In politics as in everyday life it is possible to be right at the same time as being terribly, terribly wrong. Look no further than Liz Truss instructing her lawyers to send a ‘cease and desist letter’ to Keir Starmer demanding that he stops accusing her of “crashing the economy”. The claim, she alleges, is not only false but contributed to her losing her South West Norfolk seat in last year’s general election.
Truss is right, as it happens – the mini budget delivered by her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng during her micro-premiership may have precipitated a run on bond markets, but it had little effect on the economy, and Britain did not suffer an immediate recession. The quarterly GDP growth figures for 2022 and 2023 were:
Q1 2022: +0.7 per cent
Q2 2022: +0.3 per cent
Q3 2022: +0.1 per cent
Then, following the mini budget:
Q4 2022: +0.3 per cent
Q1 2023: +0.1 per cent
Q2 2023: +0 per cent
Q3 2023: -0.1 per cent
Q4 2023: -0.3 per cent
In other words, while the economy shrank slightly, leading to a technical recession in the second half of 2023, it didn’t happen until after Jeremy Hunt had presented his own budget. Truss’ premiership simply didn’t last long enough to have much of an effect on economic growth. This is in contrast to Starmer’s government, which seems to have turned promising economic growth in the first half of 2024 (0.7 per cent and 0.4 per cent) into zero growth by the third quarter. We may well find that Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ first budget ends up causing a recession as well as a run on bond markets – given that the UK government’s long-term borrowing costs have now reached a higher level than the brief spike following Kwarteng’s mini budget.
Truss is perfectly justified in arguing that the claim she ‘crashed the economy’ is false. But what does she hope to achieve by issuing legal threats? Political debate functions on the free exchange of ideas, arguments and insults. Do we really want a Singapore-style system where the political establishment is in the practice of suppressing criticism via legal threats? If that is what Liz Truss wants, she will have to be careful. Is she sure there is nothing she has said in the rough and tumble of political debate which she couldn’t stand up in court? Maybe British workers might think of launching a class action against comments that appeared in a 2012 book she co-authored with several Tory MPs, including Kwasi Kwarteng, that characterised British workers as “the worst idlers in the world”.
Sending a legal letter to Starmer makes Truss look ridiculously thin-skinned. True, she is not the only politician who seems to be resorting to legal threats against their opponents: last month, Nigel Farage did the same in response to Kemi Badenoch’s claims that Reform UK had faked its membership tally, an allegation which has since been shown to hold little water. If Truss had been wrongly accused of a serious criminal offence then you could understand her involving lawyers; that would be a highly personal matter. But politicians accuse each other all the time of things like crashing the economy. If they are going run off to the lawyers every time they are subject to a sweeping claim, our democracy is very quickly going to be killed off, with governments able to threaten their opponents.
Moreover, Truss’ legal letter merely reminds people of her genuine failings in government, not least in sanctioning tax cuts without spending cuts – indeed, at a time when she had just made an open-ended commitment to subsidise the electricity bills of everyone in Britain. She should not add being a bad loser to her failings.
Katy Balls, Kate Andrews and James Heale unpack the challenges facing Rachel Reeves in the latest Coffee House Shots podcast:
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