Boris Johnson ignored benefit cuts, the cost of living crisis and petrol queues as he boasted to Conservative conference that he would ‘level up’ the UK.
In a 45-minute speech which contained just one new policy, the prime minister trashed the record of former Tory administrations, saying only he had the “guts” to tackle the nation’s most deep-seated problems.
He promised delegates that by investing in new homes, jobs and infrastructure in disadvantaged areas, he would solve the UK’s long-standing productivity problems by cutting the cost of housing, commuting and communications.
And he told the largely southern Tory delegates at the Manchester conference that boosting the north and Midlands would take development pressure off the wealthy towns and villages of the leafy shires.
Mr Johnson promised to unleash the “unique spirit” which he said could be found in British people from NHS nurses to entrepreneurs.
And he sought to recruit the England football team – along with tennis star Emma Raducanu and the GB Olympics squad – into his vision of national unity despite members of his own cabinet suggesting it was right to boo them if they took the knee at the Euro 2020 tournament earlier this year.
But he made no mention of the £20-a-week cut to Universal Credit which from today will slash £1,040 a year from the incomes of the country’s 6m poorest households.
And he did not address the shortage of labour in the food-processing and farming industries which has created the spectre of mass culls of pigs, fruit rotting in the fields and empty shelves in the run-up to Christmas.
The speech come on the 14th day of the fuel crisis, with the Petrol Retailers Association saying that more than one in eight – 13 per cent – of independent forecourts in London and the southeast were still dry.
Unions challenged the PM’s claim that wages were now rising for the low-paid, pointing to the pay freeze imposed on millions of public sector staff and the rising inflation which, at 3 per cent, is eating into the value of settlements for workers such as nurses.
And anti-poverty campaigners said the PM’s upbeat tone was at odds with the despair of the families of unemployed and low-paid workers facing a cut in incomes at a time of rising taxes and soaring prices for heating and food.
Katie Schmuecker of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said: “The prime minister has not had the guts to look the millions of people whose incomes are being cut today in the eye and tell them how they are expected to get through the year ahead.”
The general secretary of the TUC, Frances O’Grady, said: “If Boris Johnson was serious about levelling up Britain, he wouldn’t be slashing universal credit in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.
“The PM is in no position to lecture people on wages when he is holding down the pay of millions of key workers in the public sector.”
And the CBI warned that Mr Johnson’s call for businesses to hike pay to attract homegrown workers to replace cheap migrant labour lost because of Brexit was a recipe for inflation.
“Ambition on wages without action on investment and productivity is ultimately just a pathway for higher prices,” said director general Tony Danker.
In the one new announcement of a speech which focused more on grand visions than policy detail, Mr Johnson promised a one-off payment worth up to £3,000 for new maths and science teachers in disadvantaged areas.
But the “levelling up premium” scheme was essentially a reworked revival of a recently-scrapped fund to attract top teachers to problem schools.
It built on what Mr Johnson said was the definition of “levelling up” in a nutshell: “That you will find talent, genius, flair, imagination, enthusiasm everywhere in this country, all of them evenly distributed, but opportunity is not.
“And it is our mission as Conservatives to promote opportunity with every tool we have.”
He said that the levelling up programme – due to be spelt out in greater detail in a White Paper later this year – would “solve the national productivity puzzle” by fixing the “broken” housing market with affordable homes near to people’s place of work, providing gigabit broadband, developing transport infrastructure and investing in skills.
This, he told applauding delegates, would lead to greater investment, improved growth and lower taxes.
Mr Johnson invoked the memory of Margaret Thatcher to justify to delegates his decision to increase National Insurance by 1.25 per cent to fund the NHS and social care in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has brought the overall tax burden to its highest as a share of national income since the Second World War.
The tax-cutting Conservative totem “would not have ignored this meteorite that has just crashed through the public finances”, he said, but would have accepted that borrowing to deal with the consequences of coronavirus would just mean higher interest rates and taxes down the line.
Mr Johnson was accused of a “bare-faced lie” as he claimed that credit for the development and deployment of the UK’s AstraZeneca vaccine should go to “capitalism”, despite it being developed at publicly-funded Oxford University, backed by public money and rolled out by the NHS.
And he claimed that Brexit had enabled the UK to create its own vaccination programme, stop football’s European Super League, develop freeports and join the Aukus military alliance even though all would have been possible under EU membership.
He said that EU membership had allowed the development of a “broken” low-wage, low-productivity economic model in the UK, dependent on the cheap labour made available by free movement.
Businesses had used immigration as an excuse for “failure to invest in people, in skills and in the equipment, the facilities, the machinery they need to do their jobs”, and could not be allowed to take the same route out of the current labour shortages, he said.
In a speech heavy with jokes and wordplay, Johnson branded Labour rival Sir Keir Starmer as “a seriously rattled bus conductor, pushed this way and that by a Corbynista mob of sellotape-spectacled sans culottes”.
And he came close to accusing his opposition of condoning drug-use, claiming that Labour’s policies were dreamt up in the”powder rooms of north London dinner parties”.
Journalists attempting to cover Mr Johnson’s speech in Manchester were frustrated by the party’s failure to provide a written text – only to find that emails containing his words had been automatically directed to the “junk” basket on their laptops.
Labour chair Anneliese Dodds said: “Boris Johnson’s vacuous speech summed up this whole Conservative conference. The PM talked more about beavers than he did about action to tackle the multiple crises facing working people up and down the country.
“Far from getting a grip on the spiralling costs of energy, fuel and food, the Tories are actively making things worse – cutting incomes today for 6 million families by over £1,000 a year.”
Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey branded the speech “the most out-of-touch display by a prime minister in decades”.
“The Conservative Party conference may as well be happening in a parallel universe,”said Sir Ed. “Johnson pretends that somehow long queues at the petrol station and empty shelves in the supermarket are all part of his cunning plan and blames anyone he can for the wreckage he is causing.”
But it also won a cool response from right-wing thinktanks for giving the state a big role in driving and directing economic growth.
Matthew Lesh of the free-market Adam Smith Institute said: “Boris’s rhetoric was bombastic but vacuous and economically illiterate. This was an agenda for levelling down to a centrally-planned, high-tax, low-productivity economy.”
And Mark Littlewood, director general of the Institute of Economic Affairs, said:”Boris Johnson’s rhetoric is always optimistic and enterprising, but insofar as there were actual policies behind it, they seemed to involve yet more state intervention and spending.”
