Liz Truss, Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, warned the U.K. economy is on a “very negative trajectory” and flagged bitcoin as part of the response to what she called a long-running erosion of sound money.
In a CoinDesk interview, Truss — who led a Conservative government for 45 days in 2022 and served as Chief Secretary to the Treasury until July 2019 — argued that decades of stagnation stem in large part from currency debasement: inflation and central bank money printing that have eaten away at the value of sterling. That deterioration, she said, has gone largely unchallenged in academia and government, where serious debate about money and monetary policy has become, in her words, “quite sinister” and “a taboo.”
Her skepticism about centralization and state control has helped push her toward crypto. Truss said she’s “very interested” in bitcoin (BTC $75,821.37) — a digital asset many libertarian-leaning observers view as a hedge against currency debasement. She first encountered bitcoin while working at the Treasury and even mentioned it there “to shake things up,” she recalled.
Truss framed bitcoin not simply as an investment but as part of a broader pushback against what she sees as growing centralized control through regulation, taxation and monetary policy. “A lot of the problems we have are due to debasement of our currency and lack of sound money,” she told CoinDesk, linking monetary failure to a wider decline in economic dynamism.
She warned the U.K. faces long-term decline driven by weak growth, rising state intervention and monetary missteps. “We are getting relatively poorer, very quickly,” she said, citing high taxes, heavy regulation and energy costs that sap incentives for entrepreneurs and make “the risk often not worth the reward.”
Looking back at the market turmoil spawned by Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s 2022 mini-budget, Truss rejected the idea that those policy moves alone caused the crisis. Instead, she said they exposed pre-existing fragilities — “a tinderbox in the system” — such as leveraged pension strategies that magnified market reactions.
Now out of government, Truss is focused on building a political movement around sovereignty and liberty. She’s involved with CPAC UK, a three-day conference aimed at rallying activists, entrepreneurs and free-market voices. “We need a movement of people who understand what the problem is,” she said, bluntly framing the stakes: “There are two choices, either we’re finished or we change it.”
For crypto observers, Truss’s comments underscore how concerns about inflation, monetary policy and state power continue to push some policymakers and former officials toward digital assets as a counterbalance to traditional fiat systems.
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