The stupidity of Liz Truss: who elected these Tories, and are they brave enough to admit it?
Liz Truss: as a trade negotiator she is a blithering imbecile with no redeeming features whatsoever. And that is being charitable!
Back in December 2019, enough people in the UK thought the Conservatives should be trusted to run the country that they gained a Parliamentary majority of 80 seats.
Since then, it seems everything Boris Johnson’s government has done has proved those Conservative voters wrong.
The latest revelation about International Trade Secretary Liz Truss only hammers this point further home – and it relates to Brexit, the subject on which Johnson won his election.
More people voted Conservative because they wanted the UK to leave the European Union and forge its own future by striking advantageous trade deals with other countries. Right?
Truss cut the first such deal with Japan in September, trumpeting “strong tariff reductions on key agricultural products like pork, beef and salmon [that] will benefit farmers and food exporters”.
However, a study by the UK Trade Policy Observatory (UKTPO) at the University of Sussex has found that just 10 of 9,444 products will enjoy lower taxes.
They include birds’ eggs, raw hides, fur skins, handbags and ultra-strong spirits of at least 90 per cent alcohol – none of which are exported to Japan by the UK, meaning the study found the gain to UK exporters is zero.
Other changes trumpeted by Truss include “cutting-edge digital and data provisions” that are nothing of the sort.
And she claimed a boost to trade with Japan that would be worth £15.7bn over the next 15 years – but that is in comparison with no deal, not with the EU deal that the UK is giving up, due to Brexit.
And 83 per cent of the gains go to Japanese exporters, with the UK’s getting just 17 per cent.
In fairness, the negotiators have managed to avoid the large increases in tariffs that would have been suffered if the UK had gone back to World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules.
But that is not what Johnson and all the other rabid Brexiters promised us when we voted on leaving the EU, back in 2016.
They promised us vast improvements in the prices we would get for our goods – and that’s what Truss tried to claim she had got for us.
They all lied. They failed. They are stupid – possibly the stupidest gang of dimwits ever to infest Whitehall.
And they think we’re stupid enough to let them carry on inflicting their stupidities on us into the future.
Let’s hope they get that wrong, too.
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I had a pretty poor education in the early to mid 60’s – failed 11+ and went to a secondary school where we were viewed as factory fodder. However, I was always an avid reader and was lucky to grow up when libraries, nightschool, etc. were flourishing.
I look at this so called ‘government’ with so many of them having had the advantage of private education followed by Oxford/Cambridge etc. and think ‘these are supposed to be intelligent, educated people??’
Very good material for a 21st century ‘Blackadder’ but the difference being Baldrick would probably be PM!
The tories should all be rotting in prison for all their theft, fraud, corruption and corporate manslaughter.