Analysis: Kwasi Kwarteng and Thérèse Coffey could be among the big winners if Truss becomes PM
Liz Truss has three weeks before she is likely to walk through No 10’s black door as prime minister, facing a difficult in-tray. Here we take a look at how senior roles could shape up.
Continue reading...Analysis shows half of the most-deprived areas in England have not benefited from investment
A proposal to curb ministerial influence over the £4.8bn levelling up fund after claims of possible bias in favour of Tory seats has been rejected by the government.
Analysis has revealed more than half of the 100 most deprived areas of the country have not yet benefited from the fund. The awards are under fresh scrutiny after former chancellor Rishi Sunak told an audience in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, that he changed funding formulas to divert money from “deprived urban areas”.
Continue reading...British prime minister-in-waiting Liz Truss is said to want to appear in the fashion glossy, but she should be careful what she wishes for
Liz Truss, heavily tipped to be the next leader of the Conservative party, would like to get into Vogue. We know this because she asked the Scottish first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, how to go about it at the Cop26 climate conference last November. Sturgeon said Truss “looked a little bit as if she’d swallowed a wasp” when she told her she had made its pages twice.
“This is going to sound really up myself but I don’t mean to … I’d just been interviewed by Vogue, as you do … that was the main thing she wanted to talk to me about – she wanted to know how she could get into Vogue”, Sturgeon told an Edinburgh fringe event last week.
Continue reading...Analysis: noncommittal positions of leadership hopefuls on tackling climate crisis may be short-sighted
It’s the driest, hottest summer in 50 years, yet the Conservative leadership candidates appear to be fiddling while Britain burns.
Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have barely been asked anything about their plans for tackling the climate emergency in all their debates and hustings so far – and nor have they made it a leading campaign issue themselves.
Continue reading...Labour leader hits back at criticism saying his party has been ‘leading’ on the issue
Keir Starmer has teased Labour’s package to tackle the cost of living crisis, saying his party would end energy prepayment premiums which he claims would offer 4m households relief on bills.
The announcement, which came in what is reportedly his first tweet this month, follows criticism of Labour’s inaction on the cost of living crisis.
Every organisation has its culture, but it’s not fixed, it can be changed.
That’s what ministerial leadership is about: it’s about making sure that the policies we represent, the values we stand for, are reflected in what we do.
Latest updates: foreign secretary’s supporters accuse former chancellor of resisting changes to EU regulation as sixth hustings looms
Gordon Brown, the former Labour prime minister, has used an article in today’s Guardian to propose that the government should halt the increases in the energy price cap planned for later this year and next year and, if necessary, take energy companies into public ownership to ensure that they keep prices down.
Alongside the Lib Dem plan, with which it has some similarities (they also want a price cap freeze, and more money raised through a windfall tax), it is the most radical and ambitious proposal on the table to tackle the energy bills crisis.
Continue reading...Campaigners told new deadline for decision on first new deep coalmine in more than 30 years is 8 November
A much-anticipated decision on whether the UK’s first new deep coalmine in more than 30 years should go ahead has been delayed again.
The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (LUHC) has written to Friends of the Earth to inform the organisation that the new secretary of state, Greg Clark, has set a new deadline of 8 November to rule on whether the coalmine should be granted planning permission.
Continue reading...Tory leadership contender says rival had previously dismissed direct support as ‘handouts’
Suella Braverman, the attorney general, is giving a speech to the Policy Exchange thinktank on equalities and rights. There is a live feed here.
In a preview of the speech published in the Daily Telegraph, Braverman says she wants to clarify the law on trans rights as it applies in schools. She says:
When it comes to gender-questioning children, we should always have compassion. At the same time, our compassion should never blind us to the harm it is possible to do to children by misplaced affirmation. Many schools and teachers believe – incorrectly – that they are under an absolute legal obligation to treat children who are gender questioning according to the preference of the child. Many are scared of the consequences of not doing so.
I want to make it clear that it is possible, within the law, for schools to refuse to use the preferred opposite-sex pronouns of a child.
The UK and partners have condemned in the strongest terms China’s escalation in the region around Taiwan, as seen through our recent G7 statement.
I instructed officials to summon the Chinese ambassador to explain his country’s actions.
Continue reading...Analysis: Gordon Brown, Martin Lewis and Ed Davey are the voices being heard, as the opposition is left with the same policy as Sunak
Gordon Brown has thrown down the gauntlet with his plan to halt a winter energy crisis – but not just to the Tory leadership candidates. The call to revoke the energy price cap and consider nationalising energy firms will attract a lot of attention but fundamentally it is also a chance for Labour to choose to be radical. It is likely to compound calls from activists for the party to find a new sense of urgency.
In the middle of August, politicians can often afford to take long breaks away from Westminster to recharge – and sometimes get a valuable dose of perspective. But the extent to which politicians – including those in the Labour party – have gone missing this summer is particularly striking.
Continue reading...Foreign secretary had previously said she did not want to give ‘handouts’ to people struggling with the cost of living
Liz Truss has doubled down on her refusal to offer significant help to people with soaring energy bills this winter, despite a forecast that these could exceed £4,200 annually from January, and rise further during 2023.
Truss, the runaway favourite to succeed Boris Johnson as prime minister next month, has already said she does not want to give “handouts” to people struggling with bills, preferring to prioritise tax cuts.
Continue reading...Latest updates: Lib Dem leader says Tory leadership hopefuls have no plan to help millions of families struggling with price rises
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a leading poverty charity, says, in the light of the latest forecast about how energy bills will rise (see 10.54am), the government needs to at least double the help already provided to help people through the cost of living crisis. This is from Peter Matejic, its chief analyst.
The latest projections of annual energy bills exceeding £4,200 from January is the latest in a series of terrifying warnings over the past week, from the Bank of England and others. Families on low incomes cannot afford these eye watering sums and as a nation we can’t afford to ignore an impending disaster.
Both candidates to be prime minister must now recognise the extraordinarily fast-changing situation and act to protect the hardest hit from the coming emergency.
Unite said the 4% increase for staff in middle pay bands announced by the government last month is a “massive pay cut” because of soaring inflation.
The union will now consult with its 100,000 health members across the NHS in both England and Wales on whether they accept the “imposed deal” or want to challenge it through industrial action, which could mean strikes this winter.
Continue reading...Truss said she would lower taxes not give ‘handouts’, but ally says future support is not off the table
A senior ally of Liz Truss has played down suggestions she ruled out more emergency support payments to help people struggling through the worsening cost of living crisis this winter.
Penny Mordaunt, who is backing the frontrunner in the Tory leadership race, said Truss’s comments had been misinterpreted and she wanted to prioritise tax cuts.
Continue reading...EU officials see little hope of escape from post-Brexit low under either Tory candidate
European officials are pessimistic about a reset in post-Brexit relations with the UK, whoever becomes Britain’s next prime minister in September.
Whether it is Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak who is handed the keys to Downing Street on 5 September, officials in Brussels have little hope of a rapprochement with the new government.
Continue reading...As an economic crisis looms in the UK, legislation shelved and deadlines missed on energy, online safety and gambling laws
Mining along the west coast of Cumbria goes back to at least the 1600s, and this summer the local community awaited a crucial government decision on whether a new deep coalmine operation would be given the go-ahead.
While proponents of the £165m deep coalmine near Whitehaven say it would create jobs and help power the UK’s steel industry, environmental campaigners say it would undermine the government’s commitment to meeting climate targets.
Continue reading...Former minister also argues Britain should move beyond first-past-post political system at Edinburgh festival fringe
Former Foreign Office minister Rory Stewart has said he has found it “painful” to watch the Conservative party “lurch to the right”, arguing that electoral reform is the only way to plug a “gaping hole in the middle of British politics”.
Speaking to an audience at the Edinburgh festival fringe, Stewart said a shift away from the UK’s first-past-the-post system was needed so “new parties, new ideas, new opportunities” could break through.
He said this would be an important corrective to a “wooden, stiff and boring” Labour party and a Conservative party in “la-la-land”.
Continue reading...Former PM has warned of a financial timebomb awaiting families as Labour plans a major intervention to address crisis
Boris Johnson and the Tory leadership candidates should agree an immediate emergency budget tackling the spiralling cost of living, Gordon Brown has said, or risk “condemning millions of vulnerable and blameless children and pensioners to a winter of dire poverty”.
The intervention by the former prime minister comes as new figures seen by the Observer show that more than 4 million households are on course to spend a quarter of their net income on energy.
Continue reading...Win as One hopes to raise money to support candidates from progressive parties who are in favour of change
A grassroots campaign is hoping to raise £1m to bring more supporters of electoral reform to the Commons at the next general election.
The group, called Win as One, will work with candidates from progressive parties who are well-placed to beat the Tories and are in support of proportional representation (PR).
Continue reading...Tory leadership candidate is praised as an earnest workaholic, but critics say politically he has a glass jaw and is naive
“Let me tell you a story,” Rishi Sunak says in his soft-voiced campaign launch video, highlighting his status as the grandson of hard-grafting Indian immigrants.
If he wins the race for No 10, the 42-year-old would be the first person of colour to be the UK prime minister, and the first practising Hindu, in a historic break with the past. Yet, in other ways, his story is as establishment as it comes: private school, PPE at Oxford, the City, the Tory party.
Continue reading...Labour’s request is latest PM contender has faced with regards to management of family’s fortune
Labour is calling on Rishi Sunak to be more transparent about his finances after the prime ministerial candidate declined to answer questions about the source of hundreds of thousands of pounds he loaned to a company that he jointly owned with his wife.
The move is the latest request for the former chancellor to explain details about how he has managed his family’s fortune, which is said to total £730m and has led to him being routinely referred to as the UK’s richest MP.
Continue reading...Video shows former chancellor telling Tunbridge Wells residents he tried to divert funds from ‘deprived urban areas’ to them
The former housing secretary Robert Jenrick has said the government’s “overwhelming priority” should be inflation.
Jenrick, who is backing Rishi Sunak in the leadership race, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:
The dashboard is flashing red on the British economy and we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that all is going to be fine.
I think it’s very clear this morning that our overwhelming priority must be inflation. That’s what many people have been saying for a long time. It’s what Rishi Sunak has been saying throughout this leadership contest and tax cuts, unfunded tax cuts, in the immediate - always attractive though that might be to those of us who want to reduce the burden of taxation - seem less relevant in these circumstances.
The reality is we’re facing a recession if we carry on with our business-as-usual policies. People are struggling – whether it’s to pay food bills or fuel bills – that’s why it’s very important we reverse the national insurance increase, we have a temporary moratorium on the green energy levy to help people with their fuel bills.
The most important thing is getting the economy going so we avoid a recession and the business-as-usual policies aren’t working, we need to do more, and that’s why I am determined to reform the economy and keep taxes low.
I know it’s going to be a tough winter, I want to do all I can to make sure we’re releasing the reserves in the North Sea of gas, I want to get on with things like fracking in areas that support it, and I also want to make sure that we’re moving ahead with nuclear power and more renewables.
Of course, it will take time but the best time to start is today in moving that forward, as well as giving people all the help we can by keeping their taxes low and getting the economy going.
Continue reading...