WHEN announcing her plans to tackle the cost-of-living crisis last week, the new Prime Minister said that she is “willing to be unpopular.”  

What she means by this is that she is willing to be unpopular with the ordinary man and woman on the street who she does not have to interact with.  

She is not, on the other hand, willing to be unpopular with the bankers who she is lifting the bonus cap of.  

Or of those making billions in profit as a result of rising energy costs that are being paid out of the pockets of hard-working people.  

Although nothing that Liz Truss has said so far has come as a surprise, it is painfully frustrating to see yet another PM begin to make the same mistakes again and again which have real, devastating consequences for people living in communities like in my constituency.

By reinforcing the commitment to “trickle-down economics,” by not implementing a windfall tax and by lifting the bankers bonus cap, Truss has come out the blocks as yet another ultra-right preacher of neoliberalism despite the financial crash and subsequent austerity and decline being almost 15 years ago.

We know trickle-down economics doesn’t work. It is has been proven time and time again. Even the US President Joe Biden has disavowed it as an outdated economic theory (or at least he says he has).  

Truss cannot see this because the alternative — that growth must be accompanied with redistribution if it is actually going to improve our lives — flies in the face of her misguided and prejudiced view of working people in Britain.  

It is now well known that Truss, alongside her new Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, wrote in their book Britannia Unchained that “once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world.”  

She believes that the rising levels of poverty and worsening living standards among workers in Britain are our own fault for not working hard enough.

Not only is this incredibly patronising and typical of the Tories’ longstanding hatred of the British workforce, it is also totally false.  

British workers work longer hours than the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average globally — and work intensity has increased steadily over the past few decades.  

Truss’s vision of Britain and its workers is rooted in the Thatcherite myth that has been holding this county back for so long.  

Her plans also suggest she has no idea about the scale of the challenges she faces. This is not just about the energy crisis — as bad as the current situation is — and the country’s woes cannot be blamed solely on inflation or the war in Ukraine.  

We are in a deep quagmire of decline that stretches back decades. Wages are lower today in real terms than in 2008, and they are only getting worse.

Housing is unaffordable for young people, putting them off starting families. Child poverty in north-east England has been rapidly increasing, rising, from 26 per cent in 2014-15 to 38 per cent today, now the highest percentage of children in poverty of anywhere in the country.  

Britain was recently described as a poor country with some very rich people in it. The wealthiest in our country enjoy living standards among the global elite. But the lowest-earning bracket of British households have lower living standards than their Slovenian counterparts.  

The average household is now 20 per cent worse off than its peers in north-west Europe and the average Polish family will have better living conditions than us by the end of the decade if things continue on the same trajectory.  

Truss enters office during a flurry of resistance from the trade unions, with mass industrial action planned in early October and activists mobilising around the Enough is Enough campaign. She is already using this backdrop to play up the Thatcher tribute act.  

The Chancellor’s Budget announced last week is the opening gambit in a declaration of war on working-class people on the scale we have not seen since the ’80s.  

Her draconian plan to crack down on trade unions is a right-wing extremist policy and once again comes with a lack of appreciation of the challenges she faces.  

Our problems are not a rerun of the ’70s and ’80s. Privatisation has failed on its own terms and workers are facing a wage stagnation unprecedented in the post-war era.  

The new Prime Minister and new Chancellor are taking a big gamble with their policy direction. But it is working people in left-behind communities across the country who, as always, will be the ones to lose out if their gamble fails.

Ian Lavery is Labour MP for Wansbeck.