A Letter To Liz Truss

Ricky D. Hale writes:

Dear Liz,

I wanted to offer you a response to your comeback that absolutely no one asked for, because it seems the one group of people you are not remotely prepared to listen to are your primary victims - and there are an awful lot of us. Millions in fact. “I wasn’t given a realistic chance,” you laughably insist. Yes, you were Liz. Your party made you Prime Minister and let you implement your £45 billion of unfunded tax cuts without any consent from the British public.

They were so keen to give you a chance, they bundled you into Downing Street through the back door and told us we couldn’t have a General Election to decide if we agreed with the voting decisions of 100,000 geriatric Southerners who think “Enoch Powell was right”, have framed pictures of Margaret Thatcher on their living room wall, drink from tea cups with Queen Elizabeth II’s face on them, and would gladly send lefties to Rwanda for wrongthink and make seven-year-old Northerners do National Service to teach them to know their place.

You know who wasn’t given a chance to be Prime Minister? Jeremy Corbyn, the man whose opening gambit had he won the last Election was going to be, “Today rough sleeping and homelessness ends. There will be no more homeless people in this country. The State will provide.” And you know what? As a person who experienced the torment of homelessness as a teenager and essentially lost my early twenties to it, that’s a pretty big bloody deal. We could have had a society run on empathy. Instead we got, well, we got this.

You waltzed into Parliament with your partner in crime Kwasi Kwarteng, like the Wolves from Wall Street, sorry the Twats from Tufton Street, and you immediately crashed pension funds, cheered on by your cocaine-fuelled hedge fund buddies who had bet against the pound. The Bank of England was forced to come up with a £65 billion plan to stop a “doom loop” in the gilt market which supports the pension funds that came close to bankruptcy. Yes, you very nearly destroyed the retirements of the people in your core voter base, and then you simply shrugged.

You caused a run on the pound through your abolition of the higher rate of income tax, the cancellation of a planned increase to our very low corporation tax, and the abolition of the health and social care levy, despite everyone in the country telling you these were stupid ideas. Even my childhood dog Mikey thought they were stupid ideas and he’s been dead for many years, RIP. Yes, your understanding of Economics is less than that of a dead Jack Russell terrier. Your IQ is in negative figures, and so is your sense of empathy.

Remember when you refused to publish the forecast from the Office of Budget Responsibility because it basically said you were bringing forth the apocalypse? They told you it was a “high risk strategy” and would cause too much of a “shock to the economy”, and you did it anyway because your hedge fund mates had lined up new Maseratis and holiday homes in the Maldives.

Remember how the pound hit an all-time low against the dollar? When I was a kid, you could buy two dollars for a pound. Perhaps your most spectacular achievement in government was that you reversed that. Economists warned you the biggest tax cuts in 50 years could bring a repetition of the 1976 sterling crisis, when the UK had to ask the IMF for a bailout. The IMF even warned you the mini-Budget would “likely increase inequality” at a time when the rich had almost tripled their wealth and even the middle class was joining foodbank Britain - and it urged your Government to “reevaluate”.

You were given a chance, Liz, you were allowed to do your thing with the full support of newspapers like the Daily Mail, which ran the headline “At last! A true Tory Budget”, and the result was so catastrophic we are still picking up the pieces. The very last person we should be hearing from is you.

In The Wolf of Wall Street, Di Caprio’s character, Belfort, went to jail for 22 months for crimes related to the stock market, and he didn’t do a fraction of the damage you did. Insider trading is not an economic plan, Liz, it’s a crime that you were never investigated for, simply because you as a Tory MP are considered more or less above the law.

Jeremy Corbyn as a socialist is not allowed to wear a slightly crooked tie without the lynch mob setting about him, but you can add hundreds of pounds to people’s remortgages and you still get a chance to make your comeback. Do you have any idea of the financial misery you’ve caused ordinary people? A few hundred pounds is a pair of shoes to you, but it means homelessness to many. You did that to them, you, and I may be mistaken, but I don’t think you’ve made so much as an apology to these people. If you have, it clearly wasn’t a sincere one because you still think you were right.

You shook the hand of the Queen and she died, and then you winked at the electorate and the economy died. Interest rates increased by 1.75 per cent, the highest increase in 27 years, and that still wasn’t enough to curb inflation. You blew a hole in the economy which has been estimated at between £30 billion and £60 billion. Mortgage rates rose above six per cent and the banks pulled 40 per cent of mortgage products from the market. Borrowing costs on five-year government bonds saw their largest ever increase in a single day, forcing the Bank of England to intervene. Moody’s lowered the UK’s economic outlook to negative. Thanks to you, the IMF predicts we are the only G7 economy likely to shrink this year. Nice work!

And after all this, you have the nerve to write a four thousand word economic essay that I’m presuming was homework copied off Kwasi Kwarteng because you do not have enough words in your vocabulary, let alone the intellect to write a four thousand word essay. You are perhaps the stupidest person ever to enter Downing Street.

In your essay, you claim you were removed by a “powerful economic establishment”, by which you mean your fellow Tories who would quite like to keep their jobs and hopefully stop the baying mob reintroducing the guillotine. You say you did not appreciate the strength of resistance to your plans, because you clearly think the plans themselves weren’t the problem, the resistance to destroying people’s lives was. Infuriatingly, you still insist that in the medium term, your plan would have increased growth and brought down debt, just not for the working class, of course. For us, it would have brought around the bailiffs for our massively increased debt.

You actually have the gall to blame “others” (God knows who - the Left maybe? Jeremy Corbyn?) for failing to warn you of the risks to pension funds from liability driven investments. In other words, neither you nor Kwarteng, the people who decided to run the economy without our say-so, actually understood the consequences of what you were doing, and neither did anyone else in your party, but the rest of the country who were watching on helplessly did not need a degree in Economics to see that this thing we never voted for was about to do untold damage.

When the Bank of England has to step in to stop pension funds from collapsing as a consequence of your actions, you are not the saviour of the economy, you are the problem it needs to be saved from. This is not hard, Liz, it’s really not.

While you acknowledge the “market stability issue”, you feel you should have been allowed to fix the mess like a murderer cleaning up your own crime scene, and you seem aggrieved the mini-Budget took the blame, even though you’d earlier acknowledged it was to blame. Okay, well, to be fair, you didn’t, not quite. You actually blamed others for not warning you this was what the mini-Budget would do.

You then complained your Government had become a useful scapegoat for problems that had been brewing “over a number of months”, a period during which your party was in government the entire time, as well as the preceding 12 years. That’s quite the self-own, Liz.

You insist your and Kwarteng’s plan was necessary to counter an imagined “leftward drift” in economic thinking which was upsetting “powerful forces” (corrupt Tory donors). I’m old enough to remember when you threw Kwarteng under the bus and pretended the mini-Budget was all his idea, now you seem to be claiming joint credit for it. If you thought all this was a good idea, Liz, why did you sack the Chancellor and blame him for everything? Do you have no shame?

You said you felt like you were “pushing water uphill” during your time in charge and lamented that the media had “shifted left” on economic issues. God, I wish this were true. Are the media backing nationalisation now? A national investment bank? A green industrial revolution? A wealth tax? An end to tax avoidance and homelessness, as the two go hand in hand? An actual living wage? Cooperative ownership? Or are they still ready to scream “terrorist supporter!” at anyone who dares advocate for a kinder and more equal society?

Perhaps my favourite part of your four thousand word essay was the phrase, “even though the measure was economically sound.” Wut? I can’t even make a joke about this one, I don’t even know how to finish this sentence in an intelligible… bollocks, I think you’ve broken me. I’m just going to finish with this: at 44 days, you were the shortest-serving Prime Minister in our history. If you want to serve more time, I suggest you do it in Belmarsh.