Saturday, 24 February 2024

Truss - a journey

Tony Blair’s memoir published in 2010 was called A Journey. I’ve never read it but I always took the title to mean his political journey from left to right. Now it seems Liz Truss is travelling the same road, only going much, much further and perhaps intending to go all the way which history tells us usually ends in authoritarianism, fascism, and worse. The erstwhile prime minister is in the USA, specifically at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in Maryland, just outside Washington DC at one of the CPAC conferences running from 21 to 24 February.

In case you don’t know what the CPAC is (as I didn’t), it’s the Conservative Political Action Conference, one of three held each year, a sort of jamboree for the far right. The others are in March and July.  When I hear American politicians describe themselves as conservative it’s always a good indicator they are well off the scale.

Truss isn’t there as an observer, to see just how stupid these weirdos, misfits, nutjobs, Christian fundamentalists, QAnon conspiracy theorists, and sovereign citizens are but to participate and encourage them in their delusions. This is almost unbelievable for an ex-British PM.

She has given a speech blaming her own brief 49-day disaster on the 'deep state' rather than her own insane policies. Robert Peston tweeted that she now plans to "enforce 'the will of the people' and take on that establishment with a 'bigger bazooka'."

As the historian Robert Saunders tweeted:

She literally represented the establishment but now pretends to rail against a fictional 'deep state' to explain her abject failure. She is almost more Trump than Trump. But it wasn't just the speech. Truss appeared in several interviews with Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon. Don't forget at Oxford, she was president of the OU LibDems but soon joined the Tories in 1996 when she was 21.

Here she is with Bannon:

And with Farage where she tells him it's 'vital for the West' that Joe Biden is kicked out of the White House in November. She says she felt safer when Trump was in power and actually wants to see him re-elected and presumably quit NATO!!!

The Daily Telegraph has succumbed to the insanity too, in a piece by Thatcher's former aide Nile Gardiner: Liz Truss knows how to save America.  Gardiner says:

"US polls project the strong possibility of a Republican presidency taking over from January 2025, with Donald Trump leading the race for his party’s nomination. Britain’s political leaders should be laying the foundations for a strong US-British partnership in a likely post-Biden era, with a potential second Trump administration."

He is talking about a soon-to-be-bankrupt sexual predator facing multiple trials for insurrection, espionage, and election interference who has nothing but praise for Putin, Xi Jing Ping, and Kim Jong Un, probably the three worst tyrants on the planet. But he mentions nothing about any of that.

Margaret Thatcher would have been appalled.

Below is Jack Posobiec III an American alt-right political activist, television correspondent, and presenter according to his Wikipedia entry. He's a conspiracy theorist and former US Navy intelligence officer known for his pro-Trump views:

They are quite open about it.

I assume CPAC has no difficulty raising money for the lavish conference and hospitality. I bet Truss didn't pay for travel or accommodation. It's backed by a lot of wealthy men I'm sure with very deep pockets.

On Brexit, to show how far Truss has come, Peter Foster at the FT tweeted a link to a speech she gave to the Food and Drink Federation in May 2016 where she supported remain and described the risks that Brexit represented - all of which have come to pass. This is her eight years ago:

"I know how difficult it is getting products into markets like the US and China. DEFRA has just filled in a 1,000 page form which is one part of an eight-stage process to get British beef and lamb and we’ve still got to get a resolution passed by Congress to allow that British lamb into the market. So I think we’ve got to be very careful about taking that single market for granted and being outside that single market, and the single market isn’t something that is a sexy, exciting thing to explain. But it is really crucial to the amount of growth we’ve seen in food and drink exports over the past 40 years. It is really crucial to that."

And:

"Now the reason many of those investors want to invest in the UK market is because we have access to 500 million consumers. Yes, the UK is a hotbed of innovation, but we are also a passport into that wider market. Now I’ve spoken to many investors who are saying that they would be concerned if they invested in the UK, whether it’s in R&D, whether it’s in capital to improve our productivity, whether it’s in new production, and I want to see more investment in areas like dairy processing capacity, I think we’ve got massive potential here in the UK."

Truss is now a cheerleader for Brexit and the far right. What happened?

If she assumes her increasingly deranged pronouncements are going to win her the Tory leadership for a second time we should worry about the direction the party is going in. They will never win an election again if they don't turn back.

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