Liz Truss has called on the EU to scrap “border control and paperwork” on Irish Sea trade, setting up a clash with Brussels 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, Truss also rejected farmers’ pleas to step back from a tariff-free trade deal with Australia – insisting it was “the gateway” to a boom in sales across Asia.
She also made a cast-iron pledge to uphold a ban on hormone-injected beef, saying: “Hormone-injected beef will not be allowed into the – UK full stop.”
The trade secretary also 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,” Truss said, at the “number of meetings” she attended.
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