Liz Truss says she ‘gets it’ – but how many more U-turns can she stomach?

theguardian.com:

There are two phases to any project, launch and relaunch. After the wreckage of her party conference last week, few relaunches are more urgent than that signalled by Liz Truss’s cry that she “gets it”. Forget any charm offensive. She must dismantle – call it redefine – her rejection of Boris Johnson’s moderate Toryism, approved by the electorate in 2019, and must do it fast.

Truss has shown she can do it. A late-night Birmingham hotel meeting was enough to get her to ditch her controversial cut in the 45p top rate of tax. A similar crisis now looms over whether the upcoming increase in welfare benefits should be tied to inflation or earnings, that is, a 10% or 5% rise. Truss is tentatively committed to the latter.

A U-turn in favour of inflation is estimated to cost roughly £5bn a year and would be expensive. Yet that just happens to be roughly the annual cost of phase one of HS2, a white elephant whose total costs are now estimated northwards of £100bn. The figure of £5bn is also not far off the cost of Boris Johnson’s as yet abortive, but desperately needed, social care reform. It may be worth asking which of these programmes the British public most favours.

That would be merely the start of a Truss relaunch. Her vacuous conference slogan of “growth, growth, growth” seemed rooted in contempt for the social and external costs of such expansionism. She promised an emphatic end to previous EU regulations, most of which are directed at the environment, nature conservation, science and planning standards. She has halted “nudge” measures to aid energy saving. The so-called investment zones, unlimited in number and therefore in cost, seem to run roughshod over everything from parks and scenic beauty to zoning for height or