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Tory party gripped by 'collective madness' over no-deal Brexit, says former minister - live news
Tory leadership: Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt answer questions in digital hustings - live news
(about 4 hours later)
Arlene Foster, the DUP leader, has said the UK should leave the EU by 31 October. As Sky’s Kate McCann report, Foster made the comments, which support Boris Johnson’s Brexit stance, not Jeremy Hunt’s, at an event at lunchtime.
Q: How would he get young people to vote for the Tories?
DUP’s Arlene Foster says it is “very important” that the UK leaves the EU on 31 October (Boris Johnson’s Brexit plan) but refuses to back him outright and says she has a good relationship with both Mr Johnson and Jeremy Hunt.
Johnson says via appealing policies in the areas of housing, environment, and one “crucial thing”, the “excessive burden” of student debt. And the solution “may lie in the interest rate”, or elsewhere.
“I don’t think we should go for any more extensions” Arlene Foster says, which is what Jeremy Hunt is proposing if he believes a deal is in sight. She won’t get into whether DUP would refuse to support a leader who backed an extension though...
Q: How will he unite the country and heal Brexit divisons?
And on a campaign visit earlier, Jeremy Hunt accused Boris Johnson of making a promise, to deliver Brexit by 31 October, that he was unlikely to keep. He said:
His answer is erratic, excuse my inability to note down one clear line it contained.
You should only, if you want to be prime minister, make promises you can actually deliver and my concern about that fixed date is that we know parliament will try and stop a no-deal Brexit and then you could end up tripping into a general election, that puts Corbyn in Downing Street and there’ll be no Brexit at all.
Q: What will be his stance on immigration? And how will he avoid for his immigration policies to be viewed as xenophobic?
I’m the person who’s far, far more likely to deliver Brexit by October 31 because I can negotiate a deal with the European Union and that’s what I’m going to do.
Johnson says he doesn’t think there has been any other Tory politician being as committed to talent as he has been, “but I do believe it should be controlled.” Says he is in favour of an Australia-style points-based system.
Yesterday Boris Johnson revealed his secret model bus-making habit. Today, in an interview with Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine, Jeremy Hunt, Johnson’s rival for the Tory leadership, spoke about his passion for the lambada. He told the programme:
Who would be in his cabinet? He wants a more positive approach to Brexit, but wants to “leave it at that”, says he “made no promises”.
When I was elected as an MP in 2005 my big passion was lambada dancing, I have a lot of Brazilian friends, I used to go to the carnival in Brazil. This just brings back some happy memories. This is a dance for single people and quite an intimate dance so perhaps not one for the married listeners.
Enter Boris Johnson.
Earlier this government the Welsh government switched its position on Brexit and committed itself to firmly arguing for a referendum and for the UK to remain in the EU. Originally it had argued for a soft Brexit, to honour the referendum result. But it switched to backing remain because it concluded that a soft Brexit was not an option.
He opens his statement by saying the Tory party is “in crisis”.
The Scottish government is also arguing for remain. But what makes the Welsh government decision potentially significant is that the Welsh government is run by Labour, meaning that its new position increases the pressure on Jeremy Corbyn to commit the party to backing remain in a future referendum.
These three things, Johnson says, need to happen:
Mark Drakeford, the Welsh first minister, has written an open letter to all Welsh MPs urging them to back a second referendum. He says his government is backing remain because, with the Tory leadership election, the UK is now “almost certainly facing a straight choice between a no-deal and remain in the EU”.
1) “We need to come out of the EU on Oct 31”, with the help of someone who believes in the Brexit project
We cannot afford the economic damage being done every single day as a result of Brexit uncertainty – I’ve written to Welsh MPs to urge them to continue to take action to block a no deal & to force UK Gov to bring forward a referendum bill by 31st July. pic.twitter.com/F8wMiqoEc1
2) “We need to unite our party and our country”, says he was able to unite Londonders as Mayor.
Crashing out of the UK at Halloween could result in a “flurry of profit warnings” from publicly listed companies in November, MPs have been warned. As my colleague Lisa O’Carroll reports, the Institute for Chartered Accountants for England and Wales (ICAEW) told MPs that this could have a “systemic” impact on the confidence in the British economy.
3) Faster broadband for all parts of the country
No-deal Brexit could trigger flurry of profit warnings, say accountants
And he’s got a 4th:
Are there enough Tory MPs willing to vote down their own government in a no confidence debate to stop a no-deal Brexit? With Boris Johnson likely to become prime minister, and his Brexit strategy making no-deal looking ever more probable, it is one of the key questions of the day. But the answer is not obvious, partly because some Conservative pro-Europeans are not very clear about their intentions on this point. (For example, this morning Rory Stewart was saying he would not vote to bring down a Tory government, but two weeks ago he was saying he would “bring down” Johnson if Johnson tried to prorogue parliament to facilitate no-deal.)
4) Get the Tory party ready to fend off Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party at a general election.
In an interview on the World at One Phillip Lee, the former minister who resigned last year to back a rebel amendment giving parliament more say over Brexit, explained his thinking on this issue as a leading Tory pro-European. He said he and his colleagues needed to threaten to bring down the government - but that he did not expect it to happen. Here are his main points.
The final question to Hunt is what he would do to improve children’s mental health.
Lee said that Tory pro-Europeans like himself had to be as “ruthless” as the European Research Group (or ERG, the pro-Brexit Tory caucus) and that that was why they had to keep open the option of voting against the government on a no confidence motion to prevent a no-deal Brexit. He said:
Hunt says he wants to employ an extra 19.000 people totackle the youth mental health crisis, and that he wants the UK to be the first country to take children’s mental health seriously. And that’s it for him, his time is up.
Nobody wants to vote no confidence in the government, nobody seeks to do that ... But ultimately if we believe truly that no-deal is unacceptable without the explicit consent of the public, then we have to leave everything on the table ...
Next question is about how Hunt would reduce knife crime.
I’ve watched as the ERG have essentially won through here, and have dictated terms, and they have done this, successfully I might add, by being ruthless and having a clear strategy throughout. And it’s about time those of us who hold the belief that a no-deal on these terms is an unacceptable thing to be contemplating, that we also adopt exactly the same approach that the ERG have successfully undertaken in the last 12 months.
Hunt says reduction in police numbers went too far. Says Conservatives had to make difficult fiscal decisions post-financial crash, and the reductions in police spending and social care “went too far”, and that this would have to change. Says depite this scenario, he managed to negotioate an extra £20bn for he NHS as health secretary.
He said that there was a “collective madness” in the Conservative party with people thinking a no-deal Brexit would be acceptable. He said:
Hunt is asked about tariffs in case of no-deal.
If somebody says to me ‘Do I want to vote no confidence in the government’, of course I don’t. I’m a Conservative, have been so for over 27 years. But I look on at this and I think there is a collective madness out there at the moment, in thinking that no-deal, and delivering it in this way, is acceptable, politically deliverable, and in the interests, socially and economically and geopolitically of my country - I’m sorry, I don’t see that.
Says “there isn’t a no-deal route” in regard to Gatt24 that wouldn’t require both sides to consent. Asked whether Boris Johnson has been lying in that regard then. Hunt gives evasive answer, says he wouldn’t exactly call it lying.
He said he did not accept the idea that a no confidence vote would automatically lead to Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister. Another alternative might be some sort of government of national unity, headed by a backbencher, he said. But he said he was not aware of any conversations about a possible government of national unity taking place.
Hunt is asked what his own faults are. Answer: “I certainly have plenty of faults.”
He also said that there were other parliamentary options, besides a vote of no confidence, that could be used to stop a new prime minister going for no-deal.
But adds it would “demean the competition” if he and Boris Johnson only pointed fingers at each other.
He said that, because of the parliamentary opposition, he was “confident” the next Conservative leader would concluded that a no-deal Brexit was “just not deliverable”. Instead the new leader would conclude the only options were a referendum, a general election or revoking article 50, Lee said.
Q: How will he ensure the north of the country is getting a better deal if he becomes PM?
Here are some tweets from the post-PMQs Labour party briefing.
Hunt says he is backing the Northern Powerhouse rail, and that he wants he UK to be “the world’s next Silicon Valley”. He wants a “northern tech-triangle”, like the “London-Oxford-Cambridge triangle” in the south.
Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman says Labour will alight on “a common position that people can row behind,” on Brexit, “in the next few weeks”. And hits back against Margaret Beckett’s comments about “aides” this morning: “Jeremy has his own views and takes his own decisions”.
Hunt is asked whether he would simply go from Brexit extension to extension if he became PM.
During a post pmqs grilling of labour spokesperson by the lobby, one Labour staff member turns to another and says “this is so boring” as we try to nail down Corbyn’s Brexit position.
Hunt says he wouldn’t. “I will leave without a deal, [...] but I will do so with a heavy heart.”
Apparently @uklabour's #brexit policy will be clarified in a matter of weeks, says a spokesman following consultation with unions, MPs, the ruling NEC to find 'a common position' And @jeremycorbyn took the lead after the Euros to say there should be a referendum on any deal
Q: How confident are you that you can beat both Corbyn and Farage at a next general election?
This is what Ian Blackford, the SNP leader at Westminster, said about Boris Johnson at PMQs.
Hunt: “My absolute commitment is to not provoke a general election before we have left.”
On the one hand the Tories are asking people to put their faith in the most incompetent foreign secretary in a century, a man who has made a career out of lying, who has spent this week avoiding the media, staging photos and playing to the extreme delusions of the Tory shires.
Says Conservative Party is the actual party standing up for small people, not Labour, and the party that “walks the walk” in terms of social justice, to a bit of jeering from the audience.
Blackford also criticised Jeremy Hunt, calling him “the most incompetent health secretary in our history”, but it was what he said about Johnson that infuriated Tory MPs because Commons rules normally stop MPs accusing each other directly of lying.
Hunt now says he will give “full rights” to the 3 million EU nationals in the UK.
Frankly, does anyone care? Over the last year PMQs has become increasingly low-voltage; not irrelevant, because important issues are still being raised and debated, but it now longer feels like the forum where the great political conflicts of the day are being settled. And now that Theresa May is effectively working her notice the problem has intensified. Jeremy Corbyn chose to ask her about arms sales to Saudi Arabia, a cause he cares about passionately, and while it was good to see the topic get an airing (Corbyn did manage to make May squirm reasonably successfully, although she hit back very firmly in her final answer), it still felt like displacement activity, because he was ignoring the great crisis facing the country. The SNP’s Ian Blackford is always much more comfortable raising Brexit and for the second week in a row he used PMQs to engage in Boris Johnson character assassination. But without Johnson there to respond, it was like arm wrestling without an opponent. Still, only four more of these to go, and then come September, when the new PM is due at the despatch box for the first time, it might all liven up again.
A question about big infrastructure projects: Would he support HS2 and a third Heathrow runway? Hunt says he would back both as PM.
In response to a point of order about why he did not ask Ian Blackford to withdraw what he said about Boris Johnson making a career out of lying, John Bercow, the Speaker, says he did not hear a specific allegation of dishonesty. (See 12.25pm.) He says what he did hear was distasteful, but he did not judge it disorderly.
Hunt says US-UK relationship should be treated as “sacred”.
He is asked about the future of the NHS in case of no-deal and the potential threat of “creeping privatisation” of the health service. Hunt said president Trump misunderstood British demonstrants campaigning for better NHS funding.
Hunt now speaks about the rise of China, which, he says, “is not a democracy”, mentions his wife, jokes: “Got the nationality right!”
