A brand new British aircraft carrier (the HMS Prince of Wales), which has cost 4,000 million euros, had to return to port last week, just one hour after undertaking its maiden voyage, due to a serious mechanical failure that will have it indefinitely in dry dock; the same day, after the death of her husband at home, an octogenarian woman called the doctor to issue the death certificate, but the doctor told her that he did not make home visits and better, to carry out the procedure, that she take a selfie together to the corpse and send it to him by WhatsApp; A few dozen kilometers away, a man suffered a heart attack in his garden in the middle of a storm, and, as the ambulance did not arrive, his relatives had to improvise a shed with cardboard to protect him from the rain. He was in it, out in the open, all night. Rather than the Perfidious Albion to which Napoleon and his contemporaries pejoratively referred, England now seems at times the ridiculous Albion.
To these brushstrokes, which seem anecdotal, but they are not so much (the country's infrastructures are collapsing, doctors do everything possible to treat patients by Zoom and ambulances take up to 16 hours to arrive), join the seven millions of people on waiting lists for public health operations, deteriorating infrastructure, a public debt that is more than 100% of GDP, the highest taxes in 70 years, the forecast that inflation will reach 22% in the winter, and electricity and gas bills will sink businesses, close pubs and force millions of families to choose between eating or being cold. A Dantesque landscape, like a painting by El Greco or Hyeronimus Bosch.
That is the panorama that Liz Truss is going to inherit today, the almost certain successor of Boris Johnson according to the polls, elected by less than 200,000 militants of the Conservative Party, of whom 97% are white and 55% older than 60 years, in a doubtfully democratic exercise. Barring shock, she will be the third prime minister in the country's history, after Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May. And in the next appointment with the polls, except for early elections, the conservatives will have been in power for 14 consecutive years.
Since they couldn't change the ship, which is the one there is, the Tories have changed their captain (Johnson for Truss), in a last desperate attempt to avoid shipwreck. The new leader will have at most two and a half years to straighten out, a period that seems very short given the ferocity of the cliffs (economic crisis, war in Ukraine, supply problems, cost of living, climate change, social fracture ...). But her advantage is that her expectations are so low that she can easily do better than what is expected of her, which is very little.
Truss is a staunch liberal with a blind faith in the market, offering 1980s solutions to 21st century problems, along the lines of Thatcher and Reagan, seeking economic growth by easing the tax burden and regulations. She has promised that she will cancel the increases in Social Security contributions, green taxes and corporate rates applied by Johnson to pay for the pandemic aid. And she has suggested that she is willing to go even further and lower VAT in one fell swoop to 5%. Her critics say that she will fuel inflation even more, will trigger the debt and it is outrageous. "Of all the MPs I have known over the decades," says a veteran Tory MP, "none is closer to what is usually described as raving mad."
But that less than 0.3% percent of the British population that today is going to elect Truss (except for surprise) as the new prime minister, sees her as a mythological version of Thatcher, more typical of Game of Thrones or The Lord of the Rings that of the harsh political reality, someone who has always gone further than expected, who is not going to give up his convictions despite the fact that in the past he went from the Liberal Democrats to the Tories and the anti-Brexit camp to the pro-Brexit, and that as a child she shouted “Maggie, Maggie Maggie, out, out, out!” at demonstrations against the Iron Lady. Her father, a Labor maths teacher, is so devastated by his daughter's ideas that he burst into tears realizing he was going to lead the country.
The seriousness of the economic situation forces Truss to give a blow of effect as soon as he assumes power on Tuesday. During the campaign, he has thrown balls out on the issue of aid, but he cannot delay any longer, awaiting the announcement of a great plan to mitigate the impact of the runaway cost of electricity and gas, and at the same time lay the foundations for future energy independence. His preference is to lower taxes so that households and companies have more cash, but it does not seem enough, and a restructuring of the entire sector is not ruled out. The problem is that the cost would easily rise to more than 100,000 million euros, which must be added to the 400,000 million of the pandemic, and would trigger public debt. With interest rates on the rise and the British pound falling, almost at par with the dollar, the pessimists do not rule out that the UK, if things worsen, may need an IMF bailout.
Inflation, energy, debt, Putin. Ukraine... Liz Truss is not going to have a honeymoon, or kisses, or even a candlelight dinner. In the story of Little Red Riding Hood, the big bad wolf first eats the grandmother (in this case Johnson) and then the girl (which would be her). What he needs is one of those versions with a happy ending, in which a woodcutter going through the forest kills the beast and saves the protagonist.
