THERE may be one good thing to be said about Britain’s latest Tory Prime Minister: Liz Truss doesn’t hide that she’s an enemy of the working class.

Her predecessors Boris Johnson, Theresa May and David Cameron did — to an extent. Johnson hid it behind the jovial clown image, May behind a benign blandness and Cameron behind his “big society” One Nation Conservatism nonsense.

All of them liked to claim they were the torchbearers of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy — but Truss is the one who has truly been channelling Thatcher’s dogged resolve to crush the unions and disempower the working class.

Whether this will continue with quite such verve now that she no longer needs the approval of the party membership in the Tory shires only time will tell. But we should not be lulled into forgetting the glee with which she informed the hustings of the party faithful that it was her strong determination to unleash free-market forces, stamp out notions of redistribution and introduce more restrictions on workers’ rights.

Truss’s vehemence will weigh particularly heavily on the backs and shoulders of workers in rural communities where unionised workplaces are thin on the ground — and those that do exist struggle to recruit members, mainly owing to the fact that wages are so low that many workers can ill afford membership subscriptions; a Catch 22 situation if ever there was one.

The experience of one local woman I interviewed is illustrative. She is now retired. The majority of her working life was spent in the adult social care department of the local authority (LA) in Cornwall. She was a member of Unison and became a workplace rep just a year before she took early retirement on health grounds.

A year after retiring, in 2018, she decided she needed to take part-time work in order to top up the meagre LA pension she was living on.

The job she took was similar to the role she had with the LA, but this time the employer was in the so-called third sector, a local charity. All went well until the manager left, and the new manager decided to “tighten up” working practices.

“The atmosphere changed dramatically. Workers became anxious, distressed, confused and angry,” she recalled. “I suggested forming a workplace branch of Unite and offered to make all the necessary contacts and arrangements; out of the 20 departmental workers affected, only three responded positively.”

The majority of her colleagues found the concept of organising in a union scarily alien, scarier even than the intimidating management. The three agreeable workers soon withdrew their support as management tightened the screws. “I resigned shortly after,” she told me.

Many people living and working in rural locations will be familiar with such scenarios. And to add to the problem many coastal communities, like Cornwall, are plagued with insecure seasonal work rooted in the tourist industry and often in the gig economy.

Opportunities to organise are consequently very limited and unionisation is mainly confined to public-sector workplaces such as the NHS, social care and education, where nationally agreed terms and conditions of employment are in place.

It is interesting to note that one of Truss’s early headline policies on the campaign trail was to scrap such national public-sector pay agreements, in favour regional ones.

She was forced to retract that policy almost immediately because of the storm of protests from across the political and public spectrum. However, it remains a graphic example of her disdain for hard-won workers’ rights, the removal of which would likely hit rural and coastal communities hardest.

Despite this, or maybe because of it, militancy in Cornwall is on the rise. A sudden eruption of political activism first took off in Cornwall during the 2015-20 Corbyn project which swept Britain, to which Cornwall responded with huge energy and enthusiasm.

Many people became politicised for the first time — and they haven’t gone away, despite the best efforts of right-wing factions of the Labour Party in the region.

Over the last few years there has been a tidal wave of street protests: against the Police Bill, in support of Black Lives Matter and for radical action against the housing crisis — calling for second homes to be heavily taxed.

In the summer of 2021, the G7 summit landed in Carbis Bay near St Ives, which attracted protesters from across Britain participating in rallies, actions and demos which Cornish activists took the lead in organising and hosting, followed in the autumn by a huge protest march around Truro during Cop26.

The conscious awareness of the importance and value of workplace and community unions is also on the rise. Striking and picketing postal and railway workers have become a common sight on Cornwall’s streets this summer.

A branch of the community union Acorn has been active for a couple of years in Falmouth and Penryn. It has supported tenants blockading their homes against bailiffs and challenged ruthless private landlords and property agents over evictions which enable them to cash in on the lucrative second homes and Airbnb market.

It has successfully lobbied local councillors and held empowering activist training sessions in local communities.

The local Enough is Enough campaign and the People’s Assembly are attracting record numbers of people wanting to know what they can do against a vicious anti-working class Tory regime.

And so back to Truss — what does her ascent to the seat of power portend for rural and coastal communities such as Cornwall? Her contempt for working people, particularly those who have the audacity to organise and fight back, is unabashed.

Truss’s mantra throughout her leadership campaign has been her determination to crack down on trade union rights, to guarantee huge tax cuts for big business and the super-rich, all linked to the old right-wing lie of “trickle-down economics.” She wants to focus on economic growth at the expense of progressive taxation and social development — and of course, a massive increase in military spending — war being the final sanctuary of all arch-capitalists.

Because of the poverty endemic in rural and coastal communities, the very real threat of a collapse in living standards this winter could hit such places quite early in the season.

But the working-class fightback is on the rise, the stirrings of rebellion are everywhere — in towns, cities and villages, in urban, rural and coastal communities across Britain — and Cornwall is no exception.