Bills, Russia and angry Tories: key challenges Liz Truss will face as PM
If, as widely presumed, Liz Truss becomes the new prime minister this week, she will face a mass of policy challenges of a variety and scale almost unprecedented for a postwar leader, particularly a brand new one. Truss will be fully aware of the extent of her task, if not always necessarily how she will tackle it. These are the main challenges:
How Truss tackles this is likely to define her prime ministership and the fate of the UK in the coming years. And people want answers very quickly.
Truss has fought her Tory leadership campaign by relentlessly focusing on calls for tax cuts, and has been sceptical of what she called “handouts” – that is, direct government help for people facing energy prices that are rising so fast that millions of households will simply not be able to pay them.
Given the scale of the crises, critics say this seems politically and morally untenable. Truss has been careful to not rule out more assistance, and perhaps the biggest political decisions she will ever make will be to decide how energetically and radically she does intervene to assist people.
Take bold and expensive action, and Truss risks alienating the small state, free market Tory MPs and members who put her into No 10. Do too little, and the UK could see an economic, social and humanitarian emergency in which unaffordable energy bills create mass business closures, widespread destitution, and thousands of extra deaths over the winter.
It is hard to overstate the difficulty of the task she faces, something emphasised by the fact the government is doing contingency planning for possible energy rationing and blackouts. Police chiefs are reportedly even making preparations for the possibility of riots or wider civil unrest.
Poverty and health
Read more on theguardian.com
