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--:-- John Bickley: In 2022, the leader of Britain's Conservative Party, Liz Truss, was appointed to British Prime Minister, taking on the role with optimism about pursuing a more conservative economic agenda for the nation. But she quickly found her administration colliding with political roadblocks and her prime ministership abruptly ended. In her new book, 10 Years to Save the West, Liz Truss says the problem was the deep state, unelected bureaucrats standing in the way of conservative leadership.
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--:-- John Bickley: In this episode, we speak with the former prime minister about why she believes a conservative agenda is needed to save the West. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Sunday, May 5th, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire. Joining us now is Liz Truss, former UK prime minister in 2022. She's the author of 10 Years to Save the West, Leading the Revolution Against Globalism, Socialism, and the Liberal Establishment.
--:-- Liz Truss: Thank you so much for joining us.
--:-- John Bickley: Great to have you on the show. First, you've had time to reflect on your time as prime minister, brief as it was. What did you learn during your term?
--:-- Liz Truss: Well, I think the biggest thing I learned is the sheer power of the establishment and the administrative state. Before I got to that job, I'd assumed, I'd spent 10 years in the British government. I'd worked in the environment department. I'd been a minister in justice. And when I hit a brick wall, I assumed it was because I wasn't senior enough. So when I got to the position of prime minister and I saw my plans essentially thwarted, I really understood just how powerful the establishment and the administrative state is.
--:-- John Bickley: You tried to execute your vision of Britain as a low tax, low regulation, high growth country. What happened? Why wasn't the country ready for that?
--:-- Liz Truss: Well, I felt that it was the only way to get Britain back on track. And we'd been stagnating for a few decades. Economic growth hadn't been high enough. The government was spending almost half of our national income. Taxes were at a 70-year high. And I could only see the situation getting worse. And I wanted to change the trajectory. And that vision did have popular support. I won the mandate of Conservative Party members. It was popular in terms of the public.
--:-- John Bickley: When we put those policies forward, and it included things like getting on with fracking, holding down government expenditure, reducing taxes, reducing regulation, the economic establishment, including the Bank of England and the Office of Budget Responsibility, which is a bit like the Congressional Budget Office in the United States, those organizations actively work to undermine the policies and undermine the policies in the market.
--:-- Liz Truss: And what do I mean by that? Well, the day before we announced our budget, the Bank of England announced that it was selling £40 billion worth of government gilts. So that was making it harder for us to fund the government. They didn't tell us about the fact that there was a tinderbox of bad regulation of pension funds so that pension funds were very, very susceptible to small changes in the interest rate. We were blindsided by that.
--:-- John Bickley: And then when the bank of england stepped in to fix that problem they said they would only do it for 17 days thereby creating a deadline in the market all the time while they were doing these things they were blaming the government policy for what was happening rather than acknowledging their own mistakes.
--:-- Liz Truss: So that is essentially what happened and the problem was I was unaware that those problems existed so when the media as is the habit in Britain started its gotcha activities I did not know what was going on and that was fundamentally extremely difficult.
--:-- John Bickley: You phrased this in an interesting way in a speech to Heritage recently. You talked about the anti-growth movement that's focused on, as you put it, redistributionism, stagnation, and the imbuing of woke culture into our businesses. Can you unpack that more for us?
--:-- Liz Truss: What we've ended up in Britain is we've ended up with a corporate sector, big government. By that, I mean the civil service and the government agencies, what we call quangos in Britain, quasi-government organisations, and the wider media, who, they tend to live in London and the southeast. They tend to benefit from government largesse. So they don't want the size of government to be reduced. They don't want the subsidies to their business to be reduced, particularly if they're in sectors like green energy. And they don't want regulations to be reduced because they don't want competition.
--:-- John Bickley: So these people have been benefiting from the status quo. The problem is for the average person in Britain, their life isn't getting any better. They've seen massive inflation. They haven't seen their wages go up. They haven't seen the economy grow. It's harder and harder to run a small business because of all of the red tape.
--:-- Liz Truss: So you've got a real disconnect between those who benefit from the current status quo of big government, high taxes, high regulation, high immigration, and the average person in Britain who is struggling because of the very high cost of living.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, in your book, you emphasize the importance of conservative leadership, not only in England, but also in the US. In your view, why is conservative leadership key to saving the West?
--:-- Liz Truss: So all of the problems we've got are down to bad ideas of the left, whether it's Keynesian economics, the idea that the government can run the economy, whether it's the climate change measures that are stopping us produce enough energy, whether it the wokery in our school saying that kids have 100 genders and the DEI agenda pursued by major corporations which means they not focused on delivering valuable products and delivering profits to their shareholders. They're focused on ticking boxes and doing identity politics.
--:-- John Bickley: All of those bad ideas have come from the left. And the issue is conservatives have not taken these ideas on enough. Instead, we've kowtowed to them. We've tried to meet them halfway. And that has resulted in the current stagnation we're experiencing. And it's not just economic stagnation. It's also a sense that certainly in Britain, our country is not moving forward. People want the future to be better than the past, but that is not clear that that is happening.
--:-- Liz Truss: And the other issue the left have been very effective in Britain is embedding a human rights culture into our legal system, which essentially makes it very, very hard to deport illegal immigrants. The priority put on keeping illegal immigrants in the country seems to be higher than the priority of people already living in the country. And people are immensely frustrated about that.
--:-- John Bickley: But there are too many conservatives who want to be popular at London dinner parties, want to get good corporate jobs, who have essentially gone along with this leftward drift. And that is the problem we're facing. And that's why conservatives need to fight back in order to make our country dynamic again and put the power back in the hands of people and families, rather than the power lying in the hands of the unelected bureaucrats, which is where the power of the moment lies.
--:-- Liz Truss: And is this part of the reason you've been a supporter of Brexit? Does this connect politically and ideologically?
--:-- John Bickley: Yes, it does, because Brexit was all about returning power from an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels to people in Britain. The problem is that while people voted for Brexit, we still have all the EU laws on our statute books, because the bureaucrats in London don't want to change things, because they are happy with high levels of regulation. It gives them more power. It gives them more influence. They do not want to see power return to the people.
--:-- Liz Truss: And that is the people in Britain are very frustrated because they voted for change when they voted for Brexit in 2016. They voted again for change when they voted for Boris Johnson in huge numbers. And lots of people who didn't normally vote Conservative, people from what you would call the Rust Belt in America, voted Conservative for the first time because they wanted to see a change and they wanted to see the status quo disrupted.
--:-- John Bickley: I'm somebody who went into government to try and change that. And I got thoroughly trounced by what they did to undermine my policies.
--:-- Liz Truss: How do you feel about the current leadership? What direction do you feel like they're taking the country?
--:-- John Bickley: Well, I want to see much stronger focus on Conservative principles. We have to be honest with the British public The reason why we've been able to deal with illegal immigration the reason why people energy bills are so high the reason why people taxes are so high is that we have not taken on the administrative state And we have not reversed all of the regulations and laws that Tony Blair put in place in Britain.
--:-- Liz Truss: So I think we need to be honest with people and we need to be prepared to be much bolder in taking on these institutions that have acquired too much power in Britain. My book sort of talks through my 10 years in government and all the battles I had. And the fact that too often decisions that used to be in the hands of elected representatives now lie in the hands of unelected bureaucrats. And the public are rightly frustrated by that.
--:-- John Bickley: You've talked a lot about the U.S. and what it needs to do. Obviously, we have a major election going on and polls show it's a very tight race. If Donald Trump is elected, do you have hope for the U.S. to turn around some of this bureaucratic stagnation, as you say?
--:-- Liz Truss: I think you've got real problems with the administrative state here in the United States. Who do not want to see the Trump agenda enacted. I want to see Donald Trump get elected as president, but that will not be enough. He needs to dismantle the administrative state. I'm very supportive of those changes because I know what it's like to be in the trenches fighting against officialdom when you don't have the power to change things.
--:-- John Bickley: So yes, he needs to win. I think if he wins and he successfully takes on the bureaucratic state, that will be a huge win for the West. And that will send a signal to countries like the UK about what can be done.
--:-- Liz Truss: Final question. In your view, what's not being emphasized enough in British and American media in terms of the national political conversation?
--:-- John Bickley: Well, the thing I'm trying to really highlight in my book is the way that unelected bureaucrats have seized power. In both of our countries and the need to take them on. Too often politicians, and I've been there myself, get the blame for everything that happens. And that is not right, but it's also not going to help us fix our countries.
--:-- Liz Truss: We've seen the way that woke left-wing ideas have taken over institutions. I mean, look at what's happening in universities in the United States, the appalling anti-Semitism that is being condoned by senior figures in those universities, that shows to me a system that has gone completely wrong.
--:-- John Bickley: So I want people to understand the scale of change we are going to need to see to deliver conservative ideas. We're not in the 1970s or 1980s anymore. The left have found new ways of fighting us. They're not just fighting us in the ballot boxes. They're fighting us in the institutions. They're fighting us through the courts. And we need to be absolutely resolute to take them on.
--:-- Liz Truss: Liz, thank you so much for joining us and bringing your analysis and good luck with your new book.
--:-- John Bickley: Thank you very much. Thank you.
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