The prime minister has identified a genuine problem with the UK economy – but she lacks the authority to fix it herself
Eleven years ago, Ed Miliband made a party conference speech that must have seemed a great idea at the time. It was a denunciation of predatory capitalism that in retrospect seems very prescient, and went down well enough in the hall. It was only afterwards, when journalists started challenging him to name names, that things hit the buffers. Come on, then; if they’re so awful, who are they, these bastards ruining life for everyone? The minute his team hesitated, presumably afraid of being sued, the pack pounced. Is Rupert Murdoch a predatory capitalist? What about the guy who runs BHS? Or Sainsbury’s, or Next? A somewhat bruised Miliband ended up insisting the point was not to make “moral judgments about individuals”. It’s easy to generalise about your enemies but hard, it turns out, to be specific.
Liz Truss has just fallen into a similar trap. The Conservative party audience clapped her attack on the “anti-growth coalition” she blamed for Tory failures to deliver over the last 12 years, because it was essentially a list of people they dislike: Scottish nationalists, Brexit deniers, north London liberals who say snide things about them on the BBC. It was only on contact with the real world that things began to fall apart.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
