Liz Truss is clutching at straws

Liz Truss reckons that banning plastic straws led to the downfall of the Tories in 2024

In response to Donald Trump’s social media announcement that he’s bringing back plastic straws in the US, Liz Truss claimed that lefty policies like banning plastic straws were to blame for the unprecedented Tory election wipe out in 2024.

With content like this Truss renders political parody useless. How are satirists supposed to compete when Britain’s shortest-serving Prime Minister in history keeps doing herself over like this?

It’s debatable whether it’s even worth going through all the reasons she’s delusional, but I’m going to do it anyway, because it’s funny, and because I think we still need to reflect on what’s gone so wrong with our political system that such a foolish person ever became the political leader of our nation.

Truss takes absolutely no responsibility for the Tories getting trounced in 2024.

According to her timeline it went ban plastic straws in 2018, then nothing, then lose the election in 2024.

The rest is apparently irrelevant:

• Boris Johnson’s night of the long knives style purge of most of the brains behind the Tory operation in 2019, leaving the party with no choice beyond fools and fanatics when it came to Bodger’s successors.

• Johnson lazily plagiarising Theresa May’s shambolic mess of a Brexit deal, despite having voted against it when she was trying to get it through.

• Tories drunkenly partying away in Downing Street and Whitehall while they forced the rest of the country into lockdown.

• Tory politicians using the Covid crisis as an excuse to tear up official procurement rules and siphon literally £billions in public cash to their mates in dodgy PPE contracts, often for faulty medical kit that was entirely unusable.

• An internal Tory civil war to get rid of Bodger, which ended up with a plonker like Liz Truss becoming PM.

• Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng side-lining the financial regulator (OBR) to rush through a disastrous mini-budget that than tanked the economy.

• Truss getting replaced by Rishi Sunak, despite the fact he’d been caught red-handed pretending to be a full-time resident of the US when he was working as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Downing Street, while his wife simultaneously dodged UK taxes by pretending to be resident in India!

• All of this against a background of austerity ruination, incompetence, multiple corruption scandals, and continued economic stagnation.

Apparently none of this played a role in the Tory downfall, and if they’d just listened to Truss’s objections to the plastic straw ban in 2018, they’d still be in power today!

Then there’s the idea that banning plastic straws is a "lefty policy".

In reality it’s an environmental policy aimed at preventing a particularly bad type of disposable single-use plastic ending up in our oceans.

It’s actually got nothing to do with the left-wing politics of securing better conditions for workers, and public ownership of vital national infrastructure and services (energy, water, public transport, health, education, mail, etc.).

Believe it or not, it’s possible to have centrist or even fairly right-wing views, and still believe that it’s wrong to dump a load of disposable single-use plastics into our oceans.

You have to be way off on the fringes of the bonkers political right to think that pollution and ecological destruction are a price worth paying for plastic manufacturers to turn a tiny bit more profit, but the fringes of the bonkers political right is exactly where Truss resides.

It’s the school of thought that considers it good that privatised water companies are pumping raw sewage into our rivers and coastal waters to save money on sewage treatment, because that means more cash to pay out to shareholders and executives.

It’s the school of thought that rejects any and all efforts to protect people and the environment from the excesses of capitalist profiteering.

It’s the school of thought that holds profit to be king, and anything that gets in the way of capitalist profiteering "ludicrous".

Truss is so divorced from reality that she actually seems to believe that the majority of the country are on the bonkers radical-right fringes with her, that her spectacularly rapid downfall was down to a conspiracy of the "lefty deep state", and the massive public rejection of the Tory government in 2024 was due to the ban on plastic straws, rather than their trail of chaos, incompetence, and corruption.

And in this instance she’s taking the phrase 'clutching at straws' to a whole new level.

Like I said at the beginning, satirists probably couldn’t write content this funny.

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