The Guardian view on Liz Truss and British workers: the mask slips | Editorial

In a televised Conservative leadership debate last month, Liz Truss was questioned about a passage in a book that she co-authored with other neo-Thatcherite luminaries in her party. British workers, it asserted, are among the “worst idlers in the world”. Not her words, parried Ms Truss, correctly judging that this kind of slander might not be helpful in fostering good relations between a potential prime minister and the country she wishes to lead. “Dominic Raab wrote that chapter.”

Mr Raab has pointed out that the authors of Britannia Unchained, published in 2012, took collective responsibility for its contents. But we do not now need to rely on his testimony. A leaked recording of Ms Truss in illuminating conversation, published by the Guardian this week, confirms that “idle” is precisely what she believes British workers to be. And more. Speaking privately when chief secretary to the Treasury – a post she held between 2017 and 2019 – Ms Truss deplores the “mindset and attitude” of workers outside London. The country is being held back, she says, because too many employees have little appetite for “graft”. The Brexit referendum allowed such backsliders to blame migrants for their own shortcomings and laziness, as productivity flatlined. They should put their back into it, like the Chinese. “If you go to China, it’s quite different, I can assure you,” Ms Truss sighs with a hollow laugh.

If these views belonged to a marginal ideologue on the Tory backbenches, or Sir Bufton Tufton at the golf club bar, there might be a certain black comedy to be enjoyed from their exposure. That they are the opinions of the clear frontrunner to become prime minister, as an economic crisis to rival the fallout from Covid looms, is deeply alarming.

The only thing that Ms Truss gets right in her diatribe against working people is the assertion that Britain’s productivity crisis goes back decades. But the cause is not a lack of appetite for hard work. British employees work longer hours than their German counterparts, for example. But as a result of a perennial lack of proper investment in skills and technology, their labour is less productive. It is true that London is, to an unhealthy degree, more productive than the rest of the country. But that is due to governments since the 1980s placing all bets on a financialised, service-based economy, with the City of London at its heart. The rest of Britain, outside major cities, has become a disproportionately low-wage, low-skill environment.

“Levelling up” – the flagship policy for Boris Johnson’s administration – was intended, at least notionally, to address this disparity through state intervention. As with Ms Truss’s aborted plan for regional pay boards to “level down” wages in the north and elsewhere, this tape reveals her consummate lack of interest in that approach.

Instead, as exemplified in hustings after hustings, Tory members are regaled with laissez-faire economic liberalism of the old school – tax cuts for the better off, a smaller state and a faith-based conviction that the market will provide. For anyone who harboured hopes that once in Downing Street, Ms Truss would tone it down a bit, the tape will come as a wake-up call. This was Liz unplugged, speaking at a time when she was the second most powerful person in the Treasury. It is the “mindset” of Ms Truss, not the British worker, that the country truly needs to be worried about.