Liz Truss is more of a class warrior than Jeremy Corbyn, only she's fighting for the rich – Tommy Sheppard MP

In my adult life I’ve known ten British Prime Ministers. I’ve seen four up close in the House of Commons. But I’ve never seen anything like this.

Liz Truss’ party conference speech was one of the worst I’ve ever heard from a Prime Minister. It was poorly written, divorced from common sense with a nasty Trumpian edge to it.

She railed against a new enemy, the “anti-growth coalition” of opposition parties, unions and environmentalists for causing the UK’s economic woes (despite her party being in power for the past 12 years).

In truth, she now leads an anti-reality coalition, where the gulf between the actual problems people face and the government’s prescription to deal with them gets even wider.

This week, we witnessed her ideology collide with that very reality. Her notion to abolish the top rate of income tax for those earning more than £3,000 a week, for example, imploded upon arrival. But she still wants to do it.

Make no mistake, Liz Truss is a class warrior – and more determined in that conflict than Jeremy Corbyn ever was. She is a Prime Minister for the one per cent and sees her role as the protector of wealth and privilege, to defend those with capital and ignore those without.

She is also a friend of the big corporations and has scrapped plans to increase taxes on profits, leaving the UK with the lowest corporate tax rate in the G20. Social spending will be sacrificed on the altar of more money for those already obscenely rich.

Liz Truss's speech to the Conservative party conference was 'divorced from common sense with a nasty Trumpian edge to it' (Picture: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)

However, her refusal to tax the energy companies is worst of all. A handful of giant companies stand to make £170 billion more profit than they had expected. That’s enough to run the entire NHS throughout the UK. And they are being allowed to just keep it.

This is money that comes from the gas and electric bills we all pay and that is being siphoned out of the real economy into corporate vaults.

Meanwhile, ordinary taxpayers are being offered a sop of a penny off income tax – a drop in the ocean for families facing doubling mortgage payments and quadrupled electricity bills.

True to form, the Tories intend to pay for this by cutting back on spending on public services, especially social security payments for the most vulnerable.

This will be the battle royale in parliament over the coming months. And even if we win that, corporate tax cuts will be funded by government borrowing, creating a liability we will all pay for.

This is a serious change in direction by a right-wing government and, as the Greenpeace protesters who disrupted Truss’s speech rightly point out, who voted for this?

Scotland certainly didn’t. We do not have to put up with this extremist government. We can choose to become a normal independent country, where the powers of the state are used to reduce inequality, rather than enhance it.

It’s time to stop being held back by the UK. We can do better than this.

Tommy Sheppard is the SNP MP for Edinburgh East