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Liz Truss resigns as UK prime minister

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Liz Truss resigns as UK prime minister

#92
post #45
post #7

Imagine rising to the ranks of prime minister of one of the most influential countries ever and for your legacy to be a head of lettuce out-survived your reign. That the Queen literally died the day after meeting you. Unbelievable.

Britain, Brazil, Australia, Philippines, India, Turkey, U.S … it is mind numbing that of all the good, talented people these countries have, only the dumbest, worst of the worst end up in positions of power. Depressing. At this point, we can just randomly pick a citizen to be President or PM. We might have better chances that way

There's nothing surprising in it for two reasons:

1) People have a kind of illusion that their rulers are (or at least should be) good. But historically speaking, this was almost never the case. Most of the time the rulers thought only about themselves, how to keep power, how to benefit from it and so on. Even most of the things they were commanded on were done of selfishness, too.

2) The people who should actually go into politics never will. Some of them are very active in their local communities, though, but have no desire to participate in this ridiculous show trying to sell themselves to millions of unknown people. Moreover, they have the humility of knowing they can't promise the crowds anything - the opposite of what the crowds expect.

Re: Liz Truss resigns as UK prime minister

#93

The shortest serving British PM was George Canning who was in office for 119 days(1827). And now she made history.

George Canning died in office, he wasn’t pushed out for being a miserable failure who crashed the economy.

>>a miserable failure who crashed the economy.

Can somebody from the UK tell us what did she do that the economy crashed, in just under two months?

Re: Liz Truss resigns as UK prime minister

#94
post #45
post #7

Imagine rising to the ranks of prime minister of one of the most influential countries ever and for your legacy to be a head of lettuce out-survived your reign. That the Queen literally died the day after meeting you. Unbelievable.

Britain, Brazil, Australia, Philippines, India, Turkey, U.S … it is mind numbing that of all the good, talented people these countries have, only the dumbest, worst of the worst end up in positions of power. Depressing. At this point, we can just randomly pick a citizen to be President or PM. We might have better chances that way

That kind of highlights a flaw in the democratic way of doing things. It's a good system but can be gamed if you know how.

Re: Liz Truss resigns as UK prime minister

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She and her chancellor announced a series of tax cuts at a time when inflation is running at 10%. Even worse, they sidestepped the usual processes on fiscal responsibility and declined to explain how the tax cuts would be funded. The bonds market then panicked as a result, with the Bank of England having to step in and bail the market out to prevent gilts from entering a death spiral, which would have bankrupted pens…

Not all the tax cuts announced were bad or badly received. Especially, I think that the cancellation of the rise in corporation tax was very welcome and in fact economists now say that the rise to 25% will make the recession deeper and longer (unsurprisingly, frankly). The issue was that the other cuts, especially abolishing 45p income tax rate but frankly also the decrease of the basic rate, were not discussed, not…

> Not all the tax cuts announced were bad or badly welcomed.

Not a tax cut per se, but I'm curious what will happen with the energy bill support scheme? That seemed like a good thing to implement, one for which Truss and her cabinet got a lot of critics from a certain part of the media.

Granted, I'm not from Britain so maybe I'm reading the room wrong and that support scheme was, in fact, not liked by everyone involved, I wouldn't know.

Re: Liz Truss resigns as UK prime minister

#96
post #8
post #3

so the lettuce [1] won. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm-RE95lKJ0

Can you elaborate for those of us not hip enough for this meme(??)?

In addition to other comments, I suspect that the livestreamed lettuce was a reference to an earlier article saying describing Truss as having effectively had seven days in power before everything fell apart, saying "That is roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce." - various other media outlets seemed to pick up & run with the lettuce reference.

(Link: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/10/11/liz-truss-has-m... )

Re: Liz Truss resigns as UK prime minister

#99

What happens next will be interesting . At this point, a general election would be the obviously correct solution. It's clear that the conservative party don't have a platform and can't agree major policy points amongst themselves. However that would require conservative MPs to vote for it, which is the turkeys voting for Christmas so unlikely to happen, so I'd expect we'll have to wait till 2024 for that election. T…

On one hand I'd love a general election, but on the other hand I feel what's most needed now is a kind of stability and level-headedness that has been lacking with the last two PMs.

From what I can tell, Sunak might actually do a pretty good job there; and for the time being that may be preferable over the delays and uncertainty of a general election. At least for now, considering the state of things.

Re: Liz Truss resigns as UK prime minister

#100

What happens next will be interesting . At this point, a general election would be the obviously correct solution. It's clear that the conservative party don't have a platform and can't agree major policy points amongst themselves. However that would require conservative MPs to vote for it, which is the turkeys voting for Christmas so unlikely to happen, so I'd expect we'll have to wait till 2024 for that election. T…

Every time I think the USA is completely ruined, I remember how much worse the citizens of the UK have it. I remote worked for a London based CTO for years, with a science Phd, and to hear him discuss UK politics gave me an insight how effective propaganda and being immersed in a culture impacts one's judgement.

The US has the most effective propaganda machine ever devised.
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