Liz Truss

[Collywobblewobbles]

Am I being unreasonable to start to question Liz Truss' sanity?

OK I've put this in Aibu but it's a serious question, she honestly comes across as if she doesn't have a foot in reality and, as a former PM and current politician, it's a serious & genuine question.

She believes an extremist Islamic party is at risk of winning a local election, she believes Trump-oh-please-Mr-Putin-feel-free-to-bomb-Nato-states is the single best thing for the safety of the West and whenever she's asked a question which she can't or doesn't want to answer she just acts like nothing has been said and does this weird smile into nothingness.

There's calculated political moves to extend your career and then there's the strange machinations and declarations which we see from her, it's just.....so bizarre.

I'm just beginning to wonder if she's living in some sort of fantasy-world.

If someone can shed some rational light onto her actions then please do because I'm at a loss!

Surely the fact that she mismanaged the roll out of her policies so very badly is a clear sign that she wasn't fit to lead.

I don’t have a ‘problem’ with it all aside from the fact that you seem to think your analysis is beyond question. Your analysis is highly reliant on hindsight which is fine, but it’s still 99% of your own opinion after the fact.

Also, I’m not entirely sure why you think it was all manoeuvred to install Rishi. I can see why there might’ve been plans in the works but to actively try and unseat a PM so quickly is madness. The timescales are too off for it to be intentional imho. It’s done literally no one any favours.

Some might say she is several mints short of a tin.

I say you want to look at the Conservatives who thought she was a good choice. Their sanity is in question

I work in Finance. Coatrack you are largely correct aside from the inevitability of the events immediately after the mini budget. It was rather the BoE's (and later government's) response to the 'mini-budget' which shored up the financial system very quickly. The £ had recovered to pre budget levels within a couple of weeks.

Thank you for saying so. Obviously nobody knows for sure what would have happened if no measures had been taken.

From looking at the numbers and the sequence of events I personally believe that it would have returned to trend once the markets got used to it. Your mileage for this may vary.

My rationale is that the BOE's own data say that the peak had almost completely subsided before they announced the purchases, which was about 1 week later IIRC. This says to me that neither the measures nor even the promise of them was the reason for it.

It's possible, though a bounce doesn't necessarily mean the bottom would have been in without intervention, markets don't move in a straight line. Regardless we can both agree the damage was brief but we still hear today that she's responsible for the current rates.

I never said I was beyond question, and very little of my post is opinion. The facts are the facts and I've made my subsequent reasoning quite clear. I'm happy for people to disagree with me about my conclusions but I would also like to know why they think that. How else do we learn?

Rishi was not elected, ergo he was installed. If you wonder why I think this way, it's because the politicians and the media very rarely send out the exact same messaging on a topic. When they do, I get suspicious and I start looking into things for myself.

This happened here and it turns out there's a lot more to it, and I think it's important. I am in no way interested in defending Liz per se, but pinning it all on her deflects from the atrocious economic decisions made by Boris and Rishi himself. I think they should both be in prison for various reasons.

You can make the argument that the budget still caused trouble etc. and that's fine (I think I said in my post that she should have done it differently), but the fact that the standard narrative is that she is the main reason for your mortgage going up is just not true.

Apologies again for all the paragraphs!

Exactly 🙂

Apologies for derailing my own thread here, but have no finance or economic background and really don't understand what happened around the budget 😳

Can someone please explain it to me like they would a 5 year old?

Whenever I try & look up economic explainers they always assume a level of knowledge & I don't believe its as complicated as it sounds!

A friend took me to a Tory event once, and she sat next to us and started talking during someone else's speech; she was and is batshit crazy. I could never have voted for her; it's a sad thing that the Tory MPs put her on the ballot. She was 3rd through most rounds. It's such a pity she kicked Mourdent out. a contest between her and Sunak wouldn't have been too bad.

I've always thought that the elevation of this mad-as-a-box-of-frogs fucking woman to PM was a deliberate ploy by Johnson to ensure that whoever succeeded him was sooooooo fucking shit that they would make him look good by comparison.

I don't know how he did it or why anyone went along with it, but that's my conspiracy theory out there.

This is a very basic explanation (mainly because I don’t really understand what happened with the budget!)

My basic understanding of what happened is that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng wanted to make a huge amount of unfunded tax cuts in the budget.

I think their plan was to fund the tax cuts through the ‘trickle-down’ economic approach, which Truss loved talking about at the time. This seemed to involve creating wealth and growing economy through cutting the taxes of the wealthy, therefore letting them spend more of their money and letting that money enter the rest of the economy to benefit everyone. The ‘trickle down’ approach seems to be quite controversial - understandably, especially since the budget - and lots of people think it’s a parody economic theory that was never intended to be taken seriously.

As mentioned, these tax cuts in the budget were unfunded, as they didn’t have a plan for how they would pay for them. This frightened the markets and business world, because the economy and the markets like predictability and routine and are allergic to any kind of risk, and then destabilised the economy.

Which is worse ? The madwoman ? Or the people that voted for them ?

Liz Truss was foisted on us because enough people voted Tory. Reason enough to swerve that party. Possibly forever.

She’s my MP ☹️ and has been re-selected and is likely to get voted in again because all of the incomer Tory pensioners keep voting for her because they’re scared of Labour. She has done nothing for the area, isn’t here most of the time and didn’t even bother to campaign for the last election because her majority was so assured.

I’ve been telling friends from other areas how awful she is for years, particularly during the run up to her becoming PM. I think that they thought that I just hated the Tory party (I do) but at least they believe me now!

That’s awful 😞 sorry to hear it, @Gipil

There is an interesting graph showing that as months go by "natural wastage" is reducing the Tories share of the vote more than any other parties.

https://twitter.com/Samfr/status/1761745491010671034

Yes, I thought that after seeing her being interviewed at CPAC in the US. Used to be a broad church "conservative" conference but in recent years it's become dominated by Trump's MAGA people and now also features avowed neo-Nazis and white supremacists. And there was Liz Truss - the former LibDem and Remainer - as an enthusiastic part of it.

Unfortunately that’s probably not the case here, it’s a retirement hotspot and so the “natural wastage” is quickly replaced.

but the fact that the standard narrative is that she is the main reason for your mortgage going up is just not true

narrative endures. Labour are still the unions whipping boy and the country will grind to a halt through strikes because of the 70’s, Gordon Brown will forever be responsible for the global financial crash and a fool for selling off the country’s gold, Labour will alway be the shysters who left a note in the treasury saying all the money has gone.

if you are even loosely associated with something that hits people’s pockets that’s your legacy. Facts rarely make a difference, opinion and intangible likelihoods even less.

My take on Liz Truss is that she looks very shy and awkward. I don't think that makes someone unfit for office in itself, and we shouldn't base our choices of leader on who can look natural in front of a camera.

She has that startled rabbit in the head lights look that I always have when someone points a camera at me.

I don't think she is fit for office - but that is not based on her social clumsiness

I agree. She was and is shit, but there is no way possible she was solely responsible for trashing our economy. The crash was underway before she came PM. For example inflation was shooting up months beforehand.

Rishi should have taken far more the blame. He was a terrible chancellor. I don’t know why he’s not being held to account for the many mistakes he made, but think he got lucky as Johnson was more of a train wreck so he wasn’t exposed. He was incompetent.

You need to really dig into the stats. Overall Tory voters are dying (possibly of shame or embarrassment) at a faster rate than non-Tory voters. There will be outliers.

That’s very little comfort when your MP’s a madwoman with a 26k majority.