Liz Truss has hired a law firm whose largest office is in Tel Aviv to send a cease and desist letter to Keir Starmer asking him to stop saying she crashed the economy.
A letter sent to the prime minister by lawyers from Asserson accuses him of making “false and misleading” comments that Truss “crashed the economy” or was “crashing the economy”, which it claims are defamatory.
Asserson, founder by British lawyer Trevor Asserson, has its headquarters in London but its largest office is in the heart of Tel Aviv’s business district.
Trevor Asserson
Based in the Azrieli Center, its staff work primarily in the English legal system, which is often used to settle international disputes.
“Of particular concern are the false and defamatory public statements you made about our client in the lead-up to the UK general election from late May 2024,” the letter sent to Starmer on behalf of the former prime minister claims.
Truss’s lawyers then claim that references to her having crashed the economy “were likely to materially impact public opinion” during the July 2024 general election, when she lost her Norfolk seat.
Asked to comment on the cease and desist letter, a Downing Street spokesperson said Starmer had no plans to moderate his language when discussing Truss’s economic record.
Founded in 2005, Asserson Law initially offered English legal services from its offshore location. But it has expanded from dispute regulation services to become a Legal 500-ranked, full-service law firm, offering dispute resolution, real estate, corporate, finance and commercial advice, under both English law and US law.
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Trevor Asserson, who lives in Jerusalem with his family, is the firm’s senior partner and has a number of public interest claims on behalf of various causes – founding bbcwatch, which analyses BBC media coverage of the Middle East.
Last year he produced a report into the BBC’s reporting of the war in Gaza, and alleged the corporation was biased against Israel and had breached impartiality rules on multiple occasions.
The Asserson Report received praise from several communal organisations, although some questioned whether the author’s track record as an outspoken critic of the BBC in relation to Israel left him open to charges of bias himself.
But the author said he had used AI working alongside a team of Israeli data scientists to ensure the 199-page report adopted an impartial approach to its analysis.
The letter to Starmer refers to comments made in June 2024. It alleges that he made the claims at “a time when you knew or ought to have known that those statements were false; and the statements were likely to materially impact public opinion of our client whilst she was standing as the parliamentary candidate for the Conservative Party in South West Norfolk”.
The letter argues that the market movement during Truss’s tenure in September and October 2022 should not be classified as a crash of the economy.
