Liz Truss’s energy costs package lacks important details

theguardian.com:

There are two main things to note about Liz Truss’s energy costs package. First, there is much detail to come. Also, it is an undeniable paradox that the first move of a prime minister surrounded by former Taxpayers’ Alliance staff is a £150bn state effort to fix commercial prices.

Much like Boris Johnson would never have wanted to be the prime minister to curtail people’s liberties more severely than anyone since wartime, it is fair to say that Truss would rather not begin her tenure in No 10 with what is known as the energy price guarantee.

One of the defining elements of Truss’s successful campaign to succeed Johnson was her repeated talk of tax cuts and suspending green levies as the primary way of helping people with soaring bills.

An early Truss campaign interview with the Financial Times even airily dismissed the idea of “handouts”. Future campaign messaging was less clear, but still resistant to what was disparagingly referred to as “Gordon Brown economics”.

As it has turned out, Truss has ended up being more or less what Brown argued for in early August, a call for a freeze on prices that pre-empted not just the government but even Brown’s own Labour party.

What changed was the sheer weight of political and, what you might even term, moral pressure.

Truss was told by an array of experts that failure to take bold action would create a humanitarian disaster, with millions of households cold or hungry or both, businesses collapsing en masse, with the impact on the economy, and especially on public health inequalities, felt for a generation.

One effect of the sheer one-sidedness of the argument is that it made Truss’s decision to U-turn – whatever her aides might argue, it is a U-turn, even a gradual one – politically