Thom Yorke has condemned the outgoing British prime minister, Liz Truss, calling the ruling Conservative Party “cats in a bag tearing themselves to pieces while the country suffers in extreme distress.” The Radiohead and Smile frontman paraphrased the OK Computer classic “No Surprises” in the censorious tweet, echoing calls from various public figures and Britain’s opposition parties for an immediate general election to end years of shambolic rule by the Conservatives.
Yorke wrote: “bring down this UK government, they do not speak for us, right the fuck now. they have no authority, no mandate, no clue, cats in a bag tearing themselves to pieces while the country suffers in extreme distress. enough of this shit. shame on them.”
Truss announced her resignation this morning (October 20) after 45 days in office, making her the shortest-serving head of state in British history. The main trigger for the resignation was the disastrous mini-budget that she and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng unveiled last month—a radical right-wing platform that feebly tackled the country’s cost-of-living crisis while lowering taxes and limiting public spending. The budget crashed the country’s economy and drew condemnation even from the libertarian economists and think tanks that had inspired it.
Truss, who had secured the party leadership with an aggressively anti-woke campaign, subsequently tanked the Conservative Party’s seemingly ironclad popularity among the British public—alienating factions of her own party—and scrambled to save face by firing Kwarteng, a move that failed to reassure the markets. The Conservative Party will now install its fifth prime minister in the 12 years since it took control from the politically centrist Labour Party in 2010.
Yorke rarely shies away from criticizing British politicians, particularly with regard to Brexit. In 2019, he said Theresa May, then prime minister, had used her position to “threaten chaos upon this land” and “bring into question the lives of millions in this country as a bargaining tool.”
Read about OK Computer and The Bends in Pitchfork’s new rundown of the best albums of the 1990s:
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