Liz Truss, the Telegraph & the Society of the Spectacle
Liz Truss has written a 4,000 word article for the Sunday Telegraph which in essence claims that her hard right, 55 Tufton St inspired, ideas are correct she just tried at the wrong time.
There are a few general points of interest. Truss is keen to blame people and things for her own mistakes. For example she previously complained about people living in North London townhouses. Now it’s the ‘blob’ and the ‘left-wing economic establishment’.
She has managed to increase the length of her residence at No.10 Downing St to 49 days from 44. It doesn’t matter. It remains the shortest on record. She also claims she had a mandate for her policies which was frustrated by the forces I note above. This is bizarre but then so is Truss. The mandate was not from the electorate or Parliament but from 80,000 members of the Tory Party. They are mostly getting on a bit (I’m 66) and very right wing indeed. The good news is that they wont have the energy to mount a coup. Probably.
There are wider points of interest to the left. Truss did very briefly challenge economic orthodoxy and the markets reacted badly. Of course if Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell had been elected in 2017 they too would have challenged orthodoxy from the left, although not I think as radically as Truss did from the right. They however knew this and had a real support base in the country to challenge market reaction. Truss did not have this.
While the impact of Truss’s policies, brief as they were was disastrous for many (something she remains oblivious to) the general drift of Government policy continues. The removal of Truss as James Meadway has noted did not make things better, it just stopped making them worse. Austerity together with rising interest rates and inflation remains in place. It has been around since the world financial crash of 2008/9 and the aim remains to make the poor pay for the crisis so the rich can maintain their wealth.
There is of course a specific Truss angle to this.
The late Guy Debord wrote a Situationist Manifesto, the Society of the Spectacle. He argued that capitalism was now focused on how things appear. That is advertising, images and the use of TV and now social media.
A glance at the biography of Truss, Out of the Blue, shows that when Truss was Foreign Secretary she was obsessed with getting pictures on her smartphone to post on social media. It was the image that mattered.
Her time in Downing St and the Telegraph article now can be seen as series of economic and political poses she wants to present, with little idea if they are right for the particular moment or of their impact if an attempt is made to implement them.
As the late socialist Tony Cliff used to note if you are on a boat that is sinking a picture of a lifeboat may look interesting but it is not something rooted in practical assistance.
Leave a Reply