The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Great Britain:
Liz Truss in the Footprints of Thatcher and Johnson

Sep 12, 2022

This article is excerpted from the September 9 issue #2823 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group of that name active in France.

Liz Truss beat Rishi Sunak 57% to 43% in the Conservative Party’s internal election on September 5. The vote was no surprise.

The queen enthroned the Party’s new leader as new prime minister the next day. Truss replaces Boris Johnson, who was pushed to leave in early July by the scandal of having parties during quarantine (Partygate) and by a tsunami of resignations among his ministers.

First an economist at Shell, Truss was elected MP for the first time in 2010. From 2012 on, she was in all the Conservative governments. They imposed austerity and precariousness on workers to the present day, while helping capitalists accumulate fortunes.

Truss campaigned against Brexit in 2016 but changed her mind for the sake of her career. Despite her weathervane tendency, her consistency in nationalist and ultra-liberal rhetoric is now rewarded. She stands at the helm of government to make the working class pay the price of the crisis. But soaring prices in Great Britain have led to a wave of strikes since the beginning of summer, not seen since the 1980s.

Under these conditions, it is not certain that copying and pasting Thatcher will suffice for Truss to extinguish workers’ anger, nor will promising alms for the poorest, as Sunak did during their race.