With Liz Truss heading for victory in the Conservative leadership contest, she would be forgiven for wondering if she’s about to win a poisoned chalice. The biggest cost of living crisis in a generation, a crumbling NHS, a summer of strikes, an impending recession. Becoming prime minister of the UK in 2022 is less like inheriting a 10-bed mansion than a rat-infested shed.
Not that Truss will tell you this. Throughout the campaign, Truss has spent most of her time downplaying the impending crises. “I don’t agree with these portents of doom. I don’t really agree with this declinist talk. I believe our country’s best days are ahead of us,” she told one hustings audience. In Truss world, even the Bank of England is a doom-forecaster. “There is too much talk that there’s going to be a recession,” she said, in a Sun on Sunday interview. “I don’t believe that’s inevitable. We can unleash opportunity here in Britain.”
Truss may actually partly believe this. An ardent Thatcherite who made her name embracing Boris Johnson’s faux-optimistic populism, she’s the sort of ideologue who will push the nation’s nurses into destitution while wrapping herself in patriotism. Here, there is no need for the state to provide support – just a belief that everything is great. And yet the strategy also smacks of deep cynicism. After all, the easiest way to justify doing next to nothing to help the public through an impending socioeconomic catastrophe is to convince them that it isn’t really happening.
At the same time, the “believe in Britain” mantra has the benefit of blocking Labour from pointing out a problem – if it does, it is “talking Britain down”. This approach is crass in its simplicity but highly effective: changing the terms of the debate and framing the left as anti-British doomsayers. If her time as a losing “remoaner” has taught Truss anything, it is that facts are no match for emotive rhetoric. Our likely new prime minister will spin the cost of living crisis into a kind of post-truth Brexitism. Freezing in a cold home and skipping meals isn’t reality – that’s just catastrophising talk by lefties who don’t believe in Britain.
This is not a new playbook. In recent years, the right has successfully co-opted hope and optimism for its own ends, casting supporters as can-do go-getters and the left as the whiny quitters. The Brexit campaign perfected this tactic, pitching its opponents’ gloomy facts as “project fear”. Johnson extended this into his own premiership, decrying “the doubters, the doomsters, the gloomsters” while claiming the “pluck and nerve” of the British people would ensure a prosperous future (three guesses for how that turned out).
As I wrote in 2019, Johnson was akin to a secondhand car dealer wishing voters a smooth ride as he sent them off in a broken banger. A Truss administration is merely the next stage of this charade, squinting into the sunlit uplands as sewage laps the shores.
In reality, of course, there are few things more hopeless than the current hard right Tory ideology. It is a world so paranoid about humanity that even refugees need to be surveilled and deported, so negligent about public services that it is now entirely normal for pensioners to wait 15 hours for an ambulance. The Conservative party’s desire to frame itself as pro-Britain is almost funny for a party that spends so much of its time in power wrecking it. It is impossible to love your country while not caring that millions of its citizens won’t be able to put the heating on this winter. It is hardly believing in Britain to act as if decent healthcare, working conditions or infrastructure are somehow beyond our capabilities. Optimism – real optimism – means recognising the problems in society, while believing that things can be better. And then putting in the work to make that possible.
On this score, Truss has barely bothered to pretend she is either capable or willing. Truss’s plan to deal with the cost of living crisis? “A closely guarded secret” reports the Sunday Times, which is a remarkable state of affairs when you really start to think about it. The person about to be elected to lead Britain through a calamity of crises has got there without offering any real plans on how to address them. To believe £50bn of uncosted tax cuts is the answer to the country’s problems does not signal an optimistic nature, it signals a total detachment from reality. It is not as if the rightwing press – the same media that Truss has been criticising during her leadership campaign – can be relied on to hold her to account. As energy bills soared by 80% on Friday, the Daily Mail’s front page read that Truss had a “cheering pledge” for the crisis – the equivalent of telling the emperor they adore his new clothes.
Without a capable prime minister, it is not doomsaying to understand what lies ahead for Britain: mass fuel poverty, broken public services, rocketing bills, and an ever-increasing risk of social unrest. Britain may be Truss’s poisoned chalice, but it will be the rest of us who are forced to drink from the cup.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
