Dr Gwilym David Blunt comments on Liz Truss winning the Conservative Party leadership contest
By Chris Lines (Senior Communications Officer), Published
Following the announcement that Liz Truss has won the Conservative Party leadership race and will take over as the UK’s Prime Minister, Dr Gwilym David Blunt, a Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of International Politics at City, University of London offers the following comment in reaction.
Dr Blunt [pictured] was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and a fellow of Corpus Christi College. His research interests involve contemporary political philosophy and the history of political thought.
His interest in contemporary political philosophy is focused on transnational socioeconomic justice, the ethics of political violence, as well as conceptions of power and domination. He is also interested in the relationship between ideal theory models and guidance in non-ideal circumstances, with special attention paid to the justifiability of political violence.
David also works on the history of republican and Marxist political thought. Regarding republicanism, he is interested in the shifting contextual understanding of domination from antiquity to the nineteenth century, but with special interest in the early modern period. And for Marxism, he interested in the development of Marxist theory and its influence on the culture in pre-revolutionary parties and the self-understanding of revolutionaries.
Dr Blunt said:
“Liz Truss has won the Conservative Party leadership and will soon meet the Queen to ascend to the premiership. She is facing the most daunting situation facing a British Prime Minister since the Second World War: the fractured and perhaps irreparable relationship with the EU, the continued war in Ukraine, the centrifugal forces driving separatism in the ‘Celtic fringe’, to say nothing of the immense cost-of-living crisis that threatens to overwhelm millions of British families (I won’t mention the Climate Crisis, it’s too depressing).
“Any one of these problems would require a talented Prime Minister; all together they demand a virtuoso. You can’t help but feel a bit bad for her (and us).
“Even before walking into Number 10, she is being briefed against by members of her own party, she seems bent on pursuing a warmed-over Thatcherite agenda by stuffing cabinet with the fringiest fringe members of the backbench (if rumours are to be believed), and according to a recent Survation poll is an eye-watering 17 points back of Keir Starmer.
“Yet, for all this I wouldn’t be writing her political obituary just yet. Truss is, if anything, a survivor. She has reinvented herself from LibDem to Cameroon, from Remainer to Brexiteer.
“She has an uncanny ability to chase power, but what will happen now when she has reached the sunlit uplands of personal ambition only to find that the lowlands of everyday life are draped in a toxic miasma that rises higher every day?”
Dr Gwilym David Blunt is the author of the book, ‘Global Poverty, Injustice, and Resistance’. The book argues that the poor have the right to resist causes of poverty, examining illegal immigration, social movements, and political violence