Former Prime Minister Liz Truss has criticized President Biden for intervening in her mini-budget and called for the UK to adopt the U.S. system of appointing senior civil servants.
Truss, speaking at the US-based Heritage Foundation think tank, took aim at President Biden’s tax hypocrisy, pointing out that he criticized her for cutting the top rate of tax in the UK, even though it would still be higher than the top rate of tax in the United States.
She also suggested that President Biden’s intervention, alongside those by international bodies like the IMF, shows a resistance to right-wing free-market supply-side policies that would make economies more dynamic.
Truss said she was speaking at the Heritage Foundation to deliver a warning to the US, and to conservatives across the Atlantic, that the same forces who brought her down will come for Donald Trump if he wins the election.
She called for the UK to copy the United States government in one major respect, and allow the Prime Minister to appoint senior civil servants to the top of government departments. In the UK, the PM can only appoint around 100 ‘Special Advisors’ to assist Secretaries of State push their agenda through the Whitehall machine.
In stark contrast, the US allows the President to appoint 3000 people to government positions. She argued that there should be more political appointees to senior roles in the political bureaucracy, as well as shut down unaccountable Quangos.
Turning fire on the “global administrative state”, she similarly took aim at institutions such as the UN, the WHO and COP. Ms Truss argued that the best people to make decisions are those who are democratically elected, not “people sitting on international bodies who are divorced from the concerns of the public”.
