4 minute read
Not to be Trussted
By Jason Reid
Inexplicably many Tory supporters are of the opinion that Liz Truss, secretary of state for international trade AND minister for women & equalities, is one of the stars of the current cabinet; a future prime minister some have mused. The bar is most certainly unprecedentedly low, so they may well be right.
Advertisement
If you’re not familiar with Truss’s colourful back catalogue of ‘achievements’: In 2010, shortly after being elected as an MP she was – alongside Priti Patel, Dominic Raab and Kwasi Kwarteng – one of the authors of Britannia Unchained, a book that called for the scrapping of workers’ rights and claimed that ‘the British are among the worst idlers in the world’. Those who follow politics closely will also remember the 2018 Conservative Party conference when Truss – then environment secretary – delivered an agonising and deadpan speech which clearly sounded much funnier in her head due to the inane grinning and anomalous presentation style. The moment she stared directly into the camera and said: “We import two thirds of our cheese,” then paused for a few seconds before following it up with a menacing “That. Is. A. Disgrace” haunts me to this day. Look it up, it’s... quite something. Then there’s the litany of car crash media interviews – Truss seems to always be totally unprepared and unbothered with being exposed as a hard-hearted chancer. Where’s the accountability? She’s been permitted to saunter from one shambolic clusterfuck of failings to the next, with ease. Remind you of anyone?
Seemingly this government is aiming for alltime lows; how else can one explain Truss’s most recent speech at the Centre of Policy Studies entitled ‘The New Fight For Fairness’ – a war on the ‘woke left’ – in which she said that Boris Johnson’s government would move away from fighting against ‘protected characteristics’ such as gender, religion or ethnicity, and instead focus on fixing ‘geographical inequalities’.
Translation: Liz Truss will fight for those who Liz Truss and her right wing government of elites deems worthy. That should sound alarm bells across the LGBTQ+ community and beyond. Of course, first and foremost they will be fighting for their mates in big business; bunging private contracts their way and profiteering from the most vulnerable in society – we see them, even if some in the media choose not to. Truss then went on to say: “To make society more equal we need the equality debate to be led by facts not fashion.” By choosing to use the term ‘fashion’ in this context, Truss reveals her true disdain for lived homophobia, transphobia and racism. Taking cheap shots demeans the daily fight many in minority groups still face. Oh it’s just a phase, a fad. Get over it. We don’t experience this. We’re okay. This statement is also a dog whistle to the true blue Tory supporter and those far right idiots who blather on incessantly about the imaginary ‘woke brigade’ and ‘assault on free speech’ – they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about trans and nonbinary people’s concerns. By striking such a tone, and purposely choosing derogatory language, it seems Truss is quite plainly saying that she thinks the concerns of trans and non-binary people amount to little more than, in her own words, “fashion”. Fashion comes and goes. It is disposable. This rhetoric is abhorrent and mirrors the othering gay people faced during past decades of Tory rule. Rinse and repeat.
As a community we must not allow them to normalise this thinking. The fight really is on. Trans and non-binary people need the support of cisgender people now more ever. Not just wishy-washy liberal slogans on social media when Trans Awareness Week rolls round, but vocal advocacy with your full chest, 365 days a year. In another part of the speech, Truss talks suspiciously of “the left failing to defend single sex spaces” – which is an anti-trans talking point that has been discussed extensively over the past few years. This time the dog whistle was deafening. She knew what she was doing, make no mistake about that.
If I didn’t know the person behind this speech I would think it was delivered by someone who has never faced an iota of discrimination in their life, someone who would seemingly rather gawp at a computer full of statistics for hours on end than into the eyes of a victim for even a minute.
As humorous as it is to see risible politicians repeatedly making fools of themselves, what we need to remember is that people in power like Truss and her backers are a real danger – just like Trump was in America; who, incidentally, was cheered on enthusiastically by the Tory Party. As with the majority of the current cabinet, Truss’s record speaks for itself – incompetence personified, but somehow she is where she is, we are where we are, and the ruling far right government holds a sizeable majority in parliament. And for that reason, we must watch them like hawks.
Queer pioneers fought hard for the rights we have today, and those rights should never be taken for granted; as the UK lurches ever further to the dark recesses of the far right, complacency can never be an option. It’s imperative that the LGBTQ+ community is united – all of us shoulder to shoulder – at this critical time. Standing up for those who have stood up for us.
