Who’s occupying Downing Street: The Issue of Liz Truss

In June of 2016, former British Prime Minister, David Cameron announced his resignation after the results of the “Brexit” referendum earlier in that year. Cameron himself proposed holding the referendum - he had promised to call a popular consultation if he won the 2015 general elections with a majority. However, the prime minister favored remaining in the bloc and did not believe there would be serious consequences for the United Kingdom and the European Union. Cameron was already under intense pressure to resign, and announced that the UK should "seek a new prime minister.” The search David Cameron mentioned back in 2015 has not yet ceased, and the UK is now looking at its third prime minister in less than a decade.

Now, with Liz Truss taking the Tory leadership and the British government we wonder: who is the one occupying Downing Street, and what is Britain’s future? However, before that, it is important for us to recapitulate what happened in the United Kingdom since David Cameron left in 2016.

The Ministry of Theresa May (2016-2019)

In July 2016, after David Cameron resigned as Prime Minister, Theresa May ran for the Conservative Party's leadership and won 60% of the votes of the Tory members, becoming the second woman to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (the other being Margaret Thatcher). As the country's head of government, May took the lead in the process of the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union, triggering Article 50 of the treaty in March 2017. With her popularity still above average, May called for early general elections, hoping to strengthen her position as a leader and thus have more control over the Brexit negotiations. Theresa May's hopes went down the drain while the Tories ran a chaotic campaign and lost thirteen seats in the House of Commons (in contrast, Labour won thirty seats). The result was a suspended parliament as the Conservative Party gained just 317 seats out of the 326 needed to form a majority government. May had to compromise with the controversial Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland to form a minority government and stay in power. The fragilities of her government were extended between December 2018 and January 2019, when she outlasted two motions of no confidence, first from the Conservative Party and later from Parliament.

With almost no room to maneuver, May continued to push ahead with the Brexit negotiations with the European Union, creating the “Chequers Plan”, which resulted in the first formal UK withdrawal agreement from the EU. May’s plan offered a similar solution as the Norway-EU relations, and promised to solve the Irish border issue, but had problems regarding the European Court of Justice, tariffs, and services. The “Chequers Plan” was extremely controversial among Tory members who argued for a “no-deal” Brexit, and resulted in the resignation of May’s foreign secretary (and future prime minister) Boris Johnson. Parliament immediately defeated the plan, and negotiations with Brussels continued. A new, revised deal was proposed to Parliament and was again defeated by 391 votes to 242, weakening May's position even more.

Suffocated by an angry and fragile Parliament, a total of three flawed and extensive EU deals, and a silently growing housing crisis, Theresa May announced her resignation as British Prime Minister on 24 May 2019, effectively stepping down on 7 June. In a sad goodbye, May gave a powerful speech in front of 10 Downing Street, finishing with a hopeful unionizing statement.

“And together we have a great future. Our politics may be under strain, but there is so much that is good about this country. So much to be proud of. So much to be optimistic about. I will shortly leave the job that it has been the honor of my life to hold — the second female prime minister but certainly not the last. I do so with no ill will, but with enormous and enduring gratitude to have had the opportunity to serve the country I love.”

– Theresa May

To watch Theresa May’s full resignation speech you can click here.

The Ministry of Boris Johnson (2019-2022)

Boris Johnson's position in favor of a "hard" exit from the European Union ("no-deal") made him a potential candidate for his succession to 10 Downing Street. In June 2019, following Theresa May's resignation, he ran for the Conservative Party leadership, and on July 23, 2019, the party announced that it had won the Tory membership vote of 66%. He succeeded Theresa May as prime minister the following day.

Johnson's top priority was his no-deal Brexit, and he did everything he could to secure it. Like his predecessor, Johnson called for a general election in the first few months of his administration, creating a megalomaniacal campaign that ignored any other problems the UK was going through if not Brexit. Somehow, Johnson managed to regain the trust of the traditional conservative electorate while attracting the attention of centrists and moderates with his speech centered on the question that he would, "one way or another," resolve the situation with the European Union. As a result, the Conservative Party won an absolute majority in the elections, granting Boris Johnson full control over the government and future negotiations with EU authorities.

After the 2019 election, with an absolute parliamentary majority, Boris Johnson managed to pass much of the Brexit provisions among lawmakers. On January 31, 2020, the UK formally withdrew from the European Union, entering the so-called "transition period" and opening trade negotiations with the bloc, leading to the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

Johnson's government was embroiled in an overwhelming sequence of scandals, cases of corruption, and a tragic administration during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In November 2021, Boris Johnson supported a motion to prevent the suspension of Member of Parliament (MP) Owen Paterson, accused of corruption. The reaction by the press and the public to this measure were intense, forcing the government to back down and allow a new motion to be passed to suspend Paterson, who resigned from his position in parliament before that. In June and July of 2022, another controversy arose involving another MP, Chris Pincher, who had served as Boris's minister and held other senior government positions. Pincher has been accused of sexual abuse in at least two circumstances. Yet, Johnson claimed to have been unaware of these allegations when he appointed him to a position in his government. Johnson's claims were found to be untruthful, as information revealed he was aware of the allegations. At the time, Johnson claimed that he had "forgotten" that he was aware of the sexual abuse allegations.

Incredibly, sexual abuse and corruption allegations were not the last straw for Boris Johnson's government. The worst was yet to come during the lockdown period in Britain.

Although the British government passed a series of rules on social distancing and restricting the movement of individuals, members of the government and the Conservative Party, including the prime minister, met for parties and other social gatherings at government buildings between 2020 and 2021. This infamy became known as "Partygate" (in reference to Nixon's Watergate) and brought down Johnson's popularity, with many MPs calling for his resignation. As a result of Partygate, on June 6, 2022, the Tories held a no-confidence motion, aiming to remove him from power. However, out of the 359 Tory MPs, 211 voted to keep Johnson in office.

Following the no-confidence motions, Johnson had his last 12 months in office marked by an aggressive stance on the war in Ukraine, internal confusion – especially in the British economy – and a distorted public image, very different from the excited Boris Johnson who took over the government in 2019. After days of fighting for his position, Johnson was abandoned by all but a handful of allies amid a series of scandals that took the support of the Tories. Boris Johnson saw the same end as Margaret Thatcher, having almost all of their ministers abdicating in front of them.

Boris Johnson's resignation speech was on the opposite spectrum from that of his predecessor, Theresa May. He spoke in high spirits, focused on future plans for Britain and carried on.

“And to you, the British public, I know that there will be many people who are relieved and perhaps quite a few who will also be disappointed. And I want you to know how sad I am to be giving up the best job in the world. But them’s the breaks.”

– Boris Johnson

To read Boris Johnson’s full resignation speech you can click here.

Who is the new Prime Minister and what happens to 10 Downing Street?

At age seven, Liz Truss played the role of Margaret Thatcher in a mock UK general election at her school in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Nevertheless, unlike the former British prime minister, a symbol of neoliberalism who won most of the votes in 1983, Truss's political career did not begin at the expected pace. Still, at the beginning of September 2022, she got there: she was announced as the new prime minister of the United Kingdom in a vote among just over 172,000 members of the Conservative Party. She was sworn in on Tuesday (6/9) after meeting with the late Queen Elizabeth II.

Mary Elizabeth Truss was born into a middle-class family in Oxford in 1975. According to her, her father, a mathematics professor, and her mother, a nurse, were "blue collar labor" people. Afterward, when Truss was four years old, the family moved to Paisley, west of Glasgow, Scotland. The family later moved to Leeds, England, where the young woman attended Roundhay, a state secondary school. Truss described seeing "disappointed children" during her time there. Whatever the quality of education she received as a child, Truss entered the University of Oxford, the country's oldest and most prestigious university.

A few years later, while still at Oxford, Truss switched sides and joined the Conservative Party. According to a profile published by the Financial Times, she switched sides after a trip to Eastern European countries that had just emerged from communism.

In the 2001 general election, Truss ran for the British Parliament for the West Yorkshire town of Hemsworth but was unsuccessful. She suffered another defeat in Calder Valley and West Yorkshire in 2005. However, with significant political ambitions, she was elected councilor in Greenwich, southeast London, in 2006, and from 2008 she also worked for the Reform Group, a center-right think tank that tries to influence public policy. David Cameron, then leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister from 2010 to 2016, placed Truss on his "A list" of priority candidates for the 2010 election. She was selected to run for the Parliament seat for the South West district of Norfolk and, this time won.

Later in Cameron’s government, during the first few months of Brexit, Truss campaigned for "Remain." She even wrote in The Sun that Brexit would be "a triple tragedy." However, after the public approved of leaving, she changed her mind, arguing that Brexit offered an opportunity to "shake up the way things work."

Under the leadership of Theresa May, prime minister from 2016 to 2019, Truss served as justice minister before becoming chief secretary of the Treasury. According to The Guardian, in June 2017, Truss faced significant political attrition after she was accused of leaking conversations from May's cabinet when the then prime minister needed Parliament's support on Brexit-related actions. When Boris Johnson took office in 2019, Truss was transferred to the secretary of international trade. This role meant meeting political and business leaders worldwide to advance the UK economy.

In 2021, at the age of 46, she was placed in one of the highest posts in the British government by replacing Dominic Raab as foreign minister. In the role, she sought to resolve the thorny problem of the Northern Ireland Protocol, scrapping parts of a post-Brexit EU-UK deal - a move the European Union has strongly criticized.

The problem is highly delicate for diplomacy between Northern Ireland (part of the United Kingdom) and Ireland (a member country of the European Union) since, under the terms of the peace agreement between the two countries, the land border between their territories must remain open, which is contrary to EU rules.

When Boris Johnson resigned, Truss emerged as a minor candidate who gradually became more and more influential. In the final vote, Truss defeated Rishi Sunak, the former British chancellor. Sunak, 42, was the favorite to succeed Boris Johnson as Conservative leader and UK prime minister. Nevertheless, during the contest for succession in the Conservative Party, he came to be regarded as something of a zebra amid his rival's widespread favoritism. Sunak was one of the main ones responsible for Johnson's downfall when he resigned as chancellor because of ethical and economic differences with the prime minister. For analysts, this move harmed Sunak's political trajectory to the point that some conservatives considered him a traitor.

With the appointment to the leadership of the Conservative Party, Liz Truss became the fourth prime minister of the United Kingdom in the last six years.

Still, Truss’ campaign for leadership of the Conservative Party, was not without controversy. Pressed on how she would deal with the recent sharp rise in the cost of living, she said she would focus her efforts on "reducing the tax burden, not handing out alms." She was forced to abandon a project to link public sector wages to regional living costs after backlash from senior Conservative Party members who said it would mean lower wages for millions of workers outside London.

As head of government, Truss has pledged to quickly tackle the UK's cost-of-living crisis, saying she will devise a plan within a week to tackle rising energy bills and secure future fuel supplies. The average annual UK household utility bills are set to rise by 80% in October to £3,549, on top of an expected rise to £6,000 in 2023, decimating Brits' finances. Throughout the campaign, Truss also signaled that he would break paradigms by eliminating tax increases and cutting other fees, in a move that some economists say would fuel inflation.

Truss faces a long, costly and complicated to-do list, which opposition lawmakers say results from 12 years of weak Conservative rule. Several called for early general elections – something Truss said he would not allow.

Veteran Conservative MP David Davis described the challenges she will face as head of government as "probably the second most difficult term of post-war prime ministers" after Thatcher in 1979.

The first weeks of the Ministry of Liz Truss

The main problem with the Tories' last race is that none of the candidates, not Truss, let alone Sunak, had a well-established economic plan. There was always talk of "fixing the economy," but never of how. The closest it came was the proposals Liz Truss brought on tax cuts.

After her election, Liz Truss defended her administration's controversial announcement to cut taxes for citizens and businesses and reaffirmed that plan in a recent interview with CNN's Jake Tapper. Truss told Tapper that her government was "encouraging companies to invest and also helping ordinary people with their taxes by cutting taxes."

While the cuts were expected, critics warn that they will benefit the wealthy more than most British society. Shortly after Truss Finance Minister Kwasi Kwarteng announced the cuts on Friday, 9/23, the pound fell nearly 2.6% to its lowest level against the US dollar since 1985.

The UK Treasury said the cuts, which include lowering the maximum income tax rate from 45% to 40%, cuts in taxes paid on home purchases, and canceling a planned increase in business taxes, would eliminate 45 billion pounds (about 50 billion US dollars) of government revenue over the next five years.

Pressed about the accountability of her economic plan, Truss told Tapper: "I don't really accept the premise of the question. The UK has one of the lowest debt levels in the G7, but we have one of the highest tax levels. We currently have a 70-year high in our tax rates."

Despite the hit to public revenue, Truss confirmed in the interview that her government would still help citizens with energy bills this winter with a package of measures to support consumers with energy prices, to ensure no one has to pay more than £2,500 on their bills. The promise to help Britons pay their energy bills comes before what is predicted to be a brutal winter. But the most attractive of these policies to the British is their relationship to inflation, which rose above 10% in July for the first time in 40 years, driven by rising energy and food costs. Home energy bills have already risen 54% this year and could go even higher.

Truss has also been criticized for making that promise by refusing to tax energy companies for their windfall gains. Instead, the government will rely on borrowing to cover the cost, which the opposition described as putting the cost on the country's credit card. One concern is that this will require a substantial increase in government borrowing when interest rates are skyrocketing. The Bank of England on Thursday pushed its policy rate to the highest level since 2008. It was the central bank's seventh rate hike since December. Tax cuts, while politically popular, can also increase demand and drive up prices, making the central bank's task of controlling inflation even more difficult.

On foreign affairs, Liz Truss wants to explore further the "special relationship" with the United States and follows the example of the Boris Johnson administration in dealing with the conflict in Ukraine.

The UK is in the eye of the hurricane of a series of storms that have come together and are now raining over Great Britain. The newly formed government promises to bring the situation under control until the next general election, with Liz Truss confident of possible re-election of her government.