How much has Liz Truss made since leaving No. 10?
The latest financial statement from her eponymous company reveals that in the year up until March 2025, the Disruptor-in-Chief had just £112,657 in net assets – some way off the sums made by the likes of Theresa May and others. The accounts show that Truss took only £8,000 more than the previous year – despite publishing her memoir Ten Years to Save the West last April.
It comes after Britain's shortest-serving premier signed up to the same agency as her predecessor Boris Johnson, Chartwell Speakers. Johnson secured a £2.5 million advance for several well-paid speaking events, earning £5 million within his first year out of the top job, while the Maybot raked in more than £400,000 for six talks after stepping down. Rishi
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The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
One year in, Labour is at a low ebb. From now on, let its priority be honesty, honesty, honesty
Rachel Reeves will not be sacked, because she is unsackable. The ever-hysterical bond markets just confirmed that by spinning out of control over her tears, then restoring previous rates as soon as Keir Starmer's serial interviews confirmed heartfelt support after she was seen to be crying during PMQs. Quite right. Joined at the hip, her tough fiscal policy is his. History shows that prime ministers rarely last after sacking their chancellors. The question for both, and all of Labour, is: what next? Every management guru and motivational speaker will tell you that mistakes don't matter – the key to success is what you learn and how adroitly you change. Labour has four long years ahead and, most important of all, a stonking great majority. They are the masters so long as they don't frighten the bond markets that ejected Liz Truss and forced Donald Trump's handbrake tariff U-turn. A change of direction is forced on Starmer and Reeves by circumstances mostly not of their making. Every month that passes reconfirms their dire inheritance and the harsh global economic climate. The Bank of England, wrong so often, delays rate cuts and unwinds quantitative easing at a damagingly faster rate than other central banks, harming public finances, as my colleague Randeep Ramesh pointed out. Everyone knows tax rises are inevitable in the October budget: £6bn lost because of U-turns on disability benefits and winter fuel allowance is only a trivial rounding error in about £1.3tn of spending. How will they do it? Let's hope the government has learned that fiddling with tiny tax rises causes maximum outrage for minimum gain. It's dead right to challenge such things as farmers and family businesses escaping inheritance tax, or the well-off getting winter fuel allowances that might be used, according to the Spectator, for buying the best possible bottle of wine. But confronting older people, disabled people, farmers and small business lobbies with no overarching explanation was political suicide. The only tax rise commanding wide public support is removing VAT relief from private schools to spend on state schools (though you would never guess it from Tory press outrage). Minor taxes have gigantic coverage and wide public awareness, while big spending in tens of billions passes people by, a one-day announcement vanishing into the political ether. Bad comms, some Labour people grumble. Maybe so – but the real lack of messaging comes from the top. Yes, we know about the 'non-negotiable' iron straitjacket and other mean, tough things, but we hear a lot less about purpose, hope, what George HW Bush dismissed sneerily as 'the vision thing' (he was a one-term president). Yet you can detect Labour's priorities when it actually spends taxpayers' money on the good stuff. It's time to remind citizens that their taxes go to things everyone values most – a strong NHS, good schools, safe streets, green energy, public places and parks to be proud of, and, of course, defence. The things that really matter can only be bought through taxation. Let's hear that speech a hundred times from every minister; taxes will rise anyway, so get on the front foot and remind people that taxes are not a 'burden', but the price of civilisation. Britain has paid too little for too long compared with similar countries, and it shows in comparatively worse growth and services. Tell people we are not a high-tax country at all. Bad politics would be trying to sneak through tax rises unexplained, something that would be bound to fail. The Sunak-Hunt government lied through its teeth, promised things it never funded, pencilled in imaginary spending cuts for the future and introduced the unaffordable 4p national insurance cuts bribe that never paid off. Labour has no choice but honesty, after suffering the biggest dip in popularity of any newly elected UK government in 40 years. YouGov finds the greatest reason for defection is 'broken promises or not delivering'. Here's the irony: keeping its tax promises is its greatest risk for non-delivery. But for the best examination of how well or badly Labour's first year has really gone, look at Full Fact's thorough analysis of 62 manifesto pledges. I expected gloom, but was surprised at how relatively positive this diagnosis was. Most of Labour's best outcomes will take years, such as building homes and huge sustainable energy projects. An impatient public may not wait, but the emphasis on long-term investment, green energy, housing, transport and defence is a brave endeavour. A blizzard of policies is emerging from months of reviews. Angela Rayner's announcement this week that her £39bn social and affordable homes programme would have at least 60% for social rent, was widely welcomed. Employment policy now relies, as it always should have done, on encouraging support from newly trained work coaches, not punishing benefit cuts, as did Labour's successful 1997 New Deal. Thursday saw the 10-year NHS plan, with its emphasis on prioritising community over hospital treatment, prevention before sickness, and the white heat of IT technology to drag the NHS into the 21st century. I spent time last week with Wes Streeting, when he spoke of gross health inequality in Blackpool, England's worst area for poverty and sickness, before visiting Whitegate health centre in the town, the kind of specialist health centre every neighbourhood needs. More of these are needed in hard-pressed places. But poverty is not for the NHS to solve. The child poverty taskforce led by Liz Kendall and Bridget Phillipson has to restore faith in Labour's prime purpose to give all children fair life chances. It so happens that Starmer's first year in power on Saturday falls exactly on the 80th anniversary of Clement Attlee's election in 1945. Times were far harder, debt far higher, but look what can be done, driving on regardless. Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
Telegraph
9 hours ago
- Telegraph
Reeves has destroyed her fiscal headroom and will now bring ruin on Britain
Perhaps it should be known as the 'teardrop premium'? Re-wind three years to the fiscal crisis triggered by Liz Truss's mini-budget, and the term 'moron premium' became popular among City traders. It described how Britain had to pay a bit extra on its borrowings to allow for the fact that the country was run by people who appeared completely crazy. Now the markets are charging more to lend money to a nation whose finances are run by a woman who cries in Parliament. It might be fair or unfair. That does not matter very much. What is absolutely clear is this: with her tearful performance, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves has destroyed her fiscal headroom, and will now bring ruin on the UK. We will probably have to wait for her memoirs – which given her taste for tweaking her CV might be titled something like 'How I Became Britain's Greatest Ever Chancellor And Saved The World' – to find out the real story behind yesterday's extraordinary scenes in Parliament. It might have been a personal issue. It could have been a furious row with the Speaker. Or it might have been existential despair at the state of the public finances, and the prospect of breaking all her promises not to raise taxes again in the Budget next autumn. In the end, it does not matter very much. It is the consequences that matter. And it is already obvious that she has wiped out what little remained of her fiscal headroom. The sight of Reeves crying in Parliament dramatically illustrated two points. First, the woman who described herself as the 'Iron Chancellor' has now lost control not only of her own emotions, but more importantly of the nation's finances. The option of controlling spending no longer exists because her backbenchers won't tolerate it. Next, the 'fiscal rules' she invested so much political credibility in sticking to have now been shredded. The result? Borrowing costs have already been pushed sharply higher, and are likely to rise even further over the course of what looks set to prove a treacherous summer for the British economy. Gilt yields spiked up yesterday, rising 16 basis points in the space of a few hours, and while they moderated slightly this morning (Thursday) they will stay high so long as Reeves clings on to office. In her first Budget, Reeves recklessly gambled with the nation's finances. By leaving herself a mere £10 billion of 'fiscal headroom' she placed a massive bet that 'stability' would unlock a wave of investment; that money 'invested' in GB Energy and a National Wealth Fund would generate quick returns; that the non-doms would cheerfully pay tax on their global earnings instead of catching the first flight to Dubai; and that business would absorb the extra tax she was forcing them to pay, and sign up for an 'industrial partnership' that would reboot growth. None of it has worked. The blunt truth is this: Britain will be paying the 'teardrop premium' for as long as Reeves clings desperately to office. The debt will keep mounting, and even worse, the amount we have to pay to service all that borrowing will keep on going up as well. She promised to make the UK the fastest-growing economy in the G7. Instead, she has taken the country to the brink of economic collapse. It will get very messy. And it is too late for Reeves to do anything to avoid it now – her credibility has already been destroyed.
Scotsman
14 hours ago
- Scotsman
Scottish Trans warns 'urgent' UK gender law change needed if single-sex guidance not revised
Sign up to our Politics newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The organisation representing transgender people in Scotland has called for the law to be "urgently' amended if the UK's equalities watchdog refuses to set out how trans people can be protected under updated guidance. Scottish Trans has responded to a consultation launched by the Equalities and Human Rights Committee (EHRC) in the wake of the Supreme Court judgment in April that defined a woman in the Equality Act as referring to a biological woman. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad People taking part in a trans rights demonstration in Edinburgh | PA Scottish Trans has starkly warned the EHRC that it 'would be failing to uphold its statutory duties if it did not urgently alert the UK government that the ruling has resulted in an equality and human rights framework that will leave trans people facing discrimination, inequality and human rights violations'. It added that 'this would need to be rectified with primary legislation'. In response to the judgment, the EHRC issued a controversial 'interim update' that included guidance that in some settings such as hospitals, trans women 'should not be permitted to use the women's facilities", but also claimed that 'in some circumstances' trans women should not be able to use men's facilities. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The head of the EHRC, Baroness Falkner, who was appointed by Liz Truss in 2020, said trans people should themselves campaign for 'third spaces'. Last week, the EHRC was forced to revise its interim guidance, abandoning a previous recommendation that employers must provide single sex toilets. Campaigners celebrate the Supreme Court ruling about the definition of the word 'woman' (Picture: Henry Nicholls) | AFP via Getty Images In response to the EHRC consultation ahead of its new code of practice, Scottish Trans has told the organisation that the proposals will 'cause trans people significant harm' and "significantly increase the inequality and discrimination that trans people face'. The response adds: 'Trans people would frequently be segregated from others or excluded from services – particularly where these are provided on a separate or single-sex basis, as a huge range of critical services and facilities are. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'The totality of these impacts would certainly, in our view, result in trans people's human rights being breached, and indeed sometimes the human rights of others.' Manager of Scottish Trans, Vic Valentine, told The Scotsman that if the EHRC's proposals were to be adopted by services and organisations, 'trans people's lives would be made very much worse'. They added: 'It would turn back the clock at least 30 years to a time where trans people could not go to work safely, use services that meet our needs, or use public spaces freely. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'If we are constantly treated as our 'biological sex', excluded from services and spaces that align with who we truly are, or segregated from others, this will have massive impacts on our wellbeing, safety, and just our general quality of life.' Valentine added that the proposals 'throw up questions about how we're supposed to use services everyone needs – like toilets and hospital wards' and 'would also make Scotland and the UK an outlier when it comes to how it treats trans people'. They said: 'The EHRC will be failing to properly protect the rights of everyone, as it is required to do, if it does not include just as much information in the code about how to include us as it does about how to exclude us.
