Truss’ Thatcherite Agenda Will Carry the Day Over the Global Monetary Establishment — and Cowardly Tory Backbenchers

Prime Minister Truss has had the rockiest start of any incoming British leader since Winston Churchill was installed on the day that the Nazi blitzkrieg stormed into Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Ms. Truss takes office at the head of a treacherous party, cleaning up after a great many errors of her five immediate predecessors, and in an economic climate made turbulent and dangerous by 15 years of global fiscal and monetary mismanagement. The last British Conservative party leader who left office entirely voluntarily and in good political and physical health was Stanley Baldwin, who took a good look at Hitler and gracefully retired in 1937. There have been 14 leaders of that party between Baldwin and Ms. Truss. Chamberlain, Eden, Heath, Thatcher, Duncan-Smith, May and Johnson were pushed out; Home, Major, Hague, Howard and Cameron resigned after defeats before they could be pushed out; and Churchill and McMillan were eased out.Margaret Thatcher, the greatest vote-getter in British Conservative history, the first British leader to win three consecutive full-term majorities since before the first Reform Act in 1832, the architect of an extraordinarily successful premiership, was stabbed in the back because of her reservations about euro-federalism, although the stance she took was much more favorable to Europe than that which the British electorate has since adopted. No prominent British Conservative has acknowledged that Thatcher was right all along; they are too unscrupulous and self-righteous to see the virtues of confession. Prime Minister Johnson, in implementing the British exit from Europe, resolved the greatest constitutional crisis in that country since the American Revolution, if not the English Civil War. Mr. Johnson handled Covid decisively and was an outstanding international leader in the Ukraine crisis. He went completely overboard with the green nonsense and raised taxes instead of reining in government, but absurd pretexts were hurled against him as his party staged a repulsive re-enactment of “Lord of the Flies.” The British Conservative party’s parliamentary caucus is a fetid, stagnant cesspool of nasty and envious little people. When Mr. Johnson’s rebellious health secretary, Sajid Javid, ran out on his boss, he made a parliamentary statement affirming his belief that he is not a “quitter,” and asking for the admiration of his fellow MPs for not quitting “when people in my community said that I should not marry the love of my life.”This was the partially poisoned chalice handed to Ms. Truss, who was one of Mr. Johnson’s few cabinet secretaries who had not betrayed him and the only candidate who went full-metal-jacket Thatcher and promised to cut taxes and shrink government. Ms. Truss is not altogether plausible as a Thatcherite. Her appearance is perfectly presentable but she lacks Thatcher’s prepossessing bearing and distinct style and powerful voice, and although well educated, she has an acoustically slightly challenging working-class accent. (These things are more noticed in Britain.) She has not been as consistent as Thatcher was throughout her public career. And there is something to the French press’s description of her as not the Iron Lady but the “iron weathervane.” She ditched many of Mr. Johnson’s disloyal cabinet members, made a 180-degree turn and announced tax reductions and was somewhat unprepared for the deluge of supposedly expert criticism that cascaded down upon her, much of it shameful hypocrisy from the mouths of those who had been so mistaken for so long that they had no standing to comment.Ms. Truss has taken up her great office as much of the world is forced to face up to the gravity of 15 years of failed pursuit of easy and supposedly permanent prosperity. Instead of diligence, sacrifice, innovation and other tediously traditional concepts, our central banks and finance and treasury ministers have since the near-death financial panic of 2008 incentivized borrowers rather than savers or investors, have insanely expanded the money supply and have generated a spivvy artificial boom in luxury goods and acquisitions, faddish tech stocks, cryptocurrencies, high-end real estate and art. The idea was that this artificial wealth would encourage spending and increase tax revenues through increased economic activity that would generously fund welfare systems, while low interest rates would encourage governments to borrow whatever they wanted. As Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, put it, “The budget will balance itself”; instead, it grew exponentially and turned on us with terrifying vengeance when interest rates finally jumped out of the box. Our central bankers still can’t imagine any way to reduce inflation except raising interest rates, which runs the risk of accelerating inflation until there is a bone-cracking recession. In any other serious occupation, such a consistent record of failure would lead to experiments with other policies. Of course, much of the recent prosperity was an illusion: prices rose because demand rose because discretionary spending rose because of cheap borrowing. Productivity didn’t rise very much. A large chunk of the population didn’t gain anything from the great bubble. The global Covid lockdown, which was economic and sociological suicide in itself, was accompanied by an orgy of money-printing and quantitative easing (inflation-causing increases in the money supply brought about by the central bank buying the government’s own unsold bonds and paying for them with essentially worthless paper; a legally vulnerable practice if tried in the private sector) for the benefit of many but not all of those who had been blamelessly idled.Because Ms. Truss saw that it is possible to tighten monetary policy while loosening fiscal policy and opened her premiership with modest tax cuts to stimulate the economy out of recession, but did not accompany them with defined expense reductions, or accurately cost the revenue that she proposed to forgo, she was not only naked to her domestic enemies, including her seething and cowardly backbenchers, but also the international fiscal and monetary establishment that has chiefly been responsible for the misgovernment we have all had for many years. The new prime minister did not carpet-bomb the city of London and the globalist scribblers in the Financial Times in particular with numbers and projections and unguent assurances of believable fiscal precautions, and she has been hammered, the pound has been irrationally discounted (it’s now a buy) and the Bank of England was obliged to assist a number of distressed pension funds. The climate is made more venomous by a frenzied Twitterati that hates Ms. Truss, Brexit and traditional supply-side economics. The prime minister and her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, should have been much more informative about how they intended to expand the economy and stabilize the treasury while improving the lot of middle Britain.The prime minister’s problems have been aggravated by an outrageous torrent of slander from the International Monetary Fund, a coven of leftist faddish hypocrites who fixated on the minor item of the proposed reduction of the top tax rate by five per cent. The meltdown on the part of the left, including the now post- and pre-Blairite far-left old Labor party, is tanking the pound. Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng gave way on the point of the top tax rate but she seems to be keeping her nerve. I predict Ms. Truss will stick to her guns and carry the day. She is in these matters the most sensible prime minister since the great lady to whom she is compared, and she too deserves to succeed.From the National Post.

Truss’ Thatcherite Agenda Will Carry the Day Over the Global Monetary Establishment — and Cowardly Tory Backbenchers

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