Runaway prices
The British, like the rest of Europe, face higher living costs and rampant electricity prices. The government recently introduced a targeted grant to households to help them pay their bills, but Liz Truss wants to scrap it.
She promises to announce her own support package for this within a week, but has not wanted to say anything about it in advance.
— But the way I would do it is the conservative way, where you lower the tax burden. Not handing out “handouts” (roughly gifts), she said in the matter in an interview with Financial Times a couple of weeks ago.
The opposition wants to freeze electricity prices and compensate the electricity companies’ losses. Truss has not ruled out that, or any other action.
Inflation and rising prices have in turn started to lead to strikes across the country.
Care workers at St Thomas’ Hospital in London sit on a wall that has become a place of remembrance for the people who have died during the pandemic. Stock image. Care crisis
There is a major crisis in British healthcare. After the pandemic, there are long operating queues, patients wait for hours in emergency departments and tens of thousands of employees are missing.
Liz Truss is promising to roll back the tax-funded increase in public health and social insurance introduced by Boris Johnson earlier this year. The purpose of the increase was that care could catch up.
The money does more good in the residents’ wallets, the Prime Minister-elect has stated. But it is not clear how rising healthcare costs are to be financed, not least when she also promises large tax cuts “from day one”.
Truss’s rival for the leadership, Rishi Sunak, has warned that she will “add fuel to the inflationary fire” with multibillion-dollar loans.
Liz Truss visited Kyiv and met Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on February 17, a week before Russia launched the full-scale invasion. Archive image. Ukraine
“One of the few things that can be almost certain about Truss’s first weeks in office are pictures of her in Kyiv side by side with Volodymyr Zelenskyi,” writes The Guardians political reporter Peter Walker.
Britain, under Boris Johnson – and with Liz Truss as foreign minister – has sought to be at the forefront of international support for Ukraine since Russia began the outright invasion in February.
Britain will be Ukraine’s closest ally for as long as it takes, Truss promises.
In the tense situation around the world, she wants to increase the defense budget further, to three percent of the country’s GDP. It has not been this large since the mid-1990s.
Brexit critics demonstrate at the border in Carrickcarnon last November, to dissuade the UK government from taking any emergency measures at the border. File photo.Brexit
No, it’s not over. There is still friction around the so-called Northern Ireland Protocol, which is supposed to prevent a tightly regulated border between British Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland from arising in a still tense situation.
On the other hand, the protocol has led to trade disputes between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, which has caused a government crisis in Belfast and irritation in London.
If the EU does not want to renegotiate the agreement then it is the UK government’s duty to take action, Liz Truss wrote in a debate post in the Financial Times in July. One such measure could be to activate an emergency clause in the agreement that allows either party to introduce its own rules to protect its interests.
There are already plans for a trip to Dublin, according to sources in The Sunday Times.
Boris Johnson answers questions in Parliament in March this year. Stock image.Party split
Boris Johnson’s scandalous exit has eaten away at the Conservative Party. In a no-confidence vote held before he announced his resignation, the divide was exposed: 211 Tory MPs voted in favor and 148 against.
Johnson still has a seat in parliament and there is wild speculation about his plans.
Ahead of the party leadership election, both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak weighed in on Johnson’s legacy. They both had a high tone and were judged to target members of a particularly conservative core. In the first rounds of the election, however, Truss had unusually low support among his Tory colleagues in Parliament.
Liz Truss will govern with the large mandate given to Boris Johnson in the December 2019 election, but the Conservatives have now fallen far behind Labor in opinion polls. When the prime minister has to set out his direction for the country, the opposition will not be slow to point this out.