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Liz Truss has called for “border controls and paperwork” to be scrapped on Irish Sea trade, risking a fresh clash with the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Asked if the government’s aim is to remove all red tape – despite those checks being agreed by Boris Johnson in his Brexit deal – the trade secretary replied: “Yes.”
Answering listeners’ questions on LBC Radio, Ms Truss also rejected farmers’ pleas to step back from a tariff-free trade deal with Australis – insisting it was “the gateway” to a boom in sales across Asia.
She cast a cast-iron pledge about the current ban on hormone-injected beef, saying: “Hormone-injected beef will not be allowed into the UK – full stop.”
And she gave a guarded response to Dominic Cummings’ explosive weekend claim that “herd immunity” was the policy pursued to defeat Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic last year.
“Herd immunity was never the declared strategy,” Ms Truss said, at the “number of meetings” she attended.
The trade secretary also appeared to acknowledge widespread criticism of the Sewell report into race disparities, when asked to name someone who praised it “other than the prime minister”.
“I would be guessing if I did,” she replied, after the study, ordered amid the Black Lives Matter protests, was accused of ignoring structural racism.
Ms Truss acknowledged the failure to prosecute alleged rapists, with fewer than one in 60 cases now leading to a charge, admitting: “There’s a big issue on rape cases and I completely acknowledge that. We need to do more.”
And she insisted gay conversion therapy will be banned, while saying: “We must make sure we are protecting under-18s from making irreversible decisions about their future.”
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