Oh do not think, I see this through a narrow scope and being brilliant news. However, bringing a focus back on material reality is not a bad thing and has to be part of any process forward to break whats been going on. So that part I do welcome.
My feeling is that the path out of the mess we've got into is certainly not going to be easy or straightforward. There are huge numbers of people who believe in this and for whom it has become 'a sacred belief'. So even if material reality is allowed to be spoken there will be problems. And I'm well aware of Tory opportunism in exploiting fractures in society. Its something I'm very mindful of. The whole culture war thing is here with us for a very long time to come.
My hope is that it which shift the overton window again and this will be a subject that can be talked about again. And that speech has at least some of the right tone and approach. Which is needed to break the status quo.
That said: Liz Truss. Her record is appalling. She has many parallels with how May was as PM and at the Home Office.
This is also where I draw distinctions between what is said and what is done. Truss spent time at the Department for Justice and it wasn't regarded as good. She was Lord Chancellor at the time of 'Enemies of the People' stuff in the Daily Mail and never stood up as her roll required to defend the integrity of the judges and the courts. This was the very essence of the job and a failure to do so was a complete undermining of the independence of the justice system.
We know that there are moves to totally gut and revamp the civil service. There are concerted efforts ongoing to rid it of people deemed problematic. This is in part to try and balance the echo chamber of the service which has tended to favour people from a certain background and therefore likely to hold similar views (which are most likely to reflect 'liberal identity' view and be in favour of this time of identity politics). There has been moves to try and establish a civil service where loyalty to the government has become important (the civil service is supposed to maintain political independence). And there's been efforts to drive out those who are not ideologically driven and prefer using evidence as a base. I was reading one article just last night about how the strategy by ministers is to fuck up as much as possible with brexit/covid and then to blame it all on the inadequancy of the civil service. There is a desire to instead use the restructuring of the civil service to give power to more Tory cronies.
We also know that a lot of what is going on is related to lobbying power. The government tried a while back to disrupt the lobbying influence of charities during elections - think charities like the Trussell Trust rather than Stonewall in 2017. A lot of power on the left does derive from charities. And unfortunately you have charities which have looked for power rather than serving the interests of those who they are supposed to help and become almost corrupt in their own right - which makes them vulnerable to (and perhaps dare I say asking for) a crack down on the blurring on the lines between lobbying and charity. The current government is seeking to consolidate the lobbying power and influence it has from big business and private conflicts of interests and charitable organisations tend to be one of the large opposition groups to this. (To simplify - a battle between two groups of essentially corrupt power groups with a vested interest in lobbying is going on).
My concern is not what the Tories say its what they do - the devil in the detail if you will.This government, may well say they support lots of things, but the acid test is whether the proposals they make actually give the power and agency to the people who need it or not. There isn't a lot about the Tories to suggest they will go near this path from their track record. And from my earlier point about Liz Truss and the undermining of the justice system, I think this is where I tend to sit. The government attitude on rights seems to be that people have the law so can enforce the law if there are breeches of it. At the same time as defunding any sort of ability for the most vulnerable to access legal aid or support financially. In terms of Human Rights the overall move seems to be to moves to make it much more difficult to challenge abuses of power by the state - and large organisations (including the very ones that Truss seems to be saying she's against).
But things currently are fragile and there are no guarentees over anything going forward. We are close to several major crisis blowing out of all control and deciding into complete chaos.
And the demographics for the Tories are also precarious. They are not attracting any level of young support. And they traditionally simply have been unable to attract the vote of renters - they tend to only get that of home owners. This all poses an existential crisis to them in the long term (which may be part of the reason of the current power grab).
None of this is by any means decided as to how this will fall.
So I do think it could be used as a trojan horse. It depends on how the next few years pan out. Indeed the big worry is the economic and where the blame game on that leads. And how politicially stable the UK remains (jury is out on this, despite what anyone may be saying or how big Johnson's majority looks).
At the moment, i'd say its premature to be be predicting where this goes just yet for that reason. The next six months are critical.
And they are equally relavant to Labour. They need to spot the problem here and where the Tories are scoring wins.
Overall, I think my particular fears centre less on this issue of equality as a singular one, and more about where the UK is headed more generally. There are huge societal fractures and they need to be acknowledged and there needs to be better public awareness of them. The public have demonstrated their apathy, indifference and outright malice in the last six months in a number of disturbing ways. The assumption has been in recent months that we've dodged a bullet with Trump and this will cause the UK to change tact and direction. However I do think things like elected judges and a justice and civil service system more similar to the us which is politically aligned (with things like bail bonds possibly something the government would seek to bring in here) are a reasonable prediction which don't bode well for equality on any level. Brexit is a major driver of all this and I've spoken at length on that subject...
I think I am inclined to look for and enjoy small victories for the time being at least. Ahead of what I see as a storm of even more political turbulance.