Crisis? What Crisis? Bullish Johnson To Downplay Cuts And Focus On Levelling Up

On the day he slashes £1,040 a year from the incomes of 6 million of the UK’s poorest people, Boris Johnson will insist that his “levelling up” agenda is the key to bringing hope and opportunity to left-behind communities around the country.

- Andrew Woodcock

The prime minister will deliver his keynote speech to the Conservative Party’s annual conference against a chorus of protest from charities warning that the £20-a-week cut in universal credit coming into effect today will drag half a million more people, including 200,000 children, below the poverty line and inflict hardship on millions more.

Mr Johnson will tell delegates in Manchester that his administration has the “guts” to deal with the biggest issues facing the country.

But after more than a week of queuing at empty petrol pumps, sharp spikes in energy costs and warnings from retailers that the country faces shortages of food and other goods in the run-up to Christmas, the prime minister denied that the UK was in crisis.

In response to concern that his demand for business to ramp up wages to attract recruits to shortage occupations like HGV drivers risks pushing up inflation and triggering rises in interest rates, he replied: “There is no alternative.”

And he laughed off warnings from farmers that they will soon be forced to cull and destroy as many as 120,000 pigs because of a lack of workers in meat-processing plants after Brexit ended free movement for EU staff, joking that the animals would have died anyway to provide bacon sandwiches.

The NFU’s Tom Bradshaw said the PM’s jokes showed “no empathy at all” to desperate farmers and “a lack of respect for what is going on out there”.