Markus Andrews

Boris Johnson says teachers will get an extra £3k to teach science or mathsBoris Johnson closed the Conservative Party conference today with a keynote speech praising the NHS, confirming the need for a new Tory economic model, and launching an offensive on Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.He also unveiled a £3,000 “levelling up premium” to encourage talented maths and science teachers to go and work in disadvantaged areas – the only policy he announced in 45 minutes. However, as it turns out, an almost identical scheme was first announced in 2019 then scrapped the following year. Sam Freedman, a former Department for Education (DfE) adviser, said the old programme was “pretty similar” to what was announced today, “but they just stuck levelling up at the front of it”. He told The Independent: “Now we’ve got an overheating labour market, recruitment has fallen through the floor and they’ve just thought we’ve got a real problem again so they’ve just unscrapped some of the financial perks.”It comes amid a wave of criticism for the PM’s address, which Labour chair Anneliese Dodds branded “empty”, The Spectator’s Katy Balls said was “big on rhetoric rather than policy, and The Mirror’s Pippa Crerar called “the most policy-lite – and joke-heavy – speech I can remember covering”.Mr Johnson found time to condemn the “woke culture” threatening to “cancel” historical figures too. Using Winston Churchill as an example – after the former war prime minister was accused of being a racist last year – he said the Tories would not let people “erase Britain’s history”. Follow our live coverage belowShow latest update

1633531694Patel accused of ‘weaponising violence against women’ after speechPriti Patel has been accused of weaponising violence against women to justify new laws that will “curtail freedom and deepen inequality.”The End Violence Against Women (EVAW) Coalition, which includes Rape Crisis, Refuge, Women’s Aid and other organisations supporting victims, called for laws championed by the home secretary in her Conservative Party conference speech to be scrapped, reports our home affairs correspondent Lizzie Dearden. Ms Patel announced an inquiry into Sarah Everard’s murderer, saying that “such unconscionable crimes and acts of violence against women and girls have no place in our society”. She then went on to endorse the infamous Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which a huge number of women and girls denounced after police officers became violent towards them at a vigil held for Sarah back in March.EVAW have actually called for the bill, which contains new restrictions on protest and laws that discriminate against Travellers, to be dropped.Sam Hancock6 October 2021 15:481633531038PM’s ‘vacuous’ speech ignored many crises facing UK, says DoddsAnneliese Dodds, the Labour party chair, has described Boris Johnson’s speech as vacuous and said it ignored crises affecting Britons such as cuts to Universal Credit. In a statement she 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.Britain deserves a fairer, greener and more secure future. Last week Labour set out how we can get there. This week it’s clear that after over a decade in power the Conservatives don’t have a clue.”In a tweet, she added: “Cancel the cut.” More

Rich with jokes, but devoid of new policy announcements – or a plan for “levelling up” – Boris Johnson’s crowd-pleasing Manchester speech was also peppered with inaccuracies.The claim:“After years of stagnation – more than a decade – wages are going up, faster than before the pandemic began.”The reality:The respected Institute for Fiscal Studies says wages are rising no faster than over recent years. Furthermore – while pay is up by about 4 per cent – inflation is above 3 per cent, so there is no “significant wage growth”.The claim:“We will make this country an even more attractive destination for foreign direct investment. We are already the number one.”The reality:Last month’s UN World Investment Report said foreign investment into the UK had “declined for the second year in a row” – leaving the UK the 16th largest recipient, down “five positions”.The claim:“It was not the government that made the wonder drug. It was capitalism that ensured that we had a vaccine in less than a year.”The reality:The AstraZeneca jab was made by scientists at Oxford University – through a programme that was overwhelmingly funded by taxpayers and charities, with less than 2 per cent from private funding.The claim:“We are going to use our Brexit freedoms to do things differently …. we have seen off the European Super League and protected grassroots football. We are doing at least eight freeports.”The reality:The Super League had nothing to do with the EU or Brexit – it was a private venture – while freeports were entirely possible as an EU member. In fact, the UK used to have seven.The claim:“We have done 68 free trade deals.”The reality:All but two are “rollovers” of deals that the UK already enjoyed as an EU member. The Japan deal added no significant extra, trade experts found – while the agreement with the EU itself is vastly inferior, causing a massive slump in exports.The claim:“This party that has looked after the NHS for most of its history should be the one to rise to the challenge – 48 new hospitals.”The reality:Many of the 48 promised are new units at existing hospitals, or major refurbishments of them, while others are rebuilds of community hospitals. In August, it was revealed that NHS bosses had been ordered to describe all such projects as “a new hospital”.The claim:“When I stood on the steps of Downing Street, I promised to fix this [social care] crisis. This government …. is going to get social care done.”The reality:In that speech, in July 2019, the prime minister said he already had “a clear plan we have prepared”. The plan took two years to emerge – and the vast majority of new funding will go to the NHS, not social careThe claim:Labour “decided to oppose step four of the roadmap in July”, which would have meant the UK “would still be in lockdown”.The reality:Labour supported the lifting of social distancing restrictions – the key aspect of step four – reserving its criticism for ending the requirement to wear masks in crowded indoor settings and the lifting of work-from-home guidance. More

Boris Johnson has unveiled a £3,000 premium to encourage talented maths and science teachers to go and work in disadvantaged areas — just a year after scrapping a similar programme.Speaking at the Conservative Party conference, the prime minister said there was “absolutely no reason” why some children in the country “should lag behind”, as he set out the new version of an old scheme.It formed the only policy announcement of his keynote speech, as he ignored benefit cuts, the cost of living crisis and petrol queues while extolling the virtues of the government’s “levelling up” agenda.“To level up — on top of the increase which means every teacher starts with a salary of £30,000, we’re announcing today a levelling up premium of up to £3,000 to send maths and science teachers to the places that need them most,” Mr Johnson told the Tory faithful.No 10 later added the premium would be a one-off payment ranging between £1,000 and £3,000 — costing the Treasury £60 million — and teachers will have to be in the first five years of their career.However, it quickly emerged that the scheme resembled one announced by the Department for Education (DfE) in 2019 for teachers in “uplift areas”, such as Blackpool and Salford, which was scrapped the following year.Sam Freedman, a former adviser to Michael Gove at the department during the coalition, said the old programme was “pretty similar” to what was announced today, “but they just stuck levelling up at the front of it”.“They scrapped it last year. What happened was recruitment shot up at the height of the pandemic because obviously other jobs weren’t available, lots of people were on furlough,” he told The Independent.“And then now obviously we’ve got an overheating labour market, recruitment has fallen through the floor and they’ve just thought we’ve got a real problem again so they’ve just unscrapped some of the financial perks.”He added: “They are U-turning on rash decision that was made when there was a brief surge in recruitment”.Labour’s shadow education secretary Kate Green said: “The premium announced today is a less generous recycling an old policy that Boris Johnson’s government scrapped just a year ago”.The announcement also comes after the government faced intense criticism for the money invested in education to help children catch up on lost learning due to the Covid-19 pandemic.Earlier this year, the government’s education tsar, Sir Kevan Collins, resigned from his position, describing a £1.4 billion funding package as falling “far short of what is needed”.“A half-hearted approach risks failing hundreds of thousands of pupils,” Sir Kevan said at the time, adding the support “does not come close to meeting the scale of the challenge”.During his speech on Wednesday, Mr Johnson also praised the work of Brampton Manor academy in East Ham — “an area that for decades has been one the most disadvantaged in London”.“It now sends more kids to Oxbridge than Eton,” the prime minister added. “If you want proof of what I mean by unleashing potential and levelling up, look at Brampton Manor.”In August the school celebrated after 55 pupils received the required A-Level grades to meet their offers for a place at either Oxford or Cambridge university, compared to 48 from Eton College — a private school attended by the prime minister.The majority of students at Brampton Manor are from ethnic minority backgrounds, in receipt of free school meals (FSMs), or will be the first in their family to attend university.“We can do it — there is absolutely no reason why the kids of this country should lag behind and why so many should be able to read or write or do basic mathematics at 11,” Mr Johnson told delegates gathered in Manchester.Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “There are challenges in recruiting enough maths and science teachers in general and this can be particularly acute for schools in disadvantaged areas.“So, on the face of it, this sounds like a good idea and we look forward to seeing more details of how this scheme will work.“But there is a pressing need to look more widely at the challenges around recruiting and retaining enough teachers in the profession in general as teacher shortages have been a problem for many years.“One of the problems is that the real value of salaries has fallen over the course of the past decade as a result of the Government’s austerity agenda. Its decision to freeze pay this year has made matters worse.” More

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.” More

The foreign minister of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus on Wednesday urged Lebanon s new government to implement reforms quickly, in order for the international community to unlock aid to crisis-stricken Lebanon. Nikos Christodoulides is the first foreign minister from the European Union to visit Lebanon since Prime Minister Najib Mikati’s Cabinet took office last month. Mikati has pledged to work toward quick reforms in the small Mideast nation notorious for corruption and now on the verge of bankruptcy. The World Bank has described Lebanon’s economic and financial crisis, which started two years ago, as one of the worst the world has seen since the mid-1850s. The national currency has collapsed and inflation has soared, plunging most of the population into sudden poverty. The crisis has been worsened by the coronavirus pandemic and the massive explosion at Beirut’s port in August 2020 that wiped out the facility and badly damaged large parts of the city. “Lebanon stands at a critical crossroads and the new government has to face substantial challenges,” Christodoulides told reporters after meeting Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib in Beirut.“It is paramount that the necessary actions and reforms be taken swiftly, in order for the international community to be able to unlock the aid it has pledged to Lebanon in the past,” Christodoulides added.Lebanon resumed contacts with the International Monetary Fund in recent days and hopes to soon resume talks over a bailout package. The talks were suspended last year.Other countries have conditioned financial assistance or investments in Lebanon on its government implementing badly needed and radical reforms. Separately, Jordan agreed Wednesday to supply Lebanon with electricity through Syria and said that work is underway on a plan and a timetable on how to implement the deliveries. Jordan’s energy minister, Hala Zawati, made the announcement after a meeting in Amman with her counterparts from Lebanon and Syria. The meeting comes after last month’s agreement to supply Lebanon, where electricity shortages are critical, with Egyptian natural gas through Jordan and Syria. Zawati said the three ministers agreed on supplying Lebanon with “some of its electricity needs” through the Syrian power network. Electricity cuts in Lebanon have been a decades-long fixture; they now for about 22 hours a day. Most of the Lebanese rely on private generators for power as state company supplies are limited.Syrian Energy Minister Ghassan al-Zamel said his ministry is working on fixing the network badly damaged by his country’s 10-year civil war. Jordan’s Prime Minister Bisher Khasawneh visited Lebanon last week and said there are efforts to provide Lebanon with some electricity from Jordan. Lebanon’s energy minister Walid Fayad said work is underway on funding such an agreement. Washington, which has imposed various sanctions on Syrian officials and entities, had endorsed such a deal to help Lebanon with its energy crisis. More

Boris Johnson has used his Tory conference speech to launch an extended personal attack on Keir Starmer.Branding the Labour leader a “lefty Islington lawyer” Boris Johnson accused Sir Keir of being a “human weathervane, the Starmer-Chameleon”.In a keynote address relatively light on policy but filled with invective for his opposition counterpart, the prime minister characterised politics as a battle between a “radical, optimistic Conservatism versus a tired old Labour”.”Did you see them in Brighton last week – hopelessly divided I though they looked, their leader like a seriously rattled bus conductor, pushed this way and that by a Corbynista mob of selotape-spectacled sans-culottes,” he said. “Or the skipper of a cruise liner that’s been captured by Somali pirates, desperately trying to negotiate a change of course and then changing his mind.”He accused Sir Keir of “flapping with all the conviction of a damp tea-towel” during the pandemic, stating: “Let’s forgive him on the basis that he probably didn’t know what he was talking about.”And he added: “In previous national crises Labour leaders have opted to minimise public anxiety and confusion by not trying to score cheap party-political points: one thinks of Attlee or even Michael Foot in the Falklands crisis, and sadly that was not the approach taken by Captain Hindsight: attacking one week, rowing in behind when it seemed to be working – the human weathervane, the Starmer-Chameleon.”Mr Johnson claimed Labour’s opposition step four of his Covid unlocking roadmap in July means the UK would “still be in lockdown” had he listened to “Captain Hindsight”.”If Columbus had listened to captain hindsight he’d have been famous for having discovered Tenerife,” he quipped, to applause from the Tory faithful.The rest of the PM’s speech largely focused on the concept of “levelling-up” which he said would raise productivity. Responding to the speech, Anneliese Dodds , Labour’s party chair, 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 six million families by over £1,000 a year.“Britain deserves a fairer, greener and more secure future. Last week Labour set out how we can get there. This week it’s clear that after over a decade in power the Conservatives don’t have a clue.” More

Gary Neville has said it was “brutal” to reduce Universal Credit payments at this time, as a £20-a-week cut came into force. An estimated six million were set to be hit by a reduction in income as the uplift – introduced at the start of the pandemic – stopped being implemented.Former England footballer Neville joined charities and think-tanks in criticising the move in an interview on Wednesday – the day the changes started being implemented. “Honestly, to remove Universal Credit payments at this moment in time, it is brutal,” he told Good Morning Britain (GMB). He continued: “Let’s be clear. It is brutal.” His comments came after former health minister Edwina Currie told GMB it “doesn’t make any kind of sense to pay people to stay at home” and the “best benefit is a job”. Neville told the programme: “I trust the population of this country. I work on the theory that people at home aren’t sitting there lazy. “They really want a good job. They really want to get good pay. They really want their mental health to be sorted.”The football pundit added: “They aren’t there sitting and thinking, ‘I’m going to take the chancellor’s money and live off their money for the next 10, 15 years and do nothing’.”From Wednesday, no assessments will include the £20-a-week uplift to Universal Credit, which came into force during the Covid pandemic to support the UK’s poorest. This change means that from 13 October – a week later – no payments will be received that include the extra money.Food banks have said they were expecting a surge in demand for their services following the changes, which have sparked concerns hundreds of thousands will be plunged into poverty.Dominic Raab, the deputy prime minister, defended the £20 weekly cut on Wednesday, as the move faced fierce backlash from charities. “As we come through the pandemic, with youth unemployment going down, employment going up, we need to transition,” he told Sky News. “We don’t want to see people reliant on the welfare trap.”A government spokesperson said: “We’ve always been clear that the uplift to Universal Credit was temporary. It was designed to help claimants through the economic shock and financial disruption of the toughest stages of the pandemic, and it has done so.“Universal Credit will continue to provide vital support for those both in and out of work and it’s right that the government should focus on our Plan for Jobs, supporting people back into work and supporting those already employed to progress and earn more.” More

Boris Johnson has been talking about “levelling up” since at least the 2019 election, but critics say he hasn’t sufficiently explained what it is.His first in-person Tory conference speech on Wednesday was a major chance for the prime minister to put meat on the bones of the slogan he’s now been using for years.The idea is yet to cut through: polling by Opinium in August 2021 found that just 1 in 5 people are clear what “levelling up” actually means.Did the prime minister succeed in fleshing out the term? On the one hand, Johnson certainly elaborated at length about what “levelling up” meant in theory and the thinking behind it.But on the other hand, he did not announce any significant new policies to achieve the aim, or explain whether or how his party would actually “level up”. The prime minister said the slogan was about “offering hope and opportunity to those areas that have felt left behind”.But he argued that eliminating this disparity would not just be positive for those areas, but also others where problems are sometimes caused by their success – or the “the sheer lust of other people to live in or near” them.These problems included environmental concerns, overcrowded infrastructure, and “ugly new homes”, he said, which could be a drag on productivity.And he suggested that the issue was more significant than just a north-south divide, arguing that there are “aching gaps within the regions themselves”. This is certainly borne out by the figures.”It helps to take the pressure off parts of the overheating South East while simultaneously offering hope and opportunity to those areas that have felt left behind,” he said.And the PM argued that this would help improve productivity across the board and make the country richer.”The idea in a nutshell it is that you will find talent genius flair imagination enthusiasm everywhere in this country all of them evenly distributed,” he told Tory members. “But opportunity is not, and it is our mission as conservatives to promote opportunity with every tool we have.”This all sounds quite reasonable in theory. But is he really using “every tool that we have”?When it comes to policy the prime minister essentially had one announcement: a “levelling up premium” worth up to £3,000 to encourage science and maths teachers to head to and teach in more deprived areas of the country. The policy seems laudable, and may or may not improve the supply of the best teachers in two subject areas. But it is clearly not going to put in motion the kind of fundamental shift in wealth and power the prime minister is talking about. It is also a re-hash of a similar, recently scrapped scheme that covered more subjects.Notably, before the speech it was heavily briefed that there would be some major transport policy announcement for the north, perhaps a fleshing out of Northern Powerhouse Rail, the east-west line planned to link across the Pennines. There wasn’t one – which rail industry sources interpret as bad news for the scale and scope of any investments the government is planning to make. NRP is a can that’s been kicked down the road since George Osbrone was chancellor, and there is still no detailed plan for what it will involve. The prime minister made a good case for reducing regional inequality and investing in areas that have not been invested in for too long. But until he actually takes action to do this, at the head of the government he leads with a vast majority, it is hard to see how it is more than a slogan. More