Truss hits out at doom-mongers
Our best days are ahead, says defiant Liz
LIZ Truss yesterday accused Rishi Sunak’s supporters of spreading ‘portents of doom’ as the Tory leadership contest again turned toxic.
The Foreign Secretary went on the attack after Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab – a Sunak backer – claimed her plans for an emergency taxcutting budget would be an ‘electoral suicide note’.
On a campaign visit to Huddersfield, Miss Truss said: ‘What I care about is Britain being successful. I don’t agree with these portents of doom.
‘I don’t agree with this declinist talk. I believe our country’s best days are ahead of us. And what I’m
‘Taking money out of families’ pockets’
going to do, if selected as prime minister, is keep taxes low, get the economy growing, unleash the potential right across Britain. That’s what I’m about.’
Her stinging rebuke came as one of her leading supporters said it had been ‘blindingly obvious’ that tax hikes introduced by Mr Sunak would clobber households.
Former education secretary Michelle Donelan accused the exchancellor of ‘taking money out of families’ pockets’, leaving them in need of Government handouts.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, she said Miss Truss would, by contrast, be a ‘proactive’ leader who would ‘see the obstacles coming down the road’ and ‘tackle them head-on’.
Criticising Mr Sunak’s opposiare tion to immediate tax cuts, she asked: ‘Is it right that we wait for the UK to nosedive into a recession before we take action? I don’t think it is.’
Miss Truss yesterday refused to commit to extra support for families struggling with the cost of living as she insisted her priority was tax cuts to kick-start the economy. She said that if she became prime minister she would ‘see what the situation is like’ in the autumn.
In contrast, Mr Sunak said he would offer households ‘hundreds of pounds’ in extra support to help them cope with rising energy bills.
He told ITV News: ‘I want to make sure pensioners and the low-income households that I care most about do get the help that they need and I want them to have peace of mind.
‘I’m always going to want to make sure that those families have that peace of mind, particularly those on pensions and low incomes. And what I am worried about is Liz Truss’s plans on tax not going to provide any help for those people.’
But Miss Donelan accused Mr Sunak of making the situation worse for families during his time as chancellor by raising taxes, including national insurance. She said: ‘We have to be honest – we have been too reactive in recent years. Taxes were put up to a 70year high without proper care for the blindingly obvious challenges that would eventually cause – taking money out of families’ pockets, leaving Government on the back foot with no option but to hand out redistribution grants. This is unsustainable and cannot be our long-term solution to tackling the cost of living crisis.’
Miss Truss last night branded cash handouts to help with the cost of living as ‘Gordon Brown economics’ as she addressed a leadership hustings in Darlington.
Referring to the former Labour PM and chancellor, she said: ‘What I don’t support is taking money off people in tax and then giving it back to them in handouts. That to me is Gordon Brown economics.’
Meanwhile, Mr Sunak denied that he had ‘wielded the dagger’ to get rid of Boris Johnson. Challenged at the hustings, he insisted: ‘It wasn’t just me who felt that enough was enough.
‘The Government was on the wrong side of yet another ethical decision and it was 60 other Members of Parliament also who thought that enough was enough.’ He also ruled out increasing funding for the NHS to help it cope with rocketing inflation. He said: ‘NHS spending is fine where it is and what we need out of the NHS is more reform, more efficiency.’
Mr Johnson last night told a No10 reception he was ‘absolutely certain’ his successor would announce more help with energy bills.
‘I want them to have peace of mind’
THERE’S something about the passing of Olivia Newton-John that feels like more than just the loss of someone who, by all accounts, was a very nice person. She symbolised an entire era, a whole cultural mood.
Xanadu was the first single I ever owned, bought with my 13th birthday money. The following year she topped the charts with Physical, combining the new craze for fitness with sex and resulting in one of the most jawdroppingly tasteless music videos ever produced.
But she will, of course, be best remembered for the movie Grease. When it was released in 1978, I had just started secondary school in Italy. I seem to remember it took a while to reach our local cinema, but once it did, there was no stopping it.
Despite being a bespectacled swot in frumpy brown loafers (I already had size 7 feet, and the only shoes my mother could find to fit me were, mortifyingly, men’s), I suddenly found myself very popular, even with the older kids.
As the one English girl in an entire school of Grease-mad teenagers, I was the only person capable of deciphering the lyrics to the songs.
Aspiring young Sandys and wannabe Dannys would cluster around me at lunchtime, wanting to know the correct pronunciation of ‘Iuarr-da-uan-dat-ai-uant’ and the precise meaning of the lyrics to Summer Nights. I’m not sure I was a lot of help with the latter, since much of the subtext was lost on my 12-year-old self. Nor had I actually seen the film: my mother, who objected strongly to my father’s jokey references to ‘Olivia Neutron-Bomb’, considered both it and its stars the height of vulgarity and banned me from going anywhere near it.
But there is no doubt it spoke to my generation. There wasn’t a lot of fun to be had in the late 1970s. No mobile phones, no internet, nothing decent on the TV, just a lot of brown corduroy, handlebar moustaches and greasy hair.
Cinema was hard-edged, gritty: A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Pretty Baby, Apocalypse Now. Grease, by contrast, was a Technicolor blast of nostalgia, a silly, sunny flashback to a post-war heyday of prosperity and promise. No wonder we lapped it up.
Of course, it could never have been made today. As evidenced by recent waves of anti-Grease sentiment both here and in Australia, where Newton-John grew up, it would be cancelled at the first focus group.
The lyrics are too ‘rapey’: ‘Tell me more, tell me more, did she put up a fight?’
It contains clear incidences of upskirting (the scene where Putzie crawls beneath the stalls at the sports field) and harassment (the catcalls and wolf whistles when Sandy transforms into a vamp — soon to be an actual criminal offence if Liz Truss gets her way). There is endless gaslighting (Danny’s misguided lunge at the Drive-In: ‘Sandy, what’s the matter with you — I thought I meant something to you?’).
There’s even an attempted date rape: when the dance-off contest comes to town, Marty reveals the show’s host, Vince Fontaine, ‘tried to put aspirin in my Coke’.
Toxic masculinity, slut-shaming, lack of diversity, heteronormativity: every cardinal sin in the Gospel of Woke is there, plus some they probably haven’t thought of yet. And yes, it’s true, there is a dark undercurrent running through this film, beyond the Colgate smiles and the candyfloss curls. But that is precisely what makes it such a great movie, and why its popularity endures.
LOVE, heartbreak, peer pressure, regret, insecurity, fear of failure, of being judged: these are all emotions today’s teenagers feel, just as we did.
They are lessons every generation has to learn, mistakes that need to be made in order to be properly understood.
If Danny had been cancelled in the first scene for his (admittedly lascivious) hip movements, he would never have made the journey from greaseball to adoring boyfriend; and if Sandy had remained as prim and proper as she was at the start, she might never have discovered her power as a woman.
That’s what cancel culture fails to understand: it’s the mistakes and idiotic things we say and do that turn us into better people. It’s the grit in the oyster that makes the pearl. Without that, you risk just being another mollusc on the seabed of life.