Liz Truss on the 'Doom Loop' Engulfing the UK Economy

27:59And I think the level of economic literacy in the media has also got lower. And certainly British politics just gets reported as a pantomime rather than an analysis of the issues. There's much you say about the media and the way reporting is done that I probably am quite sympathetic with, actually. Would you ever join reform if the Conservatives can't pass modest slowdowns in the pace of welfare increases, if, you know, Labour obviously has its issues? Would you join reform? I'm not really thinking about party politics at the moment because my whole experience of being in government, and I was a government minister for 10 years before I became prime minister, was that the power was not in the hands of the politicians.

28:46The power was in the hands of the bureaucrats. So even if Nigel Farage gets elected in 2029, and currently he's the bookies favorite to get elected. If the bureaucracy isn't changed, if there isn't fundamental change to the way Britain is run, nothing will alter. I mean, a lot of the - But presumably, presumably a breakup of the, I mean, right? Like that's the idea, right? There's no prospect of breaking up the bureaucracy unless there's like genuinely something new that happens politically. Like that would be their argument, right? That a brand new party taking power is the only way that there could be some sort of deep institutional shakeup.

29:24Yes, in some ways that's true or could be true. There's no reason why the Conservative Party couldn't do a deep institutional shake-up. But the Conservative Party has to acknowledge what went wrong for 14 years. You know, why didn't we solve the immigration problem? Why didn't we solve the growth problem? Why didn't we solve things like the free speech problem? The answer is we didn't reverse the institutional changes Tony Blair made. And I talked about how he made the Bank of England unaccountable. He also made the judiciary unaccountable with things like the Human Rights Act and the Constitutional Reform Act.

29:59So until the Conservatives acknowledge that that is why we failed to deliver in office, that is true about the Conservative Party. But if you look at the two Trump administrations, Trump 1 and Trump 2, in Trump 1, there was less recognition of the institutional change that was required in the US. We're now seeing more of that from Trump. So my point is whoever is in office in 2029 needs to understand that the British state needs to be fundamentally shaken up. Otherwise, nothing is going to happen. And I make that argument to all parties. Interestingly, there are even people in the Labour Party, backbench MPs, who are saying the Bank of England's independence needs to be removed.

30:49they're saying get rid of the Office of Budget Responsibility because they can see the types of policies they want pursued are not possible with the current setup. Since we're talking political parties and on this note, you know, maybe there is some consensus on specific economic policies, as you point out. But we've had this back and forth between Conservatives and Labour for many, many years now. How do you actually go about building consensus around economic policy, especially at a time when, you know, people would describe our current environment as relatively turbulent and guilt yields are where they are.

31:28I would say there's a bad economic consensus between Labour and the Conservatives at present, which is nobody is saying, apart from me and a few others, nobody is saying that the institutions need to change. The Conservative Party are also wrapping themselves in, we need to respect the Independent Bank of England, we need to listen to the Office of Budget Responsibility. They're not prepared to take on the economic establishment, neither are the Labour Party. And we're in a situation where the policies these institutions believe in are failing. And they're manifestly failing. Guilt rates are now much higher than they were back in 2022.

32:15Unemployment is up. Our energy prices are the highest in the world and the industry is closing down. These policies are manifestly failing, yet nobody is challenging the fundamentals of the economic institutions. You know, I'm glad you brought up free speech because I'm interested in that as well. And of course, you know, again, in the West, I think free speech, liberal speech norms are good. And so I worry about when I see them failing in various countries or friends and neighbors. Palestine action seems like a bunch of like crusty old hippies. And I know they defaced a plane, but they're listed as a terrorist group in your country.

32:56People can get arrested even just for saying support them. And I think they're like a terrorist group, basically like on the same level as like ISIS, which I think most people would say, yes, that is a genuine terrorist group. Like, what is going on there? Well, they did attack a military base, and they are advocating for terrorism in the UK. They defaced a plane, and then also people get arrested or in trouble for saying that they support them? They are clearly a problematic organization, and there are lots of organizations in Britain that are allowed in the UK that aren't actually allowed in many Arab countries.

33:32So I think it's right that we crack down on these organisations. I do think when people, you know, I am a pro free speech person, I'd love to have the First Amendment here in Britain. I support both people I agree with and people I don't agree with having a lot more free speech. And it is a travesty that we've just seen Lucy Connolly released from jail, who put out a tweet, deleted it four hours later and was sentenced to 31 months in prison. That is absolutely ludicrous. And I think we've become an international laughingstock. And it is an attempt. And Keir Starmer is very clear about this. It is an attempt by the authorities to suppress what people are talking about.

34:18And I think that's a very dangerous thing for a society to go down. All of these things really worry me. In the Lucy Connelly example, so she tweeted, and I understand that she deleted it, but she tweeted about setting a hotel on fire. I mean, that is arguably a call to violent action. Like, how would that be different? Would you feel the same way if someone said, look, you know, we should set a synagogue on fire? Is that free speech? Well, I think what she said would not have been deemed a violation in the US because it wasn't, I didn't believe she was talking about a specific, you know, go out and do this now.

34:54It was a general statement. It was obviously a terrible thing to say. And she has said sorry for that. I think there's a question about whether or not in the US that would have even been a crime at all. And even if it is a crime, whether it merits a 31 month prison sentence when we have people caught with child pornography being let off with no jail time at all. I mean, you've probably heard the expression two-tier Britain. But what is happening is people are being let out very early for crimes like child rape and yet put in prison for things that they write on Twitter. And those are two different categories, in my opinion.

35:33You mentioned the First Amendment just then. How would you reform, I guess, speech rights in the UK if you were in power again? We came up with free speech, freedom of the press back in 1695. And it was a historic British liberty. We had the Bill of Rights, of course, 1689, which then the United States built on that with your Bill of Rights and so on. So these liberties are there in the British Constitution. The problem is all of the laws that have been passed since, most notably the Online Safety Act. So what we need to do is restore Britain's historic liberties with a great restoration bill that sweeps away all of this legislation that is tied to country in knots.

36:21And I've talked about our problematic institutions, the problems with the judiciary, the problems with free speech. This is all down to very poor quality legislation that is essentially handed power that used to sit in the hands of the individual British citizen or the British Parliament. It's handed those power to unelected bureaucrats.

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38:48That's unlimited data for unlimited business. There we go. Get the internet you need at the price you want. Verizon Business. Starting price for LTE business internet, 25 megabits per second unlimited data plan with select Verizon business smartphone plan savings. Terms apply. Basically, my entire professional career, your party has been in power, except for, you know, the last 10 minutes or so in labor and Kirstarmer. It doesn't feel like 10 minutes here. Maybe it just feels like it over here, because it feels like a lot of the rot you describe or the rot that you perceive in your country, almost so much of it seems to have taken place under conservative government.

39:29Why is that? And why would anyone, you know, and they're thinking about the next election. Why would anyone think that if so much rot was allowed to happen under the Tories that the Tories should be given another chance in power? So I think the rot has sort of built up over time. So I talked about the development of the permanent bureaucracy. You had the Attlee government, which socialized land, which created the NHS, which created the welfare state. A lot of our problems go back to that government. But what was very important about the Blair government is this taking power that was in the hands of Parliament and putting it in the hands of unelected bodies, bureaucracies, the Bank of England, the Judicial Appointments Commission, all of this plethora of people off-com who are now making the decisions about free speech.

40:22If these plethora of people have not been elected, now de facto run our country. And the big mistake the Conservative Party made was not reversing that. And this was because at the time, David Cameron said he wanted to be the heir to Blair. He wanted to be fashionable. The Conservatives wanted to be modern. But I think it was a huge error. And the Conservative Party lost its soul. That's what happened. And in the pursuit of power, in the pursuit of trying to be modern, the Conservative Party lost its soul. And I think it's an open question about whether or not the Conservative Party can get its soul back or be replaced.

41:01But certainly, you know, where we are now, not enough people are saying what really went wrong over those 14 years. But the Conservative Party failed to take on the bureaucracy. These were not the Conservative Party's policies. They were just policies that we didn't object to. Related to Joe's point, when you think back to certain moments in Britain's economic history, so for instance, Brexit, the argument then was that if we get rid of all this EU regulation, the UK economy will be free to flourish and prosper. And I think in the 1970s, Anthony Barber instituted some tax cuts as well. right before inflation hit, I think, 25 % or something like that.

41:51Why should the UK population have confidence that a growth-focused economic policy, one that features big tax cuts and deregulation, will actually drive economic growth? Well, I think the important thing to note about Brexit is we haven't got rid of any of those European laws. They're still on the British statute books. So laws that protect bats and nudes still on the statute books. Laws that tell you how your can opener should work are still on the statute books. We still have the working time directive. We still got all of those laws. So this goes back to the problem you were talking about, the Conservative Party.

42:34The Conservative Party is fundamentally split between people who want Britain to be Singapore on Thames, a free trading, go-getting country, and people who want it to be part of Europe and want to be part of the European, lots of labour laws protecting people, environmental red tape, all of that stuff. And that issue was never resolved within the Conservative Party, which is why you saw prime ministers being deposed, why you have the debate within the Conservative Party. And I think if you look at the Brexit vote in Britain, 52 % voted for Brexit, 48 % didn't. So Brexit was not delivered as the public intended.

43:21I mean, the biggest case in point is, of course, immigration, where the Boris Johnson government failed to, in fact, allowed immigration to increase huge amounts, which has had a very negative effect. You know, since you mentioned party politics in the UK and the split within the Conservative Party, again, ignorant question here. I do get the impression that the Conservatives just like all seem to hate each other more than the members of the Labour Party and the 1922 committee, which I still like have to Wikipedia every once in a while to remember what that is. And they're always like scheming against each other.

43:56Is there like a deeper culture of just internal hate in the Conservative Party than the Labour Party? I would say the problems of the Conservative Party go back to where Margaret Thatcher was defenestrated and the sort of Tory wets and the Thatcherites. But if you compare it to American politics, if you look at the split between people like Trump and people like Dick Cheney or the sort of Bush Republicans, it's a very similar ideological divide. But what is different in America is that Trump has basically taken over the Republican Party, whereas in Britain, the kind of the left of the Conservative Party is still in control of it.

44:41That's the difference. But there is going to be a political realignment and you can see it in America. Republicans are now getting votes from low income people, people in rural areas. The Democrats are dominating in the sort of liberal cities. That's exactly what's going to happen in Britain at the next election. It's just the Conservative Party hasn't really got its head around which of those two things it is. So one of the things that seems to be happening in many developed countries at the moment is everyone wants to boost their own domestic manufacturing sector. And I believe you've spoken about the need for this in the UK before.

45:21When I think about the British economy, I usually think there's a pretty big monopoly when it comes to, let's call it intellectual jobs. Services, finance, office jobs. Journalism. Journalism, yeah. That kind of thing. But when I think about British manufacturing, you know, it's an island with a relatively small population compared to some other places in the world and high taxes, as you've been pointing out. What would make Britain actually competitive when it comes to manufacturing at a time when everyone seems out to compete in the same field? Well, the number one thing is energy prices need to come down.

46:01They're the highest in the world. They're four times the United States. If you are a car manufacturer, a steel manufacturer, it's incredibly hard to compete. So that has to change. We have to make it much easier to build things in Britain. And if you want to build a new factory, it takes far too long. So there are all of those sort of supply side policies that need to change. I think Britain, we de-industrialize pretty much earlier than any other country. You can see the same thing now happening in Germany and continental Europe. I think it's important to do all you can to maintain a manufacturing base because a lot of industries like AI, for example, requires high levels of energy.

46:44It requires other industries that it can sort of feed off, if you like. So if you just become, I talked about Singapore on Thames earlier, but Singapore is a relatively small country, so it can afford to be a trading hub. Britain is a country of 70 million people. I think you can't rely on services alone. I think you have to produce the full gamut. I'm very worried that we're losing our last steel blast furnace. What we learned during COVID is you are seriously up against it if you are relying on China for pharmaceuticals. These are the types of industry that Britain can excel in and does excel in.

47:23I mean, our biggest manufactured export to the United States is cars. We do produce good high-end cars that people want to buy. So there are opportunities for British manufacturing. It's just been made very, very hard by high energy prices and our planning rules. I take your point about certainly about energy prices and planning rules. Many people are having the same discussions here. To my mind, and Tracy mentioned the fairly small population, scale is incredibly important. It's not that small. I mean, 70 million people. Okay, okay, okay. Well, you know, China has however hundreds of millions just in the manufacturing.

48:00But yes, I take your point. Not that small. But did Brexit harm scale capacity? Because to my mind, if we're thinking about, OK, mass production at efficient level so that it's genuinely competitive, so that it's not some sort of government subsidized albatross that just exists as a make work industry, it strikes me that sheer scale of market is very important. And it feels to me like Brexit has shrunk the scale of that market for the year. I mean, there's no evidence that exports to Europe have gone down after Brexit. And in fact, the different trade deal we got from the EU presents the UK with some opportunities because we have lower tariffs in some areas with the United States than the EU does.

48:44But I think the other big factor in manufacturing is so much of it is becoming automated that it makes economic sense for goods to be produced close to market because you're no longer getting the advantage of a massive labor cost differential. So I think it's just a natural progression of modern economies that more manufacturing is going to be done closer to home when you've got a much more automated process. Since we're talking trade and exports, the UK was one of the first countries, I think, to sign an agreement with the Trump administration on tariffs. Would you have signed that so quickly or would you have perhaps pushed back a little bit more given your emphasis on boosting manufacturing domestically within the UK?

49:28I did actually praise Keir Starmer for the deal at the time. I was one of the few people to praise it. And I said, because I've got experience of negotiating with the first Trump administration, Bob Lighthizer, so I know how difficult it is. And I thought the UK got a good deal. And so it has proven that the EU has actually got a worse deal than the UK got. So I thought he was right. He was right to do that. And I want to see, well, we are paying lower tariffs than the EU is. So just on a relative basis compared to others. On an absolute basis, you're still paying tariffs. Yes. But what Trump has done with all of his trade deals around the world is essentially reset the World Trade Organization.

50:14I think it was one of the biggest errors of American foreign policy when Clinton allowed China to join the World Trade Organization on developing country terms. And that has had, in my view, it's helped boost China's economy. China is an autocratic authoritarian regime. I think that was a disastrous policy. What Trump is trying to do is reset that. And that has inevitable consequences for all of America's trading partners. But knowing what I do about the Trump administration, I thought the deal Keir Starmer got was a good deal. Potentially one thing that could - And I don't praise him very often, by the way.

50:56I really don't praise him. I figure that's rare. One thing that theoretically could be done to lower energy prices in many places would be a resolution of the war on Ukraine. And I'm curious, when you look at either Trump's pursuits or what Keir Starmer has said, Do you see other paths? Were you the prime minister now? What would you be pushing for in that particular conflict? Well, I want what I want out of that conflict is I want Putin not to have been rewarded for his appalling invasion of Ukraine. So what we don't want is him or indeed Xi Jinping to get the signal from the resolution of the Ukraine conflict that this was a this invasion was somehow justified or worth it.

51:45I want Russia to be contained because I still believe that they have expansionist instincts. Just going back to the mini budget for a second, one of the components of that was government support to offset higher energy prices. And that was also one of the things that seemed to spook markets, this idea that the UK government would be fiscally on the hook to compensate for astronomical energy prices at the time that seemed to be expanding at an enormous rate. If you were going to do it all over again, would you have possibly included some sort of mechanism to maybe limit the cost or avoid the sense that the UK was basically bailing out its population in some way?

52:32It's important to note that the energy package was one thing that wasn't reversed. So that was not the policy. The policy that I was forced to reverse, and that was made pretty clear to me, pretty much through threats, was the corporation tax increase. The energy policy remained in place. The energy policy remained in place. And the point about the energy policy was it was not a subsidy that happened automatically. It was only when energy prices reached a certain level. And I believed it was right for the government to do that because the government had failed to ensure adequately cheap energy was supplied.

53:15But what I was doing in tandem with that policy of essentially ensuring people against very high energy prices was getting on with fracking, licensing new North Sea gas reserves, so the prices would never get that high. So it was an insurance against prices going high to give consumers and businesses confidence to invest whilst we sorted out the supply that had been so badly failed by previous governments. That was the intention of the policy. And as I've said, the policy wasn't reversed by my successor. The policy that was reversed was getting on with the fracking. So you had the energy insurance policy, but not the fracking policy.

54:02Those policies were designed in tandem so that we could make sure that businesses in the country weren't spooked by the threats of having sky high energy prices. And by the way, if the energy prices had got that high, there would have had to be some kind of package to deal with them anyway. What I was doing is giving people notice so they had the confidence to invest. The energy package was actually announced because very sadly, Her Majesty the Queen died. It was announced a few weeks beforehand. It wasn't announced at the time of the mini budget. The thing that the economic establishment really objected to in the mini budget was the taxes.

54:41It was not raising corporation tax. That's what they didn't like. I just have one last question. Tracy and I work in public, though not as public as having been the prime minister of the UK. We live in this age where stories go insane and people love to see someone publicly humiliated. And it just seems to me that the UK press in particular is a bunch of jackals, but that's just my impression over here, even relative to the press. It's always funny when Americans come over and they don't realize what they're like. And I'm like, you ain't seen nothing until you dealt with the UK press. And they always go, Liz, you were right.

55:19You were right about these people. No, I just see it in the headlines. I don't know. It seems obvious to me. What's your takeaway? How do you move past a period of one's life like that? Well, I didn't really see it like that. I just see that the British press needs to change. And I'm a big supporter of independent media. I think the British press's coverage of economics is appalling. I think their coverage of politics is skin deep. I don't think they've done anything to analyse the sort of failings of the British state. And I think there won't be serious. We don't just need to change the bureaucracy in this country.

55:58We need to deal and change the press. And people are now turning off the BBC. They're turning off the mainstream media because they can see that the truth isn't being told. And there used to be a golden age, I guess, in journalism where people cared about the truth. I'm afraid they don't now. Friends of mine who are journalists just say their editorial conference is about how many clicks their article gets. And it's, you know, I just think that's pathetic. Well, these are the tensions of being a journalist in modern times. But I have one more question. It's just going back to some technical aspects, I guess, of economic policy.

56:36So you've criticized the OBR for, you know, its forecasts that end up influencing or, you know, perhaps even dictating government policy. I guess my question is, you know, when you think about a pro-growth economic agenda, that also relies on forecasts about future growth. And when we talked to Stephen Myron from the Trump administration earlier this year, that was one takeaway from our conversation was how much the Trump administration was really betting on economic growth picking up in order to offset some of the stuff it was doing. It's the only strategy. It is the only strategy. But why should people have confidence in the growth forecast but not have confidence in, you know, OBR forecasts?

57:23But the point about the OBR, and this has been proven by history, is that they overestimate how much raising taxes will bring in in revenue because they don't take the full account of the depression and economic activity. And they underestimate the impact of supply side reforms like planning or fracking or whatever else. And there are two answers to this. One is there are better economists out there. And I think the government, as was the case prior to 2010, the government should have the ability to hire the economists that they believe are right. I don't think my homework should be marked by somebody who doesn't agree with me, which is what was happening.

58:14I think that's just wrong. If people don't like what I'm saying and they don't like the policies, they can vote me out at an election. but I wasn't even allowed to try the policies because the people marking my homework said no. I mean, that's the bottom line. But the second thing is, I think we're far too reliant on forecasts. You can't predict the future. And trying to say, which is what the UK system does, that five years out, we know exactly what the debt is going to be, is rubbish. We don't know, what if Donald Trump imposes huge tariffs? What if the UK strikes a trade deal with India? What if there's a discovery of a new technology that totally transforms?

58:57You don't know what the future is going to look like. And my economics is based on first principles. I know that if you put up taxes too high, people won't go out to work anymore. I know that if you make energy prices cheaper, businesses are more likely to invest in Britain. The problem with these forecasts, and this is another criticism of British economic media, the problem with forecasts is that people become focused on whether the number's right in the forecast rather than the fundamental principles of what makes a successful economy. Liz Trice, so great to chat with you, someone we've wanted to have on the show for a very long time.

59:36Great that we've made it happen and I appreciate your coming on up. Thank you.

59:52Tracy, I'm so glad we finally got to interview Liz Truss. We finally did it. I think it was a good time to do it, actually, because, you know, there's a lot of overlap with the Trump administration at the moment and what Truss experienced in 2022. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there was a lot that I found to be interesting there. You know what I think actually, maybe the most interesting thing to me is thinking that, okay, in the US, we have these multiple branches of government, right? So the president wants something, but Congress is going to veto it or can veto it, especially if it's a different party in power.

1:00:23Obviously, that's not the dynamic of the UK with the parliamentary system. And yet, even in the parliamentary system, to hear Liz Truss describe the fact that what she describes even modest cuts to the increase in welfare weren't palatable to the members of her party, let alone the opposition, which, of course, is never going to vote for. But in her party, I find that to be a very striking comment about the difficulty that, you know, electoral democracies have in raining back cuts. Absolutely. The other thing that kind of caught my eye or my ear was when we were talking about tariffs and, you know, Liz said that she had praised the deal that the UK struck with the Trump administration because it was less than what the EU was paying.

1:01:06And it's interesting to me that countries seem to be competing with each other. The Trump administration in some respects has been kind of successful in that, getting its trade partners to compete with each other for the lowest deal rather than to try to compete on an absolute basis for lower tariffs per se. I thought that was interesting. I also think it's interesting, you know, this sort of, I find myself having a lot of sympathy with this, this sort of like anti-democratic aspects of entities like the OBR or in the US, the OMB, and these ideas that, okay, they have one set of assumptions about how policy works and the idea that like they have a formal role.

1:01:45And, you know, there's a certain undemocratic element, I think, of these sort of institutions that either they not necessarily with a formal veto, et cetera, that aren't elected. I have sympathy for that opinion. It certainly seems like they can act as an institutional restraint on the government. But some people would argue that maybe that's a good thing. Maybe you want an independent body looking at economic policy and monetary policy, right? Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. And look, it's very striking that she said really, she does not accept the premise that the Bank of England should be as independent as it currently is.

1:02:22And that, you know, the idea is to your question, folding it back in with the Treasury is very striking. Well, also the line about, you know, not wanting to have her homework marked by someone who doesn't believe in it. I'm sure all of us as students would have liked to choose our own teacher who was grading our homework, but we don't get to for obvious reasons. We don't. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracey Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our guest, Liz Truss.

1:02:52She's at TrussLiz. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen, Armand Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. For more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. You can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash OddLots. And if you enjoy OddLots, if you like it, when we dive into British politics and economic policy, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free.

1:03:25All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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