Britain’s former prime minister has said “quasi non-governmental organizations” hold real power in the government and she fell victim to the “establishment” of the United Kingdom.
Liz Truss was speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland, the United States, on Wednesday.
Truss remained at No. 10, Downing Street, for only 50 days.
“What has happened in Britain over the past 30 years is power that used to be in the hands of politicians has been moved to quangos and bureaucrats and lawyers so what you find is a democratically elected government actually unable to enact policies.”
Truss said, “A quango is a quasi non-governmental organization. In America you call it the administrative state or the deep state. But we have more than 500 of these quangos in Britain and they run everything.”
The former Conservative MP said she was a victim of bureaucratic forces.
“I ran for office in 2022 because Britain wasn’t growing, the state wasn’t delivering, [and] we needed to do more.”
“I wanted to cut taxes, reduce the administrative state, take back control as people talked about in the Brexit referendum. What I did face was a huge establishment backlash and a lot of it actually came from the state itself.”
Truss named the Environment Agency, Office for Budget Responsibility, Bank of England and Judicial Appointments Commission as “quangos.”
“We have a major problem with our administrative bureaucracy, and I think it’s got a lot worse,” the former British prime minister said.
“There’s a whole bunch of people – and I describe them as the economic establishment – who fundamentally don’t want the status quo to change because they’re doing quite fine out of it. They don’t really care about the prospects of the average person in Britain and they didn’t want things to change and they didn’t want that power taken away.”
Truss was in office from September 6, 2022 to October 25 the same year. She was succeeded by the current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
The outspoken former prime minister of Britain was previously the secretary of state for Commonwealth. She was the minister for women and equalities in 2019.
