In Summary:
In this interview, former Prime Minister Liz Truss doesn’t hold back, laying out a scathing critique of the UK’s long-term economic failure and the deep-seated forces she believes are actively undermining change.
Truss dismisses Rachel Reeves’ economic narrative as a “load of bollocks,” asserting that the UK’s stagnation is a result of 30 years of bad policy, tracing problems back to the Blair era with its overspending, regulation, and the disastrous decision to make the Bank of England unaccountable. Her core argument is that the country is in an economic “death spiral” – a grim assessment, frankly – with income per capita now lagging 50% behind the US.
Truss vehemently defends her 2022 mini-budget, which she claims was never truly implemented and was sabotaged by the Bank of England. She paints a clear picture of a powerful, unelected “deep state” – consisting of senior Treasury officials, the Bank of England, and other bureaucratic institutions – who share a globalist, high-tax, high-spend, Net Zero worldview. These unaccountable technocrats, not elected politicians, are the ones driving policy and actively resisting any attempt to shift the trajectory. This system, she states, is why the electorate keeps voting for lower taxes and less immigration but keeps getting the opposite. It is a fundamental betrayal of democracy.
Her solution to save Britain is a three-point plan that cuts right through the hype: Unleash our oil and gas industry and get fracking to lower crippling energy costs; Cut taxes to competitive levels to reverse the talent drain; and finally, Rein in the size of the state and the power of its unaccountable bureaucracy. Beyond economics, she calls for tackling the “Blairite legacy,” including the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act, which she argues have embedded corrosive ideologies like DEI and appeasement within the system. She sees the Conservative Party as a spent force, internally corrupt and unable to fix a system captured by the left.
Ultimately, Truss makes a stark case that she was removed from office not for incompetence, but because she was a “threat” to this powerful status quo. She is skeptical of political leaders, including those potentially on the right like Nigel Farage, unless they are willing to take on and reverse the Blairite takeover – a task she believes is the single most critical step to making Britain “great again.” This interview is a truly blunt look at power, sabotage, and the bloody difficulty of enacting real change in modern Britain.
Welcome to a very special edition of the Daily Espresso. I am JJ Annisiobi, and today we are joined by a woman who remains one of the most talked about figures in modern politics, Liz Truss. She lasted just 49 days in number 10, but her time in office left a mark that is still being debated across Westminster and beyond. In today’s episode, we will talk about her life as prime minister, what really went wrong, and whether she regrets sacking Kwasi Kwarteng and if she still blames others for her downfall.
Here is the full video. For those who, like me, prefer reading while listening (read-along) or just reading instead of watching. You can follow the full transcript below at your own pace.
Liz, thank you for joining us here on Day. What is life like now after Downing Street? I do not know how to answer that question. I mean, life is great, life is great, I always enjoy life. How do people react to you when they see you walk down the street? Quite a lot of people say, “I am sorry about what happened to you as prime minister, you were right.” I get that reaction quite a lot, actually. Other people are rude lefties, those are the two categories. And what do the rude leftists say to you? Well, they just shout stuff about Gaza or whatever. And what is keeping you busy nowadays? Well, I am still busy on what I was always busy on, which is how do we actually make Britain a successful country and how do we get out of the morass that we are in.
Rachel Reeves’ Economic Blame Game
Well, let us talk about the issues at the moment, the budget only a few weeks away. This is what Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said: she blames austerity, Brexit, and the ongoing impact of Liz Truss’s mini budget for the fact she is going to put up taxes. What do you think about that? What a load of bollocks. I mean, honestly. Let us be honest, this country has not been doing well for 30 years. That is how long this has been going on. We have not had industry grow. We have had people leaving the country because they cannot make money here, frankly. Peoples incomes have not really risen, if you take account of inflation, for over a decade.
This stuff from Labor is just desperate, it is desperate because they basically realise that their policies do not work. Their whole critique of the Tory government was wrong, because if you remember, they said the Tory government did not spend enough money and they did not put taxes up enough. Actually, the Tory government spent too much money and put up taxes too much. And most of the problems go right back to the Blair era, you know, they go back to making the Bank of England unaccountable, they go back to all the regulation that Blair put on business, they go back to all the public spending that Gordon Brown did. The big failing of the Tories was to not deal with that. So Rachel Reeves is in a massive hole of her own making and she is just casting around for people and things to blame. I think the public realise this. This is why she is the most unpopular chancellor on record, Keir Starmer is the most unpopular prime minister, it is why the Labour Party polls are so low, because people are not stupid.
The Mini-Budget and Sabotage
How do you compare the impact of your mini budget to what Labor are currently doing? It is a totally different situation because my mini budget was never implemented. This is what people do not understand. What happened was, at the time in 2022, the Bank of England effectively sabotaged it. So the day before the mini budget, they announced the sale of 40 billion pounds worth of government gilts. They failed to properly regulate the pension market which created the run over the next few days in the gilt market. The Bank of England themselves admitted that two-thirds of all the market changes in 2022 were down to them. Of course, that does not get reported in the mainstream media, which is basically a mouthpiece for the economic establishment. But the fact is, it was a Bank of England caused crisis and they pointed the finger at me. It was convenient for people in the Conservative party that wanted Rishi Sunak to be installed to point the finger at me and that is what happened. But it is ludicrous to blame the mini budget, which was not implemented, for where we are now.
We go back to what is the fundamental problem with Britain. The fundamental problem is the economy has not really grown significantly for 30 years, that is the problem. That is why we are where we are.
The UK vs. US Economy
If you compare us to America, so in the year 2000, the average Brit was just about as well off as the average American. Now, American income per capita is 50% higher than British income per capita, 50% higher. Can you imagine what your life would be like if your salary was 50% bigger? That is the scale of the problem.
The argument that Americans have to pay for healthcare and we do not is irrelevant. We pay through the tax system, and the Americans are also paying taxes. This is about the amount of income the country is bringing in per head. They are bringing in 50% more income per head. That means they can, if they want, spend it in the public sector or the private sector, but the point is they are bringing in 50% more income, and that makes a massive difference. You have got to ask why are the Americans bringing in 50% more income?
One is that their energy costs are a quarter what they are in the UK, because they have done things like fracking. So they have got cheap gas, that means their industry is competitive, it means that their households are paying a quarter of the energy bill that we are paying in the UK. They have also got lower taxes and they have also got less regulation. So their industries, like the tech industry, AI, their steel industry – all of those things are doing better than ours because those industries are competitive. These are the deep-seated problems of the British economy that our energy is too expensive, that our tax is too high, our regulation is too high. The fact is, the country is going bankrupt. We have not been earning enough money as a country. As I say, we are earning 50% less per capita than the US is, and what I was trying to do in 2022 is fix that. I was trying to fix it and I was sabotaged. The situation three years down the track is now worse and there are no signs that anybody is serious about making it better.
A Three-Point Plan for a Competitive Britain
How do we become more competitive? How does Britain save itself?
First of all, we have got to unleash our oil and gas industry and we have got to get fracking. People I have spoken to suggest that we have enough gas underneath and around the UK to become energy independent and to lower our gas prices. That to me is a massive issue. Why is it that manufacturing is doing so badly? One of the main reasons is energy is so expensive. We have to get fracking and we have to unleash our oil and gas industry again. That was one of the main drivers of American economic growth over the past 20 – 30 years.
We have got to cut taxes. They are now above the Laffer curve, and what does that mean? It means we are actually bringing in less revenue than we otherwise would have done because we are actually stopping economic growth, because companies do not want to locate in the UK. They do not want to expand their businesses in the UK because the taxes are so high and because they can compete elsewhere. This has got even more acute in the modern era because people can work from home. Technology means you can run your business from anywhere. People are leaving the UK at record rates. We have to get our taxes at a competitive level.
And then we have got to rein in the state, which is things like benefits, migrant support – all of that stuff needs to be dealt with. This is a massive task, by the way, I do not deny that.
The Problem of the Deep State
Let us talk about the state, or more specifically the deep state. You say the Bank of England sabotaged you, the Treasury Civil Service. Tell our viewers and listeners about this deep state and the people who really are controlling our governments.
People think the prime minister is all powerful or the chancellor is all powerful and they can go into government and they can just pull the levers and things will happen. But actually, the government is controlled by the permanent bureaucracy, by the Civil Service. It is them who hire and fire the people that work in the government. They control the budgets of each government department. They make the decisions about how policies are implemented. So even if a policy has been signed off by a minister, it is a civil servant who says whether it is legal, it is a civil servant who implements it, it is a civil servant who signs off the budget for it, and that gives those people a lot of power.
The Bank of England Governor has what I would describe as unaccountable power. He is appointed for eight years. He can pretty much only be sacked for gross negligence. So he is able to make decisions about the economy, independent of the elected government, that have massive implications for peoples lives.
What has happened – and it has got particularly bad in the last 30 years since Tony Blair got into office – is lots of power that used to sit in the hands of elected people now sits in the hands of the unelected. They are making decisions about monetary policy, about fiscal policy. If you look at the budget coming up, you will hear a lot about the Office of Budget Responsibility, the OBR. They are the people that essentially set the tram lines which the Chancellor has to operate in. The same is true, by the way, for things like migration. This bureaucratic apparatus is there, it is essentially driving the decision-making of government and ministers pretty much have to go along with it.
Technocracy vs. Democracy
Surely it is better to trust an expert in banking and finance than a politician? That makes you part of the globalist elite, basically JJ. You are part of the problem. If you are basically saying you want the country run by unelected technocrats, you are not a Democrat, you are not a Democrat. You believe in unelected technocracy. It is a position, it is a point of view, but it is not democracy. No one voted for Andrew Bailey. By the way, he is not even a competent technocrat, he is an incompetent technocrat. But even if there were competent technocrats, the fact is no one elected them and if you just allow me to expand on this point, these are people broadly speaking, the senior people in the Treasury, the senior people in the Bank of England – they believe in Net Zero, they believe in mass migration, they believe in Keynesian economics, they believe in high tax and high spend.
They were responsible for printing vast amounts of money after the financial crisis and during Covid that has inflated asset prices and made it very difficult for young people to get on in life. So they have a world view, they are not neutral technocrats. They have a world view. These people are not neutral experts, they are people with an agenda who have huge amounts of unelected power. The public is incredibly frustrated by this because they keep voting for governments that limit immigration, for governments that want lower taxes, and governments are not delivering it. It is not because politicians are stupid, it is because they are part of this system which has a particular world view, and you are essentially saying you prefer the world view of these unelected technocrats to the world view of the British people.
Vision for the Country and Undermining Forces
If you had been given time to actually put your ideas into action, what would your vision of the country have been? First of all, we have to get out of our economic death spiral. We are in a death spiral that the country is bringing in less and less money, we are putting up taxes more and more. It is a doom loop because the more you put up taxes, the harder you make it to start a business, the lower the economic growth is, the less money is coming in. My fundamental vision was to change that, to do things like get fracking, make it easier to build things in this country, lower taxes to attract business. You get the economy growing, you are bringing in more tax revenue, not because you put up tax rates, but because there is more activity. That is the tax revenue you want. Then you can actually use that revenue to improve public services.
At the same time, you have got to cut out all of the waste, and we have got to stop funding illegal asylum seekers to stay in hotels around Britain. We have got to deal with those things. So alongside that economic change, you also need to get rid of the rest of the Blairite legacy: the Human Rights Act, which means that illegal immigrants stay in this country; you need to get rid of the Equality Act, which has embedded DEI into everything we do. There is no worse crime in Britain apparently than being accused of being a racist. We have to take on that whole unelected bureaucracy that is driving our country into the ground. That is the bottom line. My plan was to get the economy in the right direction so that we could put to the country in 2024 the really big changes we needed to make Britain great again. I was not able to even do the start of it because I was thwarted not just by the Bank of England and the Treasury, but also by people in the Conservative Party who did not want the country to change and they still do not want the country to change because they are doing quite fine out of the country as it is.
The markets were panicked, but they were reacting to the Bank of England. The fundamental policy that I was forced to reverse by the OBR and the Bank of England was raising corporation tax from 19% to 25%. Raising corporation tax to 25% has been a disaster. It has been a disaster and yet people will not talk about that.
Bad actors are bad actors. You have got to understand that there are powerful vested interests who do not want things to change, who benefit from the status quo, who actively promote the status quo. That is what the Bank of England are. Likewise, in the Conservative Party, there were people who backed Net Zero, who did not want fracking, who want to be part of the status quo. They don’t want a successful prime minister who is going to implement policies to undermine that world view. I could not go to them and say, “Change your entire world view.” They don’t want to. They have powerful positions with the press and the media. The Bank of England is very powerful with the media. If you look at what happened to Trump in 2016 to 2020, he faced a lot of those issues because the mainstream media did not want to communicate that stuff. It is very important that people understand that these forces who do not want change are not going away, they are still very, very powerful.
The Culture War and Unaccountable Institutions
On the back of the reaction to the mini budget, you sacked Kwasi Kwarteng. It was difficult, but we were put under immense pressure by the institutions, by the establishment, who did not want things to change. I did not want the country’s economy to be in serious trouble, and I was being threatened indirectly by the Governor of the Bank of England that we would not be able to finance government spending if I did not make changes.
I am also very concerned about the development of Islamism in our country, and yet we have an establishment that wants to deny any of these things are problems. They do not want to admit that the British economy is completely stagnant and our taxes are too high and our energy costs are far too high. They do not want to admit that we have got a problem with Islamism and the grooming gangs.
The grooming gang inquiry is a shambles. Jess Phillips is a complete disgrace. She has appeased Islamists essentially for her own political reasons. She has also lost the trust of the victims of the grooming gangs. She should go. But we have a system problem here that it is clear that local authorities, the police, possibly the home office were complicit in what happened.
The police are completely unaccountable. Everything I have just been saying about the Bank of England Governor goes for the Mark Rowley, it goes for the chief constables. They are not held to account. They have been captured by the DEI agenda in many cases. They have been captured by the transgender ideology as well. If you look at the arrest of Graham Linehan at Heathrow airport for tweeting something that upset trans activists, he got arrested. It was absolutely crazy. People overseas think “What the hell is going on in Britain?” Why are comedians being arrested at the airport? It is like Soviet Union stuff. The police are not sufficiently accountable and they use the excuse of operational independence to be able to pursue their own agenda. They become increasingly out of touch with public priorities. We have also got a problem with the judiciary. Blair made the judiciary unaccountable. If you want to get ahead in the judiciary, you have to go along with all the politically correct DEI pro-migration stuff.
My vision is that we need to make our country great again, we need to restore ourselves, not just our economy but also our culture, our spirit as a nation. There is a hell of a lot of roadblocks in the way of doing that, many of which have been set up by Blair.
Are there any national institutions that you trust? I was going to mention the Church of England, I mean they have gone off the rails as well. The BBC, we do not even go there, it is so bad. Pretty much every institution is captured. This is why we need to set up new institutions.
America, Patriotism, and the Future of the Tory Party
I think we need America’s help. I think we have lost our way as a country. They, with the Trump revolution, have found a new path. They take free speech very seriously and they are horrified by what is going on in Britain. We invented free speech in 1695. People are having their homes raided at night, journalists are being chased up by the police on their doorstep. I just think we have kind of become inured to this kind of thing, but over there, they ask, “Is it really true?” I say, “Yeah, it is true. Yes, we do live in a sort of Stalinist state, a sort of incompetent Stalinist state.”
Keir Starmer lecturing people about being unpatriotic is a joke, is not it? The guy comes from the strand of left-wing thinking that hates our country. He loves international institutions like the UN, international law, the EU. That is Starmer. I think we need America’s help. I see America as one of Britain’s great inventions.
On Nigel Farage, I think it is interesting. I am not sure the Conservatives started the job he wants to finish. If Nigel Farage gets elected and he does not reverse the Blair takeover, then nothing will change. That is absolutely critical, that anybody becoming prime minister needs to reverse the Blair takeover. Blair was the last prime minister that actually ran this country. Ever since, most of it has been outsourced.
It is very difficult for the Tories. Things started going wrong for the Conservatives long before the Cameron government. It was when Conservatives accepted Blairism and when Cameron said, “I want to be the heir to Blair.” That is when we failed to actually take on the human rights agenda, the equality agenda. In order for the Conservative Party to revive, it needs to say that was the wrong turn, we failed to do what we ought to have done in office. I have not seen that yet from Kemi Badenoch. Unless she actually repudiates that agenda – the modernisers, people like Gove, who were the architects of the Conservative failure – I do not think the Conservative party has got much future.
Personal Reflections
What is something about Liz Truss the person that may surprise people? I do not think there is anything people do not know about me. I like watching The Traitors, but I am just catching up, so do not tell me any spoilers. I do enjoy walking. I have just taken up golf. I tried running but it is not for me.
What are some of the key principles that have guided your career? My fundamental belief is that people are best at making their own decisions, not the government. I believe in freedom. I believe in this country. I am a patriot. Those are probably the things that guide my thinking most.
What is the most unfair thing you think has ever been said about you? How on earth could I start with that? The discussion about how long I was in office. If I had simply been an incompetent automaton, I would not have been removed from office. There have been plenty of those people who have lasted for ages. I think it was because I was a threat.
If you could give yourself advice for day one as prime minister, what would it have been? The advice I had before running was from my husband, which is, “Do not run because it is a toxic cess. They have already got rid of Boris, they are just going to get rid of you.” My husband is a smart man.
I had spent 10 years as a minister and a cabinet minister, but it was only when I got to the top and I saw the sheer power of the unelected bureaucrats and how they connived with the mainstream media and elements of the Conservative party that I understood really why our country was in the state it was in. The fact that I could be removed within that time period tells you what you need to know about how broken our system is.
How would you like to be remembered? I am not dead yet.
One-Word Descriptions of Political Figures
- Rory Stewart: Waffle
- Donald Trump: Great
- Kamala Harris: Over
- Nigel Farage: Potential
- Sadiq Khan: Corrupt
- Rachel Reeves: Auto Pen
- Kemi Badenoch: Potential
- Ed Davey: Stupid
- Elon Musk: Inspirational
- Keir Starmer: Lawyer
- Liz Truss: Still alive – to be continued
DISCLAIMER: The opinions and views expressed in this video belong solely to the original creator and participants, and do not necessarily reflect my own. This content is shared here for informational and discussion purposes only. I did not create the video or its transcript, but have presented it in a read-along format for those who prefer reading while listening.