Deed of Truss: Britain’s new leader

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. Today from London, I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. In Japan, the ethos of imprisonment is one of retribution, menial labor, restricted activities and a lot of quiet. That is bad news for the increasing share of elderly prisoners. So authorities are at last reforming the penal system. And perhaps the single most helpful technology for Ukraine's forces in fending off Russia's invasion have been anti tank missiles. Now supplies are running worryingly low, but the weapons may already have done their most important work. First up though.

Thank you. Thank you.

Well, well, this is. This is it folks. Thank you everybody for coming out today.

Britain officially gets a new Prime Minister. This morning, Boris Johnson will visit the Queen at Balmoral Castle, her residence in Scotland, where he'll offer his resignation. Before setting off one more splash of bombastic outside his Downing street residence, he compared himself to a booster rocket that had fulfilled its function.

And I will be supporting Liz Truss and the new government every step of the way. Thank you all very much. Thank you and goodbye. Thank you.

The former Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, will make that same journey to Balmoral, where the Queen will fulfill her function, asking the new Prime Minister to form a government.

It's an honour to be elected as leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party.

Yesterday, Ms. Truss promised her party that she would be a Prime Minister of Action.

Because, my friends, I know that we will deliver. We will deliver and we will deliver and we and we.

But all that delivering won't be easy. She's inheriting an almighty to do list. She'll need all her political talents and her party behind her to stand a chance of success.

Liz Truss is a self styled radical, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, someone who's survived in the Tory Party for a long time and has canny political instincts.

Andrew Palmer is the Economist's Britain editor.

She's also socially a little awkward, has not shone particularly over the years, so is kind of a surprise as a Prime Minister. She's not a mystery. But her potential to surprise, either for bad or for good, is high.

And you say she's a sort of a surprise choice to end up in this position. How did she do?

So, yeah, so Truss started out as a youthful activist, as a Liberal Democrat, which is the centrist party in Britain and a small one, and she spent her time supporting the European Union and calling for the abolition of the monarchy and all the other things that Liberal Democrats like to do.

I agree with Paddy Ashdown when he said everybody in Britain should have the chance to be a somebody, but only one family can provide the head of state.

In her 20s, when she was at university at Oxford studying politics and economics, she turned towards conservatism and has been in the party ever since. She became an MP in 2010 and she joined the Cabinet in 2014.

Morning, Minister.

It's an image. David Cameron wants to stay with you after this reshuffle. A new Education Secretary, a new Environment Secretary, two other new faces around the Cabinet table, all women.

And she's been there ever since. So she has been in government for a long time. She's the longest serving member of Cabinet there is and so she's been auditioning for this role for a long time without ever being taken particularly seriously as.

A heavyweight political figure, and now has to be one. What has she promised in the course of campaigning to get there?

Well, this is an unusual election, right? So she has not had to campaign in front of the national electorate. She's had to win the votes of first members of Parliament and then Tory party members. So we need to bear that in mind. She has won the vote of party members by, in essence, being the closest to Thatcher, the most right wing and the most optimistic. So the message that she is selling is one, that Britain's best days are ahead, that she is going to revert to a package of measures which is very familiar from the Thatcher era. Tax cuts, deregulation, the free market, let rip. All of that is manna from heaven for Tory party members. And that in essence explains why she won.

So that's the broad scope of her plans. What are the actual policy initiatives we can expect?

Well, the main things that she's outlined are tax cuts.

I would run an unashamedly pro business government. That is why, that is why I would keep corporation tax low. I'd reverse the national insurance rise and I'd make sure that we are not putting on due regulation.

She is promising that in service of a big vision which is Britain needs to grow faster. So that's her single most clear message, if you like, that Britain is in a low growth Ruth and has to get out of it. And that's absolutely right. The question is how do you get there? So tax cuts is clearly one strut of the platform, deregulation is another. She's skeptical about some of the regulators that we have operating for utilities like water for example. She's skeptical of some of the ways that government operates and she wants to repeal EU laws. So as part of the Brexit dividend so called, she wants to get rid of all EU laws by the end of 2023. So we can expect lots of talks about bonfires of and tax cuts leading to growth and the need for supply side reforms. But some of the detail is sketchy to non existent and she promises a big plan within the first month and we'll have to see whether she has more to say than those two big kind of Thatcher era Reaganite kind of.

Packages which are coming at a time of real crisis for Britain. Maybe not the best time for smaller government and the like.

Yeah, that's right. So there's a sort of chronic problem that Britain's economy doesn't grow. And then there's an acute problem shared with large parts Europe that there is a massive inflationary shock driven largely by energy prices. So as of October, energy prices for households are going to jump massively. Those for businesses are already spiking and those rises are going to continue. So an average annual household energy bill could be as high as £6,000 early next year and it was at about £1,000 at the start of this year. So huge, huge and unaffordable tick ups in energy prices and truss first task is to unveil a package that helps people to survive an unaffordable shock. What that looks like, we don't know. Yet. But it appears that her sort of pragmatic side is going to kick in here. She's spent a lot of the campaign trail opposing the idea of handouts. In practice, there's very, very little that can be done except to help people. We're expecting a package within the next week which is tens of billions, perhaps even £100 billion worth of help, which is sort of not quite on the same scale as the pandemic, but we're in that kind of territory.

And what about the position that she finds herself in now? Is she strong enough to carry all of this off?

She's actually in a pretty weak position, historically, at least. So she got the lowest number of MPs supporting her in the first stage of this election of any Tory candidate that we've seen since the system was first used in 2001. And even the Tory Party members, although they preferred her to Rishi Sunak, her rival former Chancellor of the Exchequer, they didn't do so with tremendous enthusiasm. So the winning margin, 57% to 43%, is actually again the lowest since the system was first used. So she's not coming in on an overwhelming mandate. She has an impossibly difficult in treasure, and there's an election coming by the end of 2024. So unless she has a sort of storming start, which is very unlikely given this context, you could imagine the whispers starting up again. Is Truss the right person to lead us into an election? Maybe Johnson could make a comeback. You could imagine all of that starting up again.

And troublingly, perhaps, you mentioned Boris Johnson as if he will potentially play a role here in the Trust government, or at least in the shadow of what's his potential to still have some political power here?

Well, Johnson remains very popular within the Tory Party, so polls taken in August suggest that the membership of the party would still prefer him to Truss. I don't think he's going to remain quiet. He needs to make money to fund his lifestyle and so he will probably do that through writing columns that are candid and comment on politics. So he will be around. He's also this sort of frenzied hero worship of Winston Churchill almost requires him to try to be re elected again and to become Prime Minister again, as Churchill did. So I suspect probably what he will do is wait to see whether Truss absolutely craters, because it's a really, really terrible inheritance, hope that people forget that he played his part in that and then at some point re emerge.

And on that inheritance, what chances do you give her plan for for stoking growth in the way that she says.

It will well over a two year timeframe, which is to the election, especially given that the first job is to get past this sort of inflationary shock, a recession that's coming, et cetera. I doubt we're going to see anything. And I think she would acknowledge that herself. This is a sort of five to ten year plan to turn things around. But if she consistently talks about growth, if she starts to have all the sort of mechanisms of government singing from the same him sheet, if she puts flesh on the bones of some of her ideas like investment plans, then you could imagine her fighting the election in two years time on a basis of look, I know where we're going. I've started the journey. Let me finish.

Andrew, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

The prisons in Japan have traditionally been highly punitive. People atone for their crimes through forced labor. Talking is banned during much of the day and recreational activities, including reading, are allowed only at allotted times. And life can be particularly tough for one expanding part of the prison demographic.

Japan's prisoners, like the rest of its population, are growing older, and that is pushing authorities to take a more benevolent approach to adapt to the aging prison population.

Moeka Iida writes about Japan for the.

Economist and has been to Fuchsu prison in West Tokyo.

When people hear the word prison, they might think of these kind of rugged men with scars all over them, acting violent and loudly. But at least going to Japanese prisons, that's not the impression I got at all. It was very quiet and orderly and you see a lot of older people as well, and they have grey hair and rounded backs and they're very small and thin. And I didn't feel scared or intimidated for a second during my visit, but the atmosphere did feel certainly repressive in a way. So when I went, the people in prison were working, mostly doing repetitive manual labour, but during those work hours they're not allowed to talk to each other. So they have these very strict draconian rules. And that stems from the overall attitude of the criminal justice system, that prisoners should be punished.

And you say that the number of older people in those prisons is increasing by how much?

The number of criminals over the age of 65 has more than doubled over the past two decades. In 2020, older people accounted for more than 20% of those entering prison that year. Partly that has to do with aging and society as a whole. But what makes Japan unique is that a lot of older people themselves are committing these crimes, mostly petty ones like Shoplifting Western countries, the mechanism is a bit different. So usually older people in prison have committed crimes when they were much younger, and they grew old in jail while they were serving long sentences. Another thing in Japan is that older convicts have an exceptionally high recidivism rate, and that was very confusing. Usually, crime rates and recidivism rates drop as people grow older. Experts usually point to economic factors like poverty, as well as psychological ones like loneliness.

So how do all of those older people cope with the prison conditions that you describe as being so punitive?

Things are certainly not great for them. Prison life is very tough. They don't even have air conditioners, which is terrible, because in Japan, we have very hot summers. The especially draconian rules in Japanese prisons, like banning talking, for example, make the environment more repressive than prisons in other advanced nations. And that very monotonous environment is bad for people's mental and cognitive health. And for older people, it could potentially heighten the risk of dementia. As in, when we talk about preventing dementia, we usually encourage people to talk to others and stay social. You need to be exposed to stimuli. But Japanese prisons are about depriving people of all of that. Today, the Justice Ministry estimates that around 14% of inmates over the age 60 have symptoms of dementia.

But you mentioned that officials are changing the way the prison system works to account for this demographic shift.

Yes. So, again, traditionally, Japanese prisons are highly punitive, and forced labor is required for everyone. But these older people, who are physically weaker and often have trouble memorizing things, are unable to keep up with the workload. So a lot of prisons have started to reduce their workload or give them simpler tasks instead. And also, some prisons have started to bring in social workers and carers, and some have installed handrails. So they made changes to the infrastructure, and they've even started serving pureed food for older people who have trouble chewing. A handful of prisons have started to implement rehabilitation programs on a trial basis, which is aimed at maintaining older people's physical and mental health. I saw participants doing stretches and easy exercises, and some of them were sitting in front of a computer, responding to quizzes that ask very simple questions like, is a dandelion a flower? And other people were also folding Japanese origami paper. So in a sense, it was quite shocking and bizarre to see these activities. But all of that is basically supposed to simulate these people's minds. And in June this year, the Japanese government decided to amend the penal code, which will make labor no longer mandatory, and it will also require prisons across the country to introduce educational or rehabilitation programs as a way to help convicts reintegrate into society.

You describe some grim personal situations here. Is prison the right way to punish older people in the first place?

At a global level, especially during COVID there's been growing calls to consider releasing older prisoners by offering amnesty or relaxing sentencing guidelines to avoid incarcerating them in the first place. But it seems like for Japanese authorities these solutions are out of the question. Japanese law actually prohibits jailing people with psychological disorders, especially if they can't understand why they're being punished because there's no use in putting them in jail. They don't understand what they did wrong and they don't understand why they're even there. But all too often that rule is ignored. People rarely follow that rule. I spoke to Igarashi Hiroshi who runs a non profit focusing on rehabilitation of ex convicts and he put it very well. He said there's no use telling someone with dementia to regret their mistakes.

Mueka, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me. Jason. Foreign.

Since the war in Ukraine started, anti tank weapons have destroyed plenty of Russian armored vehicles. They were critical in helping to stall Russia's opening advance on the capital Kyiv. The lightest and most portable of these missile launchers have proved key for Ukrainian soldiers fighting against a larger and more powerful Russian army. But now the supply of those weapons is tailing off.

The Javelin is the state of the art in anti tank weapon systems.

David Hambling writes about technology and defence for the Economist.

It's a fire and forget missile, which means that once you've locked it onto the target, it will track that target even if it's moving from up to 2,500 metres away and destroy it. It's capable of destroying even the heaviest Russian armour with biggest defences. That performance does come at quite a high price though. It costs about $198,000 per shot. So every time you that's equivalent to the price of a Ferrari.

And so how much of a difference have the Javelins made in this war?

They have proved hugely effective. The information we're getting back from the front suggests that 90% of the time when you pull the trigger it will destroy even the top of the range Russian tanks at the other end at maximum ranges. So they have proved extremely effective. The problem is they are very expensive. They're only available in limited numbers. So in addition to the Javelins which the US is supplying Ukraine, they are also supplying large numbers of AT4s which are simpler anti tank weapons which cost about 100 times less than a Javelin. As the high tech weaponry gets used up, Ukraine is increasingly going to be relying on less advanced weapons which are supplied by the US and other nations.

And so are the cheaper models or the less high tech models going to be as effective against Russian forces?

Certainly some of them are still extremely effective. The next step down from the Javelin would be the Nlaw, the next generation light anti tank weapon which the UK is supplying. That has a range of a kilometre rather than 2.5 kilometres, but you've still got advanced guidance and a warhead that will knock out absolutely anything on the battlefield. And although NLAWs don't quite have the performance, they are also substantially cheaper. They're about $33,000 a shot, so you get about six of those for every Javelin.

So is the idea here that sooner or later the really high tech stuff simply won't be used on the battlefield?

The idea was that there would always be enough high tech weaponry, but given the current rates of supply, that just doesn't seem feasible. America has already sent something over 8,000 javelins to Ukraine, but they only make them at a rate of about 800 a year. They're trying to ramp up production, but it really doesn't seem likely that production is going to keep pace with the demand. So we're likely to see a lot more less fisted sophisticated anti tank weapons making their way to the front. That means at 4s and even more basic weapons like the Russian style RPGs.

And so does that have the potential to change the face of the war though? If Ukraine can't get its hands on the very best stuff, it's certainly going.

To make life harder for them if they don't have as many of the more advanced weapons as they would like. However, it's got to be said that even very basic anti tank weapons can do an extremely good job, particularly at close range and in urban combat. The other thing that we're looking at now is that Russia has lost an awful lot of tanks. Particularly their more modern versions have been at the cutting edge and those have been worn down quite substantially. They're now fielding much older models and those have thinner armour, less sophisticated defences, and those can be knocked out far more easily. As Ukraine now shifts away from defence into offence, portable anti tank weapons will become less important for offensive operations. What you need more of are things like artillery and long range rockets like Himars. So it may be that the anti tank launchers have already played their most important part in this conflict.

David, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. Drop us a line@podcastseconomist.com or leave us a rating wherever you listen. We'll see you back here tomorrow.