It will take a Labour win for Tories to see Truss was right, says Odey
PROMINENT hedge fund tycoon Crispin Odey has said that “we probably need a Labour” government to force the Conservative Party to rally behind the low-tax economic agenda advocated by Liz Truss.
Reacting to the former prime minister breaking her silence on her 49 days in Downing Street, the City investment manager conceded that last autumn “wasn’t the right moment” to thrust Trussonomics on to the British economy.
Mr Odey had been a prominent supporter of Ms Truss’s plans but said in hindsight that announcement when “everyone is very poor” had proven a mistake.
However, he criticised Rishi Sunak’s policies that have taken the UK’S tax burden to the highest level in 80 years.
“This Conservative Party looks like Ted Heath’s Conservative Party,” he said
“It has stolen the policies of Labour the whole way along. The trouble is that we probably need a bit of Labour.”
He added: “Strangely, Liz Truss is not a million miles away from where the Conservative Party should be. This will be the agenda for the Tories when they’re trying to get back in.” Ms Truss wrote a 4,000-word essay for The Sunday Telegraph to defend her time as the shortest-serving prime minister in UK history.
Although not “blameless”, she said that her administration became “a useful scapegoat for problems that had been brewing over a number of months”.
Ms Truss claimed that she had been brought down by “the Left-wing economic establishment”.
Sir Rocco Forte, the hotelier, also said that “Liz Truss was absolutely right to take on the economic orthodoxy”. He said that if Ms Truss did make a mistake, it was to announce tax cuts without calculations to back them up.
He said: “Cutting taxes is not about making the wealthy wealthier.
“This is about people that are on £50,000 a year that have been left struggling to make ends meet because of the tax burden placed on them.
“It also fundamentally misses the point that the wealthiest people will just leave the country if the UK makes it more expensive to stay here.
“People are worried about the removal of non-dom status and simply move overseas. With them will go their offices and the jobs that they support by choosing to live here.”
Jeremy Hosking, the financier behind Marathon Asset Management and Hosking Partners, added: “The Truss-kwarteng reforms were a well considered and justifiable approach to reinvigorating Britain’s growth prospects that had a lot of contemporaneous support.
“The Conservatives entirely misdiagnosed the source of opposition to ‘dry’ economic policies.
“The establishment elite that controls Britain has been captured by Leftist progressive ideologies riddled with political correctness.
“Before any sensible economic policies can be adopted, a culture war needs to be fought in educational establishments and other infiltrated institutions, including the Civil Service. The Conservatives dearly want to avoid this at all costs, but this obstacle is no longer ‘swervable’.”