Chancellor obfuscated while imposing steep tax rises on ordinary Britons, says shadow minister
Rishi Sunak and his family potentially avoided paying tens of millions of pounds in taxes through his wife’s “non-dom” status while the chancellor imposed tax rises on the public, Labour has said.
The chancellor’s wife, Akshata Murty, gave in to mounting pressure on Friday, announcing she would pay UK taxes as Sunak’s position began to appear increasingly tenuous.
Continue reading...Analysis: While the chancellor says his wife paid all UK taxes due, pressure is building over what he hasn’t said about their finances
Rishi Sunak is under huge pressure over his financial affairs and those of his wife, Akshata Murty, the daughter of an Indian billionaire who made his money in IT. These are the key unanswered questions:
Continue reading...Akshata Murty says she realises many felt her arrangements were not ‘compatible with my husband’s job as chancellor’
• Sunak defends wife’s tax status as Labour and No 10 deny leak
Rishi Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murty, bowed to pressure to pay UK taxes on Friday night, after Boris Johnson said he had been unaware she was a “non-dom” and fresh questions emerged over the couple’s tax affairs.
With Sunak’s position under increasing threat, Murty said she realised many people felt her tax arrangements were not “compatible with my husband’s job as chancellor”, adding that she appreciated the “British sense of fairness”. She will pay tax on all worldwide income in future and for the last tax year, but not on backdated income, which could have saved her an estimated £20m of UK tax on foreign earnings from her billionaire father’s Indian IT company.
Continue reading...Chancellor declines to endorse claim by Boris Johnson during London visit that goal will be achieved by mid-2024
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has said his country is doing all it can to wean itself off Russian energy, but declined to endorse a claim by Boris Johnson that it would stop importing Russian gas by the middle of 2024.
Scholz said only that the goal would be achieved very soon, and that Germany would stop using Russian coal by the summer and Russian oil by the end of the year.
Continue reading...Analysis: Windrush scandal wrongly categorised people as illegal immigrants, while most Ukrainian refugees have documentation
Why has Britain, unlike every other country in Europe, insisted on requiring all Ukrainian refugees to obtain visas before travelling here?
In justifying the decision, Priti Patel has again pointed to the Windrush scandal as a key factor in the government’s refusal to waive visas for people fleeing Ukraine. But it is a reasoning that has left immigration experts baffled.
Continue reading...Union’s offices raided as part of investigation into allegations of bribery, fraud and money laundering
A police inquiry involving a Unite union official is examining contracts related to the construction of a £98m hotel and conference centre in Birmingham, the Guardian has learned.
South Wales police and HM Revenue and Customs raided the union’s offices in central London on Thursday as part of an investigation into allegations of bribery, fraud and money laundering.
Continue reading...CWU bosses say increase is relative cut in salary but BT says it is its biggest award in two decades
BT has given 58,000 workers a £1,500 pay rise that it says is its biggest award in two decades, despite its largest union rejecting the deal and saying it intends to ballot members over strike action.
Last week BT had a £1,200 pay rise offer rejected by the Communication Workers Union (CWU), which represents about 40,000 of the company’s 100,000 employees, with union bosses describing it as “insulting” and a “relative pay cut” as soaring inflation fuels a cost of living crisis.
Continue reading...72 people were killed in the fire but Pickles said 96, the number who died in the Hillsborough disaster
A former cabinet minister has challenged the Grenfell inquiry not to waste his time while giving evidence, before getting the death toll from the disaster wrong.
Lord Pickles, who served as secretary of state at the then Department for Communities and Local Government between 2010 and 2015, sparked anger after he advised the inquiry’s senior counsel to “use your time wisely” as he had an extremely busy day.
Continue reading...Letter signed by several MPs urges better enforcement of transparency law, as government accused of obstructing requests
More than 100 journalists, politicians and campaigners have signed an open letter warning that the UK’s freedom of information (FoI) laws are being undermined by a lack of resources and government departments obstructing lawful requests.
The signatories include the editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Katharine Viner, the editor of the Observer, Paul Webster, as well as the shadow solicitor general, Andy Slaughter, the former Brexit secretary David Davis, and the former Green party leader Caroline Lucas.
Continue reading...Plan will not please environmental campaigners, who say it fails to meet government’s net-zero targets
Boris Johnson is to put nuclear energy at the heart of the UK’s new energy strategy, but ministers have refused to set targets for onshore wind and vowed to continue the exploitation of North Sea oil and gas.
Amid deep divisions among senior Conservatives, the strategy will enrage environmentalists, who say the government’s plans are in defiance of its own net-zero targets and neglect alternative measures that experts say would provide much quicker relief from high energy bills.
Increasing nuclear capacity from 7 gigawatts to 24GW
Offshore wind target raised from 40GW to 50GW (from 11GW today)
Solar could grow five times from 14GW to 70GW by 2035
An “impartial” review into whether fracking is safe
Up to 10GW of hydrogen power by 2030
Continue reading...Bosses say 1.25-point rise heaps pressure on firms already enduring soaring costs linked to Covid and Brexit
Britain’s employers are being forced to shoulder a £9bn tax rise after the government pushed ahead with raising national insurance on Wednesday despite stiff opposition.
Company bosses said the 1.25-percentage-point rise in national insurance contributions (NICs), which is paid by workers and their employers, would add to already severe pressure from runaway inflation and soaring business costs this year linked to Covid, Brexit and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Continue reading...Tax status allows Akshata Murthy to avoid tax on foreign earnings
Rishi Sunak’s multi-millionaire wife claims non-domicile status, it has emerged, which allows her to save millions of pounds in tax on dividends collected from her family’s IT business empire.
Akshata Murthy, who receives about £11.5m in annual dividends from her stake in the Indian IT services company Infosys, declares non-dom status, a scheme that allows people to avoid tax on foreign earnings.
Continue reading...Eight more oligarchs will also face sanctions and UK oil and coal imports will stop by end of year, says foreign secretary
The UK will impose a full asset freeze on Russia’s largest bank and end all imports of oil and coal by the end of the year, the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has said.
Eight more oligarchs will also be sanctioned, including Moshe Kantor, the largest shareholder of the fertiliser company Acron and Andrey Guryev, the founder of another key fertiliser company, whom the UK described as a close associate of Vladimir Putin.
Continue reading...Latest updates: PM admits households are facing ‘unquestionably tough times’, but says NI increase is right thing for the NHS
Keir Starmer says the national insurance rise is “the wrong tax at the wrong time”.
The Labour leader said:
People are really, really struggling to pay their bills. And this is just going to impact on them very, very hard.
There are lots of landlords who’ve got many, many properties and they are not going to be paying a penny more in tax. Their tenants, who are going out to work, are going to be paying more in tax.
Continue reading...PM also says women should have ‘dedicated’ spaces, amid fallout over decision to exclude trans conversion practices from ban
Boris Johnson has suggested athletes who are transgender should not be allowed to compete in sports competitions that do not match their biological sex, amid the fallout from his decision not to ban conversion practices for people questioning their gender.
The prime minister said the issue “wasn’t something I thought that I would have to consider in great detail”. Johnson also said that women should have spaces in hospitals, prisons and changing rooms which were “dedicated to women”.
Continue reading...Electricity System Operator, the division that keeps the lights on in Great Britain, will form part of a new public body
The job of keeping the UK’s electricity and gas flowing will be returned to public control by 2024, under government plans for the effective nationalisation of a division of National Grid.
A new public body, the “Future System Operator”, will have responsibility for planning and managing energy distribution, with a focus on the challenges posed by decarbonisation.
Continue reading...John Lansdown seeking up to £76m, which he will use to set up trust to help fellow seafarers
A former P&O Ferries chef is suing the company for £76m over its decision to sack almost 800 staff without notice last month.
John Lansdown, the only seafarer to launch a legal action, has filed a tribunal claim against the company and its chief executive for unfair dismissal, racial discrimination and harassment.
Continue reading...Cabinet Office won’t confirm or deny existence of taxpayer-funded pictures of illegal gatherings after freedom of information request
Ministers are refusing to disclose any pictures taken by official No 10 photographers of illegal gatherings held inside Downing Street, prompting Labour to call on Boris Johnson to “come clean and release these photos”.
The Cabinet Office refused to confirm or deny the existence of any photographs of events in the cabinet room, leaving parties, and a party in the prime minister’s Downing Street flat, after official pictures of the gatherings were requested under freedom of information laws.
Continue reading...Organisations pulled out of Safe to Be Me after government failure to ban conversion practices for transgender people
The government’s flagship LGBTQ+ conference is to be cancelled after it fell into disarray with more organisations pulling out and a key government adviser accusing ministers of waging a “woke war”.
With Downing Street under fire for watering down its commitment to ban conversion practices, the Safe to Be Me event due to be hosted in June has now been scrapped.
Continue reading...Analysis: why ministers are risking political capital pushing ahead now with privatisation plan is unclear
According to one key individual involved in the battle for Channel 4’s future, the broadcaster is a “wonderful company doing a fantastic job”, it is performing well financially and plays a crucial role in supporting the British television ecosystem.
Curiously, that individual is Stephen Parkinson, a government minister arguing that the only solution to secure Channel 4’s future is to rapidly privatise it and sell it off to a commercial owner, possibly one based overseas.
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