The Official Liz Truss no longer PM but still a Clusterfuck thread

[paranoid android]

Not quote the Liz Hurley thread, is it?  

[Clown Job]

 

[Florentine_Pogen]

^^^ The Member of Parliament for the 18th Century should certainly know about fossils...................

[The Skelpit Lug]

Jacob Rees Mogg announces that the UK government's new energy strategy will focus on the extraction of fossil fuels. 

He and PM Truss then blamed Jeremy Corbyn for closing all the coal mines in the first place.

 

[Highlandmagar]

4 minutes ago, The Skelpit Lug said:

Jacob Rees Mogg announces that the UK government's new energy strategy will focus on the extraction of fossil fuels. 

He and PM Truss then blamed Jeremy Corbyn for closing all the coal mines in the first place.

 

Surely you know that Corbyn is to blame for all this country's ills? Get on message for goodness sake. He probably topped Lizzie too.

[Antlion]

13 hours ago, Florentine_Pogen said:

^^^ The Member of Parliament for the 18th Century should certainly know about fossils...................

Unfortunately he believes they’re only 6000 years old.

[Bob in Denny]

15 hours ago, Clown Job said:

 

Adolf like pose..

just add Just for Men..

[Florentine_Pogen]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/10/facile-empty-cliched-liz-truss-first-week-disaster

"Truss opposes windfall taxes as they “deter investment”. This is facile. Given soaring demand for energy, the companies already have huge incentives to invest. Truss may oppose tax and spend, but what is so virtuous in spend and borrow? While France, Germany and most of the EU are taking direct action, including windfall taxes, to break the hold energy suppliers have over their consumers, Truss is stuck in a bunker. It is hard to believe she can stay there for long.

The question now is what other campaign cliches might surrender to Truss’s pragmatism. Will she really slash corporate and personal taxes this year? Will she really open a trade war with the EU over Northern Ireland, just to get a few Unionists into Stormont? Will she really raise defence spending to a staggering 3% of GDP, potentially costing more than any energy subsidy, put by the Royal United Services Institute at £157bn over eight years? Will she really go on spending £100bn on the now outdated HS2 railway?

Opposition politicians love to make promises they hope will be forgotten, but Truss was not in opposition. She was a member of a government that spent its way through a pandemic lockdown with panache – and grotesque waste. She now means to spend as much as the government did on lockdown to excuse corporate profiteering. Meanwhile, she still has 25,000 migrants crossing the Channel this year alone. She has 60,000 court cases idle and overdue for a hearing. She has 6.8 million people waiting for hospital treatment, and an NHS the laughing stock of European healthcare."

[Frank Quitely]

13 minutes ago, Florentine_Pogen said:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/10/facile-empty-cliched-liz-truss-first-week-disaster

"Truss opposes windfall taxes as they “deter investment”. This is facile. Given soaring demand for energy, the companies already have huge incentives to invest. Truss may oppose tax and spend, but what is so virtuous in spend and borrow? While France, Germany and most of the EU are taking direct action, including windfall taxes, to break the hold energy suppliers have over their consumers, Truss is stuck in a bunker. It is hard to believe she can stay there for long.

The question now is what other campaign cliches might surrender to Truss’s pragmatism. Will she really slash corporate and personal taxes this year? Will she really open a trade war with the EU over Northern Ireland, just to get a few Unionists into Stormont? Will she really raise defence spending to a staggering 3% of GDP, potentially costing more than any energy subsidy, put by the Royal United Services Institute at £157bn over eight years? Will she really go on spending £100bn on the now outdated HS2 railway?

Opposition politicians love to make promises they hope will be forgotten, but Truss was not in opposition. She was a member of a government that spent its way through a pandemic lockdown with panache – and grotesque waste. She now means to spend as much as the government did on lockdown to excuse corporate profiteering. Meanwhile, she still has 25,000 migrants crossing the Channel this year alone. She has 60,000 court cases idle and overdue for a hearing. She has 6.8 million people waiting for hospital treatment, and an NHS the laughing stock of European healthcare."

The last few days have been a microcosm of this sceptr'd isle - all that is left is the two 'M's, monarchy and militarism.  The country is utterly fucked, and the mass hysteria confirms it.

[Highlandmagar]

Our new glorious PM to tour the UK with our new glorious monarch. The love bombing of the Union is starting.

[Antlion]

26 minutes ago, Highlandmagar said:

Our new glorious PM to tour the UK with our new glorious monarch. The love bombing of the Union is starting.

And when King Tampon and Queen Insert-Here have returned to a life of ordering lackeys about in Greater London, Liz can continue the tour with her cabinet pals.

[madmitch]

 

[Florentine_Pogen]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/12/liz-truss-sacking-civil-servants-government

"The prime minister’s peremptory sacking of the head of the Treasury, Tom Scholar, is ominous. It was one of her first decisions and cannot have been anything he said or did. She had already let it be known, through “allies”, that she also intended to sack the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, but apparently changed her mind. Scholar’s sin was that he supposedly embodied the “Treasury orthodoxy”, which Liz Truss had pledged to overturn. His ousting was clearly meant as a talisman of her new regime.

If there is any defining feature of British government it is the creative tension between transient politicians and permanent civil servants. Good or bad, it has long been a constitutional principle. Continuity and experience are set against risk and innovation, albeit with the politicians ultimately in charge. Scholar has been head of the Treasury since 2016 and led it through perhaps its most tempestuous era, embracing Brexit and the pandemic, both with seismic implications for public finances. There is no evidence that he undermined cabinet policy through these difficult times. He is merely a victim of Truss’s sloganeering.

I once asked a permanent secretary of strong leftwing leanings how he had found serving under Thatcher. He said it was his happiest time. “Every day I got to the office and could sense exactly what the boss expected me to do. My job was to find the best way to do it.” Under other prime ministers, he said, he had to guess. Civil servants may have their own views, but even Sir Humphrey in the television series Yes Minister knew where the buck stopped. The essence of the civil service is to offer independent advice and then obey. But they must know what they are obeying, not just read it in the newspapers.

Scholar’s sacking has been deplored by two former cabinet secretaries, Lords Butler and O’Donnell, as improper and disrespectful. “A government wouldn’t come in and on the first day sack the head of Her Majesty’s defence forces, the chief of the defence staff,” Butler said. Truss has also sacked her national security adviser, Stephen Lovegrove. Surely we deserve to know why. The suspicion must be that Truss sacked these officials not for being wrong but from a fear that they might be right. Scholar’s replacement will now inevitably be tainted as a Truss stooge, as a Downing Street patsy.

Truss has so far offered little ideological or political coherence, merely a ragbag of slogans. All her life she has changed her mind. Currently she proclaims no more taxes, go for growth, spend on defence and defeat Russia. When challenged to explain how her figures added up, she just shouts: “Treasury orthodoxy.” Scholar was clearly seen as messenger of that orthodoxy.

Rather than debate the message, Truss kills the messenger. Likewise we assume with Lovegrove. This is government Trump-style. Both Johnson and Truss have shown they cannot tolerate having colleagues within the tent who may disagree with them. They have rejected the tradition of party government as a coalition rather than a court.

Truss has extended that intolerance to the civil service. She plainly lacks confidence in handling argument over policy and wishes to suppress dissent. This will debilitate the quality of her decisions and reduce debate, as under Johnson, to a torrent of gossip, leaks and resignations. It does not augur well."

[BigDoddyKane]

I cant see her being in the job next summer let alone the next GE

Edited September 12, 2022 by BigDoddyKane

[O'Kelly Isley III]

On 10/09/2022 at 15:47, Florentine_Pogen said:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/10/facile-empty-cliched-liz-truss-first-week-disaster

"Truss opposes windfall taxes as they “deter investment”. This is facile. Given soaring demand for energy, the companies already have huge incentives to invest. Truss may oppose tax and spend, but what is so virtuous in spend and borrow? While France, Germany and most of the EU are taking direct action, including windfall taxes, to break the hold energy suppliers have over their consumers, Truss is stuck in a bunker. It is hard to believe she can stay there for long.

The question now is what other campaign cliches might surrender to Truss’s pragmatism. Will she really slash corporate and personal taxes this year? Will she really open a trade war with the EU over Northern Ireland, just to get a few Unionists into Stormont? Will she really raise defence spending to a staggering 3% of GDP, potentially costing more than any energy subsidy, put by the Royal United Services Institute at £157bn over eight years? Will she really go on spending £100bn on the now outdated HS2 railway?

Opposition politicians love to make promises they hope will be forgotten, but Truss was not in opposition. She was a member of a government that spent its way through a pandemic lockdown with panache – and grotesque waste. She now means to spend as much as the government did on lockdown to excuse corporate profiteering. Meanwhile, she still has 25,000 migrants crossing the Channel this year alone. She has 60,000 court cases idle and overdue for a hearing. She has 6.8 million people waiting for hospital treatment, and an NHS the laughing stock of European healthcare."

The bigger worry is that your new king may provide more opposition to the Truss government than Keith Starmer's Labour Party 

[Merkie84]

6 hours ago, BigDoddyKane said:

I cant see her being in the job next summer let alone the next GE

I fully expect involvement in a foreign conflict to boost her popularity. 
 

It worked for her hero Maggie Thatcher. 

[Granny Danger]

6 hours ago, Merkie84 said:

I fully expect involvement in a foreign conflict to boost her popularity. 
 

It worked for her hero Maggie Thatcher. 

She should invade ROI for shit and giggles.  Can’t see anything bad happening on the back of that.  It would also solve the ‘border’ issue.

[Merkie84]

5 minutes ago, Granny Danger said:

She should invade ROI for shit and giggles.  Can’t see anything bad happening on the back of that.  It would also solve the ‘border’ issue.

Nah, not “foreign “ enough to ignore the body count and destruction. 

[Granny Danger]

2 hours ago, Merkie84 said:

Nah, not “foreign “ enough to ignore the body count and destruction. 

Fair enough.  Maybe Russia then, or China?

[Merkie84]

No,  someone unlikely to offer any meaningful resistance. 
 

Tornado bombers dropping bombs on Goat herders in some place no one has ever heard of is more likely. Especially if ruled by an easily caricatured tyrant.  

Edited September 13, 2022 by Merkie84