Critics Rage as Liz Truss Is Entitled to $130K Annual Allowance After Just 44 Days in Office
DUD MONEY
The U.K.’s opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer has joined calls for Liz Truss to give up the roughly $130,000 a year of public money she is set to be entitled to as a former British prime minister. “She should turn it down,” Starmer said during a TV appearance Friday. “I think that’s the right thing to do. She’s done 44 days in office, she’s not really entitled to it, she should turn it down and not take it.” The generous allowance was first made available after the resignation of Margaret Thatcher in order to provide assistance to former prime ministers still active in public affairs. But after the economic disaster of Truss’ unprecedentedly short tenure, union bosses say it would be obscene for her to take the cash. “At a time when one in five civil servants are using food banks and 35 percent have skipped meals because they have no food, it’s grotesque that Liz Truss can walk away with what is effectively a £115,000 bonus,” Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, told The Guardian.