A YEAR AGO Liz Truss resigned as PM after 49 days leaving a considerable economic debacle in her wake. 

Something of a conspiracy theorist, Truss has blamed a “left-wing” economic establishment. Truss’s list of who this comprises is ever-expanding and now includes Joe Biden, the BBC and climate campaigners. 

It might be agreed that there is an economic orthodoxy, however, in and beyond the EU that focuses on austerity and neoliberalism.

The constant chirping from the Bank of England that wage rises (ours not theirs) cause inflation can swiftly dispel any notion that it is left wing. 

A neoliberal agenda of austerity which aims to make the many pay for financial crisis while the few profit is determined to maintain itself against challenge, as Greece found out in the 2010s when it was challenged from the left by an earlier version of Syriza. 

Truss’s policy of unfunded tax cuts was regarded as a challenge and the markets reacted accordingly — focused on the Bank of England. 

Truss was putting forward what might be seen as capital’s plan B or possibly C to increase profits and wealth for the rich and screw the rest of us.

She had no electoral mandate for it and no popular support either. Hence she was in no position to face down the markets, which in this particular case was just as well. 

While Truss was attempting to deliver the hard-right economic orthodoxy of Tufton Street and the Institute of Economic Affairs, as the left economist James Meadway has argued, the actual orthodoxy is that of the Institute of Fiscal Studies.

It is one to which both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer adhere, although interpretation of it might vary.

But, as with Greece, a similar scenario would be likely to play out if a left government planned to divert from economic orthodoxy. 

John McDonnell certainly had a plan to do this fairly mildly (that is in line with social democratic politics elsewhere in the world, where they exist) and was well aware of the challenges there would be. 

Labour lost in 2019 so the challenge was not required in a Truss-like form but Labour governments of any sort do tend to get a less than enthusiastic reaction from economic orthodoxy. 

Starmer’s plan is to avoid this by agreeing with it. That assumes of course that the reaction and politics of the market is entirely rational. Capitalism is, after all, a system based on crisis. 

Truss in regular interventions has warned of a crisis of democracy if officials won’t carry out the democratic mandate of elected politicians.

Leaving aside the reality that Truss was not elected and had no democratic basis for her agenda, the wider point was one often made by Tony Benn.

Namely that senior civil servants in a professional capacity operated within a consensus of which policies were possible and might work and which were not. 

It is a political scenario that over the past 50 years has played out both in practice and in fiction. In the late 1960s there was a plan to oust Harold Wilson’s Labour government and replace it with the army. It didn’t happen of course but was none the less real for that. 

More recently Chris Mullin wrote the novel A Very British Coup, which was also adapted for TV. The premise was that a left-wing government headed by a Sheffield steelworker Harry Perkins had won an election and what capital did about it. 

A new edition was published during the years Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader. Socialists have no time for Truss but her 49 days remain a warning to those who want to challenge capital for the many rather than the few.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian.