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  • Britain’s semiconductor plan goes AWOL as US and EU splash billions

    Britain’s semiconductor plan goes AWOL as US and EU splash billions

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    LONDON — As nations around the world scramble to secure crucial semiconductor supply chains over fears about relations with China, the U.K. is falling behind.

    The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the world’s heavy reliance on Taiwan and China for the most advanced chips, which power everything from iPhones to advanced weapons. For the past two years, and amid mounting fears China could kick off a new global security crisis by invading Taiwan, Britain’s government has been readying a plan to diversify supply chains for key components and boost domestic production.

    Yet according to people close to the strategy, the U.K.’s still-unseen plan — which missed its publication deadline last fall — has suffered from internal disconnect and government disarray, setting the country behind its global allies in a crucial race to become more self-reliant.

    A lack of experience and joined-up policy-making in Whitehall, a period of intense political upheaval in Downing Street, and new U.S. controls on the export of advanced chips to China, have collectively stymied the U.K.’s efforts to develop its own coherent plan.

    The way the strategy has been developed so far “is a mistake,” said a former senior Downing Street official.

    Falling behind

    During the pandemic, demand for semiconductors outstripped supply as consumers flocked to sort their home working setups. That led to major chip shortages — soon compounded by China’s tough “zero-COVID” policy. 

    Since a semiconductor fabrication plant is so technologically complex — a single laser in a chip lithography system of German firm Trumpf has 457,000 component parts — concentrating manufacturing in a few companies helped the industry innovate in the past.

    But everything changed when COVID-19 struck.

    “Governments suddenly woke up to the fact that — ‘hang on a second, these semiconductor things are quite important, and they all seem to be concentrated in a small number of places,’” said a senior British semiconductor industry executive.

    Beijing’s launch of a hypersonic missile in 2021 also sent shivers through the Pentagon over China’s increasing ability to develop advanced AI-powered weapons. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine added to geopolitical uncertainty, upping the pressure on governments to onshore manufacturers and reduce reliance on potential conflict hotspots like Taiwan.

    Against this backdrop, many of the U.K.’s allies are investing billions in domestic manufacturing.

    The Biden administration’s CHIPS Act, passed last summer, offers $52 billion in subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. The EU has its own €43 billion plan to subsidize production — although its own stance is not without critics. Emerging producers like India, Vietnam, Singapore and Japan are also making headway in their own multi-billion-dollar efforts to foster domestic manufacturing.

    US President Joe Biden | Samuel Corum/Getty Images

    Now the U.K. government is under mounting pressure to show its own hand. In a letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak first reported by the Times and also obtained by POLITICO, Britain’s semiconductor sector said its “confidence in the government’s ability to address the vital importance of the industry is steadily declining with each month of inaction.”

    That followed the leak of an early copy of the U.K.’s semiconductor strategy, reported on by Bloomberg, warning that Britain’s over-dependence on Taiwan for its semiconductor foundries makes it vulnerable to any invasion of the island nation by China.  

    Taiwan, which Beijing considers part of its territory, makes more than 90 percent of the world’s advanced chips, with its Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) vital to the manufacture of British-designed semiconductors.

    U.S. and EU action has already tempted TSMC to begin building new plants and foundries in Arizona and Germany.

    “We critically depend on companies like TSMC,” said the industry executive quoted above. “It would be catastrophic for Western economies if they couldn’t get access to the leading-edge semiconductors any more.”

    Whitehall at war

    Yet there are concerns both inside and outside the British government that key Whitehall departments whose input on the strategy could be crucial are being left out in the cold.

    The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is preparing the U.K.’s plan and, according to observers, has fiercely maintained ownership of the project. DCMS is one of the smallest departments in Whitehall, and is nicknamed the ‘Ministry of Fun’ due to its oversight of sports and leisure, as well as issues related to tech.

    “In other countries, semiconductor policies are the product of multiple players,” said Paul Triolo, a senior vice president at U.S.-based strategy firm ASG. This includes “legislative support for funding major subsidies packages, commercial and trade departments, R&D agencies, and high-level strategic policy bodies tasked with things like improving supply chain resilience,” he said.

    “You need all elements of the U.K.’s capabilities. You need the diplomatic services, the security services. You need everyone working together on this,” said the former Downing Street official quoted above. “There are huge national security aspects to this.”

    The same person said that relying on “a few [lower] grade officials in DCMS — officials that don’t see the wider picture, or who don’t have either capability or knowledge,” is a mistake. 

    For its part, DCMS rejected the suggestion it is too closely guarding the plan, with a spokesperson saying the ministry is “working closely with industry experts and other government departments … so we can protect and grow our domestic sector and ensure greater supply chain resilience.”

    The spokesperson said the strategy “will be published as soon as possible.”

    But businesses keen for sight of the plan remain unconvinced the U.K. has the right team in place for the job.

    Key Whitehall personnel who had been involved in project have now changed, the executive cited earlier said, and few of those writing the strategy “have much of a background in the industry, or much first-hand experience.”

    Progress was also sidetracked last year by lengthy deliberations over whether the U.K. should block the sale of Newport Wafer Fab, Britain’s biggest semiconductor plant, to Chinese-owned Nexperia on national security grounds, according to two people directly involved in the strategy. The government eventually announced it would block the sale in November.

    And while a draft of the plan existed last year, it never progressed to the all-important ministerial “write-around” process — which gives departments across Whitehall the chance to scrutinize and comment upon proposals.

    Waiting for budget day

    Two people familiar with current discussions about the strategy said ministers are now aiming to make their plan public in the run-up to, or around, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s March 15 budget statement, although they stressed that timing could still change.

    Leaked details of the strategy indicate the government will set aside £1 billion to support chip makers. Further leaks indicate this will be used as seed money for startups, and for boosting existing firms and delivering new incentives for investors.

    U.K. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt | Leon Neal/Getty Images

    There is wrangling with the Treasury and other departments over the size of these subsidies. Experts also say it is unlikely to be ‘new’ money but diverted from other departments’ budgets.

    “We’ll just have to wait for something more substantial,” said a spokesperson from one semiconductor firm commenting on the pre-strategy leaks.

    But as the U.K. procrastinates, key British-linked firms are already being hit by the United States’ own fast-evolving semiconductor strategy. U.S. rules brought in last October — and beefed up in recent days by an agreement with the Netherlands — are preventing some firms from selling the most advanced chip designs and manufacturing equipment to China.

    British-headquartered, Japanese-owned firm ARM — the crown jewel of Britain’s semiconductor industry, which sells some designs to smartphone manufacturers in China — is already seeing limits on what it can export. Other British firms like Graphcore, which develops chips for AI and machine learning, are feeling the pinch too.

    “The U.K. needs to — at pace — understand what it wants its role to be in the industries that will define the future economy,” said Andy Burwell, director for international trade at business lobbying group the CBI.

    Where do we go from here?

    There are serious doubts both inside and outside government about whether Britain’s long-awaited plan can really get to the heart of what is a complex global challenge — and opinion is divided on whether aping the U.S. and EU’s subsidy packages is either possible or even desirable for the U.K.

    A former senior government figure who worked on semiconductor policy said that while the U.K. definitely needs a “more coherent worked-out plan,” publishing a formal strategy may actually just reveal how “complicated, messy and beyond our control” the issue really is.

    “It’s not that it is problematic that we don’t have a strategy,” they said. “It’s problematic that whatever strategy we have is not going to be revolutionary.” They described the idea of a “boosterish” multi-billion-pound investment in Britain’s own fabricator industry as “pie in the sky.”

    The former Downing Street official said Britain should instead be seeking to work “in collaboration” with EU and U.S. partners, and must be “careful to avoid” a subsidy war with allies.

    The opposition Labour Party, hot favorites to form the next government after an expected 2024 election, takes a similar view. “It’s not the case that the U.K. can do this on its own,” Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy said recently, urging ministers to team up with the EU to secure its supply of semiconductors.

    One area where some experts believe the U.K. may be able to carve out a competitive advantage, however, is in the design of advanced semiconductors.

    “The U.K. would probably be best placed to pursue support for start-up semiconductor design firms such as Graphcore,” said ASG’s Triolo, “and provide support for expansion of capacity at the existing small number of companies manufacturing at more mature nodes” such as Nexperia’s Newport Wafer Fab.

    Ministers launched a research project in December aimed at tapping into the U.K. semiconductor sector’s existing strength in design. The government has so far poured £800 million into compound semiconductor research through universities, according to a recent report by the House of Commons business committee.

    But the same group of MPs wants more action to support advanced chip design. Burwell at the CBI business group said the U.K. government must start “working alongside industry, rather than the government basically developing a strategy and then coming to industry afterwards.”

    Right now the government is “out there a bit struggling to see what levers they have to pull,” said the senior semiconductor executive quoted earlier.

    Under World Trade Organization rules, governments are allowed to subsidize their semiconductor manufacturing capabilities, the executive pointed out. “The U.S. is doing it. Europe’s doing it. Taiwan does it. We should do it too.”

    This story has been updated. Cristina Gallardo contributed reporting.

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    Graham Lanktree and Annabelle Dickson

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  • Ukraine wants to join EU within two years, PM says

    Ukraine wants to join EU within two years, PM says

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    Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal has a tight two-year timetable for securing EU membership that is bound to dominate discussions at this week’s historic EU-Ukraine summit, the first to take place on Ukrainian soil.

    The problem? No one within the EU thinks this is realistic.

    When EU commissioners travel to Kyiv later this week ahead of Friday’s summit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the heads of the European Commission and Council, their main task is likely to involve managing expectations.

    Shmyhal himself is imposing a tough deadline. “We have a very ambitious plan to join the European Union within the next two years,” he told POLITICO. “So we expect that this year, in 2023, we can already have this pre-entry stage of negotiations,” he said.

    This throws down a gauntlet to the EU establishment, which is trying to keep Ukrainian membership as a far more remote concept.

    French President Emmanuel Macron said last year it could be “decades” before Ukraine joins. Even EU leaders, who backed granting Ukraine candidate status at their summit last June, privately admit that the prospect of the country actually joining is quite some years away (and may be one reason they backed the idea in the first place.) After all, candidate countries like Serbia, Turkey and Montenegro have been waiting for many years, since 1999 in Ankara’s case.

    Ukraine is a conundrum for the EU. Many argue that Brussels has a particular responsibility to Kyiv. It was, after all, Ukrainians’ fury at the decision of President Viktor Yanukovych to pull out of a political and economic association agreement with the EU at Russia’s behest that triggered the Maidan uprising of 2014 and set the stage for war. As European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put it: Ukraine is “the only country where people got shot because they wrapped themselves in a European flag.”

    Ukraine’s close allies in the EU such as Poland and the Baltic countries strongly support Kyiv’s membership push, seeing it as a democracy resisting an aggressor. Many of the EU old guard are far more wary, however, as Ukraine — a global agricultural superpower — could dilute their own powers and perks. Ukraine and Poland — with a combined population of 80 million — could team up to rival Germany as a political force in the European Council and some argue Kyiv would be an excessive drain on the EU budget.  

    Short-term deliverables

    Friday’s summit in Kyiv — the first EU meeting of its kind to take place in an active war zone — will be about striking the right balance.

    Though EU national leaders will not be in attendance, European Council officials have been busy liaising with EU member states about the final communiqué.

    Some countries are insisting the statement should not stray far from the language used at the June European Council — emphasizing that while the future of Ukraine lies within the European Union, aspirant countries need to meet specific criteria. “Expectation is quite high in Kyiv, but there is a need to fulfill all the conditions that the Commission has set out. It’s a merit-based process,” said one senior EU official.

    Ukraine is a conundrum for the EU. Many argue that Brussels has a particular responsibility to Kyiv | Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images

    Still, progress is expected when Zelenskyy meets with von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel.

    Shmyhal told POLITICO he hopes Ukraine can achieve a “substantial leap forward” on Friday, particularly in specific areas — an agreement on a visa-free regime for industrial goods; the suspension of customs duties on Ukrainian exports for another year; and “active progress” on joining the SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) payments scheme and the inclusion of Ukraine into the EU’s mobile roaming area.  

    “We expect progress and acceleration on our path towards signing these agreements,” he said.

    Anti-corruption campaign

    The hot topic — and one of the central question marks over Ukraine’s EU accession — will be Ukraine’s struggle against corruption. The deputy infrastructure minister was fired and deputy foreign minister stepped down this month over scandals related to war profiteering in public contracts.

    “We need a reformed Ukraine,” said one senior EU official centrally involved in preparations for the summit. “We cannot have the same Ukraine as before the war.”

    Shmyhal insisted that the Zelenskyy government is taking corruption seriously. “We have a zero-tolerance approach to corruption,” he said, pointing to the “lightning speed” with which officials were removed this month. “Unfortunately, corruption was not born yesterday, but we are certain that we will uproot corruption,” he said, openly saying that it’s key to the country’s EU accession path.

    He also said the government was poised to revise its recent legislation on the country’s Constitutional Court to meet the demands of both the European Commission and the Venice Commission, an advisory body of the Council of Europe. Changes could come as early as this week, ahead of the summit, Shmyhal said.

    Though Ukraine has announced a reform of the Constitutional Court, particularly on how judges are appointed, the Venice Commission still has concerns about the powers and composition of the advisory group of experts, the body which selects candidates for the court. The goal is to avoid political interference.

    Shmyhal said these questions will be addressed. “We are holding consultations with the European Commission to see that all issued conclusions may be incorporated into the text,” he told POLITICO.

    Nonetheless, the symbolic power of this week’s summit is expected to send a strong message to Moscow about Ukraine’s European aspirations.

    European Council President Michel used his surprise visit to Kyiv this month to reassure Ukraine that EU membership will be a reality for Ukraine, telling the Ukrainian Rada (parliament) that he dreams that one day a Ukrainian will hold his job as president of the European Council.

    “Ukraine is the EU and the EU is Ukraine,” he said. “We must spare no effort to turn this promise into reality as fast as we can.”

    The key question for Ukrainians after Friday’s meeting will be how fast the rhetoric and promises can become a reality.

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    Suzanne Lynch

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  • California Likely To Have $25 Billion Budget Deficit, Report Says

    California Likely To Have $25 Billion Budget Deficit, Report Says

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    SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California will likely have a $25 billion budget deficit next year, state officials announced Wednesday, ending a run of historic surpluses and acting as a warning to other states about a potential recession.

    Democratic-controlled California taxes rich people more than other states, meaning most of its drop in revenue is because the uber-wealthy aren’t making as much money as they used to. That’s why California is often one of the first states to have budget problems when the economy starts to falter.

    The S&P 500, a key indicator of the health of the stock market that drives the income of the superrich, has fallen more than 17% since its peak in January. State revenues are now $41 billion below expectations, according to an outlook published Wednesday by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office. The estimated deficit is lower because some of those revenue losses were offset by lower spending in other parts of the budget.

    The shortfall won’t endanger some of California’s major expansions of government services, including free kindergarten for 4-year-olds and free health care for low-income immigrants living in the country without legal permission.

    But it will force some painful spending decisions, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration said.

    “While we’re in fact better prepared, that doesn’t mean that the decisions to close the coming budget gap won’t be difficult — particularly if the economic conditions that have slowed the economy continue, or get worse,” California Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer said.

    Despite the gloomy outlook, California is in a better position to weather an economic downturn than it has been in the past. The state has $37.2 billion stored in its various savings accounts.

    And it has plenty of cash available to meet its obligations this year. “It’s not insignificant, but it’s also manageable,” Legislative Analyst Gabriel Petek said of the deficit. “We don’t think of this as a budget crisis.”

    California’s revenues are famous for their volatility, peaking and plummeting quickly at the whims of the stock market. Just two years ago, state officials predicted a $54 billion deficit because of the pandemic — a shortfall that never happened because the economy remained strong.

    But this latest deficit prediction is more likely to stick. Soaring inflation has made everything more expensive. The Federal Reserve has tried to rein in inflation by raising a key interest rate. A higher interest rate makes it more expensive to borrow money, which eventually causes people to spend less. Although that would control price increases, it also cuts demand for goods and services. That leads to layoffs, meaning people pay less in taxes.

    “The chances that the Federal Reserve can tame inflation without inducing a recession are narrow,” the LAO said in its report.

    Although employment in California remains strong — the 3.9% unemployment rate for September is tied for the lowest since 1976 — the high-wage tech industry has been roiled by a series of recent job cuts. Facebook parent Meta announced last week that it would layoff 11,000 people, or 13% of its workforce.

    The report did not surprise Republicans, who said they have been warning against California’s massive increase in public spending for years, with Republican Assembly member Vince Fong calling it “unsustainable.”

    “Today’s report is another wake-up call to those warnings. We must refocus on fiscal responsibility,” said Fong, who is vice chair of the Assembly Budget Committee.

    Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration wasn’t surprised, either, calling the $25 billion deficit estimate “realistic and reasonable.”

    “The good news is that as we prepare to close a budget shortfall, the state is in its best-ever position to manage a downturn, by having built strong reserves and focusing on one-time commitments,” said Palmer, the Department of Finance spokesman.

    California lawmakers could conceivably cover all of the deficit with the money it has in its savings accounts, but the Legislative Analyst’s Office warned them not to do that. Their outlook predicts deficits not just for this year, but the next three years — although the size of the deficit decreases each year.

    Instead, the Legislative Analyst’s Office says lawmakers should delay some of the $75 billion in one-time spending they approved over the past two years. As an example, they pointed to a $500 million program to clean up homeless encampments across the state.

    “That’s a very good example of the type of pause we had in mind,” Petek said.

    Palmer said the Newsom administration will begin making budget decisions next month. A change in statewide homelessness funding appears to be unlikely, given Newsom’s commitment to addressing the issue. Newsom did pause $1 billion in homelessness spending earlier this month, but that decision wasn’t related to sinking revenues.

    Toni Atkins, the Democratic president pro tempore of the California Senate, said she is confident the state can pass a budget this year “without ongoing cuts to schools and other core programs or taxing middle class families.”

    Democratic Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said lawmakers “can and will protect the progress of recent years’ budgets.”

    “In particular, the Assembly will protect California’s historic school funding gains, as districts must continue to invest in retaining and recruiting staff to help kids advance and recover from the pandemic,” Rendon said.

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  • Where Britain went wrong

    Where Britain went wrong

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    LIVERPOOL, England — On the long picket line outside the gates of Liverpool’s Peel Port, rain-soaked dock workers warm themselves with cups of tea as they listen to 1980s pop.

    Dozens of buses, cars and trucks honk in solidarity as they pass.

    Dockers’ strikes are not new to Liverpool, nor is depravation. But this latest walk-out at Britain’s fourth-largest port is part of something much bigger, a great wave of public and private sector strikes taking place across the U.K. Railways, postal services, law courts and garbage collections are among the many public services grinding to a halt.

    The immediate cause of the discontent, as elsewhere, is the rising cost of living. Inflation in the United Kingdom breached the 10 percent mark this year, with wages failing to keep pace.

    But the U.K.’s economic woes long predate the current crisis. For more than a decade, Britain has been beset by weak economic growth, anaemic productivity, and stagnant private and public sector investment. Since 2016, its political leadership has been in a state of Brexit-induced flux.

    Half a century after U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger looked at the U.K.’s 1970s economic malaise and declared that “Britain is a tragedy,” the United Kingdom is heading to be the sick man of Europe once again.

    The immediate cause of Liverpool dockers’ discontent that brought them to strike is the rising cost of living. | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

    Here in Liverpool, the “scars run very deep,” said Paul Turking, a dock worker in his late 30s. British voters, he added, have “been misled” by politicians’ promises to “level up” the country by investing heavily in regional economies. Conservatives “will promise you the world and then pull the carpet out from under your feet,” he complained.

    “There’s no middle class no more,” said John Delij, a Peel Port veteran of 15 years. He sees the cost-of-living crisis and economic stagnation whittling away the middle rung of the economic ladder.

    “How many billionaires do we have?” Delij asked, wondering how Britain could be the sixth-largest economy in the world with a record number of billionaires when food bank use is 35 percent above its pre-pandemic level. “The workers put money back into the economy,” he said.

    What would they do if they were in charge? “Invest in affordable housing,” said Turking. “Housing and jobs.”

    Falling behind

    The British economy has been struck by particular turbulence over recent weeks. The cost of government borrowing soared in the wake of former PM Liz Truss’ disastrous mini-budget on September 23, with the U.K.’s central bank forced to step in and steady the bond markets.

    But while the swift installation of Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor, as prime minister seems to have restored a modicum of calm, the economic backdrop remains bleak. Spending and welfare cuts are coming. Taxes are certain to rise. And the underlying problems cut deep.

    U.K. productivity growth since the financial crisis has trailed that of comparator nations such as the U.S., France and Germany. As such, people’s median incomes also lag behind neighboring countries over the same period. Only Russia is forecast to have worse economic growth among the G20 nations in 2023.

    In 1976, the U.K. — facing stagflation, a global energy crisis, a current account deficit and labor unrest — had to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund. It feels far-fetched, but today some are warning it could happen again.

    The U.K. is spluttering its way through an illness brought about in part through a series of self-inflicted wounds that have undermined the basic pillars of any economy: confidence and stability. 

    The political and economic malaise is such that it has prompted unwanted comparisons with countries whose misfortunes Britain once watched amusedly from afar.

    “The existential risk to the U.K. … is not that we’re suddenly going to go off an economic cliff, or that the country’s going to descend into civil war or whatever,” said Jonathan Portes, professor of economics at King’s College London. “It’s that we will become like Italy.”

    Portes, of course, does not mean a country blessed with good weather and fine food — but an economy hobbled by persistently low growth, caught in a dysfunctional political loop that lurches between “corrupt and incompetent right-wing populists” and “well-intentioned technocrats who can’t actually seem to turn the ship around.” 

    “That’s not the future that we want in the U.K,” he said.

    Reviving the U.K.’s flatlining economy will not happen overnight. As Italy’s experience demonstrates, it’s one thing to diagnose an illness — another to cure it.

    Experts speak of an unbalanced model heavily reliant upon Britain’s services sector and beset with low productivity, a result of years of underinvestment and a flexible labor market which delivers low unemployment but often insecure and low-paid work.

    “We’re not investing in skills; businesses aren’t investing,” said Xiaowei Xu, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. “It’s not that surprising that we’re not getting productivity growth.”

    But any attempt to address the country’s ailments will require its economic stewards to understand their underlying causes — and those stretch back at least to the first truly global crisis of the 21st century. 

    Crash and burn

    The 2008 financial crisis hammered economies around the world, and the U.K. was no exception. Its economy shrunk by more than 6 percent between the first quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009. Five years passed before it returned to its pre-recession size.

    For Britain, the crisis in fact began in September 2007, a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when wobbles in the U.S. subprime mortgage market sparked a run on the British bank Northern Rock.

    The U.K. discovered it was particularly vulnerable to such a shock. Over the second half of the 20th century, its manufacturing base had largely eroded as its services sector expanded, with financial and professional services and real estate among the key drivers. As the Bank of England put it: “The interconnectedness of global finance meant that the U.K. financial system had become dangerously exposed to the fall-out from the U.S. sub-prime mortgage market.”

    The crisis was a “big shock to the U.K.’s broad economic model,” said John Springford, from the Centre for European Reform. Productivity took an immediate hit as exports of financial services plunged. It never fully recovered.

    “Productivity before the crash was basically, ‘Can we create lots and lots of debt and generate lots and lots of income on the back of this? Can we invent collateralized debt obligations and trade them in vast volumes?’” said James Meadway, director of the Progressive Economy Forum and a former adviser to Labour’s left-wing former shadow chancellor, John McDonnell.

    A post-crash clampdown on City practises had an obvious impact.

    “This is a major part of the British economy, so if it’s suddenly not performing the way it used to — for good reasons — things overall are going to look a bit shaky,” Meadway added.

    The shock did not contain itself to the economy. In a pattern that would be repeated, and accentuated, in the coming years, it sent shuddering waves through the country’s political system, too.

    The 2010 election was fought on how to best repair Britain’s broken economy. In 2009, the U.K. had the second-highest budget deficit in the G7, trailing only the U.S., according to the U.K. government’s own fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

    The Conservative manifesto declared “our economy is overwhelmed by debt,” and promised to close the U.K.’s mounting budget deficit in five years with sharp public sector cuts. The incumbent Labour government responded by pledging to halve the deficit by 2014 with “deeper and tougher” cuts in public spending than the significant reductions overseen by former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.  

    The election returned a hung parliament, with the Conservatives entering into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The age of austerity was ushered in.

    Austerity nation

    Defenders of then-Chancellor George Osborne’s austerity program insist it saved Britain from the sort of market-led calamity witnessed this fall, and put the U.K. economy in a condition to weather subsequent global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout from the war in Ukraine.

    “That hard work made policies like furlough and the energy price cap possible,” said Rupert Harrison, one of Osborne’s closest Treasury advisers.

    Pointing to the brutal market response to Truss’ freewheeling economic plans, Harrison praised the “wisdom” of the coalition in prioritizing tackling the U.K.’s debt-GDP ratio. “You never know when you will be vulnerable to a loss of credibility,” he noted.

    But Osborne’s detractors argue austerity — which saw deep cuts to community services such as libraries and adult social care; courts and prisons services; road maintenance; the police and so much more — also stripped away much of the U.K.’s social fabric, causing lasting and profound economic damage. A recent study claimed austerity was responsible for hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.

    Under Osborne’s plan, three-quarters of the fiscal consolidation was to be delivered by spending cuts. With the exception of the National Health Service, schools and aid spending, all government budgets were slashed; public sector pay was frozen; taxes (mainly VAT) rose.

    But while the government came close to delivering its fiscal tightening target for 2014-15, “the persistent underperformance of productivity and real GDP over that period meant the deficit remained higher than initially expected,” the OBR said. By his own measure, Osborne had failed, and was forced to push back his deficit-elimination target further. Austerity would have to continue into the second half of the 2010s.

    Many economists contend that the fiscal belt-tightening sucked demand out of the economy and worsened Britain’s productivity crisis by stifling investment. “That certainly did hit U.K. growth and did some permanent damage,” said King’s College London’s Portes.

    “If that investment isn’t there, other people start to find it less attractive to open businesses,” former Labour aide Meadway added. “If your railways aren’t actually very good … it does add up to a problem for businesses.”

    A 2015 study found U.K. productivity, as measured by GDP per hour worked, was now lower than in the rest of the G7 by a whopping 18 percentage points. 

    “Frankly, nobody knows the whole answer,” Osborne said of Britain’s productivity conundrum in May 2015. “But what I do know is that I’d much rather have the productivity challenge than the challenge of mass unemployment.”

    ‘Jobs miracle’

    Rising employment was indeed a signature achievement of the coalition years. Unemployment dropped below 6 percent across the U.K. by the end of the parliament in 2015, with just Germany and Austria achieving a lower rate of joblessness among the then-28 EU states. Real-term wages, however, took nearly a decade to recover to pre-crisis levels. 

    Economists like Meadway contend that the rise in employment came with a price, courtesy of Britain’s famously flexible labor market. He points to a Sports Direct warehouse in the East Midlands, where a 2015 Guardian investigation revealed the predominantly immigrant workforce was paid illegally low wages, while the working conditions were such that the facility was nicknamed “the gulag.”

    The warehouse, it emerged, was built on a former coal mine, and for Meadway the symbolism neatly charts the U.K.’s move away from traditional heavy industry toward more precarious service sector employment. “It’s not a secure job anymore,” he said. “Once you have a very flexible labor market, the pressure on employers to pay more and the capacity for workers to bargain for more is very much reduced.”

    Throughout the period, the Bank of England — the U.K.’s central bank — kept interest rates low and pursued a policy of quantitative easing. “That tends to distort what happens in the economy,” argued Meadway. QE, he said, is a “good [way of] getting money into the hands of people who already have quite a lot” and “doesn’t do much for people who depend on wage income.”

    Meanwhile — whether necessary or not — the U.K.’s austerity policies undoubtedly worsened a decades-long trend of underinvestment in skills and research and development (Britain lags only Italy in the G7 on R&D spending). At British schools, there was a 9 percent real terms fall in per-pupil spending between 2009 and 2019, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Xu. “As countries get richer, usually you start spending more on education,” Xu noted.

    Two senior ministers in the coalition government — David Gauke, who served in the Treasury throughout Osborne’s tenure, and ex-Lib Dem Business Secretary Vince Cable — have both accepted that the government might have focused more on higher taxation and less on cuts to public spending. But both also insisted the U.K had ultimately been correct to prioritize putting its public finances on a sounder footing.

    It was February 2018 before Britain finally achieved Osborne’s goal of eliminating the deficit on its day-to-day budget.

    Austerity was coming to an end, at last. But Osborne had already left the Treasury, 18 months earlier — swept away along with Cameron in the wake of a seismic national uprising. 

    ***

    David Cameron had won the 2015 election outright, despite — or perhaps because of — the stringent spending cuts his coalition government had overseen, more of which had been pledged in his 2015 manifesto. Also promised, of course, was a public vote on Britain’s EU membership.

    The reasons for the leave vote that followed were many and complex — but few doubt that years of underinvestment in poorer parts of the U.K. were among them.

    Regardless, the 2016 EU referendum triggered a period of political acrimony and turbulence not seen in Westminster for generations. With no pre-agreed model of what Brexit should actually entail, the U.K.’s future relationship with the EU became the subject of heated and protracted debate. After years of wrangling, Britain finally left the bloc at the end of January 2020, severing ties in a more profound way than many had envisaged.

    While the twin crises of COVID and Ukraine have muddled the picture, most economists agree Brexit has already had a significant impact on the U.K. economy. The size of Britain’s trade flows relative to GDP has fallen further than other G7 countries, business investment growth trails the likes of Japan, South Korea and Italy, and the OBR has stuck by its March 2020 prediction that Brexit would reduce productivity and U.K. GDP by 4 percent.

    Perhaps more significantly, Brexit has ushered in a period of political instability. As prime ministers come and go (the U.K. is now on its fifth since 2016), economic programs get neglected, or overturned. Overseas investors look on with trepidation.

    “The evidence that the referendum outcome, and the kind of uncertainty and change in policy that it created, have led to low investment and low growth in the U.K. is fairly compelling,” said professor Stephen Millard, deputy director at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

    Beyond the instability, the broader impact of the vote to leave remains contentious.

    Portes argued — as many Remain supporters also do — that much harm was done by the decision to leave the EU’s single market. “It’s the facts, not the uncertainty that in my view is responsible for most of the damage,” he said.

    Brexit supporters dismiss such claims.

    “It’s difficult statistically to find much significant effect of Brexit on anything,” said professor Patrick Minford, founder member of Economists for Brexit. “There’s so much else going on, so much volatility.”

    Minford, an economist favored by ex-PM Truss, acknowledged that “Brexit is disruptive in the short run, so it’s perfectly possible that you would get some short-run disruption.” But he added: “It was a long-term policy decision.”

    Where next?

    Plenty of economists can rattle off possible solutions, although actually delivering them has thus far evaded Britain’s political class. “It’s increasing investment, having more of a focus on the long-term, it’s having economic strategies that you set out and actually commit to over time,” says the IFS’ Xu. “As far as possible, it’s creating more certainty over economic policy.”

    But in seeking to bring stability after the brief but chaotic Truss era, new U.K. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has signaled a fresh period of austerity is on the way to plug the latest hole in the nation’s finances. Leveling Up Secretary Michael Gove told Times Radio that while, ideally, you wouldn’t want to reduce long-term capital investments, he was sure some spending on big projects “will be cut.”

    This could be bad news for many of the U.K.’s long-awaited infrastructure schemes such as the HS2 high-speed rail line, which has been in the works for almost 15 years and already faces a familiar mix of local resistance, vested interests, and a sclerotic planning system.

    “We have a real problem in the sense that the only way to really durably raise productivity growth for this country is for investments to pick up,” said Springford, from the Centre for European Reform. “And the headwinds to that are quite significant.”

    For dock workers at Liverpool’s Peel Port, the prospect of a fresh round of austerity amid a cost-of-living crisis is too much to bear. “Workers all over this country need to stand up for themselves and join a union,” insisted Delij.

    For him, it’s all about priorities — and the arguments still echo back to the great crash of 15 years ago. “They bailed the bankers out in 2007,” he said, “and can’t bail hungry people out now.”

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    Sebastian Whale and Graham Lanktree

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  • So Rishi Sunak is the UK’s next prime minister. What happens now?

    So Rishi Sunak is the UK’s next prime minister. What happens now?

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    LONDON — It took one bruising campaign defeat and six weeks of exile — but on Tuesday, Rishi Sunak will finally become U.K. prime minister.

    He faces the toughest in-tray of any British leader since World War II, entering No. 10 Downing Street as the country hurtles into winter with energy bills, hospital waiting lists, borrowing costs and inflation all soaring.

    The challenge has been magnified by Liz Truss’ brief crash-and-burn premiership. As a result of her now-infamous mini-budget, which was scrapped almost in its entirety after causing chaos in financial markets, the Conservatives are trailing the opposition Labour Party by over 30 percentage points in opinion polls.

    On Monday, Sunak told MPs he was ready to hit the ground running as he addressed them for the first time since becoming Tory leader. Over the days and months ahead, he will need to carry out his first ministerial reshuffle without further fracturing his party; oversee the first budget since the last one wreaked havoc on the economy; and determine what support to offer voters with their energy bills past this spring.

    Prime ministers tend to think of their first 100 days as a way to set the tone for their premierships. For Sunak, who has just over two years to govern before he is required to face a general election, that first impression is going to be particularly important.  

    October 25 — Meeting with the king and first speech outside No. 10 Downing Street

    Sunak will become the prime minister Tuesday after an audience with King Charles III, where he will ask the monarch for permission to form a government.

    Sunak will then address the country for the first time as prime minister from the steps outside No. 10 Downing Street at around 11.35 a.m.

    To much of the British public, the former chancellor is a familiar face who announced the wildly-popular furlough scheme during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

    His task now will be to reassure people that the government will support them during another difficult economic period — only this time he is in a much tougher position. The popularity he gained during the pandemic has waned, and he is taking over after a major government crisis — the third Tory prime minister to hold office within three months.  

    October 25 — First reshuffle

    The first big political test for Sunak will be his Cabinet reshuffle. Tory MPs believe he will learn the lesson from Truss’ first and only one, where she divvied up roles between her allies and left almost everyone who didn’t back her out in the cold.

    “I think his reshuffle will be more unifying, bringing in people from all wings and will not be as destabilizing as Liz’s,” an MP who did not back Sunak predicted.

    Sunak’s leadership rival Penny Mordaunt is expected to be handed a major Cabinet position | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

    Sunak is likely to make at least his major Cabinet appointments Tuesday afternoon, so they are in place to line up alongside him on the House of Commons’ front bench when MPs grill him during so-called prime minister’s questions (PMQs) on Wednesday.

    His biggest decision will be whether to keep Jeremy Hunt — who was drafted in by Truss in a last-ditch effort to save her premiership — as chancellor. He is also likely to hand a big job to his leadership rival Penny Mordaunt.

    Close Sunak allies who are likely to get promotions include Mel Stride, the current chairman of the Treasury select committee, Craig Williams, Claire Coutinho and Laura Trott. Tory big beast Michael Gove could see a return to Cabinet.

    October 26 — First PMQs

    Sunak will go head-to-head as prime minister with Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, for the first time on Wednesday.

    Unlike his predecessor, Sunak won’t have much to worry about from his own side — Tory MPs have largely rowed behind him since he became their leader on Monday, with many expressing relief that the perpetual state of crisis of the Truss government has ended.

    But MPs will want him to demonstrate that he can land blows against Starmer at a time when Labour is streets ahead in the polls. Sunak told Tory MPs on Tuesday that their party faced an “existential threat” as a result of its low poll ratings.

    October 28 — Deadline to form a government in Belfast

    If a power-sharing arrangement is not in place at Stormont by Friday, a fresh set of elections to the Northern Irish assembly will have to be triggered.

    Calling these elections — the second set in seven months — could be one of the Sunak government’s first acts and an indication of successive Tory prime ministers’ failure to deal with the political crisis in Northern Ireland.

    The Democratic Unionist Party issued a fresh warning on Monday night that it would not participate in the assembly unless Sunak takes action on the post-Brexit Northern Ireland protocol agreed with the EU.

    October 31 — First budget

    The next budget was penciled in for October 31 by Kwasi Kwarteng, the Truss-era chancellor who wanted to use it to reassure financial markets still reeling from his last one.

    The timing of the budget — widely derided by Tory MPs because of the optics of holding it on Halloween — was intended to give the Bank of England time to react before its own key meeting on November 3, where it will set interest rate levels for the weeks ahead.

    In its biggest test so far, Sunak’s government will have to decide whether to stick with that date; what actions to take to reassure the markets; and how to fill the enormous hole in the U.K. public finances.

    Carl Emmerson, deputy director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said: “If his chancellor is Jeremy Hunt and Sunak is comfortable with the way things are proceeding for next Monday, then going ahead has lots of advantages.

    “You get the announcement out before the Bank of England makes its next inflation figure, and you get the Office for Budgetary Responsibility forecasts out there, which helps show the markets you are serious about them.

    “The case for changing that date is much stronger if Sunak says, ‘Actually, I want to do something different to what Jeremy Hunt has been planning, and I need more time,’” Emmerson added.

    November 3 — Bank of England rates meeting

    The Bank of England’s monetary policy committee is expected to raise interest rates at its meeting on November 3, triggering a fresh hike in people’s mortgages.

    This is the point when many people will realize for the first time that they will have to make much larger mortgage repayments once their current fixed-rate deals come to an end.

    Sunak made combating inflation and keeping mortgages low a central theme of his leadership campaign over the summer. Reacting to the rates decision and ensuring the government works closely with the Bank of England to combat inflation will be a key test of his premiership.

    November 6 — COP27 summit in Egypt

    Sunak made a point of telling Tory MPs on Tuesday that he is committed to the U.K.’s goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

    The question now is whether he attends the COP27 climate summit in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Truss reportedly planned to go, despite her skepticism of aspects of the net-zero agenda.

    If Sunak does go to Egypt, it could be his first foreign trip in office (unless he decides to make a quick visit to Ukraine beforehand) and his first opportunity to present himself on the world stage.

    November 8 — Boundary changes

    The Boundary Commission for England will publish its new constituency map on November 8.

    At this point, some Tory MPs will know with near certainty that their constituencies are being carved up between neighboring areas, with some forced to jostle with colleagues over who will get to stand where.

    It will be a political headache for Sunak to deal with, and any MPs whose safe seats become marginal will sense their political careers coming to an end — and will have less of an incentive to support him in key votes in the months ahead.

    November 13 — G20 meeting in Indonesia

    The next big foreign trip coming down the track is the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia.

    The meeting will be an opportunity for Western powers to present a united front against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine and against China’s increased aggression toward Taiwan, but also to hold talks behind closed doors. There have been reports that both China’s Xi Jinping and Russian Vladimir Putin will attend.

    Sophia Gaston, the head of foreign policy at the Policy Exchange think tank, said this was shaping up to be “one of the most extraordinary summits of modern history, with a violent war raging in Ukraine and the leading protagonist, Vladimir Putin, on the guest list alongside other autocratic leaders and outraged democratic allies.”

    “As well as promoting free trade and the rules-based international order, Sunak would likely see the G20 as an opportunity to build support for his proposed ‘NATO-style’ technology alliance,” Gaston said. “He may well also debut a new U.K. message on the net-zero transition.”

    Late November or early December — Chester by-election

    Labour whips are preparing to trigger a by-election in the city of Chester in late November or December.

    The by-election is taking place because the city’s MP Christian Matheson resigned after a parliamentary watchdog recommended he be suspended for sexual misconduct.

    Matheson sits on a 6,164-vote majority, and the seat has traditionally been a swing seat flipping between the Tories and Labour. It was Conservative up until 2010.

    Based on current polling figures, Labour should win a significantly larger majority than it currently has, though by-elections do suffer from small turnouts and so unexpected results are not uncommon. A dramatic Tory defeat would set alarm bells ringing in the party.

    Another by-election could be triggered in the coming months if, as expected, Boris Johnson elevates his ally and MP Nadine Dorries to the House of Lords in his resignation honors. That would likely be the first by-election in a Tory-held seat fought with Sunak as party leader.

    December 31 — U.K. deadline for joining trans-Pacific trade bloc

    The U.K. government has said it hopes to conclude negotiations on joining the CPTPP — a trade agreement signed by 11 countries including Australia and New Zealand — by the end of the year.

    Securing this deal was one of Truss’ priorities. For Sunak it would represent both a concrete foreign policy achievement and an indication that the U.K. is successfully building closer diplomatic ties with countries in the Indo-Pacific after Brexit.

    Talks around the partnership have thrown up some diplomatic obstacles, with China reacting angrily to U.K. trade officials meeting Taiwanese counterparts. Both China and Taiwan have applied to join the CPTPP.

    December or January — Johnson’s probe concludes

    The Commons privilege committee’s probe into whether Johnson misled parliament over the so-called Partygate scandal will begin taking evidence in November and is expected to conclude in December or January — though it could drag on longer.

    There have been suggestions that the evidence against him is so damning that Johnson could face temporary suspension from parliament or even be kicked out as an MP. The inquiry may have formed part of Johnson’s decision not to stand for the Tory leadership contest.

    If the privileges committee says Johnson should be sanctioned once it concludes its inquiry, Sunak will have to judge his response and decide whether to whip Tory MPs to back its recommendations even if that provokes Johnson’s ire. There is also the risk that Sunak himself will be dragged into the probe, given he too was fined over the Partygate scandal.

    Early January — COVID inquiry takes evidence

    The independent inquiry into the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic could begin gathering evidence at the start of next year.

    Among other things, the probe will examine the impact of the economic policies that Sunak designed as chancellor during the pandemic, putting his decisions under scrutiny.

    His “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme — which encouraged people to dine in restaurants during the post-lockdown summer of 2020 — could become a focus, with critics claiming it drove up coronavirus-related infections and deaths.

    February — Energy support nears its end

    By the time Sunak’s first 100 days are up, there will be pressure on the government to explain how it will support people with their energy bills past the spring if wholesale gas prices haven’t drastically fallen. Hunt has already rolled back the Truss government’s two-year guarantee and instead capped people’s energy bills at an average of £2,500 for just six months. That policy ends in April.

    The Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Emmerson said: “We’ve got a big generous offer from the government through this winter — although prices are still a lot higher than they were last year, they will be nowhere near as high as they would have otherwise been.

    “The prime minister and chancellor will spend a lot of time thinking about how they replace that scheme. In some ways, it’s very similar to the kind of furlough scheme that Sunak had during the pandemic — very generous, big scheme with lots of crude edges to it,” he said.

    “It’s understandable wanting to get in place quickly to support people, but how do you get out of it? Do it too quickly and that’s too much pain for too many people — keep it in place for too long, and that’s very expensive to the government.”

    It’s just one of so many enormous decisions the new PM faces in his first 100 days.

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    Eleni Courea

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  • The Brexit cult that blew up Britain

    The Brexit cult that blew up Britain

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    LONDON — It was a revolution 11 long years in the making.

    For a small but vocal band of right-wing libertarians, Liz Truss’ appointment as U.K. prime minister on September 6 seemed the triumphant end point of an epic and improbable march that led them from the fringes of British politics to Whitehall’s grandest corridors of power.

    In the course of just over a decade, a group of little-known politicians, fringe think tanks and outspoken media figures had helped drag the Tory Party, and the nation it led, from David Cameron’s vision of so-called compassionate Conservatism — hugging huskies and all — to a Brexit-backing, free-market embracing, low-tax juggernaut.

    It took them four Tory prime ministers, four general elections and an era-defining referendum to do it — but with Truss in charge, they were finally living their dream. The country was to be remade in their image.

    It lasted 44 chaotic days, and no more.

    “They felt their moment had come at last,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University London. “This would prove that Brexit hadn’t been a ghastly mistake, but a fantastic opportunity. But of course, as it was always based on fantasy, it was always bound to collide with reality.”

    Truss was elected Conservative leader — and so U.K. prime minister — last month on the votes of just 81,000 party members, a group large enough to defeat her more centrist opponent, Rishi Sunak, but still small enough to fit comfortably inside Wembley stadium, home of the England football team.

    This band of true-blue believers had been wooed by her heady promises of a low-tax, low-regulation state that would embrace the opportunities provided by Brexit.

    But as soon as PM Truss started to put her promises into action — via a ‘mini-budget’ on September 23 which included tens of billions of pounds in unfunded tax cuts alongside a massive energy subsidy scheme — the markets began sliding into turmoil. Within days it was clear Truss had triggered an economic crisis — and one that sent the Conservative poll ratings tumbling along with the value of the pound.

    Her MPs, facing electoral oblivion, were terrified.

    In the weeks that followed, Truss was forced to sack her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng and U-turn on most of their economic program in a desperate bid to stabilize the markets. This week her home secretary, Suella Braverman, followed Kwarteng out the door. Her MPs became mutinous, some publicly demanding her head. Support rapidly drained away.

    On Thursday morning, after a disastrous attempt to force her MPs to vote against their own manifesto pledge not to re-start fracking projects around the U.K., she accepted the game was up.

    Truss was forced to sack her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng and U-turn on most of their economic program in a desperate bid to stabilize the markets | Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

    Truss’ disastrous six weeks in power were an abject humiliation for the prime minister herself, of course — but also for the libertarian right of the Conservative movement that had fought its corner for years.

    Winners and losers

    “I’m pretty distraught about it,” said Mark Littlewood, director general of the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), one of the right-wing Westminster think tanks that inspired the Truss agenda. (He, like most of the interviewees for this article, was speaking after the abandonment of Truss’ economic program earlier this week, but before she finally resigned Thursday afternoon.)

    “It did actually appear as if we had a new government that, in very broad terms, shared the IEA analysis of the problems with our economy, and it not being market-oriented enough.” 

    But Truss botched the “political execution” rather than economic thinking, Littlewood insisted, lamenting that “if the execution goes badly wrong, it has a rebound effect on the ideas.”

    Indeed, Conservative libertarians explain the Truss debacle in various ways: She was not clear enough about what she was doing and the reasons for it; she made the announcements in the wrong sequence; she refused to match her tax cuts with spending restraint; and she failed to produce independent proof that her plans would work. There is certainly little sign of remorse.

    “The position we’re in now is that these reforms basically have not been tried,” Littlewood insisted. “Her attempts to implement change were too hurried; too rushed; not thought through; naïve in some regard.”

    Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage was another right-wing libertarian who had been advocating for low-tax, small-state ideals for decades.

    “I think the hope was that the Kwarteng budget was going to mark a very significant moment,” Farage said. “That now appears to be dead. And I would have thought dead for a very, very long time. The people in the Conservative Party that I talk to, who think on my wavelength … have pretty much given up.”

    But Tories opposed to the libertarian agenda are delighted at its failure — if not the disastrous fallout, for country and party alike. “The mild flirtation with Tea Party libertarianism has been strangled at birth, and I think for the general good fortune of the Tory Party that has to be seen as a good thing,” Tory backbencher Simon Hoare told the BBC.

    One serving Cabinet minister added: “[The libertarians] are going to have to adjust to reality like the rest of us. They can’t buck the market.”

    Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage was another right-wing libertarian who had been advocating for low-tax, small-state ideals for decades | Peter Summers/Getty Images

    Nicky Morgan, a former Cabinet minister who previously co-chaired the centrist ‘One Nation’ caucus of Tory MPs, said her party must now return to its former broad-church approach.

    “The task for the ‘One Nation’ wing of the party is almost to ignore the libertarian right and get on with reasserting one-nation politics, and prove to everyone from Liz Truss downward that if we want to stay in power, then being sane and sensible in the middle ground is a much stronger place to be,” she said.

    The long march

    For some on the conservative right, so-called Trussonomics was the inevitable end point of a march toward deregulation that began with the Brexit movement in the early 2010s. Farage was one of a number of Brexiteer thinkers who wanted the U.K. to leave the EU in a bid to drive up business competitiveness.

    Bale said the libertarian strain in the Conservative Party had in fact been present for decades, but that the Brexit cause emboldened it and brought it to the fore. 

    The turning point came in 2011, when a number of right-wing Conservative MPs — many of them newly-elected the previous year — rebelled against then-Prime Minister David Cameron and voted in support of a referendum on EU membership. “That was the first time they realized their strength,” Bale said. 

    Across the country, anti-EU sentiment was rising, fueled by the eurozone crisis and soaring levels of immigration.

    “There was a ‘push me, pull you’ going on,” Farage said. “The stronger UKIP got, the more emboldened the Tory Brexiteers got. 2011 was the moment when UKIP suddenly started coming second in by-elections. This group in the Tory Party, and this group outside the Tory Party — namely my group — always had very similar policy goals.”

    Cameron was spooked, and the pressure from within and without his party forced him to agree a referendum on Britain’s EU membership. It was won by the Leave-supporting side in 2016, cheered on by a highly vocal section of the right-wing U.K. press which also supports low taxes and deregulation.

    “The referendum allowed them all to coalesce around a single issue,” said David Yelland, a former editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned, Brexit-backing Sun newspaper, who now speaks out against the influence of right-wing media.

    “The right of the Conservative Party and their supporters in the media and the think tank world knew they had one go at this. They had to win Brexit, otherwise they were finished. And they did. And since then that has emboldened them.”

    Keep pushing on

    With Cameron forced from office, the group’s next battle was with his successor Theresa May, a euroskeptic Remainer who tried to negotiate a less drastic form of Brexit which would have left Britain tied to many of Brussels’ rules and regulations.

    Farage said the “loose relationship” between pro-Brexit libertarians inside and outside the Tory Party maintained its hold over the new Tory leader, ultimately blocking her proposed Brexit deal in Parliament and forcing her resignation.

    Theresa May was a euroskeptic Remainer who tried to negotiate a less drastic form of Brexit | WPA pool photo by Henry Nicholls/Getty Images

    Boris Johnson then emerged as the next prime minister, a genuine ‘Vote Leave’ campaigner who was able to push through the hard-nosed form of Brexit the group had dreamed of. But his personal brand of domestic politics was less to their taste — a sort of high-spending boosterism which appealed to millions of Tory and pro-Brexit voters, if not to the libertarian right.

    “The core Brexiteers were not ultra-libertarians,” explained former Tory MP Stewart Jackson, who lost his job as a ministerial bag carrier to vote with the pro-Brexit rebels in 2011.

    “There were a few that wanted [London to become] Singapore-on-Thames … but the bulk of Brexiteer MPs and definitely Brexiteer voters were much more what I would call communitarian.”

    But Jackson said the vacuum of ideas about how best to respond to Brexit, even among many Brexiteers, left space for the libertarians to fill. “They were the only game in town in terms of a new intellectual concept that the U.K. could consolidate on, being outside the European Union,” he said. 

    With Johnson’s departure in July following a series of personal scandals, the likes of Littlewood — as well as his brothers in arms at neighboring think tanks the Taxpayers Alliance and the Adam Smith Institute — found themselves in the ascendance.

    Their ideas found favor with Truss — who despite not being a Brexiteer at the referendum, was a follower of the libertarian cause — and her Chancellor-to-be Kwarteng. The ambitious pair were among colleagues who wrote a now infamous 2012 pamphlet named “Britannia Unchained” offering radical right-wing solutions to Britain’s economic problems.

    Less than two months after Johnson’s departure, their economic prospectus was finally put to the test — and exploded on impact.

    The arc of history

    As Truss and Kwarteng look back at the ashes of their brief Downing Street careers, the pro-Brexit right is licking its wounds and wondering where it goes next.

    Shanker Singham, another libertarian thinker who is close to Truss and the IEA, insisted it was too soon to tell whether the low-tax, ultra-competition agenda is too damaged by the Trussonomics experiment to resurface in the near future. 

    Brexit supporters march in Fulham in the final leg of the March To Leave Rally on March 29, 2019 | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

    “It’s a very febrile atmosphere, and things have to settle down,” he said. “There’s a big arc of history here, and Liz Truss’ mini-budget does not suddenly transform the arc of history.”

    Littlewood insists there will be another chance to implement libertarian policies in less than a decade, given the structural economic problems Britain faces.

    “Had this [mini-budget] gone as smoothly as I had imagined it in my dreams, rather than as badly as it has gone in my living nightmare, I think we could have got quite a lot of this done now,” he said. “Unfortunately, a large amount of it is off the table now, but I think it will have to be returned to.”

    Brexiteers of a different persuasion — of which there are many — are hoping for an urgent change of direction, however.

    “The vision of Brexit as ‘Davos on Thames’, only ever held by 10 percent of the Conservative electorate, is dead,” wrote Matthew Goodwin, an academic who has charted the rise of the populist right. “The only way forward for the Conservative Party now is to get back to what Brexit was really about for the 90 percent, and to reconnect with their 2019 electorate.”

    But Bale, of Queen Mary University, believes the libertarian strain among Conservatives will forever lurk just beneath the surface, insisting their radical solutions to the nation’s ills have still not been properly tried. 

    “When the spaceship doesn’t arrive,” he said, “the cultists simply say ‘we got the date wrong’, and that it will be coming in two years’ time.”

    Additional reporting by Annabelle Dickson.

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    Emilio Casalicchio and Jack Blanchard

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  • ‘Beaten by a lettuce’: 44 glorious days of Liz Truss

    ‘Beaten by a lettuce’: 44 glorious days of Liz Truss

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    LONDON — Westminster is in turmoil, the U.K. economy is floundering, and Tory MPs are about to pick their fifth prime minister in just over six years.

    But in a sign of total normality in this fully-functioning Western democracy, Brits have instead spent much of the past week fixated on a livestream of a head of iceberg lettuce, wearing a wig.

    Set up by tabloid the Daily Star, the paper’s newshounds bet big that a 60p supermarket lettuce would outlast Prime Minister Liz Truss, after her fledgling regime was gripped by unprecedented chaos in its first few weeks.

    And they were right. Truss finally resigned Thursday, just 44 days into the job, making her the U.K.’s shortest-serving prime minister. The Daily Star broke out the Champagne, declaring: “The Lettuce Outlasted Liz Truss.”

    So how did Truss put her salad days behind her, and why did she wilt under the public gaze?

    Let POLITICO take you on a whirlwind tour of Truss’ 44-day premiership — but be warned, there are more than a few icebergs ahead.

    Smashing the orthodoxy

    September 6: It all started so well. After seeing off suave-but-dull rival Rishi Sunak in a rancorous Conservative leadership contest, Truss looked triumphant as she took the reins at No. 10 Downing Street and vowed to “transform Britain into an aspiration nation.” She had good reason to be cheerful, too, vacuuming up support from thousands of grassroots Tory members, getting the key Conservative-backing newspapers on side, and confidently brushing off the fact that the majority of her own Tory MPs had doubts about her competence. What did they know, after all? They’d only worked with Truss in Westminster for the past decade.

    September 8: Upon taking office, Truss picked her close friend and neighbor Kwasi Kwarteng as her top finance minister, and immediately tasked him with taking on the stale “orthodoxy” at the Treasury. In a savvy first move, Kwarteng immediately sacked the most senior civil servant in the ministry — a man so clever his name is literally Tom Scholar — and so ensured that outmoded, orthodox qualities like “experience,” “credibility” and “economic literacy” were expunged at just the right time … amid a global economic crisis.

    Also September 8: A busy day this one, what with Britain’s longest-reigning monarch dying that same afternoon. As the country mourned Queen Elizabeth II, Truss faced her first big communications test on the job: How to capture the nation’s deep sense of grief? She duly rose to the occasion, ripping up lines painstakingly prepared by career officials to deliver a heartfelt tribute with all the enthusiasm of a Q4 sales report. The country wept, for at least one Liz.

    September 23: The queen’s death put normal politics on ice for a couple of weeks. But the pause allowed Team Truss to put the finishing touches on their very own Mona Lisa: the mini-budget. A sleeker, more aerodynamic budget than the normal kind, this mini version did away with tired conventions like “independent fiscal scrutiny by the government’s own watchdog,” and “making the sums add up.” Instead, Truss and Kwarteng pressed ahead with debt-funded tax cuts and a multi-billion pound plan to subsidize energy bills. Kwarteng also showed he retained a populist touch with crowd-pleasing measures such as cutting taxes for the U.K.’s super-rich and removing a cap on bankers’ bonuses, all in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis — before heading off to a Champagne reception with hedge fund bosses to party the night away. Cheers!

    Woke markets cancel Truss

    September 26: Eek. Then came the backlash. Financial markets — famously stuffed with tofu-munching lefties who hate conservatism and everything it stands for — failed to understand the mini-budget’s genius, while the unruly pound, which probably voted to Remain in the EU, crashed to its lowest-ever level against the U.S. dollar. Kwarteng, sounding a little shaken, promised he would publish all his fully-worked-out sums in, oooh, November? That sound OK?

    September 28: The pound’s reign of terror continued, and, as U.K. borrowing costs soared and British pension funds teetered on the brink of collapse, those radical communists at the Bank of England were forced to step in with an unprecedented emergency bond-buying program “to restore market functioning.” Their hippie best mates at the International Monetary Fund also got in on the act, saying Kwarteng’s plans would “likely increase inequality” and urging the government to “re-evaluate” its tax measures. Chill out, guys!

    Prime Minister Liz Truss is seen returning to Downing Street | Rob Pinney/Getty Images

    October 3: Phew — she made it through to the Tory party conference. Political party conferences, after all, are normally a glorious victory lap for newly-crowned leaders, but Truss again decided to smash the status quo by turning hers into a deeply embarrassing few days of U-turns, backpedaling and noisy Tory infighting. Less than 24 hours after insisting she was sticking by her economic plan, Truss suddenly junked her centerpiece proposal to cut taxes for the rich. Kwarteng admitted the idea had “become a distraction” from the government’s “overriding mission.”

    October 4: Indeed, the U-turn allowed the real “overriding mission” of the government — to needlessly piss off its own MPs — to shine through. No sooner had the tax cut been ditched than Truss’ ever-loyal Cabinet ministers were onto their next target, publicly pressuring the PM not to impose a real-terms cut to social security payments. One minister even capped off the day by telling a room full of drunk communications professionals that the government’s own comms strategy was “shit.” And who could argue?

    October 10-11: A week after ditching their flagship policy, Truss’ government had another go at calming the still-spooked markets. Kwarteng’s new idea? Bringing forward the publication of his next fiscal plan to a date in no way guaranteed to be, erm, spooky: October 31. The Bank of England loved the cut of his jib, again stepping in with a major market intervention to prevent what it called a “fire sale” of U.K. government bonds. Which sounded worrying.

    Actually, we really love the orthodoxy, please come back

    October 14: After weeks of economic turmoil, Kwarteng was dragged home from a trip to Washington D.C. so that he could be sacked on the spot while still jet-lagged — a bad day at the office by anyone’s standards. Finally free of a chancellor who had repeatedly defied her by *checks notes* implementing her exact policy wishes to the letter, the PM then ripped up her long-standing pledge to ease taxes on big business, admitting in an epic eight-minute-long press conference that she’d gone “further and faster than markets were expecting.” We’ve all been there. Reaching out to the center of the Tory party, Truss appointed former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt as her new chancellor, shoring up her faltering premiership for a full 36 hours.

    October 16: Team Truss’ strenuous efforts to build bridges with her now-mutinous party ramped up another notch over the weekend, as a No. 10 insider branded her former leadership rival and ex-Cabinet colleague Sajid Javid — who had reportedly just been sounded out by Truss’ team itself about the chancellor job — “shit.” It didn’t go down too well with him, or his mates.

    October 17: A biggie, as Hunt put a bullet in the entire Truss agenda, live on TV. In an astonishing move, the new finance minister issued a televised statement in which — by his own admission — he ripped up “almost all” the mini-budget pledges the Truss government had announced just a few weeks earlier. Even the energy support plan, clung to by Truss supporters as one of the few remaining positives of her premiership, was to be significantly pared back — although hard-pressed voters should be able to warm themselves this winter by standing near the giant “dumpster fire” that’s been Westminster the past six years. Truss capped another glorious day by avoiding an urgent question in the House of Commons and sending a junior Cabinet minister to reassure angry MPs that the British prime minister was not, in fact, “hiding under a desk.”

    October 19: Very much the End Times. A rollercoaster of a day — if rollercoasters only went downhill — as an under-pressure Truss first offered up yet another U-turn, this time on pension payments; then a senior Truss aide was suspended as that clever “shit” quote to the Sunday newspapers got investigated by No. 10; then her home secretary was sacked and posted what was essentially an extended anti-Truss sub-tweet as a resignation letter; and then the government somehow turned a really boring House of Commons vote into a bitter row about “manhandling” its own MPs, as one of them literally cried on live TV. For those watching from abroad — this is why people in the U.K. drink a lot.

    October 20: With the game finally up and her authority shot to pieces, Truss bowed to the inevitable and resigned Thursday, reeling off all her achievements in an 89-second statement on the Downing Street steps. Yet all is not lost. Tucked away in a newsroom in London, there’s one little lettuce who never lost hope. And in its still-crisp and delicious center lies the promise of national renewal. We can but dream.

    This article was updated to correct a date.

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    Matt Honeycombe-Foster

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  • Liz Truss’ new chancellor signals he could junk more of her economic plan

    Liz Truss’ new chancellor signals he could junk more of her economic plan

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    LONDON — Jeremy Hunt, the man brought in to save Liz Truss’ floundering premiership and calm spooked markets, is “not taking anything off the table” when it comes to rethinking the government’s economic policies.

    In a round of broadcast interviews Sunday, Hunt — appointed as the U.K.’s top finance minister Friday after Truss sacked Kwasi Kwarteng — left the door open to fresh about-turns on the debt-funded, tax-cutting promises that helped Truss become Conservative leader just weeks ago.

    “We are going to have to take some very difficult decisions, both on spending and on tax,” Hunt told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. “Spending is not going to increase by as much as people hoped, and indeed we’re going to have to ask all government departments to find more efficiencies than they had planned, and taxes are not going to go down as quickly as people thought, and some taxes are going go up,” he added.

    Hunt — a former Cabinet minister and two-time leadership contender drawn from the center-left of the Conservative Party — is now in an extraordinarily powerful position, having been drafted in to salvage Truss’ premiership amid collapsing poll ratings and economic turmoil.

    Conservative MPs have been openly criticizing her leadership, amid fevered speculation in Westminster that the party will try to oust her — a move that would likely require a change to the party’s internal rules and could put the U.K. on its third prime minister this year.

    As well as sacking her chancellor, Truss was on Friday forced to abandon a totemic pledge from her leadership campaign, and she will now increase corporation tax as had originally been planned by the man she defeated in the Tory contest, Rishi Sunak. It followed a humiliating climbdown over plans to cut taxes for Britain’s top earners, unveiled in a so-called mini-budget in September that was not subject to the usual scrutiny by Britain’s independent fiscal watchdog and prompted an emergency intervention from the Bank of England and a sharp rise in mortgage rates.

    Hunt went armed to his BBC interview with a message to voters and nervous MPs. “One thing I want to reassure families who are worried at home is that our priority, the lens through which we’re going to do this is as a compassionate Conservative government, and top of our mind when we’re making these decisions will be struggling families, struggling businesses, the most vulnerable people and we will be doing everything we can to protect them,” he said.

    Pressed on the scope of his revised tax-and-spend plans ahead of a fiscal announcement slated for October 31, Hunt told the BBC: “I’m not taking anything off the table.”

    But he warned Conservative MPs against trying to oust Truss, saying a further leadership contest was “the last thing that people really want.”

    Elsewhere on Sunday, Tory MPs expressed their anger at the Truss administration. Senior backbencher and education committee chairman Robert Halfon said he was not calling for Truss to go “at this time,” but demanded a “dramatic reset” of her premiership.

    The government, he told Sky News, had looked like “libertarian jihadists” who had treated the country like “laboratory mice.” Crispin Blunt, a former minister, became the first to publicly call on Truss to step aside, telling telling Channel 4 News: “U think the game’s up, and it’s now a question as to how the succession is managed.”

    Amid efforts by some government ministers to paint the U.K.’s economic woes as entirely global, former Bank of England Deputy Governor Charlie Bean told Sky’s Sophy Ridge show: “Frankly, I think it’s disingenuous to say it’s all a global phenomenon; it’s not.”

    On interest rate rises now facing the U.K., Bean argued that around two-thirds is down to global factors, with the rest a U.K.-specific phenomenon that’s developed since the mini-budget. “Basically we’ve moved from looking not too dissimilar from the U.S. or Germany as a proposition to lend to, to looking more like Italy and Greece,” he said.

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  • UK’s Liz Truss fires Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng in a bid to save her premiership

    UK’s Liz Truss fires Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng in a bid to save her premiership

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    LONDON — British Prime Minister Liz Truss has fired her finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, as she fights to hang on as prime minister after her budget crashed the markets.

    In a hastily-arranged press conference, Truss defended her “mission” to deliver a “low tax, high wage” economy that prioritizes growth. She announced that she will reverse her proposal to halt a planned rise in corporation tax and tighten public spending, conceding that parts of her budget went “further and faster than markets were expecting.”

    Downing Street announced Jeremy Hunt, who has previously served as health secretary and foreign secretary, would replace Kwarteng as chancellor.

    Despite several attempts to calm the markets, including reversing a plan to cut tax for the highest earners and bringing forward a more detailed budget statement, Truss has struggled in the face of sustained economic and political pressure. The decision to call an audience with the press — generally taken in exceptional circumstances — underlines the precariousness of her position little more than a month after she took office.

    Truss’ team hopes that in firing her chancellor she will save her premiership, though that looks doubtful given a lack of support among Tory MPs in part because the plan to cut taxes was central to her campaign for the Conservative party leadership this summer.

    Chancellor Kwarteng cut short a trip to Washington for meetings with the International Monetary Fund as his recently announced plans for major tax cuts came under increasing strain in the face of market turmoil.

    In a letter to the prime minister, Kwarteng wrote: “We have been colleagues and friends for many years. In that time, I have seen your dedication and determination. I believe your vision is the right one. It has been an honour to serve as your chancellor. Your success is this country’s success and I wish you well.”

    The Times reported that ministers would now increase corporation tax whereas they had previously planned to freeze it, in line with suggestions made to POLITICO earlier this week. 

    Truss “must come up with a credible tax policy and that will involve some retrenchment from the announced position,” a senior government insider told POLITICO’s London Playbook.

    Kwarteng had been due to announce a “medium-term fiscal plan” with full details of how the government plans to balance the books on October 31.

    Rachel Reeves MP, Labour’s shadow chancellor, said: “Changing the Chancellor doesn’t undo the damage that’s already been done. It was a crisis made in Downing Street. Liz Truss and the Conservatives crashed the economy, causing mortgages to skyrocket, and has undermined Britain’s standing on the world stage.”

    “We don’t just need a change in Chancellor, we need a change in government,” she added.

    This article has been updated.

    Matt Honeycombe-Foster contributed reporting.

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    Esther Webber and Eleni Courea

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  • Liz Truss panics as markets keep plunging

    Liz Truss panics as markets keep plunging

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    LONDON — Try as she might, Liz Truss just can’t calm the markets.

    Despite reversing her plan to cut tax for the highest earners, bringing forward a more detailed budget statement by almost a month and halting the appointment of a controversial senior civil servant to oversee the Treasury, the Bank of England was again forced to step in to try to stabilize market turbulence. 

    Insiders pointed to the surprise appointment of James Bowler to the Treasury top job, passing over Antonia Romeo, who it was widely briefed had got the role, as a sign of No. 10’s anxiety.

    “The PM is panicking and reaching for almost anything that she can do to calm the situation. She was so burnt by the fallout from mini-budget that anything that seemed bold, she now wants to massively trim back,” said a senior Whitehall official.

    Treasury officials say that Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s tone in the past week has become markedly more conciliatory as he tries to steady the buffs. 

    But in spite of these U-turns, the current market unease may be out of the government’s hands. 

    The so-called mini budget came at a particularly fragile time for the economy, caused by high inflation and the Bank of England’s attempts to end a policy that saw it buy up huge quantities of government debt, originally an attempt to stabilize the economy in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

    Kwarteng’s tax cuts, presented without any detail about how they would be funded, spooked the markets, triggering a crisis at U.K. pension funds because the huge spike in yields forced them to bonds — but that then forced prices down further.

    The Bank of England intervened with a £65 billion check book to give pension funds more time to raise cash and stop the so-called doom loop taking hold. Governor Andrew Bailey said Tuesday the Bank’s emergency support will definitely end Friday, prompting fears this may not be enough time.

    The resulting crisis leaves Britain’s new prime minister with an intensifying political problem, as support ebbs away the longer it takes to tame the markets. 

    Jill Rutter, senior fellow at the Institute for Government and former Treasury official, said: “Paradoxically, having said they were the people to take on the Treasury orthodoxy, they are now walking on such thin ice that they are complete prisoners of the most orthodox orthodoxy.”

    Staying alive

    The race is now on for Kwarteng and his Treasury team to come up with a way to restore credibility by the end of October, when he is due to explain how the tax cuts will be paid for. 

    “It’s really difficult to see how you can have a vaguely deliverable plan to bring that back under control,” said the IfG’s Rutter, who pointed out that trying to find money from one-off events such as asset sales would not help the underlying fiscal position. 

    “If you’ve still got a pension fund problem with collateral issues, what [the government] give you on the 31st will probably not be that relevant, because you’ll still be dealing with a bigger problem,” said one markets strategist, speaking of condition of anonymity.

    “If you as a government have somewhat stabilized [pension funds] … the currency is going to react based on how [the market] views the overall fiscal long-term sustainability.”

    But the government’s dented reputation will be hard to rebuild. “If the root cause is fiscal policy, then the issue probably isn’t going to go away until the markets’ concerns over fiscal policy have eased,” said Paul Dales, chief UK economist at Capital Economics.

    “That makes the chancellor’s medium-term fiscal plan on 31 October a very big event for the gilt market, the pound and the Bank of England. Our feeling is that the chancellor will have to work very hard indeed to convince the markets that his fiscal plans are sustainable.”

    Ministers originally said their plan for £43 billion in tax cuts would be funded by borrowing and economic growth, but experts now warn it will require reductions in public spending. 

    The Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank predicted the chancellor would need to spend £60 billion less by 2026-2027, while the International Monetary Fund released a report calculating that high prices will last longer in the U.K. than many other major economies..

    Ahead of the mini-budget, the Resolution Foundation’s Torsten Bell spelled out why this could have a lasting effect. “The big picture in a world where interest rates are rising and inflation is high, is that you don’t want to be seen as the one country that everyone decides is a bad bet.”

    “Showing how serious you are is important,” he added. “If we are really arguing that our growth strategy is to borrow lots more and then that will pay for itself then they [the markets] don’t believe that.”

    One government official speculated that in order to fill the hole in public finances and make the numbers add up Truss and Kwarteng would be forced to U-turn on further aspects of their mini-budget, such as the decision to cancel a planned corporation tax rise. 

    In the meantime, it’s not just the markets that remain unconvinced by Truss’ and Kwarteng’s approach. 

    At the chancellor’s debut session of Treasury questions in the Commons Tuesday, senior Tory MPs queued up to openly cast aspersion on his strategy. 

    Former Cabinet minister Julian Smith asked for reassurance that tax cuts “will not be balanced on the backs of the poorest people in the country” — normally an attack line reserved for opposition MPs. 

    Treasury committee Chairman Mel Stride warned that if Kwarteng did not seek buy-in from fellow MPs on the next fiscal statement it would upset the markets again.

    The PM’s spokesman reiterated Tuesday that Truss is “committed to the growth measures set out by the chancellor” and “the fundamentals of the U.K. economy remain strong.”

    While that statement continues to be tested, so will the position of the prime minister and her chancellor. 

    Annabelle Dickson contributed reporting.

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    Esther Webber, Hannah Brenton and Eleni Courea

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  • Roadtrippers Helps Travelers Plan Budget-Friendly Road Trips

    Roadtrippers Helps Travelers Plan Budget-Friendly Road Trips

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    The brand is offering giveaways, guides, and discounts for users to enjoy the open road without breaking the bank

    Press Release
    –

    Sep 1, 2022


    CHICAGO, September 1, 2022 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Roadtrippers, the #1 road trip planning tool that helps roadtrippers turn their trips into adventures, is helping its users overcome rising travel costs with comprehensive resources to save on their next road trip adventure. 

    Roadtrippers’ in-house travel experts have compiled their best tips for planning budget-friendly road trips, including comprehensive guides on how to save money on accommodations, food, fuel, and more. Recognizing that exploring places closer to home can be an easy way to enjoy a road trip on a budget, the brand has created a catalog of quick road trips from major U.S. cities, allowing travelers to find interesting places nearby using just one tank of gas. 

    “Roadtripping is one of the most affordable ways to travel — especially with insider tips to customize your trip and save money,” said Roadpass Digital VP of Content Stephanie Puglisi. “Making your dollars last longer means your adventure can go farther. We’re proud to offer inspiring resources that roadtrippers need to hit the road without breaking the bank.”

    With fuel costs being top of mind, Roadtrippers is helping its users fuel up for their next adventure by giving away free fuel. Each week until the end of October, Roadtrippers will give away one $100 Pilot Flying J fuel card to a lucky winner. To enter, visit Fuel Up on Us and follow the steps to enter to win. 

    Roadtrippers is also discounting its premium membership in time for the long weekend, so road travelers can plan for their upcoming trips. Beginning today, travelers can save 40% on a Roadtrippers Plus membership during the Roadtrippers Labor Day Sale. Roadtrippers Plus is a popular annual membership that gives travelers premium access features in the app, including the brand’s helpful fuel cost estimator. 

    Roadtrippers is part of Roadpass Digital’s portfolio of leading digital apps that provide campers, RVers and roadtrippers with end-to-end trip discovery and planning tools. Roadpass Digital’s other brands include Campendium, Togo RV, and RVillage. 

    To learn more about Roadtrippers, visit https://roadtrippers.com/ or contact media@roadpass.com. 

    About Roadtrippers 

    Roadtrippers is the #1 road trip planning tool, helping people experience the world around them in an entirely new way by streamlining discovery, planning, booking, and navigation into an engaging and intuitive process. Since launching in 2012, Roadtrippers has helped its users plan more than 38 million trips covering more than 42 billion miles. To learn more about Roadtrippers, visit roadtrippers.com and follow @roadtrippers on Instagram. 

    About Roadpass Digital 

    Roadpass Digital is focused on empowering roadtrippers, campers, and RVers to hit the open road. With 6,000,000+ people using apps powered by Roadpass, the company is the leading platform for road travel and outdoor experiences. Roadpass Digital has offices in Chicago, Cincinnati, and Auckland. Learn more about Roadpass Digital and Roadtrippers, Campendium, Togo RV, and RVillage products at roadpass.com.

    Source: Roadtrippers

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  • Austin Pets Alive! | Austin Pets Alive! President and CEO Gives…

    Austin Pets Alive! | Austin Pets Alive! President and CEO Gives…

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    Jul 22, 2021

    The City of Austin’s Animal Advisory Commission recently created a Working Group to focus on Austin Animal Center’s shelter space concerns. The Commission held a Special Called meeting this past Monday to discuss the findings of the Working Group as well as hear APA!’s quarterly report. At Monday’s Animal Advisory Commission, APA! President and CEO, Dr. Ellen Jefferson presented. Below is a summary of her comments to the Commission.

    Austin Pets Alive! is the largest city of Austin Animal Services partner in lifesaving and the largest subsidizer of the city’s budget to serve Austin animals.

    APA! takes animals that have medical and behavioral issues that require a higher cost per animal than the average healthy animal and care. APA! focuses on these animals in an effort to have a measurable effect on the live release rate at Austin Animal Center (AAC).

    In June alone, of all the animals that were transferred from AAC to any partner, APA! took 77% of those animals and over 200 times the number taken by the other brick and mortar shelters in Austin.

    APA!’s cost to care for the animals pulled this past quarter was approximately $500,000 – $750,000. These numbers are currently being validated through an external agency and will be reflected as accurately as possible in future reports.

    APA! receives no funding from the City of Austin but through a license agreement does receive use of the Town Lake Animal Center (TLAC) facility, which on the rental market could reasonably expect to receive about $8 per square foot per year in rent for the use (kennel), the condition its in (deteriorated), and the location it is in which, at best, is $100,000 per quarter. APA! therefore contributed between $400,000-$650,000 last quarter alone to subsidize the city’s budget to serve Austin animals. That is just for the animals we’re taking in from AAC, not for the other work we’re doing in the community.

    APA!’s mission is to eliminate the unnecessary killing of shelter animals. Over the last 10 years of this license agreement, the role of APA’s support at AAC has shifted away from lifesaving and into serving as overflow for Austin Animal Center, which was never the intention of the license agreement that was drafted 10 years ago. That’s what we’ve been trying to re-negotiate for the last five years. What that means is that Austin Pets Alive! is serving many animals that should not be at risk of euthenasia in the city’s publicly-funded shelter.

    AAC has received an increase in budget of more than $10 million since the original license agreement was signed, and many supports have been put in place over the years by the Austin City Council. APA! is 100% committed to continuing to serve as a safety net for animals that cannot be saved through taxpayer dollars and is currently negotiating a license agreement that more accurately reflects the mission of APA! and the responsible utilization of all the funds put towards animals, whether they are donated or taxpayer-funded.

    You can find the complete 2nd Quarter Report from APA! to the Animal Advisory Commission here.

    You can watch the complete meeting here.

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