After only 44 days in power marked by political drama and market chaos, Liz Truss resigned as U.K. prime minister on Thursday, with a 90-second speech that briefly and dryly acknowledged that, "given the situation," she couldn't "deliver the mandate on which she was elected."
In the six tumultuous weeks that have followed her rise to power, which included the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Truss tried to bring to life the libertarian dream of tax cuts and trickle-down economics that she had pledged during her campaign, only to see this same dream crash and burn when it met with the harsh reality of the current economic situation.
Liz Truss' libertarian dream crashed and burned when it was brought to life with her government's mini-budget. In this composite image, Truss on the day she resigned.CANVA/GETTY IMAGESWhy Did Truss' Libertarian Dream Fail?
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Inspired by Reaganomics, the free-market policies adopted by Ronald Reagan in 1980, Truss wanted to unleash economic growth in the U.K. through tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation. She described anyone who criticized this plan as part of the "anti-growth coalition."
Critics have said that many right-wing, libertarian think tanks have been trying to push their agenda into Downing Street for years, and Truss becoming prime minister finally gave them the chance to try their ideas out.
Among them is the Institute of Economics Affairs (IEA), a free-market think tank with links to both Truss and her former Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng. The prime minister's government was a chance to turn the U.K. into a laboratory for the group's ideas, wrote conservative journalist Tim Montgomerie.
"A massive moment for [the IEA]. They've been advocating these policies for years. They incubated Truss and Kwarteng during their early years as MPs. Britain is now their laboratory," he wrote in a tweet.
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A massive moment for @iealondon. They’ve been advocating these policies for years. They incubated Truss and Kwarteng during their early years as MPs. Britain is now their laboratory.— Tim Montgomerie 🇬🇧 (@montie) September 23, 2022
Truss took the chance to bring in policies that such think tanks had been advocating for years.
"She primarily thought that economic growth in the U.K. had been extremely low and that bad policy was the cause of that," Ryan Bourne, policy scholar at the Cato Institute, a think tank promoting libertarian ideas in policy debates, told Newsweek.
"And really she wanted a two-pronged approach to dealing with that. She wanted to cut a bunch of tax rates, or at least in some cases, avoid raising taxes, which was what the plan was under the last chancellor. She wanted to freeze corporation tax at 19 percent. She wanted to trim interest income tax rates. She wanted to cut the Social Security tax that had just been increased .