Former Conservative PM, whose tenure lasted 50 days, tells CPAC she fell victim to UK’s ‘establishment … its bureaucrats and lawyers’
What a loon.
Reminder:
-
far from ‘thwarting’ her plans, the UK’s economic establishment wasn’t even consulted on them (the OBR);
-
causing the gilt (UK government bond) market to crash when the scale of her unhinged and unfunded fiscal loosening was announced;
-
causing UK pension schemes that were overweight gilts to almost default;
-
causing another part of the UK’s economic establishment (the Bank of England) to have to come in and clean up her mess;
-
causing her own party to seize control of economic governance from her to prevent her doing more harm before they eventually got rid of her.
-
Everyday I wish the Deep State was real.
What they imply by deep state isn’t real, but their actual complaints is real - policies are enacted by normal, everyday workers, who are tasked with and usually pretty fastidious about following the laws that might not allow for immediate implementation of any crazy idea a regressive might think up and demand happen that day.
That’s the deep state - the workers doing the actual job of administering the government.
These people want to be monarchs and anyone who doesn’t bow to them is the enemy.
Seriously though.
If the Deep State were actually real half the problems the anti-Deep State people complain about wouldn’t exist.
I mean, it is true that there’s an unelected administrative bureaucracy that the government – any government – needs to function. And the UK is well known for having a particularly strong civil service with its own views and preferences. It’s the country that gave us Yes, Minister.
So yeah, there is a deep state that thwarts politicians do try to do overly crazy stuff. And that’s a good thing.
The UK has an independent civil service but the problem with Truss’s premiership isn’t that they thwarted her, it’s that she thwarted them - if she hadn’t broken with convention by deliberately freezing out the OBR from what she was planning (meaning there were no independent fiscal projections to go alongside her budget), then either the OBR could have warned her about the consequences, or at the very least the bond market might have reacted less violently to the announcements.
She’s crafted a narrative that some left-wing state establishment brought her down, when the actual facts are that her own party removed her after she spooked the financial markets - neither of them being much of a bastion of leftist thinking. The civil service quietly took all this lying down, which is what the markets (which tend to like good economic governance - OBR, central bank independence, etc) were so worried about.
I was trying to remember if she was this crazy during her term as the PM, but her term was honestly so short that I can’t remember anything other than the lettuce stream from it
