Liz Truss Reveals Obstacles from Britain’s ‘Deep State’ at US Far-Right Conference

Liz Truss, the former British prime minister, addressed a far-right conference in America on Wednesday, presenting herself as a populist who challenged America’s equivalent of the “deep state” in her own country. Truss was one of the main speakers at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference at the National Harbor in Maryland. The conference is known as the biggest annual gathering of conservatives in the US and has recently aligned with Donald Trump’s nativist-populism.

During Wednesday’s opening session, an “international summit”, the ex-PM sat alongside Nigel Farage, former leader of the Brexit party, both with small union flags on the table in front of them. Other speakers included Steve Bannon, a former White House chief strategist associated with global far-right nationalist movements, and Richard Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence under Trump. Representatives from countries such as Australia, Hungary and Japan also participated.

A moderator at the summit introduced Truss by saying after her election in Britain “there was a collective cheer in the conservative movement in the United States saying, wow, Margaret Thatcher is back!” Truss, whose premiership lasted only 50 days, sought to portray herself as the victim of bureaucratic forces. “I ran for office in 2022 because Britain wasn’t growing, the state wasn’t delivering, [and] we needed to do more,” she said. “I wanted to cut taxes, reduce the administrative state, take back control as people talked about in the Brexit referendum.

What I did face was a huge establishment backlash and a lot of it actually came from the state itself.” She continued: “What has happened in Britain over the past 30 years is power that used to be in the hands of politicians has been moved to quangos and bureaucrats and lawyers so what you find is a democratically elected government actually unable to enact policies.” Truss was interrupted and asked to explain the meaning of “quango”. She replied: “A quango is a quasi non-governmental organisation.

In America you call it the administrative state or the deep state. But we have more than 500 of these quangos in Britain and they run everything.” She went on to list the Environment Agency, Office for Budget Responsibility, Bank of England and Judicial Appointments Commission. “There’s a whole bunch of people – and I describe them as the economic establishment – who fundamentally don’t want the status quo to change because they’re doing quite fine out of it. T

hey don’t really care about the prospects of the average person in Britain and they didn’t want things to change and they didn’t want that power taken away.” Truss added: “So I think that’s the issue we now face as conservatives.

It’s not enough just to will conservative policies and say we want to control our borders or we want to cut taxes or we want to reform our welfare system because we have a whole group of people now in Britain with a vested interest in the status quo who actually have a lot of power.” “Now people are joining the civil service who are essentially activists,” Truss said. “They might be trans activists, they might be environmental extremists but they are now having a voice within the civil service in a way I don’t think was true 30 or 40 years ago.

So we just have a wholly new problem and, frankly, a hundred political appointees doesn’t even touch the sides in terms of dealing with them.” In an opinion piece published on the Fox News website, the former prime minister said agents of “the left” are active in the administrative state and “the deep state”. “I saw this for myself first hand as they sabotaged my efforts in Britain to cut taxes, reduce the size of government and restore democratic accountability,” she wrote. Truss took office after winning a Conservative party leadership contest to replace Boris Johnson.

Her plan to spur economic growth with a mini-budget containing £45bn ($54bn) in unfunded tax cuts – including an income tax reduction for the highest earners – shook the financial markets and led to her swift demise. Her remarks at CPAC were followed by Bannon, who at the same conference in 2017 vowed that then President Trump would wage an unending battle for “deconstruction of the administrative state”. On Wednesday Bannon said: “The administrative and deep state after President Trump wins, starting on the afternoon of the 20th of January, every day will be like Stalingrad.

It will be a war to the knife.” Bannon, a former executive chairman of Breitbart News, which he once described as “the platform of the ‘alt-right’”, a movement that has embraced racism and antisemitism, added: “If we want to save our country, we have to take down the administrative state. The..