‘Make sure failure is survivable’: PM’s book reveals pointer to Trussonomics
While the pound plummeted along with Tory poll ratings last week, there was one obscure winner from the government’s disastrous “mini-budget”.
Liz Truss’s and Kwasi Kwarteng’s 2012 free-market treatise Britannia Unchained has shot up the sales charts, hitting the top spot on Amazon rankings for books on “economic conditions”. It costs £19.55 for the paperback.
“The key is to make sure that failure is survivable,” is one of the book’s insights. “In the early stages of a project, failure need not be a disaster.”
This is likely to provide scant consolation to Tory MPs facing the threat of losing their seats at the next election. Nor is the rest of the book, which notoriously labels Britons “among the worst idlers in the world”. Britannia Unchained is a free marketeers’ blueprint for an assault on tax, regulation and what are described as the “perks” of the welfare state. It is co-authored by three other Tory MPs: Priti Patel, Dominic Raab and Chris Skidmore.
The book was published the year after Truss set up the Free Enterprise Group, which was in effect a parliamentary outpost of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the free market thinktank based in Westminster.
The successor to Truss’s Free Enterprise Group, the Free Market Forum, has floated ideas from scrapping corporation tax to withdrawing free childcare for three and four-year-olds.
Two weeks before the mini-budget, Mark Littlewood, director of the IEA, told the Politico website he hoped Truss’s new government would go “fairly gangbusters” in its mini-budget. He wasn’t disappointed.
The disastrous economic aftermath and the withdrawal of hundreds of mortgage deals has renewed focus on the IEA’s influence in government. Ruth Porter, deputy chief of staff in Downing
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