Maybe Truss won’t be so bad https://t.co/9guBBYNM4c— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) September 5, 2022
Liz Truss, now the Tory leadership frontrunner, launched an astonishing broadside against British workers, saying they needed “more graft” and suggesting they lacked the “skill and application” of foreign rivals, the Guardian can reveal.
In a leaked recording, the then No 2 at the Treasury also risked pitting Londoners against the rest of the country by attempting to explain the difference between the capital and other regions in the UK.
Truss, who has put patriotism at the heart of her leadership campaign, suggested the disparity was “partly a mindset or attitude thing”.
The comments were made when Truss was the chief secretary to the Treasury, a post she held until 2019. In the recording she intimated that there seemed little desire to change the working culture so that the UK could become more prosperous.
The highly disparaging remarks echo a controversial passage about British workers being among the “worst idlers in the world” in the book Britannia Unchained, which she co-authored in 2012 when she was a new backbench MP seeking to make her mark as a neo-Thatcherite.