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Is Liz Truss aleady on the way out? — 28 Comments

1. Durham lost another one. Not looking good for him at all. Of course a DC jury won’t convict anyone he brings to trial. No Justice left in America.

2. She is certainly no Thatcher. When the “Conservatives” over threw her they lost their reason for being.

3. I thought so zbe delivered three landlides for them

4. The Tories are absolutely atrocious; the only thing to be said for them is that they are marginally less horrid than Labour, who would certainly win should a general election be held soon. Truss is weak and seems incompetent, nor has she done anything whatsoever to address Britain’s most urgent problem, which is, without question, mass immigration. Across the channel, the French may finally be awakening on this issue since the unspeakable torture and murder, in Paris a few days ago, of a sweet twelve-year old girl (#Lola on Twitter) by four Algerian Muslims living in France illegally.

5. SHIREHOME:

   There are many many reasons these cases are going nowhere in terms of convictions, and the vast majority are not Durham’s fault. But I’m convinced that Durham’s goal at this point is merely to put the evidence out there for the public to see. Only problem is, the deck is stacked against him in that regard, too, because of the fact that the MSM has become a propaganda machine for the perps.

6. “But I’m convinced that Durham’s goal at this point is merely to put the evidence out there for the public to see.”

   Then he’s a fool, like Barr, thinking we just need to get rid of a few gosh darn bad apples and then everything will be fine.

   It’s actually similar to the apparent problem in Britain where the Tories, both cultural and socially, seem simply incapable of acknowledging or addressing the problems facing the country. If Labor hadn’t gone out of its way to antagonize the British public, they’d have regained power ages ago.

   This is how advanced societies collapse. The people inside the institutions of power refuse to recognize the problems they face because it requires admitting their own errors and shortcomings, but they also fight like hell to prevent anyone from outside the institutions from getting the power to do anything.

   Mike

7. The best candidate was the one that was winnowed out the black. Candidate she was a woman of conviction

8. MBunge:

   I just put up a post on the Danchenko verdict where I explain further about the legal obstacles, Durham, and my point of view.

9. Cameron was the very model of a wet like heseltine and hurd (they were accurated depictef in thr iron lady)

10. “This is how advanced societies collapse. The people inside the institutions of power refuse to recognize the problems they face because it requires admitting their own errors and shortcomings, but they also fight like hell to prevent anyone from outside the institutions from getting the power to do anything.” Mike

    Bingo. But… the officials that enable the continence of the societal disfunction are elected. They are symtomatic not causal.

    Miguel cervantes,

    “The best candidate was the one that was winnowed out the black. Candidate she was a woman of conviction.”

    The absolute last circumstance corrupt political institutions wish to see manifest is the elevation to leadership of a person with principled convictions. Such is an anathema to them.

11. So many carbage peoplr rise through the ranks because of their corrupt and evil ways

12. It is rather amazing when you look around the world at the absolutely abysmal quality of our leaders or rather the people who purport to be out leaders. I don’t think Liz Truss has any more say in the direction of the British government than Joe Biden has in our government. Neither one was chosen in anything that could be called a fair and transparent process. They were both just sort of chosen for being the least objectionable or most malleable. It would be nice to know who is really running things but I guess that would be too much to ask.

13. She had a bad program, and is now flailing about because the bond market rapped the government on the knuckles.

    I doubt anyone in the British establishment has an interest in a satisfactory program, which would include immigration restriction, free speech and an end to abuses inflicted by law enforcement and school bureaucrats on dissenters, restoration of price stability through open-market operations, tax simplification, replacement of a selection of welfare programs with wage subsidies, and a multi-year program of tax increases and spending cuts to balance the budget.

14. Neither one was chosen in anything that could be called a fair and transparent process.

    I don’t think there’s an issue with the process by which Liz Truss was chosen. The problem is the culture of the Conservative Party, especially in parliament.

15. Neo hit the nail on the head: “Truss seems to have projected a combination of weakness and incompetence, as well as fear and indecision. Not a great combination.” But a combination favored by Paul Ryan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush– not to mention Obama and Brandon.

    Why is it so hard for the right to coalesce behind someone who vaguely resembles Ronald Reagan (hint: not Trump)–perhaps Desantis? Kristi Noem, Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney (not to mention John McCain (Go Navy!)) turned out to be squishy when put to the test. Principled conservatism works–why not try it again? Good policy makes for good politics.

16. I saw where some wag has a webcam pointed at a small table. On the table is a framed photo of Truss and a head of lettuce.
    He’s accepting wagers on which will be gone first …

17. “Why is it so hard for the right to coalesce behind someone who vaguely resembles Ronald Reagan (hint: not Trump)–perhaps Desantis?”

    DeSantis at this point is more like Trump than Reagan. And maybe Republicans should stop looking 40 years in the past for examples of how to do politics today. The actual Ronald Reagan doesn’t much resemble the fiction of “principled conservatism” anyway.

    Mike

18. And maybe Republicans should stop looking 40 years in the past for examples of how to do politics today. The actual Ronald Reagan doesn’t much resemble the fiction of “principled conservatism” anyway.

    Reagan had to deal with Congress and other antagonistic power centers.

    Reagan’s the odd example of a Republican who entered presidential politics because he had policy goals he wanted to bring to fruition and who managed to carry along the electorate with him both in Republican nomination donnybrooks and in general elections. Richard Nixon was a contemplative bibliophile, but someone for whom issues were largely fungible; to the extent that he had preferences, they tended to favor the liberal Republican position. George Bush the Elder and Mitt Romney were also men for whom issues were fungible. Gerald Ford, Robert Dole, and John Kasich were career politicians; they had no ambition to do anything beyond minor incremental adjustments in policy and thought in terms of the dynamics within congressional committees (added to which was considerable spite in Kasich’s case). George Bush the Younger and John McCain you might say had commitments rather than convictions and landed in politics in middle age because they are competitive men (as was George Bush the Elder). Barry Goldwater was a conviction politician; he also ran in a year with a terrible head wind and then injured his cause with what one wag called ‘defoliating tactlessness’. Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes, and Alan Keyes were what you might call demonstration candidates; they ran to rally a constituency and / or press an issue; it’s doubtful they ever expected to win or even sought to win. Nelson Rockefeller and John Anderson had policy goals; they were also drawn from the segment of the Republican Party most favorable to the main body of the Democratic Party on policy matters. The closest analogues to Reagan have been Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz, who were competitive candidates, had won elections in the past, and had actual policy goals. Three men in 60-odd years.

    Then there’s Trump, who is sui generis.

19. I forgot Rick Santorum, so that’s four men in 60 odd years.

20. Art Deco:

    Where would you place Newt Gingrich? Seems to me he might be in that group.

21. “Reagan’s the odd example of a Republican who entered presidential politics because he had policy goals he wanted to bring to fruition”

    Yeah, but Reagan’s policy goals and viewpoint weren’t as aligned with “principled conservatism” as many GOP and think tank hacks like to pretend. He slapped a whanging big tariff on motorcycle imports to save Harley Davidson and not everyone on the Right was happy with Reagan’s willingness to deal with Gorbechev. Granted, he had an entrenched Democratic Congress to deal with but Reagan both policy-wise and temperamentally was a good bit different than the secular saint of Conservatism into which he’s been made.

    Mike

22. Where would you place Newt Gingrich? Seems to me he might be in that group.

    Perhaps. I can’t decide in which taxon belong Gingrich and Marco Rubio. I’d classify Ron Paul as a demonstration candidate.

23. Yeah, but Reagan’s policy goals and viewpoint weren’t as aligned with “principled conservatism” as many GOP and think tank hacks like to pretend. He slapped a whanging big tariff on motorcycle imports to save Harley Davidson and not everyone on the Right was happy with Reagan’s willingness to deal with Gorbechev.

    For ideologically motivated people, trade issues are at the periphery of their concerns. The only exception I can think of would be cosmo-libertarians like Tyler Cowan, who dream of a borderless world. See Jaghdish Bhaghwati on the current trade regime: trade treaties are compendia of carve outs that nobody understands; an actual free trade treaty would be about 10 pages long.

    Reagan was ahead of the curve in understanding the significance of Gorbachev’s change in direction. That’s not a matter of political principle, but of the ability to integrate data and make assessments.

24. Reagan was more a pragmatist in some regards say trade orthodoxy even tax policy but ideological on foreign policy vis a vis the soviets (which had 40 divisions on the other end of the fulda gap,) that posed a real ideological threat on three continents, there was the question of regulations and a tacit acknowledgement of believing christians and jews social issues like crime.

    Conversely trump prioritized trade policy social issues like crime and put a lower attention on global geopolitics

25. @ Gregory > “It would be nice to know who is really running things but I guess that would be too much to ask.”

    Tom Slater answers for Great Britain:
    https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/10/17/general-hunts-coup/

    Jeremy Hunt now runs the country. Those are six words I never thought I’d write, given the hapless Cameroon’s two failed attempts to become Tory leader. But following his ascension to the position of chancellor on Friday, appointed by Liz Truss after she sacked Kwasi Kwarteng, Hunt has become PM in all but name.

    Keen to ‘calm’ – or rather, give in to – the demands of the markets, which have been going haywire since Kwarteng’s not-so-mini budget three-and-a-half weeks ago, Hunt has taken an axe to Truss’s entire tax-cutting agenda. He did the media rounds on Saturday – warning that taxes would go up and spending cuts would be made, in complete contradiction to what Truss was saying as recently as last Wednesday.
    …
    Who elected PM Hunt? In just a few days he has fundamentally altered the UK’s economic course – taking his lead not from voters, but from markets and meddlesome bodies like the IMF. Now, as I wrote on Friday, Liz Truss’s unpopular mini-budget didn’t have a democratic mandate, either. Just 81,326 Tory members put her into No10 six weeks ago, a fraction of one per cent of the voting population. But that’s 81,326 more than Hunt got, given he was knocked out in the first round and never got anywhere near the final members’ ballot.
    …
    Turning on the TV on Saturday morning, to see Hunt staring blankly down the camera, I felt I got a glimpse of what it must be like waking up in a country after there’s been a military coup – shocked to find that some general has replaced the usual news anchor. What’s weirder still is that Truss – with her authority completely drained from her, and without even the pretence of political principle left – essentially invited him in to stage this hostile takeover of her own government.

    You don’t need to be a keen advocate of Trussonomics – we at spiked certainly aren’t – to be alarmed by all this. Had her unpopular and incoherent agenda been defeated at the ballot box, that would be another thing entirely. Instead, she has been undone by market frenzy and a hysterical media and finally finished off by a technocratic empty suit in the form of Hunt – precisely the sort of politician that we’d thought had been cast into the wilderness by the populist revolts of the past six years or more.

    I have no idea what a British chancellor is within their parliamentary system, but he seems to be wielding a lot of power over the purported leader of both his Party and the Government.
    I don’t think the American Cabinet has an analogous position, the Secretary of the Treasury doesn’t seem to have as much power, but maybe it’s kind of like a chimera of the SecTreas and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

    Britannica Dictionary definition of CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER: an official in the British government who is in charge of taxes and the money that the government spends.

    Wikipedia: The secretary of the treasury serves as the principal advisor to the president of the United States on all matters pertaining to economic and fiscal policy.

    Wikipedia: The chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System …
    Under the chair’s leadership, the Board’s responsibilities include analysis of domestic and international financial and economic developments. The board also supervises and regulates the Federal Reserve Banks, exercises responsibility in the nation’s payments system, and administers consumer credit protection laws.

    One of the chair’s most important duties is to serve as the chair of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which is critical in setting short-term U.S. monetary policy.

    Slater doesn’t clarify WHY Truss elevated her main rival to such a position, either.
    I suppose he assumes most of his readers already know.

    However, here is some more inside info on the deal, and a possible answer to who is running the British government — it’s the same group that apparently runs ours.

    The Brownstone Institute was the second-highest search hit; further down was The Economist and they are very happy with Mr. Hunt.

    https://brownstone.org/articles/jeremy-hunt-britains-new-chancellor-of-the-exchequer-strongly-backed-zero-covid-and-lockdowns/

    New UK Prime Minister Liz Truss has appointed Jeremy Hunt as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the top position in cabinet. Hunt is an establishment figure and a longtime advocate of close UK-China relations. Given Britain’s current economic crisis, commenters widely agree that this makes Hunt, as the Economist put it, “prime minister in all but name.”

    Hunt immediately went to work slashing nearly all of Truss’s proposed tax cuts and did the media rounds warning of imminent austerity. This is widely seen as a move to appease bond markets and central banks. Coupled with the damage done by lockdowns, this could be the final nail in the coffin for many of Britain’s small businesses.

    Hunt explicitly reassured the Financial Times that Truss is still “in charge”—but the fact that he had to say so is something of a giveaway that most agree this is not the case.

    Even more remarkable is that Hunt obtained his post at the head of Britain’s government “without a shred of democratic legitimacy.” Hunt lost the bid for PM to Boris Johnson in 2019, and his subsequent bid in 2022 gained the support of just 18 MPs. His career in high office seemed to be over.

    Part of the reason Hunt’s 2022 bid imploded is that testimony and video surfaced of his praising China’s draconian “Zero Covid” and quarantine measures and advocating for the UK to emulate them. Hunt had likewise been a vocal proponent of lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
    …
    Jeremy Hunt’s wife, Lucia Guo, is a Chinese native and presents a program for Chinese state media on Sky TV that whitewashes the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights record for a British audience. Hunt described his wife as his “secret weapon” as foreign secretary.
    …
    Given Hunt is widely seen as having been placed at the head of the UK Government by the British political establishment, the choice of Hunt in particular, given his intimate Chinese relations, raises troubling questions about that establishment’s priorities. This is the same British political establishment that for some reason chose to appoint a 40-year member of the British Communist Party as a leading participant in the Government’s “nudge unit” to drive consent for Covid mandates.

    Though evidence connecting Chinese political relations with global lockdowns technically remains “circumstantial”—as lockdown and China proponents are wont to point out—it’s a correlation that, as documented in “Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World,” continues to come up over and over and over again. As the saying goes: Fool me once, shame on you, fool me a hundred times…

    Kind of reminds me of another Chancellor who took advantage of his position to advance his own agenda.

    https://www.thoughtco.com/adolf-hitler-appointed-chancellor-of-germany-1779275

    Not that I want to equate Mr. Hunt with that Other Person, but the fall from democracy into tyranny takes on similar characteristics in all eras.

26. Footnote:
    https://brownstone.org/

    The Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research is a nonprofit organization conceptualized in May 2021. Its vision is of a society that places the highest value on the voluntary interaction of individuals and groups while minimizing the use of violence and force even including that which is exercised by public authority.
    This vision is that of the Enlightenment that elevated learning, science, progress, and universal rights to the forefront of public life, and is newly threatened by ideologies and systems that would take the world back before the triumph of the ideal of freedom.

    The motive force of the Brownstone Institute is the global crisis created by policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. That trauma revealed a fundamental misunderstanding alive in all countries around the world today, a willingness on the part of the public and officials to forego freedom and fundamental human rights in the name of a public health crisis. The consequences were devastating and will live in infamy.

    It’s not just about this one crisis but past ones and the next ones too. The lesson we should learn concerns the desperate need for a new outlook that rejects the rights of the legally privileged few to rule over the many under any pretext, while preserving freedom, free speech, and essential rights even in times of crisis.

    The name Brownstone is from the malleable but long-lasting building stone (also called “Freestone”) used so commonly in 19th-century American cities, preferred for its beauty, practicality, and strength. The Brownstone Institute regards the great task of our times as rebuilding the foundation of liberalism as classically understood, including core values of human rights and freedom as non-negotiables for an enlightened society.
    …
    Brownstone Institute looks to influence a post-lockdown world by generating new ideas in public health, scientific discourse, economics, and social theory, to defend and promote the liberty that is critical for an enlightened society from which everyone benefits. The purpose is to point the way toward a better understanding of essential freedoms – including intellectual freedom and free speech – and the proper means to preserve essential rights even in times of crisis.

    They have put together an impressive-looking think-tank in little more than a year.

    Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He writes a daily column on economics at The Epoch Times, and speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

    I’m going to check out some of his past posts.
    https://brownstone.org/author/jeffrey-tucker/

27. Thanks AF…for the digging.

    BTW, WRT the phrase,
    “…This is the same British political establishment that for some reason chose to appoint a 40-year member of the British Communist Party as a leading participant in the Government’s “nudge unit” to drive consent for Covid mandates….”

    …would we happen to have a name on that “40-year member of….”?

28. Per Instapundit and others, she’s gone as of this morning (Thursday 20 October 2022) after 44 days.

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