San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
New British premier already facing fierce headwinds
LONDON — For Prime Minister Liz Truss, it was a chance to steady the waters after days of turmoil in the financial markets over her new fiscal plan: eight rapid-fire interviews with local BBC radio stations from Leeds to Nottingham.
By the time Truss signed off from the last one, on Thursday morning, her political woes had multiplied, leaving her new government in a state of disarray almost without precedent in recent British politics.
She was, critics said, robotic in defending a taxcut plan that had been eviscerated by the markets, and showed little sympathy for the pain that high interest rates could inflict on mortgage holders. One host described her as a “reverse Robin Hood.” A listener on another station asked, “Are you ashamed of what you’ve done?”
Barely three weeks into her job, Truss has suffered a dizzying loss of public support. Her Conservative Party now trails the opposition Labor Party by 33 percentage points, according to a new poll by the market research firm YouGov.
That is the largest Labor lead since Tony Blair’s early days as prime minister in 1998, and the kind of gap that usually results in a landslide election defeat.
Her plunging poll numbers have badly damaged Truss’ standing in her party, which is gathering Sunday in Birmingham for what promises to be an anxious annual conference. Some speak openly of the party ousting her before the next election, although the mechanics for doing that remain complicated.
“This is by far the biggest and swiftest hit to a party’s opinion poll rating that British politics has ever seen,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “For Tory MPs, this is like realizing on your wedding night that you’ve made a truly terrible mistake.”
What makes Truss’ predicament so difficult is that none of the escape hatches are appealing. Reversing some of her tax cuts — particularly the one for the top income bracket of people earning more than 150,000 pounds, or about $164,000, a year — would mollify the markets and probably some voters.
But it would be a heavy psychological blow for a leader who ran her campaign, and has built her government, on the conviction that tax cuts and supply-side policies will reignite growth. Giving that up, Bale said, would vitiate the ideological rationale of her government and potentially turn her into a lame-duck leader until the next election, which she will have to call by early 2025.
Sticking to her guns, which has been Truss’ response so far, leaves open the chance that Britain’s economy will pick up by the time she faces voters. But the stubborn threat of inflation all but guarantees that the Bank of England, Britain’s central bank, will keep raising interest rates. That will hurt people who need to refinance mortgages and may throw the broader economy into a recession.
Beyond the tug of war between fiscal and monetary policy, critics say Truss faces a more elemental problem: Her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, has lost the faith of the markets in his stewardship.
That is partly because when Kwarteng announced the tax cuts, he did not submit the package to the scrutiny that a government budget normally receives. That fed fears that the tax cuts were “unfunded,” meaning that they would not be matched with cuts in spending and so would require massive borrowing.
On Friday, Kwarteng and Truss met at Downing Street with officials from the government’s forecasting agency, the Office of Budget Responsibility — a move designed to signal they now welcomed the scrutiny. The office will submit its projections for the cost of the fiscal program and its effect on Britain’s growth this Friday, but the government will not publish the numbers until Nov. 23.
For Truss, the political fallout from her program’s botched rollout has been profound. Political analysts point out that she won the support of only one-third of Conservative Party lawmakers in the first stage of the leadership contest. Now, the collapsing polls have left the lawmakers angry, fearful and divided.
“We’re seeing the complete implosion of the Conservative vote,” said Matthew Goodwin, a politics professor at Kent University and an expert on the Tory Party.