Deconstructing Liz Truss's bonkers Brexit word salad

Liz Truss's Brexit rambling proves that she's catastrophically out of touch with reality.

The problem with narcissists like Liz Truss is that they thrive on attention. However sometimes they say things that are so damned stupid that they really do need to be called out.

Dunking on idiots like Truss is like shooting fish in a barrel, however I hope you’ll learn a few things you didn’t already know as I deconstruct her latest Brexit brain fart about how Britain should have gone for a "Singapore on steroids" post-Brexit settlement, rather than a supposed "Norway on Valium" approach.

If you paid any attention whatever during the interminable Brexit chaos that went on between the referendum result in 2016 and the political meltdown that happened in 2019, I’m confident that you can spot the most glaring fault with Truss’s assertion that Boris Johnson’s shambolic Brexit bodge was like "Norway on Valium".

Yes, Norway is outside the EU like the UK is now. However Norway benefits from membership of the Single Market and Customs Union, while the headbanger Tory Brexiteers ensured the UK’s damaging departure from both with their militant "red lines" on quitting the EU’s free trade arrangements.

If post-Brexit Britain was actually anything like Norway, then the UK would have avoided imposing customs checks on EU imports and exports; protected British people’s rights to freedom of movement on the continent; and maintained our unrestricted trade in goods and services with the continent.

But thanks to the Tory government we chose to impose economic sanctions on ourselves by making the UK a third country like Singapore, rather than an affiliated country like Norway.

Aside from the absolute backwardness of Truss’s comparison, there’s also the glaring differences between the British and Norwegian economies to consider.

Norway is a high-pay, high-skill economy, while the Tories have spent a decade and a half using wage repression, social security cuts, and attacks on labour rights to turn Britain into a poverty-stricken, low-skill, low-pay economy.

Norway is a healthier economy than the UK on almost every measure. Higher GDP per Capita; lower poverty rates; lower inequality (GINI); higher average wages; lower unemployment; more generous social security system; lower national debt; greater infrastructure investment …

One of the big reasons Norway can afford to pay higher wages; invest in better infrastructure; and provide superior social benefits to their people, is that they invested their North Sea oil wealth into the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, making it the richest single national investment fund in the entire world, despite Norway’s relatively tiny population of just 5.5 million (similar to Scotland).

On the other hand the UK squandered away its one-off North Sea oil bonanza on tax cuts for corporations and the very rich, and successions of pre-election bribes to keep the ruling party in power.

If Britain had pursued a Norway-style Brexit as Truss implies, surely that would have involved the establishment of a UK sovereign wealth fund, given that Norway’s enormous £1.5 trillion sovereign wealth fund is the single most defining feature of their economy?

Then there’s public ownership to take into account.

Norway owns its own energy companies, national grid, trains, airports, air traffic control, postal system, water infrastructure … all of which the UK flogged off to parasitical private profiteers at an infinitesimally tiny fraction of what all this would have cost to build from scratch.

Britain’s privatisation mania has been so deranged and ideologically incoherent that the Norwegian state has actually brought up stakes in a load of the infrastructure and services that successive UK governments have flogged off.

The Norwegian government now owns significant chunks of England’s privatised water supply (Severn Trent, United Utilities), BP, BT, Centrica, National Grid PLC, Drax Group, Aston Martin, QinetiQ, Rolls Royce … all of which used to belong to the British state before privatisation mania!

The Norwegian state has also bought up stakes in the British banks that benefited from vast public bailouts in 2008 such as NatWest and Lloyds, and they’ve also invested in various private health and corporate outsourcing companies that gorge themselves on the UK public funds.

Honestly, download the PDF of Norway’s sovereign wealth holdings and take a look at the vast portfolio of investments the Norwegian government has made, and consider how the UK actively chose not to do this kind of thing with Britain’s (Scotland’s) massive one-off North Sea oil bonanza.

So Truss thinks the UK should be even less like Norway’s incredibly wealthy economy built on public ownership and the success of their enormous sovereign wealth fund, and more like the free-market utopia of Singapore.

But hang on a minute …

Singapore is one of the only countries on earth with even more sovereign wealth fund riches than Norway!

So according to Truss, we should be less like the country with the world’s biggest single sovereign wealth fund, to be more like the country with the second biggest sovereign wealth portfolio on the planet!

Perhaps Truss is simply ignorant of trifling issues like the existence of £trillion+ sovereign wealth funds, and she’s trying to push the popular right-wing trope that Singapore is the exemplar of a radical-right small-state utopia?

But this idea that Singapore is some kind of uniquely deregulated small-state economy is one of the most absurd Orwellian reality-reversals in modern political discourse.

Unlike the UK, Singapore operates its own electricity transmission and distribution network; they have a publicly owned rail system (which actually owns stakes in Britain’s privatised rail shambles); they own their own water infrastructure; and Singapore owns their own major airports and air traffic control, making it much more of a left-wing economy than post-privatisation Britain where all of this stuff was basically given away to private profiteers.

Furthermore, one of the most notable features of the Singaporean economy is the extraordinary level of public ownership of land and housing.

90% of Singapore’s land is government owned, and a whopping 78% of Singaporeans live in government-owned social housing.

Thus, if Britain wanted to be more like Singapore, the UK government should begin taking the majority of privately owned land under public control, and building vast amounts of public housing so that everyone has the option of living in a government-owned council house!

Is this really what Truss is suggesting the UK needs to do in order to become a small-state utopia like Singapore?

Then let’s compare Singapore’s social security system with the UK’s shall we?

Did you know that Singapore has something called the Baby Bonus Scheme that incentivises parenthood with cash bonuses for every child, with the payment rising from £6,500 for the first two children to £7,700 for the third and subsequent ones.

It’s rather odd that Liz Truss wants the UK to be more like Singapore because she approves of their supposed small-state ethos, when in reality their government uses public cash to generously incentivise large families, rather than economically punishing them like Truss’s Tories do with their eugenicist poverty-spreading two-child policy that denies child social security payments to British families that have more than two kids.

It turns out that Liz Truss’s primary example of a small-state utopia is built on a rock solid foundation of publicly owned land, housing, infrastructure, and services; enormous sovereign wealth riches; and a generous welfare system that incentivises parenthood rather than penalising it!

Apparently we don’t want to be a big-state country like Norway with their dreadful sovereign wealth riches; terribly widespread public ownership; and disgustingly generous welfare system because it would be much better to be a "small-state utopia" like Singapore, with their … erm … vast sovereign wealth riches; widespread public ownership; 90% publicly owned land; plentiful social housing; and generous welfare system!

It turns out that if the UK actually ever tried to become more like Singapore, they’d have to become more like Norway in the process, because after four decades of radical-right neoliberalism, the UK is the right-wing, small-state outlier compared to both of them.

But in order to understand this, Liz Truss would have to have taken the time to actually consider reality and learn something about what she’s talking about, which is never going to happen because Truss and her ilk represent a huge and increasingly powerful demographic in contemporary British politics; those who have very strong opinions about subjects they know next to bollocks all about.

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