Running With Wolves

 

Truss, Truss, oh where to start? Lampooning Bozza was easy: a sociopath with an insouciant and easy disregard for all but himself, pricked up and pompous in the blind faith in his own intellectual and class superiority; a cartoon of a man whose clay feet were self-evident when his mettle was truly tested.

Truss, by comparison - likened by many to be batshit crazy (not my words) - seemed to be a naif on the grand stage she had engineered her way onto: indeed the leading role of which she now occupied. But no, her history is steeped in the murky realms of neoliberal macroeconomics, the cult place of worship of big business and right-wing governments alike.

Right-wing 'Think Tanks' abound, in the UK and US in particular, with secretive hyphae that stretch underground across the G7, via banks, hedge funds and 'wealth-management' firms, and into the fabric of governments across the global north.

Boiled down to a phrase, the ideology underlying all current right-wing economics is 'Supply-side'. All the principle influences on Truss and her policy decisions basically emerge from the same origins: the neoliberal theoreticians [read gurus] of the latter part of the twentieth century, and the educational outlets that influenced a couple of generations of students, and guided them to the Promised Deregulated Land of some Free Market New Jerusalem, on the back of a set of pathetically simple and naive ideas.

The idea is this: reduce taxes and the supply of goods will increase, and the economy will grow. Really? I mean, that is pretty much like saying that taking aspirin will cure any and every human disease, or that filling the washer bottle on your car will somehow fix the transmission. A brief quote from Bruce Bartlett of the New York Times, writing in 2007: 

    'As one who was present at the creation of “supply-side economics” back in the 1970s, I think it is long past time that the phrase be put to rest. It did its job, creating a new consensus among economists on how to look at the national economy. But today it has become a frequently misleading and meaningless buzzword that gets in the way of good economic policy.'

2007. Like the Harvard MBA, now much derided in sensible business circles, forty years into its toxic legacy of business, social and economic failure, it's high time we stopped allowing people into government who have studied Politics, Economics & Philosophy at Oxford: another lazy degree that leads to the kind of stultifyingly simplistic economic theory that neoliberals hold as true articles of faith. Like any faith, it is simply that, faith.

These people have been inculcated into the mantra of a cult whose philosophies were busily being discredited before most of the acolytes and adherents of that cult were out of school. There has to be a better way of running this world, and many great thinkers and their ideas have been consigned to the bonfire of the vanities that is neoliberalism: a stupidly simplistic and dangerous embodiment of one of the Seven Deadly Sins: Greed.

Truss likes to run with the wolves: in 2018, she gave a speech at the Cato Institute in Washington, arguing for '...a new, small-state "Anglo-American dream" ["the market millennials" used to the freedoms of the app economy] - "Uber-riding, Airbnb-ing, Deliveroo-eating freedom-fighters - [allowing] the young to flower and the anti-establishment to flourish". Sounds like some barking bit of student politics to me, folks. Not exactly what is required just at this, rather critical moment in history, or indeed ever, outside the Oxford Union debating chamber...