Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Will the free-market cause ever recover from Liz Truss?

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In theory, I should be delighted about the Liz Truss project. She is saying the things I’ve been arguing for years: talking not just about lower taxes but about basic liberty and how it relates to everyday life. She’s passionate about these ideas – and sincere. I remember watching her deliver a rallying cry, a salute to the ‘Airbnb-ing, Deliveroo-eating, Uber-riding freedom fighters’. This was just over three years ago when she was a Treasury minister. Her speeches were getting punchier and her one-liners becoming newsworthy and memorable. She was turning into one of the most recognisable faces of classical liberalism in Britain – a development which clearly delighted her.

Truss asked for this job. I don’t mean the job of party leader and prime minister – though she asked for that too. I mean the job of the UK’s free-market revolutionary. It’s too early to say with confidence where it all went wrong, but I suspect it can be traced back to problems with her changing ideology even before she was elected leader.

My worries about a Truss premiership started during the leadership race, when it became clear that fiscal discipline was not going to play a role in her campaign. She wanted tax cuts and wouldn’t wait. Far from cutting down the ‘magic money tree’, she seemed keen to water it. My concern at the time was that fiscal responsibility would slowly die; instead, we seem to have witnessed a sudden fiscal explosion that may yet take the free-market movement down with it.

‘If the magic money tree doesn’t make a dash for growth, we’ve had it.’

Free-market arguments can be tricky to make, because they’re often counterintuitive. Lower tax rates, for example, can actually increase the tax take. Using the private sector can often deliver better, more extensive coverage for what we consider to be ‘public services’.

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