LONDON — With the United Kingdom’s economy in turmoil and questions swirling about her future as its leader, Prime Minister Liz Truss might have been expected to try and reassure an anxious country Thursday.
Instead she spent the morning fielding angry mostly written questions on a list of local radio phone-in shows — a full hour of being berated in different regional English accents.
“Are you ashamed of what you’ve done?” one listener on BBC Radio Kent asked. “What on earth were you thinking?” a second from the coastal town of Birchington-on-Sea asked. “Have you taken the keys to the country and crashed the economy?” another said.
Truss spoke to eight radio stations in all, spending between 5 and 10 minutes with each. It was part of what was supposed to be a regular round of media appearances before party conferences — it just happened to land in the midst of a national economic crisis.
The prime minister did not answer many of the questions directly instead giving the same semi-scripted answers, often punctuated with notable pauses and silences.
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What the call-ins did reveal was the level of boiling anger and fear being felt across the United Kingdom caused by a suite of unorthodox economic policies announced Friday, which includes a tax cut for Britain’s highest earners and freezing people’s energy bills for two years.
But after a week when Truss has seemingly vanished from public view, she did not offer a hint of a U-turn or an apology.
“People like it when politicians are honest,” Sarah Julian, the presenter on BBC Radio Nottingham, opened her segment. “Why don’t you just hold your hands up and say, ‘This is a mess, we got it wrong and we’re going to do something different?’”
“This is like a reverse Robin Hood,” she added, contrasting Truss’ tax cuts for the wealthy to Nottingham’s folkloric hero who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor.
She says these “tough choices” were needed to spark growth in an otherwise sluggish economy. So far these choices have sent the pound crashing against the dollar, threatened to sink pension funds, drawn a rare rebuke from the IMF and forced the Bank of England to stage an emergency economic intervention to buy up government debt.
Reacting to the prospect of spiraling interest rates, mortgage lenders have taken hundreds of products off the market — amounting to some 40% of all mortgage offers — over the past week, according to the financial information company Moneyfacts.
“As prime minister, I have to do what I feel is right for the country,” Truss told one of the radio stations, BBC Radio Norfolk, based in eastern England. “We had to take action.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
