Prime minister U-turns on attending climate conference in Egypt following criticism of decision not to go
Sam Hall, director of the Conserative Environment Network, has welcomed Rishi Sunak’s decision to attend Cop27.
Rishi Sunak has confirmed that he will attend the Cop27 climate summit in Egypt next week.
Continue reading...Roger Gale says home secretary is only really interested in playing to the right wing of the Conservative party
JK Rowling has described the SNP MSP who quit the Scottish government in a row over plans to allow self-identification for transgender people as a “heroine”.
The author, who is known as a vocal critic of the reforms, praised Ash Regan, saying: “This is what a principled politician looks like.”
Her comments on Twitter came after Regan stood down as community safety minister in the Scottish government. She said then that her conscience would not allow her to vote for the gender recognition reform (Scotland) bill, quitting her ministerial post just hours before it faced its first vote at Holyrood.
Rowling, who has previously tweeted a picture of herself wearing a T-shirt calling Scotland’s First Minister a “destroyer of women’s rights” took to social media to praise Ms Regan.
The Harry Potter author wrote: “This is what a principled politician looks like. @AshtenRegan will rightly be seen as a heroine when future generations of Scottish women look back at the profoundly misogynistic legislation currently being pushed through by the Sturgeon government.”
Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said she imagines policymakers in France and Germany would look at the UK immigration numbers and “wondering what the fuss is about”.
She said the backlog had increased because, as numbers have risen, capacity for decision-making not increased and there are fewer asylum claim decisions being made over the last year or so than before the pandemic.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:
The UK experienced a period for most of the 2010s where there were actually very low numbers of asylum claims by historical standards.
Continue reading...PM said he stood by Tories’ 2019 manifesto policy when asked in Commons, in rebuff to Liz Truss
Fracking will in effect remain banned under Rishi Sunak’s government, his spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday, saying the new prime minister was committed to the policy in the 2019 manifesto.
The confirmation came after the prime minister told the Commons that he “stands by” the manifesto, which put a moratorium on shale gas extraction.
Continue reading...PM accused of immediately breaking integrity pledge by restoring home secretary in ‘grubby deal’
Rishi Sunak has been accused of immediately breaking his pledge to restore government integrity by bringing Suella Braverman back as home secretary in exchange for a key endorsement for his leadership bid.
Coming under pressure in his first prime minister’s questions, Sunak did not deny that civil servants had raised concerns about one of the most senior roles handed out in his cabinet reshuffle on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Rishi Sunak to meet monarch after Liz Truss chairs her final cabinet meeting at 9am
I’m Helen Sullivan, with for the next while. If you have questions or see news we may have missed, you can get in touch on Twitter here.
We’re expected to hear from Nadhim Zahawi, who made a dizzying U-turn from supporting Johnson to supporting Sunak yesterday, on Sky News at 07.05 this morning.
Continue reading...MPs face potentially losing whip after No 10 confirms chaotic vote is being treated as confidence issue
Dozens of Conservative MPs are facing potential disciplinary action or losing the party whip after Downing Street announced that a chaotic vote on fracking was being treated as a confidence issue.
It was widely reported that Liz Truss’s chief whip, Wendy Morton, and the deputy chief whip, Craig Whittaker, had stepped down after disorderly scenes, with MPs alleging ministers physically pulled some wavering Tories into the voting lobbies.
Continue reading...Home secretary departs after sending an official document by personal email but uses resignation letter to criticise PM
Plans to create Great British Railways, a public sector body to oversee Britain’s railways, have been delayed, MPs have been told.
Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the transport secretary, told the Commons transport committee that the transport bill, which would have set up the new body, has been delayed because legislation to deal with the energy crisis is being prioritised. She said:
The challenges of things like the energy legislation we’ve got to bring in and various others has meant that we have lost the opportunity to have that [bill] in this third session.
What we are continuing to pitch for will be what I would call a narrow bill around the future of transport technologies, the legislation around things like e-scooters.
Continue reading...Opposition motion drafted to make it very difficult for government to ignore or allow mass abstentions
Labour will attempt to force a binding vote on fracking on Wednesday, as Tory MPs mull backing a bid which would allow the opposition to put down a bill banning shale gas extraction.
The motion submitted by Labour for its opposition day debate is drafted to make it very difficult for the government to ignore the vote or allow mass abstentions.
Continue reading...Statement from No 10 comes straight after PM told MPs she was ‘absolutely’ committed to avoiding public spending cuts
Sajid Javid, the former Tory chancellor, has been speaking at an event organised by the Legatum Institute thinktank this morning. As Chris Smyth from the Times reports, Javid said the turmoil in the markets was caused by the fact that the tax cuts in the mini-budget went “way beyond” what Liz Truss promised during the leadership campaign, and by the fact that her energy bills bailout was also much bigger than expected.
The government has drawn up a plan to cap the unit cost of gas and electricity for two years. Labour proposed its own plan to freeze energy bills, but it only proposed a commitment for six months.
Continue reading...All four nations would have interest in referendum so Westminster has authority, UK government lawyer tells supreme court
Judges sitting in the UK’s highest court have been told Westminster is the ultimate authority on Scotland’s future because Scottish independence is of “critical importance” to the future of the UK.
Sir James Eadie KC, a senior lawyer acting for the UK government, said the union between Scotland and England was “the constitutional foundation of the modern British state”, and mattered to everyone in the UK.
Continue reading...PM suggests borrowing will rise as she surprises MPs by saying she has no plans to cut public spending
Liz Truss has said the Conservatives will push ahead with tax cuts without cutting public spending, instead allowing borrowing to rise over the next few years.
Senior economists had warned on Wednesday that such a strategy, if set out by Kwasi Kwarteng in the chancellor’s fiscal plan at the end of this month, would be likely to spook investors, creating renewed market turmoil.
Continue reading...Labour’s Ben Bradshaw says church is ‘actively pursuing a campaign of discrimination’ against lesbian and gay people
The Church of England must move swiftly to welcome lesbian and gay people and embrace same-sex marriage or face mounting questions in parliament about its role as the established church of the country, a senior MP has said.
The church was “actively pursuing a campaign of discrimination” against lesbian and gay people that was incompatible with its role as a church for England, said Ben Bradshaw, the Labour MP for Exeter and a former secretary of state for culture, media and sport.
Continue reading...Prime minister is facing the same fate as Theresa May when the Commons returns and could even be removed as leader
Liz Truss is already facing the possibility of crippling parliamentary rebellions over welfare, planning and a new wave of austerity, as MPs warn that No 10 has become “disconnected from reality”.
With some Conservatives in talks with Labour over how to block elements of the prime minister’s sweeping plans, senior Tories believe that Truss is now heading into the bruising parliamentary warfare that characterised Theresa May’s beleaguered premiership.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Walker is to be involved in the inquiry into whether Boris Johnson misled MPs
The veteran Tory MP Charles Walker is expected to be handed a spot on the committee investigating Boris Johnson over claims he misled MPs over Partygate.
A well-respected, long-serving backbencher, who was vice-chair of the 1922 Committee for about a decade, Walker was quietly nominated by the Liz Truss government as the House of Commons went into conference recess.
Continue reading...Thérèse Coffey announces measure aimed at freeing up beds in hospitals in England before winter pressures
Ministers are setting up a £500m emergency fund to get thousands of medically fit patients out of hospital as soon as possible in an attempt to prevent the NHS becoming overwhelmed this winter.
Thérèse Coffey, the new health secretary, unveiled the move in the Commons on Thursday as part of her plans to tackle the growing crisis in the health service, especially patients’ long delays for care.
Continue reading...First MP to take new oath was Lindsay Hoyle, followed by Harriet Harman and Peter Bottomley, then Liz Truss
MPs and peers, among them Liz Truss, have formally retaken their parliamentary oaths to swear allegiance to the new King, followed by another round of tributes in both parliamentary houses to the late monarch.
The first MP to take the revised oath, which refers to the King rather than Queen, was the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, followed by the two longest-serving MPs, Peter Bottomley and Harriet Harman, then Truss and a dozen or so other senior MPs, mainly ministers, shadow ministers and party leaders.
Continue reading...Health secretary says Truss did not focus too much on rewarding friends as new ministers attend first cabinet meeting
According to a report by Jason Groves in the Daily Mail, Liz Truss may announce an end to the ban on fracking this week. During the leadership campaign she said she wanted to allow fracking, but only in areas where there was a clear public consensus in favour.
On the Today programme this morning Lord Deben, the Tory peer who chairs the Committee for Climate Change, said fracking was not a solution to the UK’s energy problems. He explained:
The price of gas is not affected by the relatively small amount that we can get, in addition to the North Sea or indeed from fracking.
This is an international price and we would be paying the same price we got out of the fracked gas as we are for the gas we’re using now.
Continue reading...Exclusive: change to registration process will pave way for thousands of staff trained overseas to come to UK, says government
Ministers will introduce legislation as soon as parliament returns on Monday to tackle the NHS’s worsening staffing crisis by making it easier for overseas nurses and dentists to work in the UK.
The move is part of a drive by the health secretary, Steve Barclay, to increase overseas recruitment to help plug workforce gaps in health and social care.
Continue reading...Boris Johnson accused of trying to ‘intimidate and bully’ inquiry into claims he misled MPs
Boris Johnson has been accused of trying to “intimidate and bully” an inquiry into claims he misled MPs over Downing Street parties, after No 10 took the highly unusual step of commissioning a senior QC to scrutinise the legal basis for the process at a public cost of almost £130,000.
The crossbench peer David Pannick had argued that the Commons committee on privileges and standards was “proposing to adopt an unfair procedure” in examining allegations that Johnson falsely told the Commons he knew nothing about lockdown-breaking gatherings.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Ministers encouraged to stay at Westminster to devise emergency plans to address cost of living crisis
The next Conservative leader has been urged to scrap MPs’ four-week break for party conference season and told it would be “immoral and insulting” to go “missing in action” during the worsening cost of living crisis.
With the Commons due to go into recess for a month in mid-September for the parties’ annual conventions, ministers were encouraged to remain in Westminster to devise and debate emergency plans for supporting struggling people through the winter.
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