Former prime minister Liz Truss has taken aim at the “deep state” at a major US political conference.
Speaking on a panel marking the opening night of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Truss told attendees she faced a “huge establishment backlash” during her short tenure as PM, particularly “from the state itself”.
Truss was hailed as a new “Margaret Thatcher” by CPAC panel moderator KT McFarland, who served as former president Donald Trump’s deputy national security adviser.
Also speaking on the panel was former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who was welcomed as the “champion of Brexit”.
Singling out “trans activists” and “environmental extremists”, Truss argued problematic individuals were filling the ranks of the civil service.
Truss said: “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 you find a democratically elected government actually unable to enact policies”.
Asked to explain what a quango is to the American audience, she replied she meant “Quasi-Non Governmental Organisations”.
Quangos are administrative bodies outside the civil service that receive funding from the government, such as the Forestry Commission and the British Council.
She said: “In America you call it the administrative state or the deep state, well, we have more than 500 of these quangos in Britain, and they run everything.
“We’ve got the Environment Agency, we’ve got the Office of Budget Responsibility, we’ve got the Bank of England, we’ve got the Judicial Appointments Commission.”
“We have a major problem with our administrative bureaucracy”, she added. “And I think it’s got a lot worse”.
“Now people are joining the civil service who are essentially activists, they might be trans activists, they might be environmental extremists, but they are now having a voice within the civil service in a way I don’t think was true 30 or 40 years ago, so we just have a wholly new problem”, she said.
Taking aim at former prime minister Sir Tony Blair, Truss said: “He got rid of the traditional role of the Lord Chancellor, who sat in the cabinet and was the head of the judiciary he instead put control of appointments in the hands of a quango.
“So what you have is rather than democratically elected politicians being accountable for decisions, often those decisions are now in the hands of people who aren’t elected”.
Ahead of her arrival in the US, Truss wrote an op-ed for conservative media organisation Fox News in which she also took a swipe at Joe Biden, warning that American values were “being undermined” by left-wing ideas.
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