Liz Truss has been elected leader of the Conservative Party in the UK. After a visit to Her Royal Highness at her Balmoral estate in Scotland, Queen Elizabeth gave Truss permission to form a government. She will assume the office of prime minister on Tuesday.
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson handed his resignation to the queen minutes earlier on Tuesday after barely winning a vote of “no confidence” in June. His scandal-plagued administration then collapsed when several cabinet ministers resigned. Johnson announced his resignation on July 7.
Truss, the former foreign secretary, was in a bitter leadership election contest with former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak. Truss promised to cancel a planned hike in the corporation tax, reverse a rise in the national insurance personal tax, and unveil an emergency budget soon after taking office. Sunak said that Truss’s economic proposals will only increase inflation, and branded her tax-cuts plan a “moral failure.”
But Truss was wildly popular with rank-and-file Tories and easily won the leadership election with 81,326 votes (57.4%) from Conservative members versus 60,399 (42.6%) for Sunak.
Fox News:
Typically, the transfer of power has been officially conducted at Buckingham Palace in London but is being held in Scotland this time to ensure a swift process and limit the 96-year-old queen’s travel.
Johnson indicated that he will be leaving politics, comparing himself to a Roman dictator who took to farming after leaving his position.
“Like Cincinnatus, I am returning to my plow,” Johnson said. “And I will be offering this government nothing but the most fervent support.”
Truss’s platform was extremely vague, promising to cut taxes, do something about energy costs, and address the key issue of a falling standard of living. But as the Wall Street Journal points out, she’s got a lot bigger problems than that.
Productivity growth has dropped to half the rate it was in the early 2000s, real wages are falling, the pound is nearing record lows and an aging population is placing a growing strain on public services, even as the government tries to rein in the public spending that soared during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Britain’s exit from the European Union has hampered trade with the country’s largest trading partner, and immigration restrictions have choked off access to inexpensive European labor. That has worsened a labor shortage of a scale not seen in the rest of Europe, driven by an unexpectedly high number of people leaving the workforce after the pandemic.
The energy crisis combined with a labor crunch is an inflationary double whammy.
The British economy hasn’t been in these kinds of dire straits since Margaret Thatcher took office in the early 1980s. And unless Truss can substantially improve the situation, an election before the next scheduled contest in 2025 is likely.
But the British Labour Party is still in disarray after the disastrous leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, who presided over the worst Labour defeat since the 1980s three years ago. Even if the Tories have to face the voters before 2025, the Labour Party isn’t offering much of a challenge.
Source: PJ Media
