Category Archives: Politics

Sunak accused of retreating from global climate leadership at Cop28

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PM attracts cross-party criticism with claim that ‘climate politics is at breaking point’ during combative summit visit

Rishi Sunak has been accused of “shrinking and retreating” from global leadership as he used the Cop28 summit to claim that “climate politics is at breaking point” because of the costs of net zero.

While many other world leaders, including King Charles, spoke of the urgency of action on the climate, the prime minister used his brief appearance at the summit in Dubai to promote his approach to slowing the pace of net zero policies and reducing pressures on family finances.

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Sunak says retaining Parthenon marbles is matter of law as he denies ‘hissy fit’

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PM reaffirms stance after George Osborne suggests snub to Greek counterpart was result of ‘petulance’

Rishi Sunak has denied having a “hissy fit” over the Parthenon marbles row and has said they cannot be returned to Greece “as a matter of law”.

The prime minister this week accused his Greek counterpart of using a trip to London to “grandstand” over the issue of the ancient Greek sculptures.

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Rishi Sunak ‘won’t allow foreign court to block’ Rwanda plan

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Centrist Tories urge PM not to abandon UK’s human rights commitments, but Sunak said his patience ‘worn thin’ by delays

Rishi Sunak has promised not to allow foreign courts to stop Britain sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, even as a group of more centrist Conservative MPs urges him not to abandon Britain’s international human rights commitments.

The prime minister said on Friday his patience was being “worn thin” by delays to the Rwanda plan, which was ruled illegal under domestic and international law by the supreme court last month.

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Matt Hancock appears for second day of evidence to Covid inquiry – UK politics live

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Health secretary during pandemic returns to inquiry after saying tens of thousands of lives could have been saved if UK had locked down earlier

Gordon Brown has said political briefings against Alistair Darling in 2008 were “completely unfair”, as he paid tribute to his former chancellor following his death aged 70.

In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the former prime minister said Darling was a “compassionate politician who wanted to get things done” but was “always very quiet in the way he did it”.

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King Charles to give ‘call to arms’ Cop28 opening statement, says PM

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Rishi Sunak’s attendance comes after he scaled back pledges to help the UK reach net zero by 2050

King Charles will give a “call to arms” in his Cop28 climate summit opening statement, Rishi Sunak has said, expressing delight over the monarch’s record championing the issue.

Sunak said it was a “proud moment” for him to witness Charles deliver his speech on Friday, which “speaks volumes about our type of leadership as a country”.

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British Museum ‘will continue Parthenon marbles talks’ despite fallout

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Institution’s chair, George Osborne, says the row opened Rishi Sunak up to a ‘devastating line of attack’ from Labour

Rishi Sunak opened up a “devastating line of attack” from Labour by snubbing his Greek counterpart this week, according to the British Museum’s chair George Osborne, who said the row had encouraged the institution to press ahead with talks over loaning the Parthenon marbles to Athens.

Osborne said: “That is, I think, something worth exploring. And we can go on doing it whether or not Rishi Sunak meets the Greek prime minister or not. In fact, if anything, things have been rather clarified by this week. We obviously know we’re not going to get any particular support from the Conservative government.”

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Earlier lockdown could have saved lives of 30,000, Hancock tells Covid inquiry

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Ex-health secretary has described Boris Johnson’s Downing Street as undermined by ‘culture of fear’

Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved if the UK had locked down three weeks earlier, Matt Hancock has told the Covid inquiry, as he described the operation of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street as undermined by a “culture of fear”.

The former health secretary said his staff were abused by Dominic Cummings and that Johnson’s then chief adviser attempted to exclude ministers and even Johnson himself from key decisions at the start of the pandemic, hampering the government’s response.

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Matt Hancock ‘was not told about eat out to help out scheme until day it was announced’ – as it happened

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This live blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here

Hancock is now deploying the defence previewed in the Observer on Sunday. (See 9.58am.)

He says from the middle of January the DHSC was “trying to effectively raise the alarm”. He says:

We were trying to wake up Whitehall to the scale of the problem and this wasn’t a problem that couldn’t be addressed only from the health department. Non-pharmaceutical interventions cannot be put in place by a health department. A health department can’t shut schools. It should have been grasped and led from the centre of government earlier. And you’ve seen evidence that repeatedly the department and I tried to make this happen.

And we were on occasions blocked, and at other times our concerns were not taken as seriously as they should have been until the very end of February.

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Younger Britons are more pro-EU but ‘fixing’ Brexit not their priority

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Ursula von der Leyen hopes young people can drive a rapprochement but polls show they have other things on their minds

“We goofed it up, you have to fix it,” the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said on Tuesday in a message to the younger generation about Brexit.

Fixing it would be “the direction of travel” with regard to the UK rejoining the EU, she told an audience in Brussels. But as the fourth anniversary of Brexit approaches, is it likely that Britain’s millennials and generation Z will demand a rapprochement?

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‘Don’t be naive like I was’: UK academic advises Cop28 attenders to stay safe

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Matthew Hedges, tortured in UAE in 2018, tells reporters and activists to take clean phones and watch who they deal with

Journalists and campaigners attending the Cop28 climate conference in Dubai should “not be naive” and take steps to protect their physical and digital security, a British academic who was tortured in the summit’s host country has warned.

Matthew Hedges, who was detained in the United Arab Emirates for seven months in 2018, advised reporters and activists to take new, clean phones, think carefully about who they deal with and how and where they protest.

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Labour vows to ‘rewire Britain’ as pylon plans spark row in Tory party

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Opposition vows to tackle rural connection delays to the grid while Conservatives call for offshore network to preserve landscapes

Labour is promising to “rewire Britain”, making its case to the UK’s rural communities that it will connect farmers and businesses to the National Grid at record-breaking speed.

The pledge comes as Rishi Sunak faces a battle over electricity pylons with the trade secretary, Kemi Badenoch, and former ministers urging him to pull the plug on crucial grid infrastructure.

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UK and Rwanda ‘still committed’ to deal after reports Kigali is cooling

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Officials in the east African country are frustrated by delays in migrants arriving and negative attention scheme has engendered

The UK and Rwanda remain committed to their controversial migrant deportation deal, sources have said, after reports emerged that support in Kigali for the agreement had cooled because of the continual delays.

Westminster has already paid the Rwandan government more than £140m but nobody has been sent to the east African country yet. The first flight was scheduled for June 2022 but was cancelled after legal challenges.

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Home Office ‘loses’ 17,000 people whose asylum claims were withdrawn

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Tory MP queries claims marked withdrawn as government tries to clear backlog by end of year

Rishi Sunak has been accused of losing control of the UK’s borders after the Home Office admitted that it does not know the whereabouts of 17,000 people whose asylum claims have been withdrawn.

Amid a stalled Rwanda deportation scheme and rising costs for housing people seeking refuge in hotels, senior civil servants in the department were told by the Conservative MP and deputy party chair Lee Anderson they “hadn’t got a clue” after failing to provide answers on people seeking refuge in the UK or foreign offender removals.

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Sunak rejects von der Leyen’s comments that UK could rejoin EU

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European Commission president said Brexit could be fixed because leaders had ‘goofed it up’

Rishi Sunak has rejected the suggestion that Brexit could be in peril after Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, claimed that the UK could be on a path to rejoining the European Union.

At an event in Brussels on Tuesday night, von der Leyen admitted that European leaders had “goofed up” over the departure of Britain from the bloc and suggested the younger generation could “fix” it.

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Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer clash over immigration and Parthenon marbles at PMQs – UK politics live

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Prime minister’s record shows he has the ‘reverse Midas touch’, Keir Starmer says

Back at the home affairs committee, Tim Loughton (Con) has just had another go at getting answers about the number of asylum applications that have been withdrawn. (See 10.38am.)

He said, when he said earlier 95% of withdrawn applications were categorised as withdrawn for “other” reasons (and not because the claims were not substantiated), he was quoting figures for the last quarter.

Whilst the prospect is perhaps what none of us would wish to plan for, I believe the reality will be that we will need to discharge Covid-19 positive patients into residential care settings for the reason you have noted.

This will be entirely clinically appropriate because the NHS will triage those to retain in acute settings who can benefit from that sector’s care.

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How Labour’s plan for ‘fair pay deals’ looks to solve UK social care crisis

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Underfunded, overstretched sector to become testing ground for battle against low pay but critics say policy is weak and vague

“My sister is a care worker. She was a care worker during the pandemic. Fourteen-hour shifts, often overnight. Unimaginable pressure. And the reward? A struggle every week – and I mean every week – just to make ends meet.”

So spoke Keir Starmer last month, drawing on experience close to home in his party conference speech to underline his determination to overhaul the cash-strapped social care sector.

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MPs add to pressure on ministers to vet Barclay family’s Telegraph offer

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Call for national security law to be used to investigate proposed deal involving consortium backed by UAE

A group of MPs including the former Conservative party leader Iain Duncan Smith have asked ministers to use national security law to investigate the Barclay family’s proposed deal to give control of the Telegraph to a consortium backed by the United Arab Emirates.

The group of 18 MPs, which also includes Alicia Kearns, the chair of the foreign affairs committee, have written to the deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, arguing that the proposed deal poses a “very real potential national security threat”.

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Sunak accuses Greek PM of ‘grandstanding’ over Parthenon marbles

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Prime minister escalates row with Athens counterpart in first public comments after cancelling their meeting

Rishi Sunak has intensified his diplomatic spat with his Greek counterpart, accusing Kyriakos Mitsotakis of using his recent trip to London to “grandstand” over the issue of the Parthenon sculptures.

The prime minister told MPs on Wednesday he had cancelled a planned meeting with Mitsotakis in London on Tuesday because the Greek prime minister had reneged on a promise not to use the trip as an opportunity to advocate for the sculptures’ return.

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V&A director says museum trustees ‘infantilised’ amid row over Parthenon marbles

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Tristram Hunt says trustees should be able to ‘make case’ for items to be retained or returned to countries of origin

Museum trustees should be able to “make the case” whether items in their collections should be retained or returned to their countries of origin, but instead were being “infantilised” and “hidebound” by legislation, Tristram Hunt, the director of the V&A, has said.

He was speaking as a diplomatic row between the UK and Greece over the future of the Parthenon marbles, held at the British Museum, blew up this week after Rishi Sunak abruptly cancelled a meeting with the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

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Sunak accused of trying to ‘reset’ climate credentials at Cop28

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British PM to tell UN summit of plans for rainforests and new national park – but green groups remain sceptical

Rishi Sunak is to announce a new package of green measures as the Cop28 UN climate summit begins in Dubai, including a search for a national park, a strategy on British rainforests and landscape recovery projects with farmers.

But green groups have told the Guardian the package is greenwashing and an attempt by the UK prime minister to “reset” his reputation after previously opposing environmental measures.

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