What a disaster of a speech by Liz Truss. I don't even give her to Christmas at this rate. She's a high functioning ideologue who is totally bereft of empathy or humanity and can't see any position, other than her own. This is exemplified by her standard; "I don't accept the premise of your question," response when being questioned.
The choice of her entrance song must have been made by a bloke (denied by her spokesman), as blokes just go for the tune and pay no attention whatsoever to the words and, as anyone who is familiar with the words of Moving On Up will know, they're totally inappropriate. Marketing 101.
Additionally, it's always best to check with the writer of the song that they agree to their song being used. It's rather bad PR to have the writer emerge from the woodwork, as the founder of M People did, and have them furious at being associated with the event and the people.
Truss' speech was full of contradictions and hypocrisies - one minute praising British workers for their aspiration, and then trashing them for having the temerity to aspire to a decent wage by going on strike.
Plenty of 'whats' but bugger all 'hows'. 2 week guarantee for a doctor's appointment - how is that going to be achieved? Nothing she said wasn't a repeat of her party election campaign.
Another mistake was to stand in front of a bluescreen, which gave digital warriors the perfect opportunity to put whatever background in there that they wanted, including immigrants, food banks and pipes pumping sewage into rivers and beaches, as per the example below.
While; "Education, education, education," worked for Blair, you can't repeat a rhetorical trick and hope for it to succeed again with; "Growth, growth, growth," a couple of decades later. You need a new mantra, although Truss gave us her opponents the perfect one when she called for the GreenPeace protesters to be ejected - "Let's get them removed." I can just see Labour adopting that.
As for ditching EU Red Tape - the Conservatives have increased Red Tape, especially for exporters wanting to export to the EU. Unadulterated nonsense that anyone with half a brain can see is totally vacuous.
Vested interests dressed up as think tanks? The ERG, the Tax Payers' Alliance, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Bruges Group - they all put her where she is, for heaven's sake.
Doubling down on oil and gas production - the products that generally come from countries with questionable human rights records (and that now includes the UK, given Cruella Braverman's expression of glee at getting flights to Rwanda going) - is not exactly what the more sensible section of the population wants to hear. As for fracking.....
The Anti-Growth Coalition - what exactly is that? Seems it includes everyone except the Conservatives. The institutions she mentioned aren't anti-growth, but just don't want the same mistakes of the last 12 years to be repeated. By the OBR's own analysis, the UK has lost £100bn a year of output, which is a 4% drop in GDP. How's that for the Party of Growth? The T shirts are selling like hotcakes, apparently, and people are queueing up to become affiliated.
Of course, the 'faithful' lapped it up and clapped like trained seals. It would seem that the Conservative Party has become the Labour Party's recruitment arm and Truss is the Tory Party's Jeremy Corbyn. I'm surprised Labour didn't offer to pay for the conference to continue for another couple of days.
Given the Party's atrocious record on selecting leaders, I can see the Party's role being minimised after their defeat at the next General Election.
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