UK politics live: minister suggests government will reject plan for £3bn sugar and salt tax
Latest updates: Robert Jenrick says government ‘does not want to make life more difficult for people on low incomes’ with plan to improve national diet
- Food strategy calls for £3bn sugar and salt tax to improve UK’s diet
- Rishi Sunak says UK is bouncing back as payrolls soar in June
- Coronavirus – latest global updates
- See all our coronavirus coverage
Minette Batters, president of the National Farmers Union (NFU), told Sky News this morning that she welcomed the emphasis in the National Food Strategy (see 9.24am) on making the provision of food more localised. She explained:
[The report] sets out a new paradigm and for me ... this is about getting back to cooking from scratch, it’s about whole foods.
I think we need to get back to a more localised system, a more added value food system.
Mark Drakeford, the Welsh first minister, has used interviews this morning to restate his opposition to two key elements of Boris Johnson’s Covid opening up policy.
Drakeford said he thought the PM was wrong to say that fully-vaccinated people returning from amber list countries after 19 July would no longer have to isolate. Wales is also adopting this policy, because many Welsh holidaymakers travel through airports in England and the Welsh government decided it would not be practical to try operating a different policy. But he said the Welsh government was advising people to holiday at home, and that Johnson’s move could backfire. He explained:
I do regret the fact that the prime minister has decided that people returning from amber list countries do not require to self-isolate. I think it runs the risk of re-importation of the virus into the United Kingdom, I think it runs the risk of new variants cropping up elsewhere in the world coming into the UK and into Wales.
But when people are on holiday, they will behave in the way that people on holiday behave. They will be mixing with more people, they will be doing the sorts of things that bring them into contact with one another.
Here in Wales in September of last year, we ended up with considerable difficulties caused by the reimportation of the virus. People going on holiday to many other parts of the world and when they came back to Wales, they were already infected. That drove a new rise in infections here in Wales.
I think it will be difficult for people in England to know exactly what is required of them.
I’ve often been told by the UK government that we should work to have a four-nation approach to coronavirus and I don’t disagree with that at all.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3elPdNE
No comments