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By: Breccan F. Thies / December 10, 2024 / The Federalist
Truss believes a political alignment is coming in Britain, and it is likely to be similar to Trump-style populism.
Liz Truss, the former British prime minister who only lasted 44 days in office, is sounding the alarm on the permanent bureaucracy, or the deep state, which she believes poses the biggest existential threat to Western civilization.
“The Prime Minister vs. The Blob,” a documentary from Palladium Productions and the Wall Street Journal Opinions section, dives into Truss’ short tenure as a case study in which a world leader can effectively be deposed by the self-proclaimed expert class of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats (which the British not-so-affectionately call “The Blob”).
The film is available for free on the Wall Street Journal’s website.
Truss’ account of the problem in Britain is not unlike the rot experienced in the American administrative deep state, known as The Swamp: An arrogant group of technocrats who believe they should have the power to dictate their worldview to the populace and see the people of their own country as a cultureless and bitter enemy.
“In Britain, we now have a party of the left-wing establishment, which is the Labour Party. Rachel Reeves [Chancellor of the Exchequer] is a former Bank of England economist, Keir Starmer [Prime Minister] is a former Director of Public Prosecution,” Truss, a member of the Conservative Party, said at an early viewing of the documentary at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C. “These are these are the creatures of The Blob, and that is what the Labour Party now: It represents the public sector, it represents the liberal elite who live in cities, it represents the liberal media.”
“It’s a groupthink shared by senior media executives, senior corporate executives, civil servants: ‘Wouldn’t it be better if experts and technocrats were running everything?’” she explained in the film. “That’s a whole shared belief system: Big spending, big government, big taxes, big immigration.”
Lasting between September and October of 2022, Truss’ tenure took place between that of fellow Conservatives Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, and began in the wake of the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
While Truss described the leadership of both Johnson and Sunak as being fundamentally non-threatening to, or even advancing, the despotism of The Blob, she described her mindset coming into office as wanting to confront them.
“I looked across the Atlantic at the United States, and I could see policies that were working, such as tax cuts, deregulation, fracking, and I was frustrated that we weren’t able to implement those policies in Britain,” she said in the documentary. “So I ran on a ticket of change, of removing Britain truly from the European orbit. We left the European Union, but we still had, we still have all the European laws on our statute books.”
In the film, Truss described being raked over the coals for firing Tom Scholar, the former Permanent Secretary to the Treasury of United Kingdom, as not being supportive of the “civil service,” which she said is “not working now to be able to deliver conservative policies.”
“The civil service has differing views, such as the support of Black Lives Matter, supporting the extreme trans agenda, support of eco-extremism,” she added. As the movie noted, the rot deepens into “hundreds of independent agencies which are not accountable to the Prime Minister.”
However, perhaps the biggest run-in with The Blob came after Truss’ relatively modest economic proposals, called the mini budget, became an affront to the “civil servants” in the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the Bank of England (their version of the Federal Reserve), and with its governor, Andrew Bailey.
“The mini budget was, frankly, presented as much more radical than it actually was,” she said in D.C. “This was about not raising corporation tax. It was about cutting the top rate from 45 percent to 40 percent, which cost no money to the exchequer. It was about doing fracking, and it wasn’t, sort of, a mission to the moon. It was sensible policies to get the British economy going.”
Despite that, the OBR reacted quickly to develop an economic report, which it then leaked to the public, saying the minor changes would bring about an economic crisis in Britain, Truss said. The crisis numbers inevitably ended up being incorrect, but the report achieved the purpose of having the policies reversed and eventually Truss resigned.
“What I simply did not realize before I went into Number 10 [the official home of the Prime Minister] is how viciously [the deep state] would fight back,” she said.
Truss explained that The Blob has entrenched further and moved considerably to the left since the days of Margaret Thatcher, in large part due to the premiership of Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair from 1997 to 2007, who allowed political oversight of government to be largely removed from the will of the British people.
“The bureaucracy has become radicalized and has genuine activists in it, which it just didn’t, and also, a lot of power has been outsourced to independent agencies, which it hadn’t, and a lot of that happened under Tony Blair,” she said, describing many of the bureaucrats as “neo-Marxists.”
Decisions like who would sit on the judicial benches or who leads the Bank of England are now made by “independent agencies” as opposed to political leadership, and the British media is more interested in covering the clothing choices of senior government officials than the corruption within their own government, Truss explained at the early viewing.
“Americans think they’ve got a problem with the deep state; at least they get to appoint the head of the Treasury!” she said in D.C. “I mean, did you hear the arrogance of these people? It’s like, ‘How on earth could she possibly say, replace the head of the Treasury.’ How on earth could it possibly be not true that the Prime Minister should be able to decide who leads a department like that?”
Truss said she sees a political realignment coming, and that it is likely to look “Trumpian.”
“People are very, very frustrated in Britain and very, very angry because they keep voting for change it doesn’t get delivered. The reason it doesn’t get delivered is a large part due to The Blob, and Donald Trump is right in the way he talks about The Swamp, the way he talks about the deep state,” she said. “That is the campaign that needs to be run ahead of the 2029 election in Britain.
“This is what, what we need: We need our Elon Musk, we need our Vivek [Ramaswamy], we need our DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency], and we need our Donald Trump,” she explained, saying it could come from an alignment with some in the Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Reform Party.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.