The PM aimed to buoy Tory activists despite concerns over inflation and national insurance
Boris Johnson let the bombast flow as he delivered a speech designed to buoy Tory activists despite their nerves about the forthcoming national insurance increase and the risk of dangerously high levels of inflation.
In a specially constructed auditorium, the prime minister announced only one new policy – spending the remainder of his 45-minute address fleshing out in colour and tone how he plans to hold on to the swathes of voters who voted Conservative for the first time at the last election and meandering between some of his other favourite subjects.
We have one of the most imbalanced societies and lopsided economies of all the richer countries. It is not just that there is a gap between London and the south-east and the rest of the country: there are aching gaps within the regions themselves.”
When this country was sick, our NHS was the nurse. Frontline healthcare workers battled against a new disease, selflessly risking their lives, sacrificing their lives. And it is right that this party – that has looked after the NHS for most of its history – should be the one to rise to the challenge.
It has become clear to me that this isn’t just a joke – they really do want to rewrite our national story, starting with Hereward the Woke. We really are at risk of a kind of know-nothing cancel culture, know-nothing iconoclasm. We Conservatives will defend our history and cultural inheritance not because we are proud of everything, but because trying to edit it now is as dishonest as a celebrity trying furtively to change his entry in Wikipedia, and it’s a betrayal of our children’s education.
It was the private sector that made it possible. Behind those vaccines are companies and shareholders and, yes, bankers. You need deep pools of liquidity that are to be found in the City of London. It was capitalism that ensured that we had a vaccine in less than a year and the answer therefore is not to attack the wealth creators, it is to encourage them – because they are responsible for the aggregate increase in the country’s wealth that enables us to make those Pareto improvements.
Tired old Labour … Did you watch them last week in Brighton? Hopelessly divided, I thought they looked, their leader like a seriously rattled bus conductor, pushed this way and that … by a Corbynista mob of Sellotape-spectacled sans-culottes. Or the skipper of a cruise liner that has been captured by Somali pirates desperately trying to negotiate a change of course and then changing his mind.
When I became leader of this party, there were only – can you remember what percentage of households had gigabit broadband when you were so kind as to make me leader? Only 7%. And by the new year that will be up to 68%. Thanks to Rishi’s super-deduction, the pace is now accelerating massively as companies thrust the fibre-optic vermicelli in the most hard-to-reach places.
Does anyone seriously imagine that we should not now be raising the funding to sort this out? Is that really the view of responsible Conservatives? I can tell you something – Margaret Thatcher would not have ignored this meteorite that has just crashed through the public finances. She would have wagged her finger and said more borrowing now is just higher interest rates and even higher taxes later.