Liz Truss Tory conference speech disrupted by Greenpeace protesters; PM claims cutting taxes ‘right morally and economically’ – live | Politics

Teaching union condemns Kit Malthouse for saying some schools ‘hanging onto mediocrity’

Sally Weale

School leaders have reacted with fury to a speech by the new education secretary Kit Malthouse, in which he suggested parts of the sector were “hanging onto mediocrity”.

The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) has written to Malthouse expressing dismay at his comments, accusing him of taking cheap shots at a profession “already on its knees”.

Speaking on Tuesday at the Conservative conference, Malthouse said England’s school system was in need of constant attention and pressure from government to drive it forward.

He said there had been vast progress in lots of schools, “but there are still pockets that need our attention. And we need to reflect on the fact that there’s nothing quite as persistent as people hanging onto mediocrity.”

The ASCL letter, signed by general secretary Geoff Barton and president Evelyn Forde, said the key challenges affecting schools and colleges were lack of funding and a rapidly growing staff recruitment and retention crisis. Barton and Forde went on:

In this context, we were frankly appalled to hear you talk about people leading and working in our schools and colleges as ‘hanging on to mediocrity’, and claim that education needs ‘constant attention and constant pressure’ in order to ‘drive it forward’.

Rather than raising the stakes even higher, and taking cheap shots at a profession already on its knees, your department should be moving heaven and earth to provide schools and colleges with the funding they need to keep their doors open, the support they need to provide education and care to children and young people with increasingly complex needs, and a functioning pipeline of teachers to staff their organisations. Anything else is mere posturing.

The NASUWT teaching union also criticised comments by the schools minister Jonathan Gullis, who told a fringe meeting the government was “not going to budge” over teachers’ pay in England this year.

Gullis – a former teacher and NASUWT union rep – said he wanted to “do everything I can to avoid any kind of industrial action” to avoid disruption.

But Patrick Roach, the NASUWT general secretary, said Gullis needed to “urgently” think again over the government’s 5% pay offer. Roach said:

We have asked ministers to talk to us but it is clear that finding a negotiated settlement is not their priority. Ministers are leaving us with no other alternative than to ballot our members to support industrial action in response to the cuts to teachers’ pay.

The Conservative party whips will take steps to ensure that ministers are more disciplined in what they say in public about government policy, No 10 has hinted.

At a briefing after Liz Truss’s speech, her press secretary said:

There’s always going to be differences of opinion between people, people are entitled to their personal opinions. But they should be raised in a more constructive manner. Collective responsibility is the same as it always has been.

Asked if that message will be rammed home in Westminster next week, the press secretary replied:

You will have to speak to the whips about that, but that should answer your question.

Asked if Penny Mordaunt could lose the whip for saying benefits should be uprated in line with inflation, when the government has yet to take a decision on this, the press secretary replied said: “That’s one for the whips but I don’t imagine that to be the case.”

The conference was notable for the lack of message discpline by Tories, with ministers setting out their personal views on policy, instead of sticking to the government line.

Ben Quinn

Liz Truss has angered the founder of M People by walking on stage before her Tory party conference speech to the sound of the dance music band’s 1993 single Moving on Up.

Michael Pickering, who co-wrote the song and founded the group, expressed his annoyance on Twitter before the Truss speech was even finished, tweeting: “No permission given for that we’re very angry.”

He later added:

So apparently we can’t stop Truss walking out to our song, very weird!”

So sad it got used by this shower of a government. BTW Truss labour used it with permission in 90’s. I don’t want my song being a soundtrack to lies.

It’s not the first time that a Conservative leader has fallen foul of British musicians.

Johnny Marr, a founding member and the lead guitarist of the Smiths, called in 2010 on the then prime minister, David Cameron, to stop saying that he liked the band. “Stop saying that you like the Smiths, no you don’t,” he wrote on Twitter, adding: “I forbid you to like it.”

Truss has also previously suggested that her own favourite tastes are rooted in the decade of Thatcherism

“Maybe one thing people don’t know about me is that I love 1980s music and I do love karaoke – so, as well as working hard, I like to enjoy music,” she told GB News, adding that her favourite song was I Wanna Dance With Somebody by Whitney Houston.

And this is what political journalists and commentators are saying about Liz Truss’s speech. “OK” would be a reasonable summary, in so far as there is a consensus.

From my colleague Rafael Behr

From Lucy Fisher of Times Radio

From the New Statesman’s Jeremy Cliffe

From the Sun’s Harry Cole

From the Financial Times’ Robert Shrimsley

From ITV’s Robert Peston

From my colleague Gaby Hinsliff

From the Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman

From the Economist’s Matthew Holehouse

From the BBC’s Faisal Islam

From the broadcaster Michael Crick

From the former FT editor Lionel Barber

From the Observer’s Michael Savage

From the Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges

From Talk TV’s Tom Newton Dunn

From my colleague Peter Walker

From the author and broadcaster Steve Richards

From my colleague Owen Jones

And here is the passage from Liz Truss’s speech attacking the “anti-growth coalition”.

I will not allow the anti-growth coalition to hold us back.

Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP …

… the militant unions, the vested interests dressed up as thinktanks …

… the talking heads, the Brexit deniers and Extinction Rebellion and some of the people we had in the hall earlier.

The fact is they prefer protesting to doing.

They prefer talking on Twitter to taking tough decisions.

They taxi from north London townhouses to the BBC studio to dismiss anyone challenging the status quo.

From broadcast to podcast, they peddle the same old answers.

It’s always more taxes, more regulation and more meddling.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

We see the anti-growth coalition at work across the country.

Keir Starmer wants to put extra taxes on the companies we need to invest in our energy security.

And his sticking plaster solution will only last six months.

He has no long-term plan and no vision for Britain.

Mark Drakeford in Wales is cancelling road-building projects and refusing to build the M4 relief road.

Nicola Sturgeon won’t build new nuclear power stations in Scotland to solve the energy crisis in Scotland.

Have these people ever seen a tax rise they don’t like?

Or an industry they don’t want to control?

They don’t understand the British people.

They don’t understand aspiration.

They are prepared to leave our towns and cities facing decline.

My friends, does this anti-growth coalition have any idea who pays their wages?

It’s the people who make things in factories across our country.

It’s the people who get up at the crack of dawn to go to work.

It’s the commuters who get trains into towns and cities across our country.

I’m thinking of the white van drivers, the hairdressers, the plumbers, the accountants, the IT workers and millions of others up and down the UK.

The anti-growth coalition just doesn’t get it.

This is because they don’t face the same challenges as normal working people.

These enemies of enterprise don’t know the frustration you feel to see your road blocked by protesters, or the trains off due to a strike.

In fact, their friends on the hard left tend to be the ones behind the disruption.

The anti-growth coalition think the people who stick themselves to trains, roads and buildings are heroes.

I say the real heroes are those who go to work, take responsibility and aspire to a better life for themselves and their family.

And I am on their side.

That was a safety-first speech. It was much shorter than a usual party conference speech, it did not contain any policy announcements, and in fact it did not really contain much news at all. Given the hostile reaction to much of what the government has been saying in the last four weeks – on the financial markets, in the polls (the opinion markets), and among MPs – the fact that Truss managed to get through this without antagonising her party any further is probably a bonus. She hasn’t made things worse.

Quite a lot of the speech sounded like the stump speech she was making during the Tory leadership, or what she was saying during the hustings. These arguments were successful with her audience – Conservative party members – and so it probably made sense to provide them with an encore today. But hardcore free-market libertarianism is a niche enthusiasm, even in the Conservative party, and there was nothing in the speech that will make her economic agenda sound more appealing to the public at large than it is already (which is not, not very). The speech was not even particularly well-written.

It is not as if the government has no plans. Within the next few weeks the government intends to introduce supply-side reforms (deregulation, mostly) in eight areas, but Truss did not want to talk about these in detail at all. Perhaps she realises the plans won’t be universally welcomed, even by her party. You can imagine the conversation in the speech-drafting session. “Shall we include the bit about ripping up the working time directive, or issuing more visas for seasonal workers, or Jacob Rees-Mogg’s plan to allow people on high salaries to be sacked for no reason? Probably best we don’t.”

Welfare was another black hole in the speech. Truss did address the controversy over the 45% top rate of income tax (using the same words Kwasi Kwarteng used), but she did not talk about uprating benefits. Given the mood in the party, she may have already given up hope of getting away with not uprating them in line with inflation.

The most memorable passage of the speech was the attack on the “anti-growth coalition”. This sounded like a routine Daily Mail whinge about anyone with vaguely progressive views. It did not amount to a serious critique, and some of it may have angered her own MPs (for example, the line criticising people who “taxi from north London townhouses to the BBC studio to dismiss anyone challenging the status quo” – a category that includes a large number of prominent Tories).

It was also hypocritical. If Truss really wanted to go to war with the anti-growth coalition, she would pick a fight with Brexiters opposed to rejoining the single market, MPs who block development on the green belt and politicians who want to restrict immigration. But she can’t, because that’s her party.

Liz Truss wrong to claim she is first PM to have attended comprehensive school

Richard Adams

Liz Truss was wrong when she claimed in her conference speech that she was the first prime minister to have gone to a comprehensive school. Gordon Brown went to a comprehensive secondary school (Kirkcaldy high school), while Theresa May’s school was converted into a comprehensive while she was a pupil there: Holton Park girls’ grammar school, in Oxfordshire, became Wheatley Park comprehensive school in 1971, two years after May enrolled. The education secretary at the time was Margaret Thatcher.

The environmental activists who disrupted Liz Truss’s Tory party conference speech denounced the prime minister’s “shredding” of her party’s election manifesto promises on protection for nature.

As Truss outlined her reasons for the economic policies implemented within days of becoming prime minister, Greenpeace UK’s head of public affairs, Rebecca Newsom, and its policy officer, Ami McCarthy, stood up close to the front of the conference hall with a banner asking: “Who voted for this?”

Conference delegates responded with boos and snatched their banner from their hands, only for the two women to pull out another, identical banner. “Let’s get them removed,” Truss said, as badged security guards intervened.

In a statement sent moments after the intervention, Greenpeace UK said it had identified at least seven areas across environmental protection, climate action, workers’ rights and tackling inequality where policies considered by Truss’s cabinet contradicted the 2019 Conservative election manifesto.

In the statement Newsom said:

Who voted for this? In a healthy democracy, people should get the government programme they voted for, but Liz Truss is putting most of it through the shredder.

People voted for strong action on climate, a fracking moratorium, world-leading environmental protections, and tackling poverty and inequality.

What they’re getting instead is fracking, a potential bonfire of rules on wildlife and nature protection, and now the prospect of benefit cuts.

Broken promise after broken promise, the prime minister is quickly turning her party’s manifesto into the longest piece of false advertising ever written. Many will be left wondering whether her government answers to the public or to the hedge fund managers, rightwing thinktanks and fossil fuel giants that are cheering it on.

Truss has now reached the passage in the speech she referred to earlier.

I will not allow the anti-growth coalition to hold us back: Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP, the militant unions, the vested interests, the talking heads, the Brexit deniers, Extinction Rebellion and some of the people we had in the hall earlier.

I will not allow the anti-growth coalition to hold us back.

She says people in this group prefer talking on Twitter to taking tough decisions. And they would rather rush to a BBC studio than challenge the status quo.

She says this group have never seen a tax rise they don’t like.

And they have no idea who pays their wages, she claims. The anti-growth coalition “just don’t get it”. They don’t know how frustrating it is to see the roads being blocked by protesters, or the trains on strike.

She says the protests are normally being organised by their friends on the hard-left.

The anti-growth coalition sees these people as heroes. But the real heroes are the people who go out to work, she says.

Truss says she will “realise the promise of Brexit”. She goes on:

By the end of the year, all EU red tape will be consigned to history.

Brexit will allow the UK to do things differently, she says.