Cabinet minister Michael Gove has suggested that Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner called the Conservatives “scum” last month because of her childhood in a poverty-stricken family.
“If you consider the circumstances under which she’s had to grow up, and what she’s achieved, then anyone can make a mistake,” Mr Gove told the Conservative Party’s conference in Manchester.
Ms Rayner has previously spoken about difficulties in her childhood and said that if she had grown up in “modern times” she “definitely” would have been taken away by social services.
It came as five people were arrested after former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith was allegedly assaulted by being hit on the head with a traffic cone.
Sir Iain said that he was pursued by a group on his way to a Brexit talk on the fringes of the conference on Monday afternoon.
Good morning, and welcome to The Independent’s rolling politics coverage as Day 2 of the Conservative Party conference gets going. Stay tuned as we bring you the latest updates from Manchester, where the summit is being held, Westminster and beyond.
Sunak pledges £500m to help people back into work after Covid
Rishi Sunak is to commit more than £500m in fresh funding to help people back into work as he seeks to stem the continuing turbulence of the coronavirus pandemic.
He will explain, during his first in-person speech at the conference as chancellor that the new funding will be used to help workers leaving the furlough scheme and unemployed over-50s back into work, while the “kickstart” scheme for young people will also be extended.
It comes after he resisted expanding all of the support announced during the pandemic, with the furlough scheme ending and the £20-a-week uplift to Universal Credit falling away.
Sam Blewett reports:
Chancellor admits unemployment will rise now furlough ended
Sky News’ Alan McGuinness reports the following:
PM accused of being out of touch with struggling pig farmers
Nick Allen, chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, has said he was “surprised” that Boris Johnson appeared to be unaware of problems facing pig farmers when questioned on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show.
Mr Allen added that tens of thousands of butchers are needed and the training period for each is around 18 months.
He told Sky News:
“We’ve been talking to government on a daily basis about the problems we’ve been having, so I’m somewhat surprised that he [Mr Johnson] wasn’t aware of the situation.
“We’re short of skilled-up butchers and these aren’t people you can just pull off the street and put in the process. It takes time to train these people and we’re about 10,000 to 15,000 people short.
“It takes 18 months to train a butcher and get them up and running, so we’re looking for some help here to manage the transition, not just stopping everything overnight.
“We’ve had a long-term reliance on non-UK labour and it’s going to take a long time to adjust.”
Farmer crisis could see pigs in blankets absent from Christmas table
Following my last post, Nick Allen said Christmas turkeys are likely to be from the continent this year due to labour shortages in Britain following Brexit, adding some foods like pigs in blankets may not be available.
“We’re not saying that there’s not going to be food on the table at Christmas, but we’re struggling to put the party food together – the pigs in blankets, the netting of gammons,” he said.
“But I suspect that food can be imported and probably the turkeys might not be British turkeys but they may end up being French, or even turkeys from further afield.
“We’re not saying there’s going to be desperate shortages, but there certainly won’t be the choices available for British food, that’s for certain.”
Blairs avoided £312,000 in tax by acquiring offshore firm
Tony and Cherie Blair avoided paying £312,000 in tax on the purchase of a London property by acquiring an offshore company, according to a trove of leaked documents.
The former British prime minister and his wife bought the £6.45m townhouse on Harcourt Street, Marylebone, in 2017 as an office for her legal advisory firm Omnia and her foundation for women, writes Daniel Keane.
The manner of the deal allowed the Blairs to avoid having to pay stamp duty, as the tax is not paid when the holding company of a property is acquired rather than the building directly. There is no suggestion the Blairs actively tried to avoid paying the tax and the transaction was not illegal.
More than 20% of petrol stations without fuel in London
Although better in much of the country, the fuel crisis persists in London and southeast England.
Gordon Balmer, chairman of the Petrol Retailers Association, said 22 per cent of filling stations remain without fuel in that region.
BP is the worst affected, he added.
NFU suggests govt must do more to get food on shelves
The president of the NFU appeared to go after the government this morning, saying there is “plenty of food out there” and more work simply needs to be done to get it on the shelves.
Minette Batters added Boris Johnson did not look to be “as well briefed as perhaps he should have been” on the issue, adding it was her job to get the facts across to him.
“There’s been a whole-chain approach from the NFU, the British retail consortium to the Hauliers Association and many others,” Ms Batters told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. “We’ve got to look at this as a whole supply chain approach, there’s plenty of food out there, we’ve got to get it on the shelves.”
Addressing people’s concerns over the union’s calls for help from foreign workers, she said: “I’ve continually reiterated it, we are part of national living wage, we are highly regulated in the food and farming sector, so it is no different to any other part of the economy, but we do have the most affordable food in Europe, that’s been an enormous success story for consumers that are facing rising costs on every level.
“They want to continue to have affordable food, we want to make sure, as Britain’s farmers, that they have that food, we need to get into the shelves. This is short term, things will change, but in the run-up to Christmas, we need to resolve this crisis.”
Sunak declines to rule out further tax hikes
Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, has declined to rule out a hike in income tax ahead of the next election or whether the government will allow councils to increase bills in order to pay for social care.
It comes after the Local Government Association (LGA) warned that council tax may have to rise to plug a black hole in social care, claiming that authorities in England face extra cost pressures of almost £8 billion by 2024/5 “just to keep vital local services running at today’s levels”.
Quizzed on whether he could guarantee the public won’t see a rise in council tax, Mr Sunak told Sky News: “Social care is funded by a max of different ways — one way is through local taxes, like council tax. Later in the year, we have something called the local government finance settlement, where the secretary of state for local government sets out all the plans for local government for the coming year.”
Our political correspondent Ashley Cowburn reports:
‘No magic wand’ to solve global supply chain issues – Sunak
Chancellor Rishi Sunak said this morning he cannot “wave a magic wand” to make global supply chain issues disappear as Britain faces shortages.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It’s reasonable that people expect us to do what we can.
“But we can’t wave a magic wand and make global supply chain challenges disappear overnight.”
Moving to discuss the pig industry crisis, Mr Sunak added: “With regards to butchers, my understanding is that those are indeed on the shortage occupation list that we already have.”
