Apparently, it is being claimed in some circles that Truss is undeserving of the epithet 'Thick Lizzy', given that she did PPE at Oxford.
Supporting evidence is therefore required, so let's start with the fact that she has recently been critical of the British work ethic (which she compares unfavourably to that of China), asserting that ‘more graft‘ is required in the form of increased productivity, especially in the case of employees who reside outside of London.
In doing so she exhibits a spectacular failure to take account of studies demonstrating the very bleeding obvious, namely, that political freedoms (China anyone?), as well as decent standards of health and education are all poorly correlated with economic growth. And that's before we even start to address the issue of whether growth is accompanied by a lessening of economic inequality.
In their painstaking research, the epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have highlighted the ‘pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, [and] encouraging excessive consumption‘. In their publications
The Spirit Level and
The Inner Level, they demonstrate that for each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, rates of imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being, outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries. Notably, the UK fares poorly with respect to all of these indices. Which again is pretty obvious if you take a look around.
Given that Truss is a professed admirer of Thatcher and especially the former PM's whacked-out and utterly discredited Friedman and Hayek-inspired neoliberal policies, ones that have actually turned out to be incredibly damaging, exacerbating levels of inequality and eroding social cohesion wherever they have been introduced, especially in New Zealand where a previously non-existent underclass was created when a neoliberal experiment was tried there, it also doesn't take a genius to anticipate that further economic crises and still worsening inequality can be expected if Truss keeps on with that approach here.
A lot of this information is already widely known and available in bestselling books like the ones by Wilkinson and Pickett, Ha Joon Chang and John Gray. So the fact that Truss seems to be blissfully unaware that neoliberal thinking is no longer taken very seriously and has not been for quite some time, is a further indication that she is utterly gormless.
