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Alex Lo
SCMP Columnist
My Take
by Alex Lo
My Take
by Alex Lo

‘China threat’ is poor excuse to revive left-for-dead Liz Truss

  • From the cost-of-living crisis to the collapse of public health and other civil service functions, the real menace to the average British citizen is persistently incompetent government, not China

Zombie, noun. 1a: a will-less and speechless human (as in voodoo belief and in fictional stories) held to have died and been supernaturally reanimated; b: the supernatural power that according to voodoo belief may enter into and reanimate a dead body. 2a: a person held to resemble the so-called walking dead. – Merriam-Webster Online

Why “zombie”? Because we now have four decades’ worth of experience showing that deregulation and tax cuts for the rich do not, in fact, produce higher wages and faster economic growth. So the idea that tax cuts are the secret of prosperity should be dead. – Paul Krugman, columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist

Just when you think Liz Truss is as dead as they come in British politics, supernatural forces are attempting to return the country’s shortest-serving prime minister to the land of the living.

As reported by the conservative Telegraph, “Liz Truss [is] set to reignite China row in fresh challenge to Rishi Sunak … as she continues her return to the political fray.”

‘Global Britain’ cannot lead itself out of dire straits, let alone Asia

Her vehicle of reanimation is, of course, “the China threat”. The outcome, at the moment, is uncertain, as you would expect from any good horror flick, but it rarely ends well. The revived creature, however much it resembles its once-living body, will quickly decay and fall apart. But some “jump scares” along the way may still prove entertaining. Expect some hair-raising moments in her upcoming trip to Japan.

Her reanimation PR team has leaked to the British press that she is preparing a key speech on February 17 at which she will signal a Churchillian warning on the threat posed by China. It’s also expected to be a takedown on her Tory replacement Rishi Sunak for being “soft on China”.

Fellow anti-China hawks including former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison and ex-Belgian premier Guy Verhofstadt will also take part at “the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China” symposium in Tokyo, whose programme will focus on “Beijing’s threats to Taiwan, its use of economic coercion, its growing long-arm policing and malign influence operations abroad, as well as its gross domestic human rights abuses”.

That will make an interesting panel, as Tory conservatives are still recovering from their rage against Verhofstadt, who is also the European Parliament Brexit coordinator, for inexplicably suggesting that without Brexit, Russia would not have dared to invade Ukraine.

Truss of course has had plenty of time to brood over China. Sunak has more to worry about on the domestic front, such as a collapsing economy and the worst mass strikes in the country’s modern history. If he has sensibly talked about the need to engage China, that has only opened him to charges of “appeasement”.

While Truss and fellow Western hawks prefer finger-wagging over such grand themes as the need for an open and free Indo-Pacific, the British prime minister may need to work on more mundane if pressing tasks such as smoothing trade – now tied up in bureaucratic red tape, destroying businesses – with the European Union.

It seems Truss and her kind still have not grasped the dire straits in which their country has found itself and which have nothing to do with China. In fact, “the China threat” has become a real distraction.

The current collapse in living standards – unprecedented for any Group of Seven economies – means average real wages are lower today than almost two decades ago. Based on Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development data, Britain now has the most meagre social welfare system of any developed country, including the United States.

The tragedy of Chris Patten, our last British governor

In an intergenerational audit released in November by the Resolution Foundation, young Britons can expect to pay a lot more taxes in their lifetimes than they will receive back in terms of public services, pensions and other benefits. It was the opposite for their parents and grandparents. Without family help, a situation familiar to young people in Hong Kong, many cannot aspire to home ownership.

The near collapse of the National Health Service and mass strikes by doctors and nurses have meant excess deaths are rising while it is now the only European country to experience a decline in life expectancy.

A large and structural trade deficit cannot be reversed without long and sustained growth, a prospect that looks increasingly unlikely for the rest of the decade. In its latest report, the OECD forecasts British GDP growth of -0.4 per cent for 2023, the lowest among G7 countries.

Economic decline goes hand in hand with economic inequality, and Britain has some of the worst data among developed economies. According to the Equality Trust, “Wealth in Great Britain is even more unequally divided than income. In 2016 … the richest 10 per cent of households [held] 44 per cent of all wealth. The poorest 50 per cent, by contrast, [owned] just 9 per cent. More than that, for the UK as a whole … the top 0.1 per cent had share of total wealth double between 1984 and 2013, reaching 9 per cent.”

Yet, Truss had wanted to cut taxes for the richest people and biggest corporations, and raise military spending to take on China. I submit to you that the blindness, complacency and arrogance of the British ruling elites personalised by people like Truss are the greatest threat to the well-being and security of the vast majority of British people, except for the top 10 per cent. These are the zombie politicians following zombie ideas and turning their country into a zombie economy.

Be that as it may, Britain will likely stand shoulder to shoulder with America for a long time yet; and the Chinese bogeyman can always be invoked as the rationale. But since the last illegal Iraq war, that has become a recipe for disaster. The only country with a global empire to fret about is the US. Britain should stop burdening its weary little head over such grand matters.

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