October 2, 2023 - 10:00am
Liz Truss has said and done some strange things in her political career.
There was her pork markets speech, of course, and the Margaret Thatcher cosplay. Then came the fever dream of her brief time as PM — followed by a post-prime ministerial career of blaming everyone but herself for crashing the economy.
However, she’s waited until this year’s Conservative Party Conference in Manchester to unleash the wrongest of all her wrong-headed ideas. In a BBC interview she said that “people never vote on the past: they vote on what is your future prospectus and who do they think is going to do a better job.”
With this latest intervention, the Tories should realise that the mind of Liz Truss is once again at odds with reality. Really, people do “vote on the past”. Indeed, they vote on the basis of things that happened before they were born. Take Ireland, for instance, where for decades the big two parties were Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Ideologically, they occupy the same centrist space on the political spectrum — but they were on different sides in the 1922-23 Irish Civil War. That was enough to define the country’s party system for the best part of the next century.
An even older divide can be seen on the Polish electoral map — where the strongest areas for the two biggest parties in the country today are delineated by the border between the German and Russian Empires (when, from 1795 to 1918, Poland was partitioned between them).
Or, for a British example, consider the “Red Wall” constituencies of Northern England, the Midlands and Wales. Wrongly considered a pre-Brexit Labour heartland, the Red Wall is better described as an area in which the Conservatives have persistently underperformed in general elections. The reason why they didn’t win more of the seats (until Brexit) was because of multi-generational anti-Tory sentiment.
One way or another, the past is present in every general election. However, it needn’t be the deep past. Voters are also influenced by more recent events. A fresh memory of an epic government screw-up is especially motivating.
The classic example is Black Wednesday — when, on the 16 September 1992, a financial crisis forced the the UK out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (the predecessor to the single currency). It was an utter humiliation at the time, but the UK made a strong economic recovery and by the next general election — almost five years later — the future was looking bright. In fact, the economic outlook was much rosier than it is today.
So did the voters forgive and forget the Tories for Black Wednesday? Er, no. The truth is that once a government has breached a certain level of political ineptitude, the electorate neither forgives nor forgets. Voters may have to wait years before settling accounts — but sooner or later it will happen.
Liz Truss’s idea that voters only care about the future and not the past is self-serving. It provides a basis on which she could run again for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Or, at least, it would do if her latest theory was at all credible. But, as history makes clear, it isn’t.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeThe Conservatives LOL what did they ever conserve ?
The Ireland reference is wrong. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael occupied broadly centre left and centre right positions in the political spectrum for most of the last century. For some, it was a tribal matter going back to the civil war but for the ordinary voter, it was always the policies of the day that mattered. Now both have converged in the globalist centre with the rise of other parties
Liz Truss remains a LibDem at heart. The statement about voting on the future is strait from the LibDem horses’ mouth.
Problem for the Tories is they’ve started to ignore Mad Liz a little too late. They stuck her in No.10 for goodness sake, cheered when she announced unfunded tax cuts…and then sheepishly retreated disowning when the stupidity unravelled.
Let’s try to keep her in the public eye though as much as poss to remind the public what happens when Tory members chose our PM.
You still here watson?
Anyway, let’s not allow Jeremy ‘Jezza’ Corbyn to be quietly airbrushed out of Labour party history. Important to remember what happened when the £3 membership scheme opened the floodgates to a torrent of small-minded Lefty idealists (the type whose idea of political comment is to shout ‘Tory Scum’). I believe that Len McCluskey and his stooge Ed Miliband were the geniuses behind that super wheeze.
On the other side of the Labour divide let’s not forget Tony Blair’s New Labour project. To the delight of Labour’s social engineering do-gooders the state gained ever increasing powers to interfere in people’s lives – powers that continue their insidious growth post Blair.
While we’re on the topic of Blair’s blunders let’s not forget his bright idea of giving half the population a university education – presumably driven by the prevalent Lefty delusion that to be well educated is to be socialist (and vice versa).
Tony Blair, Alistair Campbell, Gordon Brown and even Ed Balls (a veritable Gang-of-Four) are reportedly hovering around Sir Keir. Are they planning a resurgence of New Labour by behind-the-scenes influence?
Yep, it’s 1997 all over again.
Things can only get better
Good grief Sat, 4 paragraphs!
Albeit all about a Blair Govt that was 16 years ago. Strange how you keep forgetting who’s been in power the last 14 years. You haven’t been some form of extended coma have you?
There’s no such thing as an unfunded tax cut. It’s the spending that’s unfunded. Doh!
There is DU if you don’t say what you are going to cut. Which is what happened.
I can sense why you are easily led astray.
There is no such thing as an unfunded tax cut. Also, the tax cutting measures that would have restored the UK to approximately the same tax burden as existed under the last Labour government was not what caused the market panic 12 months ago, it was the potential for the energy bill support package to cost upwards of £100bn that did that. In the end it didn’t cost that, and now a year further down the line with our still-unreformed public sector and tax burden, bond yields are in any case riding towards where they were at the height of the Truss/Kwarteng so-called crisis. So how exactly did maintaining the high tax model help? Answer: it didn’t.
She spiking interest rates and increased the national debt, so her plan most certainly did not work. The point being if she’d explained how she was funding the tax cuts and that stacked up then whilst tax cuts for the richest may be bad politics it’s less likely to have spooked the markets. So I’m afraid the simple fact is she proposed something that was unfunded without more borrowing.
Only partition line here is the one between Liz Truss and reality. She’d be a very fine governor of the Bahamas.
Sadly that useful cupboard for the embarrassing was locked shut with full independence in 1973 – the Duke of Windsor being a notable recent incumbent before then.
Weddings, Parties, Anywhere !!
I understand that the Falkland Islands have a Governor.
Though perhaps Ms Truss would launch an invasion of Argentina?
“The classic example is Black Wednesday — when, on the 16 September 1992, a financial crisis forced the the UK out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (the predecessor to the single currency). It was an utter humiliation at the time, but the UK made a strong economic recovery and by the next general election — almost five years later — the future was looking bright. In fact, the economic outlook was much rosier than it is today.”
Correct but is missing the crucial observation that the UK’s recovery post-ERM was a direct consequence of leaving the ERM, which had been imposing punitive monetary policy measures on the UK economy for no good reason at all (unless, of course, one subscribed to the odd view that the point of Britain is to serve European federal ambitions).
The nightmare days of 15% mortgage interest rates were from the times when the UK was trying to stay in the ERM. Getting out of it was what created the 1990s decade of rising prosperity.
The headline is two words too long…
Liz presents the Celtic Tiger model to attract international inward investment, but the British political establishment is set on joining the euro by broadly keeping within the EU’s growth and stability pact. Hence, Mr Hunt’s fiscal policy even if some superficial tax cuts are proposed next year.
Liz Truss can only rely on some tories believing any kind of old hogwash it seems in their interests to believe. A combination of selfishness, lack of vision and cognitive atrophy. People like her, in fact.