Threatened throughout the get together, Truss defends her authority on the Conservative Celebration congress

A month after succeeding Boris Johnson, Truss has taken a stand against financial markets, voters and prominent figures in her own party.

The British Prime Minister Liz Truss ended this Wednesday (5th) the turbulent annual congress of British Conservative Party with a firm defense of your controversial economic planin an attempt to consolidate an increasingly questioned authority in his party.

“In these difficult times, we must act. I am determined to push the UK forward to weather the storm,” she said during a 30-minute speech, briefly interrupted by two activists from the NGO Greenpeace with a banner that read “Who voted for this?”.

A month after succeeding Boris Johnson, Truss has pitted himself against financial markets, voters and prominent figures in his own party with a program of big tax cuts that will add to Britain’s already bloated public debt.

But at the end of the Birmingham congress, she once again defended her ultra-liberal shock plan to revive a recession-threatening British economy mired in runaway inflation that puts many families in trouble.

“The scale of the challenge is immense,” he said. “That’s why in the UK we have to do things differently,” he insisted.

“Whenever there is change, there is disorder. Not everyone will be in favor,” he acknowledged. “But the whole world will benefit from the result: a growing economy and a better future,” Truss said.

Illustrating Truss’s rapid loss of credibility, former minister Grant Shapps claimed she could face a censure vote from her own deputies if her speech does not begin to improve her poor polling position.

Hailed as an electoral champion after achieving the widest Conservative majority in 40 years in 2019, Johnson was pressured to resign in July as the accumulation of scandals showed he could no longer successfully lead his party to the next legislative election, scheduled for January 2019. 2025 at the latest.

However, a YouGov poll published Wednesday before Truss’s speech showed that the prime minister, who took office on Sept. 6, is already more unpopular than Johnson at her worst.

“I don’t think Conservative lawmakers, if they see the polls staying this way, are going to sit back,” Shapps told Times Radio.

no mandate

Lacking Johnson’s charisma or oratorical skills, Truss has focused in recent days, in numerous interviews with media outlets large and small, on defending the dramatic shift she has been forced to make to her economic plan.

Its finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced on Monday that he was abandoning the highly controversial abolition of the maximum 45% tax for income above 150,000 pounds ($170,000) a year.

Included in a broader tax package, this measure has drawn harsh accusations of favoring the rich as many Britons sink into cost-of-living poverty.

Even though she is a member of her government, Secretary of State for Parliamentary Affairs, Penny Mordaunt, went off-script and publicly supported the need to update welfare in line with inflation, which Truss and Kwarteng are currently reluctant to do.

Truss denies having lost control of the Executive and the party.

But her very conservative interior minister, Suella Braverman, accused her detractors within the party of wanting to carry out a “coup d’état” against the prime minister.

Polls show the main opposition force, the Labor Party, is up to 33 points ahead of a right wing that has been in power for 12 years.

Source: AFP