In 1975, Margaret Thatcher declared: “The other side have got an ideology… we must have one as well.” Liz Truss is of a similar mind. As Stephen Bush reported in the New Statesman last year, she would complain to her aides “when they would draft remarks criticising Jeremy Corbyn for being ‘ideological’, telling them that the only good thing about Corbyn was that he had a clear ideology”.
Truss is far from the first Conservative prime minister in recent history to cut taxes. David Cameron’s government abolished the 50p income tax rate and reduced corporation tax from 28 per cent to 19 per cent. But whenever possible, Cameron and George Osborne would clothe their actions in progressive garb (recall “we’re all in this together”). By contrast, Truss clothes regressive policies in regressive garb. She unashamedly dismisses the issue of wealth distribution in favour of a rhetorical focus on wealth creation, thus ignoring the question of why there are numerous economies that are both richer and more equal than the UK (Germany, France, the Nordic states, Australia and New Zealand).
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