UK PM Boris Johnson pledges to 'get on with the job' of rebuilding UK

In his Conservative Party conference speech, UK PM Boris Johnson promised to “get on with the job” of uniting and levelling up the nation. According to the BBC, the main theme of Johnson’s 45-minute speech was “levelling up”, with the UK PM saying that reducing gaps between regions would ease pressure on south-eastern England while boosting places that felt left behind. In his address, Johnson claimed that a high-wage, high-skilled economy was being created in the wake of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Johnson’s speech was his first to a conference since the COVID-19 pandemic began. He said that the overwhelming Conservative general election victory in 2019 placed an onus on his government to deliver change demanded by voters. He also defended tax rises to pay for the NHS and vowed to fix social care. 

Conservative Party Conference 

The UK PM also reiterated the promises that he had set out during his party’s conference earlier this week to crack down on crime, improve transport links and broadband, and reform the housing market. Johnson also sought to reassure about plans to increase National Insurance to pay for the NHS and social care. He claimed that it was what his predecessor Margaret Thatcher would have done if the economy had been hit by the pandemic. 

Johnson said, “She (Thatcher) would have wagged her finger and said that more borrowing now is just higher interest rates and even higher taxes later.” 

Moreover, during the conference, Johnson also insisted that the present problems were the result of an economic rebound in the wake of COVID-19 shutdowns. He even added that controls on immigration represented the “change that people voted for” in the 2016 Brexit referendum. He promised to end declining homeownership among young people by building more housing. 

Additionally, the UK PM went on to announce a £3,000-a-year bonus for teachers, as an incentive for struggling areas of England to recruit maths and science specialists. He said that there is “no reason why the inhabitants of one part of the country should be geographically fated to be poorer than others”. He added, “You will find talent, genius, flair, imagination, enthusiasm - all of them evenly distributed around this country. But opportunity is not.” 

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