Prime Minister’s Questions with Liz Truss – she answered, but not well
This Writer was away from his desk yesterday (Wednesday, September 7, 2022) because I was on a mercy mission – taking a family member to hospital.
So I’m relying on this video and BBC News (heaven help me!) for my information:
Interesting stuff.
So Liz Truss actually bothered to answer the questions. Was this because she doesn’t have the imagination to distract us with nonsense or divert us onto another subject? I find the latter likely but the former incredible, considering the amount of nonsense with which she regaled us all during her Tory leadership election campaign.
Ah, but her answers were useless. That’s more familiar ground. In fact, it seems clear that if the energy generation companies aren’t going to be made to subsidise our increased bills with their profits (which would be an excellent way of ‘chilling’ them – discouraging them from charging so much in the first place), the onus will fall to the general public.
This seems likely to take the form of a loan scheme, under which households will be forced to pay back the extra cost of their energy bills over a longer period of time, alongside whatever their energy will cost at that time.
This has the potential to put us all in perpetual debt. It reminds This Writer of an idea called the zombie economy, in which the working classes are kept in perpetual slavery to the business owners and politicians because they are forced to keep working in order to service ever-increasing debts that have been foisted on them, along with high government taxes.
Doesn’t that seem to be what’s happening?
Truss contradicted herself somewhat by saying she wants a high-wage economy. That would undermine the zombie plan – if it were true – but, as Phil Moorhouse points out, Boris Johnson said he wanted a high-wage economy too – and then told everybody to get back to work, the instant they started demanding it.
She said her energy plan would help business – so now we all want to know how. If she doesn’t help businesses, they’ll go under, and that’s a bad thing.
There’s a good sideswipe in the clip at the idiot Austerity policy of David Cameron and George Osborne: cut spending and you shrink the economy. The more they cut government expenditure, the lower tax receipts fell – because the money the government had been spending generated growth. And what did they do in response? They repeated the same mistake, expecting a different result (which is now a well-known definition of madness).
It seems tax-cutter Truss wants to repeat the mistake again – this time by cutting tax receipts first and claiming there isn’t the money to carry on spending on public services (the infamous Starve The Beast policy).
Truss said she would publish her energy plans today (Thursday) – meaning she’ll face a full week of debate in Parliament. That could be embarrassing – unless she merely announces aims.
And it seems she wanted to launch a catchphrase: “You can’t tax a country to growth, you know!” Except you can. History shows a clear correlation between GDP and tax revenues.
She said cutting Corporation Tax would lead to more businesses relocating to the UK – but in fact they are leaving, because of Brexit (which Truss used to oppose but now supports because she is in turn supported by the European Research Group loonies).
And Truss thinks the Northern Ireland Protocol contradicts the Good Friday Agreement – when it in fact protects the Good Friday Agreement.
So, Liz Truss actually answered the questions. But considering the nature of her answers, we can make an easy conclusion:
She is out of her depth.
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