Liz Truss says ‘trans activists’ have infiltrated UK civil service
Liz Truss has made more claims about trans folks (Leon Neal/Getty Images)
The UK’s shortest-serving prime minister, Liz Truss, has told a right-wing conference in the US that the UK civil service contains “trans activists” and “environmental extremists”.
Truss, who announced her resignation as prime minister after just 44 days in office in 2022, addressed an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), at the National Harbor, in Maryland, on Wednesday (21 February).
She appeared on an international panel alongside Nigel Farage, the former leader of the Brexit party, former White House strategist and Breitbart executive Steve Bannon, and other speakers from around the world.
Truss, who earlier this week “took delight” in revealing the cover for the US version of her book, Ten Years to Save the West, told the audience that she ran for Number 10 because “Britain wasn’t growing” and the “state wasn’t delivering”.
She went on to say: “I wanted to cut taxes, reduce the administrative state, take back control as people talked about in the Brexit referendum. What I did face was a huge establishment backlash and a lot of it actually came from the state itself.
“People are joining the civil service who are essentially activists,’ she then claimed. “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 and, frankly, a hundred political appointees doesn’t even touch the sides in terms of dealing with them.”
This is not the first time Truss has made comments about the transgender community.
Earlier this month, she described supporters of LGBT people as “left-wing extremists” and previously expressed support for banning trans women from single-sex spaces and enacting laws that would prevent trans youth transitioning.
During the CPAC event, she claimed: “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 a democratically elected government actually unable to enact policies.”
Asked what a quango is, she explained: “[It’s] a quasi non-governmental organisation. In America, you call it the administrative state or the deep state. But we have more than 500 of these in Britain and they run everything.”
Truss, whose premiership famously failed to outlast the shelf-life of a lettuce, listed the Forestry Commission and the Environment Agency as such “deep state” actors, adding: “There’s a whole bunch of people and I describe them as the economic establishment, who fundamentally don’t want the status quo to change because they’re doing quite fine out of it.
“They don’t really care about the prospects of the average person in Britain and they didn’t want things to change, they didn’t want that power taken away.”
