Liz Truss conveniently forgets her own place in the “anti-growth coalition”

Liz Truss attempted a reset of her leadership with her speech to Tory Party conference yesterday (yes, already). Taking aim at an “anti-growth coalition” – featuring Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP alongside “the militant unions, the vested interests dressed up as think tanks, the talking heads, the Brexit deniers, Extinction Rebellion” – she seemed to conveniently forget that the Conservatives have been running the economy for the past 12 years. This point was not lost on Labour’s Rachel Reeves, who highlighted that Truss – who was a minister for many of those years – “has been at the heart of building a Conservative economy that has led to the flat wages and low growth”.

Both parties, then, are talking about growing the economy. Keir Starmer declared in a speech in July that his party will “fight the next election on economic growth” and “rebooting the economy”. Truss yesterday vowed to “grow the pie so that everyone gets a bigger slice” and, although you obviously cannot ‘grow a pie’, you get the gist. The problem for Truss banging on about growth is that polling suggests that most voters currently think Labour is more likely to deliver it – 33% told YouGov last week that Starmer’s party is best placed to deliver growth compared to 16% who said the same of Truss’ Tory Party. The problem for both parties is that a) growth is an end, not a policy; and b) people do not really know what it means when a party promises to deliver it. In our recent focus group in Bassetlaw, for example, voters thought it was a “good idea” but only after the moderator had explained what it actually meant. It seems that simply saying that you want growth is not enough.

On LabourList today, polling released last night indicated that the Conservatives are on course for a wipeout in Scotland. Polls by YouGov and Savanta found that support for the Tories has tanked in recent weeks and that Labour is set to increase its number of seats from one to seven. Meanwhile, Starmer has warned that the “fantasy economics” being pursued by the Conservative government means that households across the country will see an “eye-watering” increase in monthly mortgage payments.