I have met Liz Truss only once. It was in Oxford Town Hall in November of last year and I had tried (without success) to smuggle in an iceberg lettuce under my shirt. The lettuce having been confiscated, I made my way into the hall. Very soon Truss climbed onstage, looking pleased as a duck. She began to rant about how she had been toppled by transgender activists in the civil service and the left-wing economic establishment. What struck me even more than the talentlessness of her oratory was her absolute lack of self-awareness or self-reflection. “It is,” as James O’Brien puts it, “as if Liz Truss seems to operate in a universe where she’s never met Liz Truss.”
The same attitude is clear throughout Truss’ new memoir. Reflecting on her time as Prime Minister, she can mention “policies I believed in ” in the same line as “catastrophic economic meltdown” without ever once linking cause to effect. She simply cannot accept that her policies were on the wrong side of the debate, and the few debates in this book which she does win are, as if in the shower, completely imaginary. Justifying radical low-tax policies, she writes that: “If we push taxes up to 80 per cent… fewer people will aspire to earn more or start a new business”. A sound point. But nobody is saying that we should push taxes up to 80 per cent.
The closest she comes to self-reflection is in a paragraph beginning “To be self-critical,” which runs to about four lines. Mostly she complains that she had no political honeymoon, or that we need radical reforms to give prime ministers more agenda-setting and policymaking power. For one who regards herself as an apostle of democracy, she has remarkably little regard for checks and balances.
High taxes, wokery, identity politics, the deep state, global left-wing media elites – these, in Truss’ eyes, are the evils from which she is destined to save the West. She comes out with solutions like “We Must be Conservatives” and “We Must Dismantle the Leftist State”. Much of it is pure Daily Mail stuff (although the Mail sells roughly more copies every fifteen minutes than this book sold in its first week).
Truss, like so many populist politicians and pseudo-intellectuals, is eager to defend “Western values” from attack. But I doubt whether she or anyone of her political leanings could define that term if called upon to do so. It is a tricky one, not least because by naming something as a Western value the implication is that it cannot be an Eastern value. Then what exactly is a Western value, according to Truss? Democracy cannot be one, because she speaks at far-right conferences alongside maniacs whose stated aim is the outright overthrow of democracy. Tolerance? No, no, she wants to repeal the Equality Act. Human Rights? Impossible: she is also opposed to the Human Rights Act. Rational thinking? Individual responsibility? No, in Truss’ case they all fall flat. All that she knows for certain is that Western values are under siege from the woke mob.
The “wokery” charge is interesting only in one respect. In principle Truss is right to object to “the rewriting of history”, though her examples on the matter are quite misguided. She opposes the idea of schools teaching more inclusive curriculums, or of students moving slaveowner statues from street corners into museums; she cannot see that for a country to have an honest rethink about its own history is not revisionist, at least not dangerously so. The real dangers of revisionism come when some countries – some, indeed, which she otherwise praises in this book – completely erase or deny the barbarities of their own recent history, and, doing so, go on in the present day to enact even more terror. That is infinitely more dangerous than the kinds of trivialities which Truss falsely holds up as examples of “rewriting history”.
One positive which emerges from this book is that she has at any rate given up trying to cast herself as a modern-day Margaret Thatcher. She compares herself instead, bizarrely, with Sir Robert Peel. A far closer parallel would be Anthony Eden, another Tory who, despite extensive experience as a minister, made such a hash of the premiership that his only choice was a very hasty resignation. Truss also expresses a strange admiration for the polemicist Thomas Paine, whose work she surely cannot have read; otherwise, she would have denounced his plans for an eighteenth-century welfare state as “handouts”.
Some of Truss’ personal insights are terrifyingly banal. She confesses that: “Leading the nation in mourning after the death of our beloved monarch of seventy years was not something I had ever expected to do” (it would have been an oddly specific expectation if she had), and adds that this book is not “simply a chance to tell the detailed inside story of my time in government” (a good thing, too, for it would take a Joycean level of detail to fill so many pages with so few days).
Making an effort to be likeable, she tries to be funny about the inside life of a Prime Minister, and shares some very lifeless anecdotes. For example, she once confused Mrs Macron for Mrs Biden at the UN! (The real master of this kind of gaffe was Truss’ foe Tony Blair, who once tried to tell an interviewer in French that “I desire to emulate the French prime minister in many positions”, but omitted the verb “to emulate”).
The accounts of Truss’ early career do make for fun reading. We learn that at school she was wildly paranoid about the risk of being stabbed with safety-scissors. (It would be useful if any psychology students are able to connect this early phobia to her later career: please do get in touch at [email protected]). She was shaped by her time as an officer at Oxford Student Union, which left her with a loathing of “political correctness”. In Parliament, when she inherited Labour’s Department of Education, she describes her horror at discovering… “rainbow decorations hanging from the ceiling”. (Now, this is just the kind of thing that makes it impossible to take her seriously). It is also interesting to learn that, as early as 2010, The Spectator had named her the “human hand grenade”, and perhaps, if we had known that, we wouldn’t have allowed her within firing distance of the economy.
There is no question of Truss’ genius, at least in Truss’ own mind. I can only think that – perhaps having heard that the infallible sign of genius is to have all the dunces in confederacy against you – she cast the Treasury, the governor of the Bank of England, Joe Biden, the Office for Budget Responsibility, and the late Queen in the role of the dunces, and herself in the role of the genius referred to.
And there is nothing that makes for funnier reading than a self-proclaimed genius.
The Rwanda deal: Inspiration for other countries?
The UK confirmed on the 1st May that it had detained an unspecified number of asylum seekers in the previous few days ready for deportation to Rwanda in July. This comes after legislation passed in Parliament that same week in support of such an arrangement, which would see forced deportations of asylum seekers to have their claims processed abroad. A man has reportedly already gone voluntarily to Rwanda. The policy purports to primarily focus on those who have taken a dinghy to cross the English Channel. According to the BBC, there are currently 52,000 people in this pool. Rwanda has “in principle” agreed to accept 5,700 migrants already in the UK this year.
Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, has said that the UK’s Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill is “setting a worrying global precedent.” One may wonder, then, whether the UK is the first to have innovated such a policy, and whether other countries will follow suit – as hinted at by the UN.
Firstly, the policy was ruled as unlawful by the UK Supreme Court, citing concerns that Rwanda could not be considered a safe country. Rishi Sunak subsequently circumvented this by drafting the now successful bill which legislated for the designation of Rwanda as a safe country.
As the UK’s Refugee Council has expressed, the concern with the Rwanda deal may not just be about Rwanda as a destination. It is concerning that a country like the UK, which does not take a very large share of the proportion of the world’s refugees, still considers it necessary to transfer them abroad. The UK is capable of finding other ways to promote safe routes to its country, and it can find the resources to process the claims it receives domestically.
Australia introduced a deportation policy in 2001, similar to the UK’s current policy, targeting migrants arriving in Australian waters by boat. Asylum seekers were transferred to offshore detention centers in Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and the South Pacific island nation of Nauru. The policy went through several changes, including a brief dismantling between 2008 and 2012. It was only last year that the last few asylum seekers pursuing Australia as a destination were relocated from Nauru. The policy had a reputation of being extremely costly for Australia and one may wonder, given the UK is also facing financial pressures if the Rwanda agreement is implemented, whether the UK will sustain the policy longer, or even as long as Australia.
Additionally, the BBC reports that some 4,000 Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers based in Israel were sent to Rwanda and Uganda between 2013 and 2018. Other reports suggest they were given the choice of either being deported to their country of origin or accepting a payment of $3,500 and a plane ticket to either Uganda or Rwanda, facing jail in Israel otherwise. However, the agreement between the countries was secretive and eventually abandoned. Nonetheless, given the Australia model has already inspired the UK, and similar legislation in Denmark which was not implemented, it may be expected that other countries will also find inspiration in the formalised Rwanda deportation model.
But which countries may follow suit? According to the Spectator, “asked if they would like France to adopt a Rwanda-style bill, 67 per cent of the French canvassed replied favourably to the idea.” Although current French leadership remains opposed to the idea, any possible future change in leadership, especially a change towards a populist one, may lead to a French Rwanda-style deal. It is worth noting that French support is higher than the 37% that view the policy favourably in the UK, according to a YouGov poll in January.
Arab Gulf States have also conducted weekly deportations of migrants, facing huge criticism. Given they are claiming to be working to improve their human rights records, they may see the UK-Rwanda model as one that they could follow. ُThough they are not signatory to the same international agreements, the UK is a country that publishes Human Rights and Democracy Reports as part of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)’s efforts to promote human rights abroad. If the UK is seen going through with such policies, then that may hold its weight in policy considerations of other countries – especially as they may view the UK as a global leader or have strong historic ties.
Yet such a consideration may be misleading. Although the UK is indeed a country that holds its weight internationally, including as a member of the G7 group of advanced democracies, it is not immune to making mistakes on advancing and protecting human rights. This may be the UK’s contemporary moment of violating such rights. Therefore, it is certainly not a good idea for other countries to follow suit, even if they will naturally watch closely to see the legal and reputational backlash the UK may receive. If the UK survives this backlash, it may inspire them. However, this inspiration would stand in the way of better solutions that could be developed to migration issues.
Lastly, even if other countries do not follow suit, the UK itself may expand the policy to deport asylum seekers to other partners. Reports have indicated Armenia, Ivory Coast, Costa Rica, and Botswana as contenders for similar arrangements with the UK. This is possible not only as Rwanda has limited capacity, but also because Rwanda may be risking domestic political trouble by receiving all these asylum seekers. In fact, though much of the blame for this policy is rightly set on the UK, Rwanda should also bear some of the criticisms that arise from this deal. Many countries have reportedly declined being approached by the UK for a similar deal, including Morocco and Tunisia. Rwanda still has the chance to be the last line of defence against this policy, preventing the proliferation of a costly, abusive, and populist solution to international migration.