15 July 2023 , 17:54
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Liz Truss has been urged to come clean on who funds her new think tank, after links to right-wing US organisations were revealed.
After crashing the economy and tanking the pound with her disastrous mini budget last September, the failed former Prime Minister this week launched her ‘Growth Commission’ - a “task force” to “fix the economy.”
A spokesman for the body would only say it’s funded by “donations from private individuals.” But campaigners fear the body will try to influence ministers to give Ms Truss’ reckless policies another try - and have demanded to know where the money behind the group comes from.
“The Growth Commission isn't an innocent bystander. It is trying to set the government's agenda," Tom Brake, the Director of campaign group Unlock Democracy said. “That's why it is essential that everyone knows who is bankrolling it and whether it's their agenda they are pushing, or one that is beneficial to the UK as a whole."
He added: " Liz Truss must get the names of her donors out into the open, so we can judge for ourselves."
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Labour MP Clive Lewis said: “Not content with trashing the livelihoods of millions, Liz Truss is now busy acting as the mouthpiece of the very people and corporations her failed calamity budget sought to enrich. “It’s high time Truss came clean about who the Growth Commissions backers are. If the ideas of the group are so good and so beneficial then why not let us all thank and praise the generous benefactors behind her initiative?”
While Ms Truss doesn’t sit on the 13-strong board of “commissioners” herself, a string of “experts” linked to bodies pushing right-wing economics do. On his Democracy for Sale Substack newsletter, author and investigative journalist Peter Geoghean found almost a quarter of the board was made up of staff from the Mercartus Cente, a right-wing US think tank which has previously suggested climate change was “beneficial” and was “making humans better off.”
The chairman of the Mercatus Center, Tyler Cowen, and Mercatus Centre fellows Alden Abbott and Christine McDaniel are all listed on the Growth Commission.
In 2020, Mercatus was accused of promoting “flawed” research to “hobble” environmental regulation in Australia. And it has been heavily funded by the big oil-linked Koch family foundations.
Other members of the board have links to the Institute for Economic Affairs, the London-based think tank whose extreme free market ideology was a partial basis for Ms Truss and her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng ’s failed economic plan. And another commissioner, Stephen J Entin, comes from the US-based Tax Foundation, which backs slashing taxes for the rich.