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Truss is promoting an agenda that explicitly permits the powerful with a grudge to abuse anyone they wish with impunity.
I should be grateful to GB News. They appear to be the only news organisation that was willing to carry verbatim extracts from Liz Truss’s speech to the so-called Popular Conservatives yesterday.
They report her as saying:
I believe the fundamental issue is that for years and years and years- and I think it goes back two decades – Conservatives have not taken on the left-wing extremists.
These people have repurposed themselves. They don’t admit they’re socialists or communists anymore, they say they’re ‘environmentalists’. They say that they’re in favour of helping people across all communities. They are in favour of supporting LGBT people or groups of ethnic minorities.
They also noted her saying:
They no longer admit that they are collectivists – but that is what their ideology is about. It’s all about taking power away from people and families and handing power to the state or unaccountable bodies.
And the problem is, the Conservatives have tried to appease these people. They’ve tried to triangulate.
[A]nd we’ve had pandering to the anti-capitalists as well, in terms of regulating business, regulating landlords, regulating small enterprises.
Our shortest-serving ever Prime Minister has spoken. It is fair to say that the words she had to offer delivered an ugly and offensive message. Most will think them deranged. I think they are dangerous.
Truss is really saying three things.
First, she wants a white, male-privileged society that is focused on the supposed Christian values of the family, which is defined to exclude any LGBT people, and with the values and principles of any minority group being treated as aberrant and offensive and so to be subject to permitted prejudice.
Second, she wants to define all forms of collective concern, including for the environment and for society itself, as a threat to the right of the individual to exploit the planet and others.
Third, she wishes to end business regulation so it can exploit the consumer, the planet, places, tenants, and others without showing any apparent awareness that markets cannot function in the absence of regulation.
This is, then, an agenda that explicitly permits the powerful with a grudge to abuse anyone they wish with impunity. And anything that gets in the way, like democratic government and the rule of law, must be vilified or abolished.
This is beyond being called far-right ideology. This is fascism. It should be described as such because no other word in the political lexicon fits it.
