Liz Truss is renewing her contorversial push for a radical low-tax agenda.
Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, who lasted just six weeks at No 10, is urging the UK and the US to better promote “free markets” in the face of the threat from authoritarian regimes.
In a speech to the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation in the US on Wednesday the former Tory PM will claim a “cartel of complacency” is damaging economic growth – accusing Western governments of aiding China, Russia and other authoritarian regimes by refusing to offer tax cuts.
Ms Truss will use the group’s annual Margaret Thatcher Lecture to claim that the 1980s “Anglo-American” economic model of increased privatisation and small government is being “strangled into stagnation”.
She is set to say: “The sad truth is that we have seen stagnation, redistribution and woke culture taking hold in businesses and the economy in the UK and the US … It results in more tax, more subsidies, more regulation.”
The former PM is expected to suggest that this agenda has given succour to authoritarian regimes in the latest leg of her attempted comeback to the political limelight.
Ms Truss will also take aim at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as she lashes out at the “cartel of complacency” advocating higher taxes to bring down inflation.
“Not content with high taxes in their own countries, we now see governments seeking to agree high taxes around the free world – I’m talking about the OECD minimum tax agreement, which will stop countries lowering things like corporation tax and becoming more competitive,” she is expected to say.
Ms Truss beat Rishi Sunak in last summer’s Tory leadership contest running on a tax-cutting agenda before her disastrous economic plans saw her booted out by her own party – handing her rival the keys to No 10.
Keen to restore her credibility, she is due to urge right-wing conservatives around the globe to “mount a fightback for freedom” and “get real about the threat from authoritarian regimes and their unwitting allies in the anti-growth movement”.
Ms Truss is expected to say: “It was Anglo-American individualism that made the world prosperous... Low taxes, limited government and private enterprise were what won the Cold War. I worry that we are now seeing this model strangled into stagnation.
“And we have to ask ourselves: are we still match fit to take on China and to take on the whole concept of state capitalism?’
In an attack on so-called “woke” politics, she will add: “We’ve allowed our opponents to own our institutions, crowd our campuses and fill our airwaves.
“Not long ago the United States and the United Kingdom were absolute bastions of free enterprise, free markets and free speech ... But what we’ve seen now is self-flagellation – lashing out at the very things that made us great.”
The speech will accuse western leaders meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping of displaying “weakness”. It comes days after French president Emmanuel Macron and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen met with the Chinese leader in a show of European unity over the Ukraine war.
“Putin and Xi have made it clear they are allies against Western capitalism. That is why Western leaders visiting President Xi to ask for his support in ending the war is a mistake. And it is a sign of weakness,” Ms Truss is expected to say.
Ms Truss had been expected to officially re-designate China as a “threat” in official speak instead of a “systemic competitor” during her leadership, while Mr Sunak has described the nation as a “systemic challenge” rather than a threat.
