Liz Truss to announce plan to unilaterally abandon parts of Northern Ireland protocol – UK politics live | Politics

At the end of last week the government announced that it was delaying a ban on “buy one get one free” deals on junk food for at least a year, ostensibly to help people with the cost of living crisis. It is now questionable whether the ban will ever be implemented by this government. Health campaigners criticised the U-turn, but No 10 will have been heartened by the fact that it was warmly welcomed by the Sun.

However, today the move has come under withering attack from perhaps an unlikely source – William Hague, the former Conservative leader. He has writtten about it in his Times column, under the headline: “Obesity U-turn is weak, shallow and immoral.” It’s a good read. Here are some of his main points.

• Hague suggests Boris Johnson dropped the cheap supermarket junk food deals partly to avert a leadership challenge from Tory MPs. He says:

Under pressure from some Conservative MPs, some of whom have been threatening to write letters of no confidence in Boris Johnson unless they get their way, ministers have retreated from banning “Buy One Get One Free” deals and from imposing a watershed of 9pm on junk food advertising. While some measures, such as rules on the positioning of unhealthy foods by retailers, will still go ahead in October, this U-turn adds to the long history of failed obesity strategies.

• Hague rejects claims that the proposed ban was un-Conservartive because it would have restricted people’s freedom to buy what they want. Accusing food companies of exploiting their customers, he says:

Humans evolved, when food was scarce, to indulge in calorie-dense foods if the opportunity arose. Now, the abundance of food and its particularly highly processed nature, which means we go on eating for a long time before feeling full, leads us to eat a lot of the wrong things. Food companies have an overwhelming incentive to design products that lead us ever further down this chemically induced addiction to foods that make us overweight, more prone to disease, and less able to work and enjoy life to the full. This is not freedom …

Freedom is, most crucially, being free from oppression, violence or discrimination. But it is also the freedom of a child to skip and somersault; of an adult to enjoy running down a country lane or in a city park; of an old person to keep their quality of life until their final days … These are the freedoms being denied to vast numbers of people who are the victims, not the free agents, in a system that wants to fill them up with salt, sugar and saturated fat.

• He rejects claims that “buy one get one free” deals help people with the cost of living, quoting research saying they encourage people to buy food they do not need.

• He says failing to tackle obesity will make it harder to cut taxes in the long run. Quoting analysis saying that by the mid-2030s the NHS could be spending more treating type 2 diabetes than treating cancer, he says:

It is therefore a terrible error to associate conservatism with a reluctance to protect people from their natural appetites being abused, in an industrial age for which they were not designed. If we could liberate more people from that fate, they could enjoy greater personal freedom and have some chance of a lighter tax burden.

• He describes the U-turn as “intellectually shallow, politically weak and morally reprehensible”. He says:

MPs who have pressed, seemingly successfully, for the dilution of the obesity strategy are profoundly mistaken. They are acquiescing in a future of higher dependence, greater costs, reduced lifestyle choice and endless pain. For the government to give in to them is intellectually shallow, politically weak and morally reprehensible.

And here are some of the main lines from Brandon Lewis’s interviews on the Northern Ireland protocol.

• Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, said the EU’s plan for the protocl would “make matters materially worse” because they wanted to end some of the “grace periods” in place that have prevented some full checks coming into force. The “grace periods” were only ever meant to be temporary, because they were meant to allow businesses time to adjust to the new rules. The UK now wants them to be permanent, and for the proposed new checks to be abandoned for good. The EU does not agree. Lewis said:

What sometimes gets missed in this is that what the EU is proposing now is that some of the checks we’ve had grace periods for – we are at a standstill at the moment where we are not fully applying some of the checks the EU wants – they actually want to bring those in, so they want to make matters materially worse for the people of Northern Ireland, and that’s just not viable.

• He said it was never the government’s intention to bring the proposed new legislation on the Northern Ireland protocol to parliament for a vote this week.

• He said the UK wanted to set up a system of “green lanes” for goods entering Northern Ireland for Britain, so that items not destined for Ireland are exempt from checks. He explained:

The solution is, and what we’ve been outlining to the EU, that products that are moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland should effectively go through what has colloquially been called a ‘green lane’.

So, those products that are being consumed in the UK, used in the UK, from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, should not be going through the same checks as products that are moving into the EU, into the single market – that’s pretty much what we have been outlining.

There are too many companies, including major supermarkets, at the moment who have no stores in the Republic of Ireland, who are moving their products from their depots in Great Britain into Northern Ireland for sale and consumption in Northern Ireland, but going through checks as if they were going into the EU.

That just doesn’t work and there are products that can’t travel that way.

Soaring bonuses for City bankers and high signing-on fees for construction and IT professionals pushed Britons’ average annual pay up by 7% in March, but most workers suffered a fifth consecutive month of falling living standards. My colleague Phillip Inman has the story here.

Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, had the morning interview round this morning on behalf of the government. Mostly he was talking about the protocol, but he also delivered what sounded like a mild rebuke to the governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, over his comments to MPs yesterday. Lewis implied that Bailey went too far.

As my colleague Larry Elliott reports, Bailey blamed the war in Ukraine for the highest inflation in the UK for three decades and warned that “apocalyptic” food prices caused by Russia’s invasion could have a disastrous impact on the world’s poor.

Asked about the comments, and particularly about Bailey’s use of the word “apocalytic”, Lewis told the BBC:

I was surprised to see that particular turn of phrase, I have to say.

But the Bank of England is independent, they will have their view of their assessment, their economic view of where things are and where things are going.

Lewis went on:

We do recognise … and as a constituency MP I see the challenges that some of my constituents face, that we all face.

In my part of the world [Lewis represents Great Yarmouth in Norfolk] we are all – the majority of people – on oil fire heating and you see that change in the price which has a big impact on people.

That’s why I think it is important as a government we put in the packages of support we’ve put in and, as the chancellor said, this is something we will keep under review because of the global pressures, as the Bank of England governor said yesterday, that we’re seeing on economies around the world.

Good morning. Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, will make a statement to MPs later about government plans for legislation that would allow it to ignore parts of the Northern Ireland protocol – the agreement signed with the EU imposing checks on some goods going from Britain to Northern Ireland, to ensure that Northern Ireland can remain in the EU’s single market and to prevent checks having to be imposed at its border with Ireland.

The proposal is potentially inflammatory – because it would involve the UK unilaterally abandoning a deal it agreed with the EU less than three years ago.

But there are signs that it might not be quite as provocative as originally envisaged. Truss is not going to publish an actual bill today, and government sources have been indicating that MPs won’t start debating the legislation until later this year. That, of course, fuels suspicions that No 10 is not particularly serious about this anyway, and that it may be no more than an empty threat. In our overnight story Rowena Mason, Lisa O’Carroll and Rory Carroll write:

No 10 has not appeared to be as keen as Truss on the option of legislation to undermine the protocol in recent days.

One diplomatic source said one of the prime minister’s top aides had been privately telling people that the government was very committed to negotiations and no decision had been taken on pressing ahead with the legislation.

The full story is here.

In the light of these briefings, it will be interesting to see quite what tone Truss adopts. At the weekend the Sunday Times carried a report by Tim Shipman suggesting that some of Boris Johnson’s allies view her as a “knucklehead” on this. Shipman wrote:

There is ill-disguised fury in some parts of No 10 that Truss and David Canzini, the deputy chief of staff, are so privately gung-ho about confrontation with the EU. One senior official said: “The object of the exercise with some people seems to be to have a fight. The object of the exercise for the prime minister is to restore democratic processes to Northern Ireland. We want a weapon on the table, we don’t want to use it. It’s like the nuclear deterrent. The PM does not want to use nuclear weapons, whatever the knuckleheads tell him.”

Truss briefed Simon Coveney, her Irish opposite number, on the plan last night, and this morning he says he told her that “breaking international law” is not the solution.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Boris Johnson chairs cabinet.

11.30am: Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, takes questions in the Commons.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

After 12.30pm: Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, makes a Commons statement about proposed legislation allowing the government to ignore parts of the Northern Ireland protocol.

After 1.30pm: MPs resume their debate on the Queen’s speech. At 7pm there will be a vote on a Labour amendment calling for a windfall tax on energy companies.

2.30pm: Alistair Burt, the former foreign minister, gives evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee on how the government responds when people like Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe are taken hostage by foreign states; at 3.30pm Jeremy Hunt, the former foreign secretary, will give evidence.

3pm: Greg Dyke, the former BBC director general, and Andrew Neil, the broadcaster, give evidence to a Lords committee about the future of BBC funding.

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