“Well, the new British prime minister, Liz Truss, has laid out a terrific supply-side economic growth plan which looks a lot like the basic thrust of Kevin McCarthy’s Commitment to America plan.”
Republican Economic guru on Fox Business, September 23rd.
“Will Liz Truss still be prime minister within the 10 day shelf-life of a lettuce?”
London’s Daily Star tabloid on October 14th. She wasn’t.
With the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, the sun set on the British empire for the first time in well over a century. The Britain that ruled the seas, held colonies all over the world, was reduced to a small island nation with a few remaining pockets of colonial holdings. The above map on the left shows Britain at a time of its maximum colonial reach; the pale-yellow map shows the UK’s global colonial holdings today. Sure, the “commonwealth” covers more, but I think my visual point is obvious. Britain ain’t what she used to be.
While the UK is an ultra-modern nation with a state-of-the-art military, a financial capital and home to some of the finest universities on earth, she’s not even the most populous nation in Europe; she lags Germany by almost 20 million. Her departure from the European Union in early 2020 removed her from significant connectivity to the rest of Europe, now bereft of her internal EU influence and forced to deal with that massively larger European political unit as an outsider, perhaps, in some ways as a supplicant. Brexit and post-Brexit have been anything but smooth. Still most troublesome is the difficulty between Ireland (EU) with its vast border with Northern Ireland (UK). Open or not open? It’s complicated.
The predicted “bad chickens” are beginning to roost in post-Brexit UK. The UK still has working ties with all of traditional Europe, is a member of NATO and counts the United States as one of her closest working partners. But internally, the UK is a mess. Lumbering under the same inflationary crush facing the rest of the world (yet a bit higher), having just ousted a very controversial Conservative Party Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, and having just dealt with the death of the longest reining monarch in British history, Conservatives elected Liz Truss as their new PM. Her appointment was hailed by the American right – see the above quote – as a brilliant step in the right direction – based on “slashing tax rates and deregulating energy.” Tens of billions of pounds being slashed.
While the American electorate has never figured out that “supply side economics” – that rising tide that was supposed to float all boats by cutting taxes for the rich – has never ever worked anywhere, the Brits rejected that notion almost instantly. But that phrase sounds so good, so logical, that it has now become the immutable GOP axiom of economic theory. Yet, nobody has ever convinced the rich, whose taxes have been slashed, that they must go out and immediately hire lots of people at solid wages and salaries.
Unfortunately for Ms Truss, the UK taxpayers figured that out immediately after she announced that her party would shepherd in a new supply-side massive tax cut for the rich. The British pound instantly plummeted to its lowest value, almost on par with the US dollar, in recent memory. Public markets also dropped, lenders pulled out of the mortgage markets, and after 44 days as British PM, on October 20th, Truss resigned saying that she could not “deliver the mandate on which I was elected.” Having reshuffled her cabinet, with no improvement, Truss claimed the prize as the PM with the shortest tenure in British history.
These are hardly the halcyon days of economic prosperity for most of us. But the UK is feeling the pain more than most of her Western allies. Writing for the October 21st Los Angeles Times, Jaweed Kaleem describes the issues: “Britons have grown accustomed to near-constant governmental and economic crises since the country narrowly voted six years ago to exit the European Union. In that interval, there have been four prime ministers — each having resigned — with a fifth on the way… All have been from the Conservative Party, whose long-standing majority in Parliament has given it the ability to choose one leader after the next.
“Polls suggest that the party would lose if a general election to decide parliamentary seats were held today, prompting activists to call for such a vote ahead of schedule. The next one is not due until 2025. The last one was in 2019… Voters are clearly fed up.
“‘We’re the nation of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher,’ said Sanmeet Singh, a tech worker who was out to eat in East London on Thursday [10/20] when the news alerts of the resignation flashed across his phone. ‘Now we have this clown car of a government, a parade of dunces… Who knows what nightmare Halloween will bring?’ [Adding] ‘I used to be proud of our country no matter the party in power. Now I am embarrassed.’”
If a general election were called today, Conservative would fall to Labour in an instant. The Conservatives, hoping to avoid that necessity, are voting to replace Truss with a member of her own… as even members of her own party, in acts of desperate self-preservation, hastily have thrown Truss under a bus. They hope to have one of their own in place by Halloween! But the bigger question remains: what is Britain’s place in global politics and influence in 2022?
I’m Peter Dekom, but at least the British voters understand the complete BS that underlies the entire notion of supply-side, trickle down (incent the “job creators”) folly.
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