In 20 or 30 years’ time, Liz Truss will be known for only four things.
Obviously, salad. A very difficult pub quiz question on who was the Prime Minister when Charles III came to the throne. That strange lady who comes to the Cenotaph every year for no apparent reason, and an object lesson for historians in why independence for the Bank of England, the Office of Budget Responsibility, the Civil Service and the Judiciary are such great ideas.
The BOE single-handedly justified its independence when Liz Truss was Prime Minister, and in different ways the OBR did the same. The civil service supported his impossible policies as best they could, but they proved impossible to implement. The courts have escaped charges that are merely a leftist conspiracy against the wishes of our elected representatives.
For which we should all be very grateful.
As this week’s prices data showed, the Bank of England has taken politics out of interest rate decisions, meaning it can better fight inflation. But the value of its freedom is much greater than that – it is also more able to intervene and protect us from the government because it is free.
The OBR has achieved a similar position. The economic predictions made by politicians are not worth the paper they are written on, and the OBR, in its brief existence, has become the respected arbiter of whether the government’s maths makes sense. It’s no surprise that bypassing the OBR was really for the big balls of Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget.
But Truss wanted to end the bank’s independence by sacking its governor and now says the OBR must go too, because it infringes the power of politicians.
Yes, Liz – that’s the whole bloody point.
That is why we have an impartial civil service and an independent judiciary.
Abolishing the system that prevents the British government from adopting childish economic policies, or bringing politics into policy or even the administration of law, is not a smart thing to do. Actually, it is very dangerous.
Why? Well, just look at Truss’s premiership. The markets, investors and experts did not trust him or his Chancellor as much as they could throw at him. The markets were falling badly and only his immediate impunity and the intervention of the Bank of England with billions of taxpayers’ money were enough to prevent an economic collapse, which would have been similar to the credit crunch; But this time only in the UK. Ayn Randism in one country, as it were.
Unlike Liz Truss’s full-blown self-delusion, it was the institutions and experts who saved us from her and her insane Tufton Street idiocy. That and their freedom.
Without the OBR and the Bank of England being able to speak truth to power and act independently to avoid the consequences of his and his Chancellor’s stupidity, we would be in the bay without an oar.
Now Truss is back, with a joke for publicity, and calls for the sacking of the Governor of the Bank of England, the abolition of the OBR, the politicization of the civil service, the abolition of the Supreme Court and the ECHR. And maybe even the United Nations.
Liz Truss is not ruling out becoming Prime Minister again, but if she ever returns to Number 10, my guess is that her second premiership will be even shorter than her first.
All and any of those policies will destroy the country, its democracy, the rule of law, its reputation, its economy, its international role, its trade, and its relations with its friends and allies.
Liz Truss was absolutely useless. She was and is financially illiterate and in slavery to the economy and the interests of the super-rich, who think the rest of us are dust beneath their feet.
But we survived, thanks to the very things she hates. The idea of letting him return to power, so he can destroy them and try again, is horrifying.