Meat producers say Johnson talking ‘nonsense’ about reasons for labour shortage in sector – as it happened

• Queues for petrol and mass culls of pigs at farms because of a lack of abattoir workers are part of a necessary transition for Britain to emerge from a broken economic model based on low wages, Boris Johnson has argued. But the British Meat Processors Association said Johnson was talking “nonsense” about the reasons for the problem in its sector. (See 3.07pm.)

• Senior Tories have urged Johnson not to give up on low-tax Conservatism. (See 6.49pm.)

• The conference has opened with a battle cry against “woke aggression”, with cabinet ministers decrying “cancel culture” and expected to rail against leftwing bias at the BBC.

• A Tory MP has said that he hopes the current HGV driver shortage will lead to supermarket supply chains being dismantled. “It will mean that the farmer down the street will be able to sell their milk in the village shop like they did decades ago,” Chris Loder said. (see 4.10pm.)

• The Conservatives’ young women’s group has called for an investigation into “the apparent culture of misogyny in the police”, piling pressure on Johnson after he faced down calls for a major independent inquiry.

• Oliver Dowden, the party co-chair, has confirmed that the party is rethinking its planning reforms. (See 4.04pm.)

This is from my colleague Polly Toynbee, who is listening to Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader and former work and pensions secretary, at a fringe meeting. Duncan Smith is one of the Tories most opposed to the decision to cut universal credit by £20 a week this month.

Here is Anand Menon, the academic who runs the UK in a Changing Europe project, on the implications of the Tory MP Chris Loder’s call for supermarket supply chains to be dismantled. (See 4.10pm.)

Speaking at the TaxPayers’ Alliance fringe, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons, also claimed that the planned restoration of the House of Commons could cost up to £20bn. That was too much, he said:

I love the Palace of Westminster as much as anybody but it is not worth £10-20bn in public expenditure.

Rees-Mogg said the “basic works” of wiring and sewage does need doing but he argued that covered courtyards and an underground delivery system are unnecessary. “It does not need to spend huge amounts of taxpayers’ money but it needs to be done properly,” he said.

Boris Johnson spent the morning making this case for “red wall” Conservatism – a Ukip/Brexity version of the original that is different from the Conservatism of David Cameron and George Osborne. (See 12.42pm.)

But on the fringe senior Tories have been arguing vigorously for low-tax Conservatism. The two strands are not entirely incompatible (red wallers don’t like paying tax either), but they are in conflict; Johnsonism implies high public spending, which creates less space for tax cuts.

Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the backbench 1922 Committee, told a fringe meeting that the Tories had to restore their reputation as a low-tax party. He said:

One of the difficulties we have faced this year of course is that whilst Conservatives don’t like raising taxes, nor do Conservatives like constantly borrowing more and more money and leaving future generations to pay it back either.

I think a certain fiscal adjustment recognising the consequence of what has gone on over the last year and a half is understandable.

The question I guess is how do we turn that around and make sure there is a clear and plausible message for the next general election.

And if we want to go into the next general election with a credible reputation as the party that believes in the lowest taxes that can possibly be achieved in the circumstances, then we can’t, to quote Lynton Crosby, you can’t fatten a cow or a pig on market day.

You’ve got to start sooner than that. You’ve got to set out something well before, that is, how we intend to achieve that lower tax future again, and work to try and make people believe it.

And Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons, told a separate fringe meeting that the tax burden was as high as it could go. He said:

We are at the upper reaches of the reasonableness of the tax burden.

Even when tax rates have been considerably higher, the tax take has not been much higher.

Why on earth would you think higher rates in the 2020s would have a greater effect than they did in the 1960s and the 1970s.

I think we are about at the limit of what taxation can raise.

Rees-Mogg made the same argument in an interview with the Telegraph last week, saying Britain was being taxed “as highly as the country can afford”.

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Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, told a fringe meeting that a trade deal with the US was not the “be all and end all” for the UK. She said:

I don’t agree with you that that’s the be all and end all of trade.

My message to the Americans is ‘we’re ready when you are ready’ but there’s a whole world out there, there are lots of fast-growing parts of the world who want to do business with Britain and there’s a full pipeline of trade deals we are negotiating.

Brexiters used to be very keen on a UK-US free trade deal, but recently they have acknowledged that it is not a priority for Washington.

In her speech to the Conservative conference, Anne-Marie Trevelyan said that as well as being the international trade secretary she was also president of the Board of Trade – an ancient title normally never used, although famously revived by Michael Heseltine. She went on:

I’m proud to say that I’m the fourth female president of the Board of Trade since it was established in 1672.

Four women in 349 years.

A shocking statistic you’ll agree, that I’m glad to say is gradually being corrected.

Still, more progress than the Labour party have had with female leaders.

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In an interview with Times Radio this morning Oliver Dowden, the Conservative party co-chair, was asked if some of the party’s MPs still remained to be convinced about the PM’s “red wallism”. He replied:

Yes, and I think that’s why the theme of this conference is getting on with the job. We need to demonstrate to people that the people who put their trust in us, who put their trust in us in 2019, who voted for us in places where they’d never voted for us before, we’re actually going to get on with the job and deliver.

He also said he found the term “male privilege” crass. He explained:

I think it’s a bit too simplistic to simply talk in terms of male privilege. I don’t think, for example, if you’re an unemployed man on a council estate outside Newcastle, you’re going to feel particularly privileged, so I think it’s a bit of a crass term. But historically it has been the case that men have had more opportunities than women and society has rightly addressed that.

A reader points out that Boris Johnson’s language about the need for employers with labour shortages to pay high salaries (see 10.57am and 12.42pm) is the same as Joe Biden’s.

Sky’s Beth Rigby has been seeking some EU reaction to Liz Truss’s speech snubbing the bloc.

Although a Tory source has told Rigby that she should not read too much into the omission, the idea that it was not deliberate is fanciful. Much thought goes into deciding who gets a name check in a conference speech like this. Truss may well view EU countries as important allies but it is telling that, when speaking to a room full of Tory activists, she chose not to say so.

Here are the main points from Liz Truss’s conference speech. It was her first big speech as foreign secretary, and so it provided a glimpse what she will bring to the role that’s new. On the basis of this, she will be more hawkish than her predecessor, and less diplomatic.

• Truss omitted the EU from a list of the UK’s friends and allies. She said:

We must win this battle for economic influence … and this starts with forging closer ties with our friends and allies including:

o The G7 and Nato …

o Our Pacific partners like Australia, Japan and Mexico …

o The great democracy of India and our friends across the Commonwealth …

o Israel …

o South Korea

o The Gulf states …

o Those countries who escaped the USSR and fought for freedom … like the so-called Visegrad Fourand the Baltic 3 …

o And of course our vital strategic partner the United States.

The G7 and Nato are both organisations in which EU countries feature prominently, and the Visegrad Four (the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary) and the Baltic 3 (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) are all in the EU. But it was striking that Truss did not mention the EU directly, or refer to any EU country by name. Just after Brexit it might have been awkward including the EU in a passage about forging “closer ties”. But she did not mention the EU anywhere else in the speech either. It was as if it had been airbrushed from her world view.

• She signalled that the UK should adopt a “tough” approach to China. She said:

We will build coalitions of the willing to advance these causes.

We will also be tough on those who don’t share our values and don’t play by the rules.

It is important we trade with China, but we must make sure it is reliable trade … that it avoids strategic dependency … and that it does not involve the violation of intellectual property rights or forced technology transfer.

The world is safer and more prosperous when countries abide by their international obligations.

(The EU may want to quote this passage when the row over the Northern Ireland protocol next flares up, because it sees this as an example of Boris Johnson not abiding by the obligations that he agreed to follow in a treaty.)

• Truss said the UK wanted “to more countries who haven’t historically been aligned to Britain”.

• She said she wanted to extend freedom across the world. She said:

As Mrs Thatcher said in her Guildhall speech just days after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989: “the message is clear … when people are free to choose, they choose freedom.”

And we need to give countries across the world that choice.

The freer a country is the wealthier it is … the more secure it is … the greener it is

It is less likely to harbour terrorists and radical fundamentalists …

It is less likely to have huge migration outflows.

And less likely to go to war.

Freedom enables enterprise to flourish … people to flourish … girls and women to flourish.

It’s the best way to influence the world and tackle the great issues of our age.

• She accused Labour of “sneering about our place in the world” and said this lack of patriotism was one reason why the party was unpopular. She went on:
  

There are those on the left who believe in moral equivalence between Britain and our adversaries.

Jeremy Corbyn may no longer be leader, but the same spirit lives on the Labour Party.

This moral relativism translates into their attitudes here at home, and has given rise to a creeping illiberalism that threatens our fundamental freedoms.

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The Spectator’s James Forsyth says that Oliver Dowden’s speech (see 4.04pm) made it clear that the planning bill has not just been paused, which was the formula used when Michael Gove took charge of that department. Dowden was more in delivering last rites territory.

Earlier there was a panel discussion at the conference about cultural events taking place this year. Andy Street, the West Midlands mayor, was supposed to attend, but the chair of the event said he was not available, without explaining why.

Jonathan Walker from the Birmingham Post says Street boycotted the event because it was an all-male panel.

3 Oct 202111.10 EDT

Tory MP says it could be 'great opportunity' if supermarket supply chains were to break

Rowena Mason

Chris Loder, a Tory MP, has told a fringe meeting that it would be a good thing to destroy supermarket supply chains, even if it causes short-term problems.

“I think actually one great opportunity we have from the issues we see at the moment is actually for some of these supermarket supply chains to crumble,” Loder, who was first elected MP for West Dorset in 2019, told a fringe meeting on farming at the party’s conference in Manchester, arguing that Brexit was not to blame for the problems. He went on:

I know it might not feel like it in the immediate term. But it is in our mid and long-term interest that these logistics chains do break.

It will mean that the farmer down the street will be able to sell their milk in the village shop like they did decades ago. It is because these commercial predators – that is the supermarkets – have wiped that out and I’d like to see that come back.

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