Boris Johnson RECAP: Prime Minister pledges ‘high-wage, low-tax economy’ in Conservative conference speech | Science and maths teachers to benefit from 'levelling-up premium' | Johnson says reducing GP and NHS waiting times is now the ‘priority of British people’
Scroll down for all the updates as they happened...
Boris Johnson LIVE: Latest updates as Prime Minister addresses Conservative Party Conference
Key Events
- PM said he wants to “unleash” the “spirit” of the nation.
- Johnson critical of Labour’s performance during the pandemic
- Tory leader urges people to go back to their workplaces
- PM says it is only responsible to raise taxes to fund healthcare
- Johnson pledges more trees, increasing rape prosecutions, tackling people traffickers
Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party conference has focused on “getting on with the job” – as the slogan in Manchester proclaims – despite queues at petrol stations, protesters clogging major roads and warnings of empty shelves at Christmas.
Here is a look at some of the key points from the Tory jamboree.
– Crisis? What crisis?
With the military driving petrol tankers, fears over festive shortages and pigs being culled because there are no abattoir workers to slaughter them for market, you might expect ministers at the Tory conference to be consumed with worry.
But that was far from the case as Boris Johnson sought to brush off the supply chain crisis as the growing pains of an economy returning to health following the Covid-19 pandemic.
Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme if there was a crisis, the Prime Minister said: “No, I think that on the contrary, what you’re seeing with the UK economy and indeed the global economy, is very largely in the supply chains the stresses and strains that you’d expect from a giant waking up, and that’s what’s happening.”
– President Johnson
Mr Johnson was everywhere during the course of the conference, finding time to visit a youth centre, inspect a railway improvement project, ride a bike and pose with a digger during his time in Manchester.
His domination of the airwaves left little room for his Cabinet ministers and his popularity within the party off the back of 2019’s election landslide gives him a greater grip on power than any of his predecessors since Tony Blair.
– So, what is levelling-up?
It’s at the heart of Mr Johnson’s agenda, but more than 30 conference fringe events were devoted to deciphering what levelling-up actually entails.
The Prime Minister’s view is that “you will find talent, genius, flair, imagination, enthusiasm – all of them evenly distributed around this country – but opportunity is not, and it is our mission as Conservatives to promote opportunity with every tool we have”.
To Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab, who has a marginal seat in Surrey, “levelling-up” needs to be sold to southern voters as an opportunity to grow the economy outside the South East to make sure other parts of the country pay a greater share of tax, easing the burden on them.
For Rachel Wolf, one of the architects of the 2019 election-winning manifesto, levelling-up needs to mean cleaning up “graffiti on cenotaphs” and bringing hanging baskets to towns to restore civic pride.
– The Iron Lady looms large
Mr Johnson said Margaret Thatcher would have approved of the Government’s tax hikes to repair the damage done by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Margaret Thatcher would not have borrowed more money now, I’ll tell you that much for free,” he said.
He also borrowed the Thatcherite slogan “there is no alternative” to explain his plan for the economy, insisting that short-term labour shortages should not mean a return to mass immigration but would instead lead to a high-skill, high-wage society.
– Low-tax, high-tax Tories
At every opportunity, Conservative ministers were eager to say that the Tories are the party of low taxes.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid, a Thatcherite former chancellor, said he was “confident” the Tories “will absolutely maintain our reputation as a low-tax party”.
This is despite the 1.25% hike to workers’ National Insurance Contributions which the Institute for Fiscal Studies said means “taxes will reach their highest sustained level in the UK”.
But there were some breaking ranks with the official message to warn against future hikes, such as Commons Leader Jacob Rees-Mogg, who argued taxation has hit “the limit”.
Boris Johnson will tell activists the Government is “embarking now on the change of direction that has been long overdue in the UK economy”.
“We are not going back to the same old broken model with low wages, low growth, low skills and low productivity, all of it enabled and assisted by uncontrolled immigration.”
He will say: “The answer is to control immigration, to allow people of talent to come to this country but not to use immigration as an excuse for failure to invest in people, in skills and in the equipment or machinery they need to do their jobs.”
Instead, he will promise “the greatest project that any government can embark on” by “uniting and levelling up across the UK”.
On the ending of the Universal Credit uplift, Dominic Raab said: “The £400 billion that the Government has put in to supporting the economy, workers and the most vulnerable is just clearly unsustainable long term. The UC uplift was always going to be temporary.”
The Deputy Prime Minister told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “What we’ve done – National Living Wage, personal allowance, the ending of the over-reliance on cheap labour from abroad which depresses wages – is so critical to our vision for the economy.”
Dominic Raab warned against returning to an “addiction” to “cheap, unskilled labour from abroad”.
The Deputy Prime Minister told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Our vision for the economy as we bounce back from this terrible pandemic, employment rising, youth unemployment going down, is also to make sure that wages are rising.
“Now, real wages are rising on the latest quarterly figures, but we need to support that and we can’t go back in the long term to being reliant on the addiction, if you like, of cheap, unskilled labour from abroad.”
He added: “It’s absolutely true that if we’re, over a long period of time, overly reliant on cheap, unskilled labour from abroad, we’re ducking some of the big productivity issues that we’ve got to address.”
Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab said the Government was “absolutely committed” to making sure people could meet the cost of living through rising wages.
“Our rate of increasing jobs is incredible, youth unemployment is going down, we have got a million job vacancies being advertised,” he told BBC Breakfast.
“There has got to be a question for the workers of this country – particularly those on low and middle income – of ‘have they got the wages that they need to deal with the cost of living?’
“We are absolutely committed to making sure they do.”
Mr Raab said the national living wage, increased income tax thresholds and an end to the “easy reliance” on cheap labour from abroad were parts of the answer.
“We want a high skill, high employment, high wages economy,” he said.
Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab has said the “overall, driving force of the economic plan is to see wages go up”.
The economy could “not rely on the cheap drug of unskilled labour from abroad” any more, he added.
Ahead of the Prime Minister’s Conservative Party conference speech, Mr Raab defended the £20 weekly cut to Universal Credit which begins to be implemented today.
“Of course the emergency support we have provided was because of the pandemic,” he told Sky News.
“As we come through the pandemic, with youth unemployment going down, employment going up, we need to transition.
“We don’t want to see people reliant on the welfare trap.”
Johnson to announce he has ‘guts’ to fix UK’s problems as benefits cut bites
The Prime Minister will declare he has the “guts” to reshape the British economy and solve major domestic problems on the same day as his administration was criticised for cutting the incomes of millions receiving benefits.
In his keynote Conservative Party conference speech, Boris Johnson will attempt to define his “levelling-up” agenda, arguing that by boosting “left behind” parts of the country it will ease pressure on the “overheating” south-east of England.
It comes as reports suggest the party leader is only weeks away from signing-off on a minimum wage rise as he looks to lead from the front in establishing higher pay in society.
What time is Boris Johnson speaking at Conservative Party Conference, what will he say, and how can I watch?
Boris Johnson is set to use his keynote speech at the Conservative Party conference on Wednesday to declare he has the “guts” to reshape the British economy and solve major domestic problems.