Liz Truss has echoed the language of former US president Donald Trump as she called on her party to “make Britain grow again”.
The ex-prime minister, who was ousted from Number 10 after just 44 days following her disastrous mini-budget, made the remark when appearing at a packed out fringe event at the Conservative Party conference. Queues snaked around the Midland Hotel in Manchester to get into the event, with key figures of the right in attendance - from Tory former ministers like Dame Priti Patel and Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg to former Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage.
In her main message, the former leader said it was up to the government to “make life easier and better for families across our land”, claiming there were three things they could do now to "really change the agenda - “axing the tax, cutting the bills and building the homes”.
With tax, Ms Truss reiterated her call to reduce corporation tax to 19% - a move she attempted in her short tenure that led to market turmoil - saying: “What we know is that economic growth and making Britain grow again is not going to be delivered by the Treasury, it’s not going to be delivered by more public spending. It’s going to be delivered by giving businesses the freedom they need to succeed.”
To cut bills, she revived her previous policy to drill for shale gas in the UK - despite questions over its safety and effectiveness - saying: “Some will say using our own gas is not environmentally friendly, but how environmentally friendly is it to rely on regimes abroad, who often have very poor records for our gas, to ship that gas into the United Kingdom, often at both environmental cost and financial? We are sitting on 50 years worth of sustainable gas. Can you imagine if we unleash that, what that would mean for households, what that would mean for businesses?”
And on building homes, Ms Truss called for a 500,000 a year target to be met, adding: “That won’t just mean people will find it easier to get into a home. People will find it easier to start a family because there will be more affordable housing. Employers will find it easier to employ people somewhere because their workers can afford homes. It will also save the government money… because we will cut our housing benefit bill [and] we won’t need to intervene so much in the housing market because we are making the prices cheaper and that is fundamental to what these reforms should be about.”
As usual, the airhead hasn’t thought her “policies” through … 
Cutting corporation tax is not a magic bullet for increasing investment
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)
The way corporation tax cuts are justified goes something like this: the UK has low levels of productivity and low levels of capital investment, and both need to rise. By cutting tax rates, this reduces the tax bill of firms, putting money on their balance sheet that they will then invest in capital or research and development (R&D), which will result in economic growth. A secondary aim is that by having a ‘competitive’ tax rate (ie lower than comparable countries) the UK will be a more attractive investment destination.
The problem with this story is that it has not turned out like that. Whilst UK corporation tax rates have fallen since 2007, private sector investment is still amongst the lowest in the OECD, the lowest in the G7, and far below the average among developed economies. Corporate tax cuts have failed on their own promise.
Fracking will not ease the UK’s energy crisis or bring down heating bills, but will imperil climate targets, scientists and economists have said, after the prime minister, Liz Truss, made lifting the ban on fracking one of the central planks of her energy strategy.
The technology used for hydraulic fracturing of shale rocks, and the difficulty of extracting gas from the UK’s shale deposits, have not changed markedly in the decade since fracking was first tried in the UK, according to scientists.
While the soaring price of gas might make fracking seem a more attractive proposition, in fact the difficulty of tearing up the UK’s countryside in pursuit of relatively small and hard-to-reach deposits means it remains very doubtful it could ever be profitable.
Jim Watson, professor of energy policy at University College London, said: “There is huge uncertainty about the economic viability of fracking, and it may take a long time to produce relatively small amounts of gas.”
Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh, said: “Fracking in the UK is a very high commercial risk, as the geology is wrong, and almost all of the oil or gas has leaked away millions of years ago. Analyses of the shales recovered while drilling for fracking in Lancashire showed the wrong type of shale and no oil or gas present.”
Even if shale gas could be produced here at the scale needed, it would not make a dent in fuel bills. That is because the gas price is set by international markets, so any gas produced would be sold to the highest bidder and vast amounts would be needed to make any change to the gas price.
https://www.theplanner.co.uk/2023/02/20/when-enough-enough-infrastructure-paradox-explained
The UK government has committed to adding 300,000 new homes per year to the housing stock. But what is actually stopping us having enough housing stock to meet the needs of all – is it a lack of physical dwellings, or something else?
The barrier is not necessary a lack of physical infrastructure – according to census data and the English housing survey, there are over 1.2 million more homes than households in England. But the distribution of the consumption of housing space is brutally unequal, with research by geographer Danny Dorling suggesting that the top 10 per cent most spaciously housed in England occupy five times the rooms per person of the least spaciously housed.
This use of housing space is deeply ecologically inefficient. Every square metre of England’s housing space has an environmental footprint, as it needs to be heated, energy and materials are used in building it, and expanding built infrastructure broadly speaking takes away greenspace from what remains of England’s deeply degraded nature.
So here’s the crux: the story that more infrastructure is always better is wrong, for two reasons. First, because it fails to account for the very real environmental costs of building and running new infrastructure. But, even more importantly, because in countries with already abundant infrastructure stocks it’s not necessarily the amount of infrastructure that is limiting – it’s the way society shares out the benefits of that stock and regulates who has access to the services it provides.
Instead of building more roads, the question became: how can we give people access to mobility without relying on the private car? So how much infrastructure is enough?
