Excerpts from this article in the 9/22/22 issue of the New York Review of Books.
The Party’s Over
Fintan O’Toole
Truss will take the Tories further down the only path that is open to them, that of anarcho-authoritarianism. Like Johnson, she projects herself as a rebel against authority: “I hated being told what to do and that has driven my political philosophy.” She put forward the legislation that allows British government ministers to break international law by tearing up the Northern Ireland protocol. She has indicated her willingness to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights.
This outlawry is underpinned by the language of piracy. A chapter in Britannia Unchained, a 2012 book cowritten by Truss and other rising Conservative politicians, is titled “Buccaneers” and quotes Steve Jobs approvingly: “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.” It concedes, with evident reluctance, that “law and order” are “on the whole beneficial.” But it hankers after an ideal of “capitalism as chaos,” the magic that happens “when nearly all society’s strictures are relaxed.” Hence the claim by Truss’s supporter David Frost, who led negotiations of the Brexit deal with the EU and is widely expected to have an important role in a Truss administration, that “what needs to be done [by the new prime minister] will be turbulent and disruptive.”
This promise of disruption is all that remains of Brexit. It can function now only as a fantasy of liberation, not from Brussels but from all restraint on the making of money. Truss’s language evokes a Britain whose only real problem is that its natural exuberance has been constrained by regulation. Hence the recurrence in her rhetoric of “unchain,” “unleash,” “unshackle.” But, as in current US conservatism, these images of freedom must go hand in hand with their opposite. When she is not talking of unshackling everything, Truss is promising to “crack down” on everything. The chains that are to be taken off the moneymakers will be clamped on much of civil society.
In her speeches, and in the way they are reported by her fans in the Tory press, she has promised, so far, to “crack down” on “militant” trade unions, on civil servants who are working from home, on Chinese companies like TikTok, on onshore renewable energy projects, on “unfair protests” by climate activists, on “antisocial” behavior, on illegal migration, and on the “excessive caution” of financial regulators. She is even promising to repress criticism of the dire condition of post-Brexit Britain, warning the democratically elected first minister of the devolved administration in Wales that “I will crack down on his negativity about Wales and about the United Kingdom.” In the pantomimes, it is customary for the audience to cry out against certain assertions made by the characters: “Oh, no, it isn’t.” In this next version of the show, those who dare to make that call will be ejected from the theater.
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