Rishi Sunak is far better than people think, but Ms Truss has the vision and skill set required to deliver now
Source - Daily Telegraph - 30/07/22
Britain is on the verge of a breakdown. Our economy has not recovered from being put into an induced coma for the better part of two years. Our currency has been debased. Our tax levels are at a 70-year high. Our bureaucracy is dysfunctional. Our healthcare system is an international embarrassment. Part of our country is governed by the EU – and the rest retains most of the Brussels regulations which we were supposed to have scrapped by now. Our trade unions threaten aggressive strikes. We may be heading for a full-scale sterling crisis.
Things badly need to change. That is why I am backing Liz Truss.
Despite – or, more likely, because of – having served in five Cabinet posts, she has a clear sense of what is wrong with the cheap-money, high-spending consensus that has grown up since Tony Blair’s time in office. She knows that we need to do things differently, and she understands the fierce urgency of our predicament.
Mine will be a wholly positive vote. One of the saddest aspects of these leadership contests is that over-enthusiastic members of the various teams get into negative briefing cycles that leave everyone besplattered. Ministers who have worked amicably around the same Cabinet table and will, in all probability, soon do so again, are for a few weeks portrayed as loons, lightweights and socialists. “Stop X!” say some. “Anyone but Y!” say others.
This blackguarding was unfair to all ten original contenders (all eleven if we count the hilarious candidacy of Rehman Chishti). It is especially unfair to the two finalists, both of whom have held high office with distinction.
Rishi Sunak – I really shouldn’t have to write this but, in the current climate, perhaps I do – is not some sort of Gordon Brown manqué. He is a thoughtful and principled Thatcherite whose job, as Chancellor, was to pay the bills for a prime minister who refused to rein in his spending.
Other criticisms are even more absurd. He did not “stab Boris in the back”. He behaved precisely as ministers are supposed to behave when they find that they can no longer support an administration, backing government policy in the name of collective responsibility until the moment of his resignation, and refraining from any personal criticism thereafter.
Nor is it a crime to have made money, for heaven’s sake. In a crowded field, the silliest smear to have found its way into the newspapers was the notion that it was somehow improper for Sunak to have given £100,000 to his old school, Winchester – a donation intended to fund bursaries for children from poorer backgrounds.
(Almost as silly was the suggestion that it was outrageous for Truss to have spent too much money flying abroad as foreign secretary. What next? Home secretary hanging around with criminals? Defence minister spending too much time with dangerous weapons?)
As for Sunak’s wife’s non-dom status, the only criticism I make is that she allowed herself to be pressured into paying tax that she did not owe. If she had the money to spare, it would have been better to give it to a worthy cause than to slosh it into the leaky tubes and chambers of the government machine to pay the pensions of NHS diversity consultants and fund civil service videos about white privilege.
No, I have no quarrel with the clever, courteous, Brexit-supporting former Chancellor. He would make a fine PM. But the Foreign Secretary will make a finer one.
She understands that we need to act immediately, cancelling the scheduled tax rises, reducing other selected taxes, removing tariffs, scrapping EU regulations and ensuring that the Bank of England pursues sustainable growth based on sound money.
You might object that these ideas are hardly peculiar to Truss. But, while most Conservatives sign up, in theory, to a low-tax, low-regulation economy, you can hardly fail to have noticed that we don’t have one.
Why not? Partly because of institutional inertia. Our standing bureaucracies are change-averse and attached (unsurprisingly, given how civil servants earn their living) to big government. Partly, too, because market reforms, however necessary, risk bad short-term headlines. Every one of Margaret Thatcher’s privatisations was unpopular until it happened. So were her monetary reforms, denounced by 364 economists in 1981 as likely to “deepen the depression, erode the industrial base of our economy and threaten its social and political stability.”
Any radical change, however overdue, invites opposition from the beneficiaries of the existing dispensation. Milton Friedman called it “the tyranny of the status quo”. Scrapping a payment, even a temporary one, triggers disproportionate fury from its recipients. Removing a regulation, however harmful it was to the economy, enrages those who had learned how to make a living out of it.
For example, our childcare centres require an exceptionally high ratio of staff to kids: one to four in England, as against one to six in the Netherlands, one to eight in France, and none in Germany or Sweden. No one seriously claims that German or Swedish kids are harmed in consequence, and relaxing our rules might save parents £300 per child each month.
Truss has long pushed for this reform. But it is tenaciously resisted by existing childcare providers, because it makes it harder for competitors to enter the market. Obviously, they don’t put it like that. Instead, they talk of “protecting children”. Journalists, whether from gullibility or hostility to the Tories, repeat that line. And so the reform is repeatedly shelved.
Will Truss overcome the aversion to short-term unpopularity that paralysed Boris Johnson? I think so. Certainly she will when it comes to childcare ratios, a long-standing concern. Likewise with many producer-driven regulations. We will, for example, finally see the liberalisation of financial services.
She won’t be perfect. No politician is. She has set a target for defence spending, as if the spending itself, rather that the outcome, were meritorious. Then again, so did almost every other leadership candidate. She continues to pretend – again, like all the others – that the housing crisis can be solved by building more on brownfield sites or in crumbling northern cities.
But she has the three qualities that a great reforming prime minister needs: a clear vision of what she wants, namely a Britain with a smaller state and bigger citizens; a mastery of detail; and the ability to push reforms past a reluctant civil service.
This third quality is the clincher. I have watched Truss at work as a minister, and marvelled at her ability to charm and cajole officials out of their Leftist prejudices. She is good at delegating, and adept at finding people who challenge Whitehall groupthink. Look at the non-executives she brought in as Trade Secretary: Dominic Johnson, the virtuoso fund manager who combines Beau Nash’s charm with Adam Smith’s opinions; Douglas Carswell, the first elected UKIP MP; Dambisa Moyo, the dazzling economist and critic of development aid.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should add that she asked me to join the Board of Trade. More to the point, she also knocked aside her critics – including some Tory MPs who should have known better – to bring in Tony Abbott, the fiercely Anglophile former PM of Australia. At the same time, in her capacity as minister for women and equalities, she made the wonderful Katharine Birbalsingh, Britain’s strictest headmistress, Chair of the Social Mobility Commission, thereby scandalising the Blob.
Truss knows that the Conservatives will not be re-elected unless they are seen to be fixing the economy. Doing so will mean doing things that are immediately unpopular, such as cutting spending and letting interest rates rise. But not doing so will be far worse – worse for the party, which will find that it experiences an ERM-style collapse; and, more important, worse for the country, which is running out of time to pull itself out of the economic nosedive.
Sunak is a gentleman: polite, diligent and patriotic. It is a pity that, in our present mood, we place such little weight on these virtues (see also Hunt J, Tugendhat T). Yet his very reasonableness makes Sunak, like Keith Joseph, listen a little too eagerly to his officials. A team player, he seems to feel proprietorial about the tax increases over which he had to preside.
Truss, by contrast, is ready to take on all opponents: Bank of England money-printers, EU bureaucrats, activist judges, woke permanent secretaries, RMT militants. She understands that, while charm has its place, results are what matter. She has delivered in every department she has so far run. She will deliver as prime minister.
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