Liz Truss says her critics are ‘decadent’ ahead of Laura Kuensberg interview at Tory conference launch – UK Politics Live | Politics

Here are a few more lines from Liz Trussinterview with Edward Malnick in the Sunday Telegraph.

One of the things we will be announcing is raising the definition of a small business, in terms of regulation, from 250 employees to 500 employees.

Truss said the move would affect 40,000 businesses and “make it easier for them to continue their business”.

The prime minister has rejected claims she wants to ease immigration rules to boost the number of low-skilled migrants coming to the UK as part of her plan to boost growth. “That’s not true,” she insists with a frown.

But she appeared to confirm that the government would increase the number of seasonal farm workers and other “highly skilled people” allowed to work in Britain.

“What we want to do, and the Home Secretary will set out more detail on this, is to make sure we have the right mix of people coming into the country. So the highly skilled people who will contribute to the economy – I mentioned previous seasonal agricultural workers, for example, to help with farming. But this is not about hiring a lot of low-skilled workers, but about people who will contribute to the economy.

This is confusing because typically seasonal farm workers would be described as low-skilled immigrants (even though, done correctly, their work requires considerable skill).

The Telegraph can also reveal today that one plan being developed is to increase the number of babysitters by increasing the number of specialist babysitting agencies. Agencies are registered to be inspected by Ofsted, which reduces the administrative burden on individual workers. Mrs Truss championed the idea when she was childcare minister between 2012 and 2014.

Change is always something that people may find unsettling. But what I’m basically saying is that we need to change and the status quo is not an option…

We made promises to people in 2019 that things would be different. And what does it mean? That means more opportunities, higher wages, more investment, and these are all things I aim to unlock.

Of course, there will be resistance to this. Because there is a pretty strong consensus around what I describe as a high-tax, low-growth economy. But in the end [with] high taxes low growth economy the country becomes poorer.

During Covid we acted quickly and decisively on things like the OBR no forecast leave scheme because the situation was urgent. Both I and the Chancellor believe that the situation is equally urgent now and here.

But the OBR said there would have been time to publish a forecast alongside the mini-budget, although it admitted it would not have been as detailed as usual because of the lack of time.

The reason I’m going to Prague on Thursday is that I want to talk to colleagues from all over Europe, including those who are in the European Union and those who are not – it’s a wide variety of countries – about migration and how we collectively deal with migration. This is not a problem that Britain can solve alone.

We have many countries that people travel through to get to the UK. So we need a better solution for that, we need to address the upstream problem, so that’s what we’re going to talk about, but also energy.

Good morning. During the Tory leadership contest, an internal Labor Party document leaked to the media said the election of Liz Truss could deliver a 10-point increase in the polls. The briefing, which was met with some scepticism, was intended to stop Labor from becoming complacent and was based on historical figures showing that in the past having a new prime minister usually led to a bounce in the poll. It is now clear that the memo was much more prescient than anyone imagined – only that it is Labor who is benefiting from the bounce, not the Conservative Party, and that the bounce is worth a lot more than 10 points.

Of course, it was the budget that made the difference, not Truss’s election as Tory leader, but that distinction will be of little comfort to Conservative MPs as they begin their conference today in Birmingham. The main division in the party right now is probably between those who think the damage done by the mini-budget to Truss’s premiership is extreme and those who think there is some slim chance of recovery.

Here’s the latest Opinium polling data as reported in the Observer.

Trot will be on BBC Sunday with Laura Kuensberg later. (The program starts at 8.30am, but Truss is likely to be on shortly after 9am.) It will be her first in-depth TV interview since the mini-budget debacle and she will be hoping it goes down better than her local radio. in Thursday.

She gave an indication of what she is likely to say in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, in which she insisted she would keep all the measures announced in the mini-budget (many Tories want her to delay or abandon scrapping the top 45% income tax rate) and said Kwasi Kwarteng, the chancellor, was doing an “excellent job”.

Underscoring her belief that economic change is necessary and her desire to “bring people on this journey with her”, Truss also claimed her critics were “decadent”. She told the Sunday Telegraph:

It’s a decadent mentality, the idea that Britain’s best days are behind us and that it’s all about managing the distribution between people, not increasing the size of the pie. I believe we can increase the size of the pie. But we have to make the hard decisions to do that.

Here is the program for the day.

8.30 am: Jake Berry, chairman of the Conservative Party, is among the guests on Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday.

8.30 am: Liz Truss is interviewed on BBC Sunday with Laura Kuensberg. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, is also interviewed.

From 12 p.m.: Events around the conference begin.

15:00: Michael Gove, the former promotion secretary, took part in a side event ‘in conversation’ organized by Tory think tank Onward.

4 p.m.: The official conference opened with speeches by Penny Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons; Andy Street, Mayor of the West Midlands; Jake Barry, party chairman; Chris Heaton-Harris, Northern Ireland Secretary; Douglas Ross, leader of the Scottish Conservatives; Andrew RT Davies, leader of the Welsh Conservatives; Robert Buckland, Welsh Secretary; and Ben Wallace, Secretary of Defense.

Comments will be open later today. I’m trying to follow the comments below the line (BTL), but it’s impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, include “Andrew” somewhere in it and I’m more likely to find it. I try to answer questions and if they’re of general interest I’ll post the question and answer above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise I’ll do this for everyone.

If you want to get my attention quickly, you’re probably better off using Twitter. I’m on @AndrewSparrow.

Alternatively you can email me at andrew.sparrow@theguardian.com