THE NEW YORK TIMES: LONDON — “Do we confront this moment with honesty,” asked Rishi Sunak, one of the two candidates running to replace Boris Johnson as prime minister of Britain, “or do we tell ourselves comforting fairy tales?”
The answer, from the Conservative Party membership, at least, is fairy tales. On Monday, the members elected Liz Truss as their new leader and the next prime minister. In a campaign built around a belief in the miraculous power of tax cuts, Ms. Truss presented herself as the economic savior of a country heading into a winter of crisis. In the face of sky-high inflation and widespread economic misery, it’s a fantastical proposition.
But fairy tales don’t come out of nowhere. For her zealous commitment to privatization, deregulation and tax-cutting, many see Ms. Truss as a would-be second coming of Margaret Thatcher. Sealed by sartorial mimicry, there’s something in the comparison. Yet Ms. Truss’s most apt antecedent, in fact, is someone who had already left the Conservative Party under a cloud of controversy by the time Thatcher came to lead it: Enoch Powell.
Largely known for his bitterly racist denunciation of immigration, Powell has a claim to being Britain’s most influential postwar politician. That’s chiefly because, in an era of decolonization, he sketched out a route for Britain to maintain its global dominance. Fashioned in the dying of the imperial light, that roster of policies — preferential terms of global trade achieved through hard-line anti-migrant policies, shrinking the state, undermining organized labor and fostering finance — forms the basis of Ms. Truss’s politics today. The British Empire may have all but ended 60 years ago, but the country’s next prime minister is still in thrall to its legacy. » | Kojo Koram * | Tuesday, September 6, 2022
* Mr. Koram is the author of “Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire.”
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