Category Archives: Rishi Sunak

It’s too late to replace Sunak so Tories must ‘march towards the sound of the guns’, Ben Wallace says – as it happened

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Former defence secretary tells colleagues there is no alternative to Rishi Sunak and to ‘get on with’ preparing for an election. This live blog is closed

Ofcom has ruled today that GB News broke impartiality rules on five occasions by using Tory MPs as news presenters.

But it has not imposed sanctions on the broadaster. It says these count as first offence, and that there may be sanctions if it happens again.

Under the Broadcasting Code, news, in whatever form, must be presented with due impartiality. Additionally, a politician cannot be a newsreader, news interviewer or news reporter unless, exceptionally, there is editorial justification.

In line with the right to freedom of expression, broadcasters have editorial freedom to offer audiences a wide range of programme formats, including using politicians to present current affairs or other non-news programmes. Politicians may also appear in broadcast news content as an interviewee or any other type of guest.

These are the first breaches of Rules 5.1 and 5.3 recorded against GB News. Since opening these investigations, there has only been one further programme which has raised issues warranting investigation under these rules. We are clear, however, that GB News is put on notice that any repeated breaches of Rules 5.1 and 5.3 may result in the imposition of a statutory sanction.

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Rishi Sunak will lead Tories into election, Mark Harper says

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Cabinet minister urges backbenchers to have confidence in party leadership amid reports of plot to remove PM

Rishi Sunak will lead the Conservative party into an election at the end of the year despite reports of rebellious MPs plotting to oust him to avoid wipeout at the polls, a senior cabinet minister has said.

Mark Harper, the transport secretary, told his fellow MPs to “have some confidence” in the party leadership, insisting Sunak was focused on “making the right decisions” for the country.

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Over a third of first time buyers relying on ‘bank of mum and dad’

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Tories accused of deserting those without financial support, as proportion relying on help with deposits rises from 27% to 37% in a year

Rishi Sunak has been accused of “locking the door on home ownership” and entrenching inequality, amid evidence that tens of thousands more young house buyers have been forced to turn to the “bank of mum and dad” to secure a new home.

A crisis in housing affordability is again set to be a major election flashpoint, with the prime minister already admitting in recent months that the Conservatives needed to do more to address falling home ownership rates among the young. The party has failed in its manifesto pledge to build 300,000 houses a year.

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Frank Hester racism row: how key figures reacted to Diane Abbott remarks

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Tory donor has been widely condemned over racist and misogynistic comments about prominent black MP

It has been four days since the Guardian reported on the extraordinary remarks by the Tory donor Frank Hester about Diane Abott. They elicited widespread condemnation for being racist and misogynistic. Here are some of the key voices – and what they have said:

Diane Abbott MP

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Angela Rayner says she wants to see Diane Abbott get Labour whip restored – as it happened

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Deputy Labour leader says party must follow procedures but says she would personally like MP to have Labour whip restored. This live blog is closed

In his speech Keir Starmer has just confirmed that Labour would stop ticket touts buying up tickets for events and re-selling them at rip-off prices.

This is what Labour said about the plan in a news release this morning.

Reselling tickets for profit has already been banned in many countries, but under the Tories, fans have been let down.

Too often, genuine fans are missing out on getting tickets only to see those same tickets on secondary ticketing websites at far higher prices, making them unaffordable and putting them out of reach.

My first ever trip abroad was to Malta with the Croydon youth Philharmonic Orchestra. You will know that excitement you feel when you have an encounter with the arts that changes your life. Everyone in the room will know that the sense, I suppose, of being drawn into something that seems bigger than ourselves, of being truly moved by a piece of music, or painting, or a play …

Even now even now, listening to Beethoven or Brahms as I read the Sunday papers, takes the edge off some of the more uncomfortable stories.

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Diane Abbott says it is ‘frightening’ to hear what Tory donor Frank Hester said about her – UK politics live

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Hackney MP says she feels more vulnerable after Tory donor said looking at her makes you ‘want to hate all black women’

Kwasi Kwarteng, the Conservative former chancellor, has said that the remarks about Diane Abbott attributed to Frank Hester were clearly racist and sexist. But he said he did not know for sure that Hester actually used those words.

Speaking on the BBC’s Politics Live, Kwarteng said:

[Those comments] are clearly racist, and they’re clearly sexist.

And I think Diane [Abbott] was right to point out that the call to violence, even in a flippant way, is really inappropriate. So they were very stupid remarks.

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Biggest Tory donor said looking at Diane Abbott makes you ‘want to hate all black women’

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Exclusive: Remarks by Frank Hester, who has given £10m to the party in the past year, raise questions over his workplace behaviour

The Conservative party’s biggest donor told colleagues that looking at Diane Abbott makes you “want to hate all black women” and said the MP “should be shot”, the Guardian can reveal.

Frank Hester, who has given £10m to the Tories in the past year, said in the meeting that he did not hate all black women. But he said that seeing Abbott, who is Britain’s longest-serving black MP, on TV meant “you just want to hate all black women because she’s there”.

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Revealed: legal fears over Michael Gove’s new definition of ‘extremism’

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The communities secretary wants ‘trailblazer’ government departments to pilot a scheme to ban individuals and groups deemed extremist from public life

Michael Gove is set to announce a controversial plan this week to ban individuals and groups who “undermine the UK’s system of liberal democracy” from public life, despite fears inside government that the scheme is at risk of a legal challenge, leaked documents reveal.

Officials working for Gove, the secretary of state for the levelling up, housing and communities, have drawn up plans for “trailblazer” departments to pilot the scheme, according to documents that have been circulated to the Home Office and Downing Street and seen by the Observer.

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Sunak warned unfunded axing of national insurance would harm services

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Economists say making the policy an election pledge could cost £40bn, which is badly needed for health, education and elsewhere

Rishi Sunak has been warned against fighting an election on an unfunded plan to abolish employee national insurance amid projections the move could blow a £40bn hole in the public finances.

As the pre-election battle on the economy between the Conservatives and Labour intensified, the prime minister was on Thursday under mounting pressure to explain how the measure could be afforded while public services were crumbling.

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UK politics: Sunak refuses to say how abolition of national insurance would be funded – as it happened

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PM says ‘people trust me on these things’ and refuses to be drawn on whether government would forgo entire £46bn raised from measure

Keir Starmer has accused Jeremy Hunt of repeating the budget mistakes made by Liz Truss during her disastrous premiership.

In comments on the budget during a visit to a building site this morning, Starmer focused on Hunt’s proposal to abolish employees’ national insurance over time, saying that this was a bigger unfunded tax promise than those in Truss’s mini-budget. (See 9.28am.)

How humiliating was that for the government yesterday?

We’ve argued for years that they should get rid of the non-dom tax status, they’ve resisted that. And now, completely out of ideas, the only decent policy they’ve got is the one that they’ve lifted from us.

Nothing that Jeremy Hunt did yesterday, nor anything the OBR said, changes anything very significantly. Which is a shame. Because that means we are still:

-heading for a parliament in which people will on average be worse off at the end than at the start,

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Rwanda deportation bill set back again after House of Lords votes

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Rishi Sunak’s bill was opposed in 10 votes by peers, two days after five amendments were forced through

Rishi Sunak has suffered further setbacks in the House of Lords over his controversial Rwandan deportation bill after peers defeated the government on all 10 votes.

Wednesday’s vote comes two days after the prime minister endured his heaviest defeat in the House of Lords when the archbishop of Canterbury and former Conservative ministers joined forces with the opposition to force through five amendments.

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Budget 2024 live: Jeremy Hunt cuts national insurance, abolishes non-dom status and raises child benefit threshold

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NI cut of 2p announced, along with new tax on vapes, end of tax relief for holiday lettings and more cash for NHS IT system

Jeremy Hunt is expected to extend the windfall tax on energy companies in the budget to help fund his national insurance cut. Extending the windfall tax is a Labour proposal that the Tories used to dismiss, and, according to a Daily Telegraph story, Douglas Ross, the Scottish Conservative leader, is so angry about the move that colleagues thought he might resign. Ross is MP for Moray, in the north-east of Scotland, and he is worried that the potential impact on the oil and gas industry in Scotland will cost the party votes.

In their story, Nick Gutteridge, Dominic Penna and Simon Johnson say Ross had a row with Rishi Sunak about this at a reception on Sunday night. They report:

The leader of the Scottish Conservatives had doggedly sought out Mr Sunak across the crowded, stifling room, determined to give him a piece of his mind about the Treasury’s plans to extend the windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas giants for an extra year.

What followed was a “heated” discussion between the pair, with Mr Ross warning the move would hammer the Tory vote north of the border and the prime minister countering that it was necessary to deliver a National Insurance cut for millions of workers.

Glen O’Hara, professor of modern history at Oxford Brookes University, points to the gaping trade deficit left for Labour in 1964, when outgoing Tory Chancellor Reginald Maudling infamously left a note for his successor reading: “Good luck, old cock … sorry to leave it in such a mess.”

Conservative Chancellor Norman Lamont’s pre-election budget in 1992 introduced a lower rate of income tax which Labour opposed, allowing the Tories to portray them as a “high-tax party.” The Tories unexpectedly went on to win the subsequent poll.

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Lords pass five amendments to Rwanda bill in heavy defeat for Rishi Sunak

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Peers, including senior Tories, vote by margins of about 100 votes for changes to legislation, which will have to go back to Commons

Rishi Sunak has suffered his heaviest defeat in the House of Lords after the archbishop of Canterbury and former Conservative ministers joined forces with the opposition to force through five amendments to the Rwandan deportation bill.

The string of government setbacks, most passed by unusually large margins of about 100 votes, means the legislation, which aims to clear the way to send asylum seekers on a one-way flight to Kigali, will have to go back to the Commons.

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Sunak suffers defeats in House of Lords over Rwanda bill – as it happened

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Prime minister suffers defeats in House of Lords over Rwanda bill. This live blog is closed

There will be one urgent question in the Commons today at 3.30pm, on the Home Office’s decision to publish 13 reports from the former independent chief inspector of borders and immigration last week on Thursday afternoon.

The former minister Paul Scully has announced he will stand down at the next election in a statement suggesting the Conservative party has “lost its way” and is heading down “an ideological cul-de-sac”.

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UK general election opinion polls tracker: Labour leading as election looms

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Find out who’s up and who’s down in the latest polls – and how many seats each party is likely to win in the next general election

The next UK general election is looming, with most analysts expecting it to be called late this year.

After 13 years of Conservative rule, Keir Starmer’s Labour has been consistently ahead in the polls since the start of 2022.

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Labour rattled by Galloway win as Sadiq Khan slams PM over racist ‘poison’

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London mayor says Sunak must be tougher on his party, while Gaza ceasefire fracas piles pressure on many sitting Labour MPs

Sadiq Khan has condemned Rishi Sunak for failing to call out “racist, anti-Muslim and Islamophobic” remarks by a senior Tory MP, following the prime minister’s Downing Street address in which he criticised political extremists.

In a blunt response to Sunak’s unusual intervention, the London mayor said the prime minister had still not fully addressed the nature of the remarks made by former Tory vice-chair Lee Anderson, who said Islamists had “got control” of Khan and London. Khan, one of the most powerful Muslims in public life, warned that the past few weeks had seen “a concerted and growing attempt by some to degrade and humiliate minorities for political and electoral gain”.

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Pro-Palestine marches to continue after Sunak ‘extremists’ speech

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Organiser suggests PM consider own MPs’ behaviour after speech about rise in ‘extremist disruption’

Pro-Palestine protests are to continue across the UK on Saturday after Rishi Sunak’s warning that democracy was being targeted by “extremists”.

In an address to the nation on Friday, the prime minister spoke about “forces here at home trying to tear us apart”, in the aftermath of the 7 October attacks by Hamas against Israel.

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Extremists trying to tear us apart, says Rishi Sunak in impromptu No 10 speech

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PM condemns ‘shocking increase in extremist disruption and criminality’ in wake of Gaza war, in sometimes rambling address

Rishi Sunak has claimed extremist groups in the UK are “trying to tear us apart”, in a hastily arranged Downing Street statement that came hours after George Galloway won a byelection in Rochdale.

Standing outside No 10 late on Friday, the prime minister condemned what he called “a shocking increase in extremist disruption and criminality” after the 7 October massacre by Hamas and the Israeli invasion of Gaza.

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Extremist groups are a growing threat to British democracy, says Rishi Sunak in Downing Street speech – as it happened

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PM gives speech saying extremist groups are a growing threat to British democracy

The SNP MP Alison Thewliss has accused the Tory party of stoking up the culture war that has led to the extremism Rishi Sunak says he wants to stamp out.

“The Tories are the architects of the culture war in the UK - and Rishi Sunak has spent his whole time in office promoting it,” she said. “The prime minister has repeatedly, and very deliberately, sought to stoke up divisions, pander to the far-right and pit communities against each other for electoral gain.

“Whether it’s attacking refugees, insulting LGBT people, or failing to call out Lee Anderson’s Islamophobia for what it is - this is an attempt to rewrite history and people in Scotland see through it.

“If the Tory government now wants to bring people together, it must start by changing its own record of divisive language and policies. For people in Scotland, the best way to end these culture wars is to make Scotland Tory-free by voting SNP.”

The Liberal Democrat leader has, in effect, accused Rishi Sunak of hypocrisy, saying the prime minister’s promotion of some Conservative MPs who have made controversial remarks has “sowed the seeds of division for years”.

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Sunak hints at further national insurance cuts in spring budget

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Government wants to make life easier for working people, he says at Scottish Tory conference

Rishi Sunak has issued a strong hint that there could be further cuts in national insurance rates in next week’s budget.

The prime minister told reporters gathered at the Scottish Tory conference in Aberdeen on Friday that he wanted to make life easier for working people across the UK, particularly at a time when the Scottish National party government was raising income taxes from April for anyone in Scotland earning above £28,850.

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