LONDON (AP) — Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss said Sunday that her failure in office was not her fault.
Truss blamed a “powerful economic establishment” and internal opposition in the Conservative Party for the rapid collapse of his government, saying he continues to believe his tax-cutting policies were the right ones.
The shortest-serving prime minister in Britain’s history resigned in October, six weeks after taking office, after her inaugural budget plan wreaked havoc on the markets.
Breaking his silence after his resignation, Truss published the Sunday Telegraph edition which belittled the resistance his free-market policies would face from “the establishment.”
“I’m not saying I don’t bear any responsibility for what happened, but fundamentally I was not given a realistic opportunity to enact my policies by a very powerful economic establishment, coupled with a lack of political support,” he wrote.
Truss took office in September after winning a Conservative Party leadership race to replace scandal-ridden Prime Minister Boris Johnson. His promise to boost economic growth with tax cuts and deregulation excited party members, but a budget containing 45 billion pounds ($54 billion) in unfunded tax cuts – including a cut in income tax for people with higher incomes – scared the financial markets.
The prospect of higher debt and higher inflation sent sterling to its lowest ever level against the US dollar. The cost of government borrowing soared and the Bank of England had to step in to prop up the bond market and prevent a broader economic collapse that would threaten people’s pensions.
First, Truss fired his Treasury Secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, and then resigned.
In the article published Sunday, he noted that his government had become the “scapegoat” for a long-simmering instability with liability-based investing, a form of bond market derivatives in which equity funds pensions are heavily invested,
Truss said he still believed his low-tax, small-state agenda “was the right one, but the forces against it were too great.” He claimed that “much of the media and the public sphere in general” had a leftist bias, and criticized US President Joe Biden for calling his plan a mistake.
Critics accused the former prime minister of rewriting history and using the populist playbook by blaming the system for its own failures.
