Good morning. Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, will deliver his keynote speech to his party’s conference today and he is going to use it to attack “the cruelty and stupidity” of the Trump administration in the US. He will be referring in particular to its attitude to medical research, according to extracts from the speech briefed in advance. Davey is expected to say:
The United States is by far the world’s biggest funder of cancer research – mostly through its National Cancer Institute. But since Donald Trump returned to the White House, he has cancelled hundreds of grants for cancer research projects.
He’s slashing billions of dollars from the National Cancer Institute’s budget. He’s even ordered a review of all grants for research involving supposedly ‘woke’ keywords – including the word ‘women’.
And last month, Trump’s health secretary – Robert Kennedy Jr – cancelled half a billion dollars’ worth of research into mRNA vaccines. He did it based on totally false conspiracy theories about these life-saving vaccines. The same type of vaccines that protected us from Covid just a few years ago …
It is hard to express the cruelty and stupidity of cutting off research into medicine that has the power to save so many lives. A decision – by the way – that was enthusiastically applauded by Farage’s party at their conference. I don’t think we should let the Trump Administration hold back progress on tackling cancer like this.
Davey’s embargoed comments were briefed to the media before Trump used a White House press conference to make bogus claims about the causes of autism, and so the Davey speech could not be more topical. A day after Nigel Farage outlined plans to deport hundreds of thousands of foreigners, Davey will be speaking up for immigration. Specifically, he will say the government should set up a dedicated fellowship scheme to lure US cancer researchers, who are appalled by the Trump policies, to the UK.
Peter Walker has a full preview here.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9am: Liberal Democrats start the final day of their conference with emergency debates on digital rights and the asylum system.
10am: The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development publishes its latest interim economic outlook, with its latest forecasts for the UK economy.
2.20pm: Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, closes his party conference with his keynote speech.
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