PM casts himself as the defender of Conservative values as he pledges to protect the family, get tough on crime and clamp down on benefits
Rishi Sunak pledged to stop people being “bullied” into accepting trans arguments as he used his conference speech to take on Labour over gender.
The Prime Minister said it “shouldn’t be controversial” to ensure parents were informed what their children were being taught about sex and relationshipsy at school. He insisted it was “common sense” to say that “a man is a man and a woman is a woman” in his most strident intervention yet on the highly charged subject.
Mr Sunak made the remarks in an hour-long address to his party’s grassroots in Manchester, during which he cast himself as a defender of Conservative values. The speech drew a clear dividing line with Sir Keir Starmer, who has struggled to explain his stance on trans rights, ahead of Labour’s own conference this weekend.
Although announcements on A-levels, smoking and HS2 dominated, much of the 7,617-word address was dedicated to fleshing out the Prime Minister’s broader political ideology.
He took the opportunity to present himself to voters as the candidate on the side of law and order, financial responsibility and hard-working families.
Here are five of the key themes from the speech:
Gender and family
The Prime Minister has sometimes seemed reluctant to get stuck into “culture war” issues, but he shook off those inhibitions for what was the punchiest part of his address.
Mr Sunak fired up the audience when he insisted that voters must not be “bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be”.
His remarks on gender drew the loudest applause of the afternoon and followed an announcement that trans women will be banned from female-only hospital wards.
He said: “We shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be. They can’t – a man is a man and a woman is a woman. That’s just common sense.
“It shouldn’t be controversial for parents to know what their children are being taught in school about relationships. Patients should know when hospitals are talking about men or women.”
Mr Sunak also spoke about the importance of family, saying that Conservatives should “never be afraid” to champion its importance to a stable society.
Tough on crime
One of the key battlegrounds at the next election will be crime, with Labour and the Tories competing to send out the toughest message to the electorate.
The Prime Minister recommitted to the expansion of whole-life sentences to cover those people who commit the most “heinous” killings
“I can confirm that we will legislate for sexual and sadistic murders to carry a full-life term with no prospect of release,” he said.
“We are going to change this country and that means life means life. That shouldn’t be a controversial position. The vast majority of hard-working people agree with it.”
He also hit out at police forces for “tolerating” low-level offences such as anti-social behaviour, warning that “virtue-signalling has replaced common sense” in too many cases.
“Every crime should be investigated,” he said. “Our streets will be safer, our communities more secure, no one should be afraid to walk home alone at night.”
Tax cuts
The Prime Minister and Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, had to spend much of the pre-conference build-up hosing down calls for immediate tax cuts.
A growing number of Tory MPs are calling for the burden to be lifted now, and Mr Sunak acknowledged their pleas for action.
But he also defended his stance that getting inflation under control must be the priority, and releasing more money into the system could threaten that.
Mr Sunak quoted Margaret Thatcher, who once said: “No policy which puts at risk the defeat of inflation, no matter its short-term attraction, can be right.”
He said her words were “as true now as they were then” and added: “I know you want tax cuts, I want them too and we will deliver them.
“But the best tax cut we can give people right now is to halve inflation and ease the cost of living. We need our economy to grow faster and for people across the country to feel the benefits of that.”
Benefits crackdown
Mr Sunak pitched himself as a champion of doers and strivers and branded the huge rise in people on sicknessbenefits a “national scandal”.
He heralded a major clampdown on welfare payments for long-term illness, saying it was “not fair” taxpayers were having to pick up the growing cost.
The Prime Minister said that 12 years ago, one in five people who applied for such payouts were deemed unfit to work, but the proportion had risen to almost two-thirds.
“That’s not Conservative, that’s not compassionate – that must change,” he said. “Are people three times sicker today than they were a decade ago? Of course not. It’s not good for our economy, it is not fair on taxpayers who have to pick up the bill and it’s a tragedy for those two million people being written off.”
Stop the boats
Mr Sunak pledged that he would “do whatever is necessary” to stop illegal migration and attacked Labour’s plans for an asylum deal with the EU.
He hailed recent progress on reducing Channel crossings and is confident “once flights start going regularly to Rwanda, the boats will stop coming”.
But he did not go as far as Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, who warned on Tuesday that the UK was facing a “hurricane” of new arrivals.
“It is non-negotiable that you, the British people, decide who comes here… and not criminal gangs,” Mr Sunak said.
“By contrast, Labour’s plan is to cook up some deal with the EU which could see us accepting around 100,000 of Europe’s asylum seekers.”
“If your answer to illegal migration is to increase it, you clearly just don’t get it. That’s why we have got to stop them.”
Nicola Sturgeon
Mr Sunak joked that Nicola Sturgeon faces prison as he claimed “the forces of separatism are in retreat across our country”. He said the Union was “the strongest it has been in a quarter of a century”.
He then delivered a jibe about the police investigation into SNP finances. “Nicola Sturgeon wanted to go down in the history books as the woman who broke up our country but it now looks like she may go down for very different reasons,” Mr Sunak said.