Liz Truss has refused to rule out having another go at leading the Conservative Party, which has sent most of Westminster into a fit of pique or giggles. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that her short time in office resulted in such turmoil on the financial markets.
But while people may balk at the idea of a political comeback by the UK’s shortest serving prime minister, the reaction to her ideas for how to fix some of the problems facing the country exposes a deeper problem which Westminster would be smart to solve.
Wise or wild, Truss is throwing grit into the machine – a machine which isn’t as well-oiled as it ought to be. There are problems piling up across Whitehall which will take creative thinking and fresh ideas to fix.
Whether her calls to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, scrap the Supreme Court and the Human Rights Act and think again about how much control the Civil Service has over policymaking are workable or not, they are worth consideration – if only to stress test the way things currently run.
But the response to these suggestions has been almost universally to scoff and shrug them off, in turn proving Truss’s own claim that Westminster has lost the ability to consider things which don’t strike it as obvious, to its own detriment.
The result is a narrowing of the lens through which MPs and ministers look for solutions to problems, a sense of inertia which turns voters off and a feeling that being elected to Westminster means keeping your head down or being cancelled if your ideas don’t fit, which is part of the reason some MPs who joined parliament in 2017 and 2019 are leaving after just a few years. None of this is good for democracy.
It is clear that Truss is not the perfect messenger at the moment. Her time in office is too recent, her political ambitions too naked and her own sense of injustice at being booted out of No 10 after just 49 days still too raw.
But she is not the only one to call out Westminster and Whitehall for its failure to properly consider things which don’t fit the narrative.
In the House of Commons this week Health Secretary Victoria Atkins launched a passionate defence of the Cass Review, a report into the UK’s youth gender identity development services. The comprehensive review has been welcomed by both the Government and Labour shadow ministers, yet MPs, medical professionals and campaigners who have made similar arguments in the past have been vilified. They have been abused and had their views ignored in favour of a policy which, the report finds, could have done serious damage to young people.
There is nuance, as with every complex policy, but put simply they were not considered mainstream enough until Westminster collectively hit a turning point, then suddenly their ideas became acceptable.
But the struggle to be heard takes an incredible toll, and few are cut out to do it. Comedian and actor Dawn French has spoken out this week, explaining with sadness that she can “smell her own cowardice” because she restrains herself for fear of being cancelled in the culture wars.
When did we become so bad at listening to one another, especially when the idea is so completely different to our own? When did we stop following people we disagree with on X (formerly Twitter) to better inform our own thinking, or stop reading certain newspapers because we feel they don’t represent us?
This is dangerous; it narrows our horizons and fixes some things as untouchable so we develop blind-spots and run the risk of travelling so far down a tunnel without realising it, it’s impossible to get out again.
In the case of politicians, this desire to shut down, cancel or drown out people whose ideas seem odd or different is also strangling new talent from entering a world which is crying out for it. I can’t count the number of MPs who have told me they’ve considered standing down because they’re so fed up of being shouted at online or put in a box by colleagues.
Yet without opposition and new ideas we can’t grow or change – we need the grit to shake things up a bit. Without it Westminster will get bogged down in the middle ground, with those on the fringes branded as extreme and it will come at a great cost, because it doesn’t represent the real world and voters know it.
Kate McCann is the political editor at Times Radio
