Above the seats in the auditorium at the University of Buckingham’s main campus is a quote from the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. It reads: “Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.” Other quotes in the auditorium – “The creation of wealth is the key to compassion” – follow a similar theme. They are all ways of saying that property ownership is the foundation of ethics, that having things is right. Or, to put it more snappily: “Fuck the poor.”
The Hayek line draws nods of approval as the crowd files in; one man, taking a seat beneath it, observes that Buckingham is “one of the few universities where that would not be perceived as a hate crime”. Another quote – “When no one owneth, no one careth” – is attributed to Aristotle, which seemeth a bit dodgy, but it fits the place: Buckingham, a private university, careth deeply what its students owneth, because it chargeth them up to four times the yearly tuition fees of a regular public university. As with private schools, Buckingham prefers “independent”. This extends to what is taught here, which includes an economics department focused on free trade, low taxes and control of the money supply. This is the university Margaret Thatcher helped set up, and today it hosts the Growth Commission, a group of economists and thinkers – including the former PM, Liz Truss – who still cling to her ideas.
And so it is without a shred of irony that a conference called Mending Britain’s Broken Economy is taking place in a room where 18-year-olds pay £13,875 a year to learn digital marketing. The students are on holiday, the whole place eerily quiet except for this small conference at which the true believers in a particular kind of economic view – call it Thatcherism, classical liberalism or Trussonomics – have gathered to celebrate the things they believe in. Steve Baker, the hard man of Brexit, is grabbing a coffee and shaking hands; Andy Wigmore, one of the bad boys of Brexit, is distributing business cards. Many of the attendees are men past retirement age; there are double-breasted suits and tie pins and jowls that are already being shaken at the parlous state of the British economy.
Then Truss arrives, quietly. Any other former PM would arrive two minutes before they are due on stage and expect to be whisked to a private room; they would affect to be extremely busy, right up to the point at which their valuable time could be shared with the public. Truss just walks in, at the same time as everyone else – she’s not due on stage for several hours – and wanders around making awkward small talk. She wears a pinstripe suit, a white shirt, an outfit with more than a hint of Thatcherite finance to it. When the first session is underway, after the Buckingham vice-chancellor wishes us all “freedom of thought”, she listens from the front row, and during the Q&A she raises her hand; she has to wait several minutes before she’s picked to ask her question.
Among the heroes of the Growth Commission are Hayek, of course – “This is what we believe,” as Thatcher said of his book – and Arthur Laffer, whose famous curve is invoked to explain why cutting taxes fixes a country. They still believe in the monetarism of Enoch Powell and Milton Friedman, and in the smallest possible state. Andrew Lilico, the economist whose ideas about steep public spending cuts were adopted by Rupert Harrison and George Osborne in 2009, breezily suggests a new programme of cuts – £180bn at least, although £300bn would be better. He sits with his arms crossed, talking in fast, clipped tones, looking at the ceiling: picturing, perhaps, the government buildings he would close up and sell off.
Brexit is skated around carefully. Poland, on its current growth trajectory, is going to be richer than us in a decade. “They’re doing something right that we’re not doing,” complains a speaker (the thing Poland is doing right is continuing to have unrestricted trade with the EU). The fact that Britain has five times as many trade negotiators as the US is raised as an example of wasteful government, not a result of our needing to renegotiate all of our most important trade relationships. A man who runs a smoked-salmon factory complains that the Europeans are still throwing red tape at us, including incoming regulation that has “zero tolerance for listeria in salmon”; a tiny little bit of listeria is fine, it’s probably good for you! Adds to the flavour!
At lunch – sadly no salmon – I get talking to a man who describes himself as a “supporter” of the Growth Commission, which means he gives them money. He told me he’d been a donor to political parties (the Conservatives and Reform), but this doesn’t buy you much more than a handshake and a few glasses of warm white wine, unless you give them millions. Funding a think tank or a commission is more interesting, he said; he gets more access – he gestures to Truss, who is drinking coffee a few feet away – and they’re more grateful. What he doesn’t say is that it’s also less transparent, because these bodies don’t have to declare their funding.
My guess is that the Growth Commission has some support from the US, because Truss has been spending time there, and because its programme combines the economics of the Reagan-Thatcher era with the evangelical conservatism of the modern Republican Party. Among the speakers was Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian sociologist who was interviewed by a Bitcoin promoter, and who seemed to think the economy would grow more if we got rid of diversity programmes and prevented trans women from playing in female-only sports competitions. It’s that simple! Our GDP will take off, like China in the Noughties, if we can just make sure none of our women’s volleyball players have dicks.
When it’s finally time for Truss to get on stage, no one introduces her; she just sits waiting with her two panellists, then gets up and starts speaking into the microphone. In her recollection, the mini-Budget was not her undoing; it was the “LDI crisis”, an entirely different episode that happened at the same time as the crisis everyone else remembers, but which had a different cause (the Bank of England failed to spot risks being taken by pension funds). Truss says the vast sums of new money created through QE inflated asset prices and house prices, which led to rising inequality, and that these were decisions taken by people at the Bank of England, who had no democratic mandate to change people’s lives. There is truth in this.
On stage, however, she has a weird job to do, alternating between her discussion of quantitative easing and British financial institutions with a former Treasury official, and what seems to be a completely separate but concurrent conversation with Dave Brat, a former US congressman who tells the audience: “You are in a war, an existential cultural war.” He explains that because all economic growth has been produced (in his view) by “the Judeo-Christian West”, there is a simple solution to get more of it: “You’d better get back to church.”
Somehow, Truss wraps up both conversations, and then she sits patiently on stage while a man takes the podium to thank the audience for coming, and especially the Americans, and then another man follows him in thanking the donors and the university, and the organisers. Truss waits on, smiling, but no one thanks her. Perhaps they never will.
[Further reading: Pete Hegseth’s war of annihilation]
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This article appears in the 25 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Easter Special
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