Boris Johnson all over again.