Liz Truss has continued her comeback tour with a speech on economic competence in the US.
The Conservative former prime minister delivered the Margaret Thatcher Lecture for the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation in the States.
She used the speech to criticise the size of the state in the US and UK, and warned they are becoming “social democracies by the backdoor”, describing a “culture where too many people and too many businesses expect a bailout”.
She told the audience: “The sad truth is what I think we’ve seen over the past few years is a new kind of economic model taking hold in our countries, one that’s focused on redistributionism, on stagnation, and on the imbuing of woke culture into businesses. I call these people the anti-growth movement.”
“There are also the people who live in the (Washington) beltway, or they live in London, they live within the M25, and they’ve been enjoying quite a nice life,” she said elsewhere in her speech, adding “they don’t want to see the status quo changed. All of those people are part of the resistance to the change we need to see”.
Truss also criticised the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) minimum tax agreement as “nothing short of a global cartel of complacency”.
She said she did not understand “quite how hard” it would be to change the culture of government to something more in line with what she is now advocating, acknowledging “last autumn I had a major setback”, but adding “I care too much to give up on this agenda”.
She said her plans faced “co-ordinated resistance” from her own party, the “British corporate establishment”, the International Monetary Fund and US president Joe Biden.
At one point, she made a remark expecting applause but actually received pin-drop silence.
Watch the cringeworthy clip below:
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