Truss’s jibe at British workers shows that she fails to understand the problem

Liz Truss’s analysis harks back to a labour market that has long since disappeared. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA

It will doubtless come as a surprise to British workers toiling in distribution warehouses, call centres or the NHS that Liz Truss thinks they could do with showing “more graft”.

Judging by comments made when she was chief secretary to the Treasury, the frontrunner to be prime minister thinks the UK’s economic problems are down to a working culture quite different from that in communist China.