Rt Hon Liz Truss MP, Chief Secretary to The Treasury Visits Colchester - Invited by Local MP Will Quince

Colchester MP, Will Quince, asked The Colchester Business Network to a Colchester Business Questions & Answers, with the Rt Hon Liz Truss MP, Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

The meeting was held on Friday 30th November from 4 - 5.30pm, at The George Hotel, High Street, Colchester. 

First-class hospitality was supplied by Surya Hotels who are opening a new hotel in Colchester High Street, while the George Hotel gets some loving TLC and a complete refurbishment.

Image: A large turnout for the Will Quince MP Brexit event at the George Hotel, Colchester.

According to Wikipedia: After graduating from the University of Oxford in 1996, Truss worked in sales, as an economist, and was deputy director at the think-tank Reform, before becoming a member of parliament at the 2010 general election. As a backbencher, she called for reform in a number of policy areas, including childcare, maths education, and the economy. She founded the Free Enterprise Group of Conservative MPs and authored or co-authored a number of papers and books, including After the Coalition (2011) and Britannia Unchained (2012).

Critics who have attempted to engage with her, according to George Monbiot in The Guardian, have said that she is "indissolubly wedded to a set of theories about how the world should be, that are impervious to argument, facts or experience. She was among the first ministers to put her own department on the block in the latest [2015] spending review, volunteering massive cuts. She seems determined to dismantle the protections that secure our quality of life: the rules and agencies defending the places and wildlife we love."

Truss's thinking came across as rigid and inflexible. All free-market economics and nothing original. In response to an ABC question about homelessness and the treatment of the poor, Liz Truss just went back to an earlier argument about speeding up planning permission. Sixteen million people in the UK have less than £100 in savings. How will that help them?

Simon Collyer pointed out  in a question that ‘Excess Mortality Statistics’ in England and Wales showed an extra 50,100 deaths in the winter of 2017 and 2018 and he pointed out the 120,000 DWP related deaths and the fact that the statistics for those who had died on or shortly after being declared 'Fit for Work' have never been released.

Liz Truss's face crumpled into a grimace when the name Jeremy Corbyn was first mentioned. She talked about the threat of a Labour government that was anti-business and anti-jobs, where taxes would increase and warned of the threat of a Labour government, as if the Black Death was about to arrive again. Not people who just believe in a fairer society and less inequality.

Labour is not anti-business by definition - socialism thinking states you need to pay in to take out. If Labour goes after the rich it is because it was their class that has grabbed all the money. If we need to fix up our country, the rich have all the cash and that’s where it will have to come from to make things better – the undeserving rich.

The room was broadly divided between supporting prime ministers May’s Brexit deal, to leaving without a deal or staying in the EU. Whatever is decided about Brexit, according to this straw poll 2/3 of the population are going to feel very unhappy. 

With the government disintegrating, Liz Truss MP thoughts, words, and ideas may be completely irrelevant. She had no new ideas to offer, and she could only spout the usual free market dogma.

She did not appear to care much about the poor at all when engaged about the murderous treatment of them by the government and the DWP, she just went back to her arguments about speeding-up planning permission and doing away with the ‘Green Belt’ which she said were neither ‘Green’ nor a ‘Belt’. A stance hardly likely to appeal to the Environmentalists’ among us, and there is a lot of them these days. 

Audience member, farmer, and businessman William Sunnocks pointed to our crumbling, inadequate infrastructure in the roads department in Essex and Cambridgeshire.

Image: Liz Truss MP speaks about potholes. 

Liz Truss talked about an idea for sponsoring potholes. This was an idea she announced with a smile she said 'after the BBC cameraman had left the room'.

Perhaps the answer is we ought to securitize potholes and trade them on the Internet? A replacement for Bitcoin perhaps….?

I am afraid Liz comes across all theory and no practical. A rigid thinker, a product of the ‘jolly hockey sticks’ end of the comfortably off middle-classes. Liz appears to think that social issues of the magnitude we have in our country are all going to be solved by more tax cuts to the rich and a bit more economic growth and some planning permission changes.

At the ABC we don’t think so somehow.

Liz struggled to reach four out of ten on the ABC 'vote meter'. Perhaps Liz fared better with the Tory faithfull, but not the ABC I am afraid? 

ABC Comment, have your say below:

.