“Currently, the government spends 45 percent of GDP in Britain. You know, that is a pretty astonishing figure. It’s 36 percent in the United States, so you’re not that far behind. But in Britain, it’s 45 percent, and I don’t think that represents a proper free market economy.”
In this episode, I sit down with Liz Truss, former prime minister of the United Kingdom. We dive into the reality of mass immigration and net-zero climate policy in Britain and discuss how parliamentary powers are being supplanted by unelected bureaucracies.
“Even though we left the European Union, most of the European laws are still on our statute books. So, it’s a bit like getting divorced and still living in the same house as your ex-husband,” says Ms. Truss. “We’ve reduced carbon emissions, but that’s because we’re importing more goods from countries like China, who are building coal-fired power stations. So, there’s no net benefit to the planet. All that’s happened is we have empowered our enemies, and we’ve damaged our own industry.”
Watch the clip:
We also talk about the anti-Israel protests sweeping Britain, and Islamist threats targeting members of Parliament.
“There’s clearly a basis of self-loathing. The people who are on the streets chanting in favor of Hamas or saying ‘capitalism is evil’—they don’t like Britain. They don’t like the British way of life. They don’t like our values,” she said. “A lot of conservatives just think this is a normal political fight. It’s not a normal political fight. This is an enemy within our own country.”
🔴 WATCH the full episode (23 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0229LizTruss
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Liz Truss, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Liz Truss: Great to be here.
Mr. Jekielek: Last night at the CPAC International Summit, you said something astonishing. Many people in the U.S. and in liberal democracies around the world are concerned about the rise of the administrative state. People here were complaining that there’s only 3,000 elected positions in our administrative state of millions. You said that in Britain there are only 100 of those elected positions, and the room went quiet for a moment. Please tell us about that.
Ms. Truss: That is right. In Britain, we have a permanent civil service who are career civil servants. Then we have a hundred special advisors, and just to be clear, those people don’t run departments. Those people advise ministers. The entirety of the state, all the government departments in Britain, are run by the permanent civil service.
Plus, we have something called quangos, which are quasi-non-governmental organizations, things like the EPA in America. We’ve got the Environment Agency in Britain and those are all independent of democratically-elected ministers. The situation is that a lot of power has essentially been outsourced from the democratic process into the so-called independent process. That’s a problem for democracy.
Mr. Jekielek: This is a situation where essentially career bureaucrats run the show. Please tell us about your experience. You were the prime minister, the highest office in the land. How much power did you use? How much did you actually have?
Ms. Truss: As prime minister, I set out a very clear agenda. I was supported by the party membership in becoming the leader of the Conservative Party to deliver that agenda; cutting taxes, cutting the size of government, and taking some of the power back from the unelected bodies that I’ve talked about.
When I put those policies through, I found there was leaking going on with my plans. There was briefing done with the press. There was a lack of support from those bodies for the policies, which they made pretty clear. That made it very, very difficult for me to deliver in what were quite volatile economic times.
Mr. Jekielek: We’ve heard all sorts of things in the legacy media, and we have our own reporting in the Epoch Times about what happened. At the end of your role as prime minister, how do you view what happened?
Ms. Truss: What I found was that the forces of the bureaucracy and essentially the establishment in Britain were just too great to take on with the amount of political support I had. That’s the bottom line. There was not enough support from Conservative MPs to really change these things. That is why I am now determined to build up the support, because we need these policies in Britain.
Currently, the government spends 45 percent of GDP in Britain. That is a pretty astonishing figure. It’s 36 percent in the United States, so you’re not that far behind. But in Britain, it’s 45 percent. That does not represent a proper free market economy, and it’s not giving people the opportunities they need.
That is why we need to deal with the bureaucracy and the establishment’s resistance to change. All these people are protecting the status quo. They are protecting their vested interests, and that is not what the people of Britain want.
Mr. Jekielek: The power is supposed to come from the people. This concept is enshrined in every liberal, democratic constitution. But somehow, right under the noses of the British people, a lot of this power has eroded. Is that your contention?
Ms. Truss: Our constitution has been watered down and undermined. The core concept of the British constitution is parliamentary sovereignty, that the MPs elected in the House of Commons have sovereignty over decisions. That is what the prime minister is. He or she represents the leadership of parliamentary sovereignty.
What has happened is that parliamentary powers have been outsourced. A lot of this happened under the Tony Blair government when the traditional role of the Lord Chancellor was abolished and he created a new Supreme Court. We didn’t have the separation of powers in Britain.
Previously, the legal system was accountable because the Lord Chancellor sat in the cabinet. Now, that is gone. Instead, you have an independent Supreme Court. We also saw the development of lots of agencies. I mentioned the environment agency. We had the creation of the Office of Budget Responsibility.
The Bank of England was given independence, and the Bank of England governor was pretty much made unsackable. If you’ve got a Bank of England governor that is unsackable, and a prime minister that is sackable, that changes the balance of power.
That is what has happened in Britain, and it’s crept up on us over the years. You’ve seen more and more agencies develop. You’ve seen these powers taken away from the Lord Chancellor. You’ve seen the creation of international law as well. The ECHR [European Convention on Human Rights] has proved to be a massive issue when we want to deport illegal immigrants. All of these things have built up, and they have denuded Parliament of its sovereign role.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about Brexit for a moment, because Brexit was viewed as a coup against the establishment. Certainly, it was viewed that way here in America. One of the core issues of Brexit was the issue of unchecked immigration. But once Brexit was achieved, things did not change all that much.
Ms. Truss: No, in fact, immigration has gone up. We have record immigration this year. There are two points I would make. First of all, even though we left the European Union, most of the European laws are still on our statute books. It’s a bit like getting divorced and still living in the same house as your ex-husband. We’ve done the part of leaving the EU, but we’ve still got all that bureaucracy in Britain.
This is one of the things that the administrative state doesn’t want to let go of. They don’t want to let go of that closeness to Europe. They don’t want to let go of that regulation. Bureaucracies like regulation. It gives them power. You’ve got all that stuff still in place.
On immigration, because of the extra powers that have been given to the legal system and taken away from politicians, the Left are able to thwart immigration policy through the legal system. They’re using every trick in the book to try and stop conservative policies from being delivered.
Mr. Jekielek: This parallels some of the scenarios that we see here in America and in many other countries.
Ms. Truss: What has happened is the Left is not succeeding at the ballot box in Britain. They are spending all their energy on lawfare to stop conservative policies or to use the administrative bureaucracy to stop conservative policies.
Mr. Jekielek: I’m hearing the Conservatives are expected to be trounced in this coming election. Is that accurate? Why would that be, given what you are saying?
Ms. Truss: The opinion polls are not looking good. That’s certainly true. But if people think things would get better under a Labour government, they are completely wrong. Look at the Labour Party. They’re currently backing these protesters on Hamas, and they’re not strong on defense and foreign policy. Also, they want more power for the bureaucratic state, so we will have the current situation on steroids if Labour gets in.
What you’re talking about is a frustration of the public, that the things they want delivered like proper control of our borders isn’t happening. I’m saying to Conservatives that we need to be bolder. We need to actually change the institutions. We need to restore parliamentary sovereignty. We need to get rid of these quangos that are stopping conservative policies from being enacted.
We need to demonstrate to the public that we’re not going to be the same. We need to show the public we’re prepared to do that and we understand there’s a problem. Because if we don’t do that, then the danger is that Labour gets in power and they do even more of this.
Mr. Jekielek: You’re also advocating for internal reform among the Conservatives. Do I understand that correctly?
Ms. Truss: We’ve got a movement called popular conservatism and it’s about advocating these policies. We’re saying it’s not enough just to have conservative policies. It’s not even enough just to get in a position of power. Unless we change the system, we’re actually not going to be able to deliver the policies.
That’s why the situation is quite similar to here in the U.S. You do have a huge administrative state, so the problem isn’t just which party is in power. The problem is that the system has become antithetical to change. That is also true in the UK.
Mr. Jekielek: In the U.S. we see this erosion of power away from the legislature into the administrative state. In your case, it would be the Quangos. But Congress isn’t that unhappy with that, because Congress can say, “It wasn’t us, it was the agencies.” Then the agencies can say, “It wasn’t us, it was Congress.”
Ms. Truss: People are going to say, “What’s the point of you if you don’t actually make any decisions in the House of Representatives or the Senate? What’s the point of you?” That is my worry for democracy. People elect us to make decisions and we are meant to represent the people of our constituencies, or districts in the case of the U.S. If all these powers have been outsourced to these bodies because we’re too afraid to make decisions, what’s the point of us? That is a threat to democracy, and I’m very worried about that.
We could repeal the acts that created the Supreme Court. That’s what we should be doing. We’ve got all this legacy legislation that essentially tied politicians’ hands and we need to be bold and change that. That’s what I’m advocating. I’m saying that we’ve got to explain to the public what’s gone wrong. Rather than politicians being courageous and making difficult decisions, it’s been palmed off and it’s not working.
But the first step, and actually in some ways the understanding of this is better in the United States, is that people have to understand the administrative state is a problem. It’s not just politicians being hopeless. It’s also that they can’t actually do things because their hands are so tied.
Mr. Jekielek: We were talking about immigration. When you talk about immigration, you’re talking about unchecked immigration, not immigration writ large.
Ms. Truss: We need to reduce the number of legal migrants and we also need to deport illegal migrants as well. We need to do both of those things.
Mr. Jekielek: I want to talk about net zero. There almost seems to be a consensus on these net zero policies.
Ms. Truss: There really isn’t. The government has now postponed things like banning oil boilers, which they threatened last year. My constituents got very angry about that because they didn’t want to have to replace their oil boilers with a heat source pump. People are angry about energy bills being too high as well.
The reason energy bills are so high in Britain is because we’re not doing things like fracking. It’s banned because of net zero, so people don’t like the effect of the policies. We have to communicate that this effect is being caused by this net zero legislation. People now understand with the war in Ukraine how important it is to have your own energy independence.
Britain is a net energy importer. We could be a net energy exporter if we built more nuclear energy, and if we got on with fracking. Those are the arguments we have to make. There’s growing concern about the cost.
The problem is that we legislated first and then looked at the cost later. In Britain we have reduced carbon emissions. But that’s because we’re importing more goods from countries like China who are building coal-fired power stations, so there’s no net benefit to the planet. All that has happened is we have empowered our enemies and we’ve damaged our own industry.
Mr. Jekielek: We’ve outsourced our emissions to our enemies, which is bizarre.
Ms. Truss: It is bizarre. The Left and the environmental movement have been very successful at making everybody think they are nice. But actually, it has been a Trojan horse for collectivism and taking away power from sovereign nations. That is happening in international bodies and it’s a big problem.
The Left no longer make traditional socialist arguments. They don’t argue for control of the means of production and things like that. Instead, they say, “We’ve got to be kind to the environment. We’ve got to be kind to transgender people. If you don’t agree with these policies, you’re a nasty person.”
Mr. Jekielek: You’ve just described the weapon. The weapon is basically a kind of slander, and everyone hates being slandered. It has been such an effective weapon.
Ms. Truss: It has. It’s a weapon used against conservatives, and too many conservatives accept the premise. They accept the premise that somehow it’s nice to advocate for these policies. No, it’s not. What we’re effectively doing is making people poorer because they can’t afford energy. We’re exposing our young people to dangerous, irreversible treatments. That’s not nice. We need to talk about what the actual consequences of those policies are.
It’s like performative empathy or something like that. Politics is full of performative empathy, and it’s one of the things I dislike most about it. It is difficult being in the age of performative empathy, because it’s not a rational argument. But we have to show people what are the consequences of these Left-wing policies, what they are about, and why they are wrong.
It’s about taking power away from individuals and families to make decisions and instead putting power in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats or international authorities. That is collectivism, and it’s collectivism by the back door.
This is particularly important for the English-speaking democracies, where the problem is most acute; United States, UK, Canada, and Australia. The Left has been very effective at mounting these long-term campaigns, like on the environment and transgender rights, and spreading them. The whole development of social media has helped spread that Leftist ideology as well.
Mr. Jekielek: At the same time, you could argue that social media was very important in Brexit or the unexpected election of Donald Trump in 2016.
Ms. Truss: That’s true, but I’m trying to explain why it has spread in such a way across the free world. For example, in Britain, we ended up having protests about Black Lives Matter and we had people taking the knee, including the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer. This was an issue in the U.S. and had nothing to do with us, and yet people in the UK had become involved.
In my view, they had become indoctrinated by the overall narrative of Black Lives Matter, which we don’t want to hear about. We know that essentially it has Marxist roots. We know that. But that wouldn’t have happened 40 years ago and that stuff would not have spread.
Of course, you’re right, good ideas spread as well. We have to make our ideas more contagious than those of the Left. Brexit is a good example of that type of movement. You’ve also got malign regimes pushing some of these messages and funding some of these organizations. The Soviet Union used to fund Left-wing organizations like the CND. You now have a modern version of that, and these people are being funded by our enemies.
Mr. Jekielek: In the UK, there are these massive pro-Palestine mass rallies of 500,000 people. Under closer scrutiny, some people see them as pro-Hamas. Why do you think the scale of this is so great in Britain in particular?
Ms. Truss: As you say, it’s happening all across the world. But what we haven’t seen enough of in Britain is the police actually cracking down on some of the vile anti-Semitism that’s taking place at these rallies. We have an accountability problem and we have an enforcement problem in Britain. But it’s a very small minority of Brits who actually think that way.
But it’s getting oversized because of the extreme tactics of those demonstrators. The most worrying thing recently is that MPs are being threatened. MPs are being threatened to change their vote in the House of Commons because of these vile, extremist demonstrators. That is when we need to make sure our laws are properly enforced.
Mr. Jekielek: Did one step down?
Ms. Truss: You’re right. A Member of Parliament stepped down because his office was torched. There was an arson attack on his office. He represents a very strong Jewish area in London. Over the past 10 years, two MPs have been murdered. MP security is a real issue in Britain.
Mr. Jekielek: What are the steps today that we can take? What’s your message to the American people?
Ms. Truss: We need to be brave and advocate conservative values. We need to be proud of our countries. We need to not compromise with the Left. I said in my speech earlier that you can’t triangulate with terrorists. You can’t compromise with communists. They want to destroy our way of life.
These people on the Left who advocate this point of view, they’re after the destruction of Western civilization. Too often, conservatives don’t understand this, and that’s the aim. These people are not trying to be helpful. They are actively trying to undermine our way of life, and that is why we need to be brave at taking them on.
We need to make sure that our institutions are properly, democratically accountable, so that they cannot be captured by these extremists.
Too often in Britain, corporate organizations, universities, and government departments have been captured by these extremists. They’ve been captured by this ideology because there’s not enough pushback.
There’s clearly a basis of self-loathing.
The people who are on the streets chanting in favor of Hamas, or saying capitalism is evil, don’t like Britain. They don’t like the British way of life. They don’t like our values. A lot of conservatives just think this is a normal political fight. It’s not a normal political fight. This is an enemy within our own country.
Mr. Jekielek: Liz Truss, any final thoughts as we finish?
Ms. Truss: No. It’s been fantastic to be on the show.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Ms. Truss: Thank you.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining former British Prime Minister Liz Truss and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
🔴 WATCH the full episode (23 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0229LizTruss
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