Liz Truss beats Rishi Sunak and meets queen Elizabeth as Prime Minister
Britain’s New Prime Minister Liz Truss Is Inheriting a Mess
For the past eight weeks, Liz Truss has been attempting to persuade the 172,000 members of the Conservative Party in Britain—who are significantly more male, older, whiter, and wealthy than the rest of the population—that she is the best candidate to succeed Boris Johnson as party leader and prime minister.
She now has to prove to everyone else that she is qualified for the position now that Queen Elizabeth II has officially designated her as the nation's 56th Prime Minister.
Trust inherits a challenge up ahead
Truss won't, however, have a honeymoon phase like the majority of newly elected prime ministers do.
Instead, she must deal with problems that have been building up over the course of a long, anxious summer: a dire cost-of-living crisis that may cause energy poverty for the majority of Britons, record-breaking inflation, a collapsing healthcare system, widespread labor unrest, and an economy that some claim is already in recession.
And that's before she even has the chance to consider other issues like the protracted conflict in Ukraine, the tensions surrounding trade in Northern Ireland, the resurging Scottish independence movement, and the minor matter of bringing her ruling Conservative Party back together following a contentious leadership campaign.
Can Liz Truss handle so many issues at once?
For Truss, a variety of factors are present at once. Her premiership will be defined by how Truss decides to handle the plethora of issues on her plate and if she is successful in allaying the worst concerns of economists.
The following general election must take place no later than January 2025 (without a snap election). It will be decided if her party's next few years in power will be their last for a while.
In the previous 12 years of her party's rule, they have implemented Brexit, managed a pandemic that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 Britons and had four different leaders in six years.
There aren't many causes to be optimistic. Gavin Barwell, a senior Conservative minister and Theresa May's former chief of staff, tells TIME that the enormity of Truss' issues "is one of the most challenging any Prime Minister has faced in my experience."
The Brexit vote outcome was a massive problem for his former employer, which ultimately lost her the position of prime minister, but "the rest of the policy climate was rather benign." Truss does not have a single issue to concentrate on or a single signature policy to complete.
Britains energy crisis
If there is one issue that Truss must address right now, it is the growing cost of energy, which is being mostly driven by the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
The average family energy bill in Britain will rise by 80% starting next month, with more hikes expected in 2023, the country has been informed.
Businesses will experience a greater increase—and some may even face closure—since they are not subject to the same energy price limitations as regular consumers.
The situation has gotten so bad that Britons have started sharing money-saving advice to help people through the winter, ranging from the nonsensical ("showering elsewhere five days a week") to the seemingly logical ("using cost-efficient equipment").
Can Truss pass Tax Cuts?
Truss proposed broad tax cuts as a candidate in order to address the energy issue, which included rolling back the increase in social security-like National Insurance (NI) contributions that are now required.
However, analysts have cautioned that the NI decision and tax cuts alone won't be sufficient and, if anything, would help higher earnings at the expense of poorer Britons.
Although Truss originally disallowed direct assistance to the most disadvantaged, she is already under pressure from some of her parliamentary counterparts, whose redistributive economic commitments were considered as crucial to the Conservatives' landslide success in the 2019 election.
The Butterfly effect
The additional difficulty for Truss is that any choice she takes at this time will have an impact on the other problems she is dealing with.
For instance, her NI decision means that she no longer has the funds necessary to pay for the post-pandemic backlogs afflicting the nation's cherished National Health Service.
Which has already seen average hospital wait times rise above 12 hours while millions of people wait months for non-emergency medical treatments.
If tax reductions are insufficient to lower living expenses, there may be more industrial action in Britain as workers in many industries, including train and postal services, garbage collection, and shipping, the strike for higher compensation.
Upcoming general elections are ahead can the conservatives get it together?
Truss is in an untenable situation, and that much is true. A Prime Minister who took office against the preferences of the majority of her parliamentary colleagues and with the avowed backing of less than 1% of the electorate, the majority of whom preferred her predecessor anyway—would likely be overthrown by this confluence of problems.
Truss has essentially received a "hospital pass," a rugby word for when a comrade is sent the ball in a way that exposes them to a clobbering from the other side, according to the former British ambassador Peter Ricketts.
The upcoming general election will be the beating if the Conservative leadership contest was the hospital pass.
Even if party leader Keir Starmer continues to have a low net favorability rating, recent polls show that the opposition Labor Party is in the lead for the first time in almost a decade.
In the event that the Conservatives regain control, Truss will still be faced with the challenge of explaining the long history of choices made by the party. There won't be anybody else to blame after more than a decade of Conservative Party control.
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