There has been the stone age and the bronze age, of light and darkness, before and after Christ, before and after the pandemic... And next September 5 (unless there is a in the battle for the leadership of the British Conservatives) will be the first day of the Trussian era. “Trusiana” by Liz Truss, the very likely new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
As will be? Above all, extreme Thatcherism, even more than the iron lady ever dared to contemplate, who was sometimes (not always, far from it) more prudent and less ideological than her reputation. And that is a political philosophy -deregulatory capitalism- largely discredited since the financial crash of 2008, when the speculative excesses of the banks almost took away the current economic model.
But in an increasingly aging country, where for the first time in its history there are more people over 65 than under 15 - and far more so among Tory voters and readers of the highly influential press right-wing-, the words Thatcher or Thatcherism have nothing to do with the reality of what it was. They are an ideology, a symbol, a dream, a myth, a Valhalla, with precepts that are almost impossible for most economists to apply in the current situation. Nowhere.
But Truss is Thatcher to the nth degree, and with that tunic it seems almost certain that she will conquer the leadership and be the successor to Boris Johnson, at least until the next elections (in 2024 if she does not advance them). A former Remain EU supporter and Liberal Democrat, like her Tory she has embraced the faith of the converts, as if she had something to prove. She has become (or appears to be) as Eurosceptic as anyone else. She assures that she will break the Northern Ireland Protocol, a fundamental aspect of Brexit, even if it means violating an international treaty. He says that he will not respect the decisions of the Court of Human Rights, that he will make a bonfire with all the EU regulations that are still in force, and in spite of all this, he raises his hands to his head when Brussels does not allow Great Britain to continue participating in the Horizon scientific cooperation program. She brazenly seeks conflict with her former associates, to cover up the smell of coming economic rot.
In the great economic crisis of the 1980s, Thatcher raised taxes, which would only be lowered later, when the picture settled down. And one of her favorite phrases was "the State as such does not generate money and everything it spends comes out of the people's pockets in one way or another, sooner or later." But Truss assures that he is going to reduce the tax burden from the outset to stimulate growth, a kind of flight forward, equivalent, to another level, to the Barça formula (instead of austerity, continue spending despite being broke , to be successful, excite and thus obtain income).
It cannot be ruled out that, installed in Downing Street, it will change course, after all, it has already done so to change the Liberal card for the Conservative one, and to support Brexit, in the most monumental decision that the country since World War II. But at the moment, she talks about herself as the most radical version of Maggie, and even dresses like her. She presents herself as the defender of the interests of shareholders, retirees, real estate developers, investment funds and the owners of their own homes. She refers to state subsidies as charity, and despises those who ask for them. His audience is conservative voters for whom those who are unemployed are lazy, those who receive disability benefits are pretenders and the money from subsidies evaporates in fraud, parents know how to educate their children better than the authorities, regulations block growth, and the blame for everything lies with the unions and the defenders of woke, who see discrimination of one kind or another in everything. She advocates a class struggle disguised as a kulturkampf (culture war).
Ultraliberal in the defense of individual freedoms (except those of protesting against the State, demonstrating or going on strike), it seems to be on the extreme right on issues such as immigration, with approaches not very different from those of Meloni in Italy or Le Pen in France, determined to send asylum seekers to Rwanda and other countries, and take radical measures -even if they are inhumane- to stop the avalanche of foreigners who cross the Channel in small boats (about twenty thousand a year). Dominic Cummings, who was an adviser to Johnson, calls it "the human grenade." Others compare her to a rottweiler. She is an unsentimental, unsympathetic strategist who tries to solve problems like a mathematical equation, and doesn't mind looking for solutions that may seem far-fetched. Unlike her predecessor, she is hyperactive, she works a lot, she likes to fight back and she doesn't need the good life or being loved.
Liz Truss's world is black and white, patriots or immigrants, creators of wealth or subsidized, metropolitan cosmopolitan elites or “authentic people” from the countryside and the suburbs, supporters of leave and remain. Her honeymoon, if she has one, is going to be the shortest ever, not even a candlelit dinner. He is going to inherit (if confirmed) a country that is paying for the intellectual, moral and political failure of the last quarter of a century, without energy policy, with a collapsed public health and education system, aging infrastructures, without sufficient housing, dysfunctional public services, salaries stagnant, deep differences in wealth between regions, supply crisis, addiction to cheap money, the highest taxes in seventy years, minimal investment, appalling productivity, danger of blackouts, a currency in check, brutal increase in the cost of living and not insignificant danger of territorial disintegration.
Johnson resorted to an unorthodox cocktail of social conservatism and social democratic economics. The Trussian era, which is already looming out the window, promises Thatcherism in the bucket from the start.
