Category Archives: Rishi Sunak

Rishi Sunak appears ready to try to tough out further wave of NHS strikes

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High-risk tactic increases likelihood of combined stoppages by nurses and junior doctors in England

Rishi Sunak appears set on trying to face down unions in a high-risk strategy to tough out a renewed wave of NHS strikes in England that health service leaders warned were unsustainable and could put patient safety at risk.

With the prime minister and his health secretary, Steve Barclay, seemingly offering no fresh concessions for nurses or junior doctors, they risk the possibility of combined strike action, a scenario one NHS leader said would put the health service “into uncharted territory”.

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Local election voters may punish Tories as NHS strikes drag on

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Chair says party could lose 1,000 English seats on 4 May, despite voters finding Rishi Sunak more palatable than his predecessors

Even by the standards of political expectations management, Greg Hands’ message in his Sunday morning interviews was stark: the Conservative party, which he chairs, should expect to lose more than 1,000 councillors in next month’s local elections.

When party bigwigs make such predictions they usually do so against a context of significant wins the last time the seats were contested. But in May 2019, Theresa May was weeks away from announcing her departure, and the Tories lost more than 1,300 seats.

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Rishi Sunak scraps plans for new smart motorways in England

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Fourteen smart motorways removed from government road-building plans over cost and safety fears

The building of new smart motorways is being cancelled as Rishi Sunak acknowledged concerns about safety and cost.

Fourteen planned smart motorways – including 11 that are already paused and three earmarked for construction – will be removed from government road-building plans, given financial pressures and in recognition of the lack of public trust.

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Royal College of Nursing rejects government pay offer and announces new strike – as it happened

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

Nurses in England are preparing to go on strike until Christmas after members of the country’s biggest nursing union voted against the government’s pay deal, the Guardian has learned.

The Royal College of Nursing will announce that members have rejected the government’s offer and will at the same time announce a new ballot for more aggressive strikes likely to last for the next six months.

The vote has closed and the figures are being verified. There is no result until that point. We will make an announcement later today and tell our members first.

Members of the GMB union at the company’s Coventry fulfilment centre will walk out on Sunday for three days.

Further strikes are planned from April 21 to 23.

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Joe Biden due to address Irish parliament after saying US relationship with Ireland getting ‘stronger and stronger’ – politics live

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US president praises emerging relationship with Ireland to taoiseach Leo Varadkar

Chris Philp, the policing minister, has published an article in the Telegraph today explaining the changes being introduced to the way that police record crimes in England and Wales. The changes are being introduced following recommendations from the National Police Chiefs’ Council.

Philp says:

Firstly, we are dropping the requirement for police to record some crimes twice or more, reintroducing the previous “principal offence” rule. This will remove multiple entries on the database which effectively re-record the same incident many times.

Accurate crime recording is vital, and these changes will better reflect victims’ experience. Recording crime does not equate to investigating crime and the police will continue to pursue all offences involved in the incident.

Accurate records of crime must be kept, and crimes will be recorded. These changes to the crime-recording rules will enable police to target and focus investigations and provide victims the service they deserve.

Ambulance response times for all types of emergencies have got longer, including for life-threatening illnesses and injuries, but remain below record levels.

Meanwhile around one in 10 people arriving at major A&E departments are having to wait more than 12 hours before being admitted, transferred or discharged – the first time data of this kind has been published.

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Sunak: I can’t be sure small boats will be stopped before election

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PM calls fulfilling Channel crossings pledge ‘complicated’ in wide-ranging ConservativeHome interview

Rishi Sunak has risked provoking the ire of Conservative MPs who want a swift end to people crossing the Channel illegally, by refusing to guarantee that his pledge to “stop the boats” will be fulfilled by the next general election.

A hot topic, given that the number of landings is expected to increase as summer approaches, the prime minister tempered expectations by stressing it would not be easy to deliver on his promise.

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White House rejects claim that Biden ‘hates the UK’ as he prepares to meet Sunak – politics live

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Latest updates: US president is not ‘anti-British’ as DUP has claimed, says White House

Joe Biden is “not anti-British,” one of his most senior aides has said in response to accusations by the former Democratic Unionist party leader Arlene Foster that the US president “hates the UK”. (See 10.37am.)

Just hours after he arrived in Belfast, the purpose of Biden’s short visit to Northern Ireland was being questioned by unionists who have been boycotting power-sharing arrangements in Northern Ireland for more than a year meaning the territory has no devolved government.

I think the track record of of the president shows that he is not anti-British. The president has been very actively engaged throughout his career dating back to when he was a senator in the peace process in Northern Ireland and that involved engagement with leaders of all of Northern Ireland parties from both of the two main communities.

I think his message to the DUP and to all the political leaders is going to be … the continued strong support for seeing the peace process move forward here and the strong desire by this president to increase US investment in Northern Ireland to take advantage of the vast economic potential that that seems here, and to reiterate broad support for the returning of the devolved government in Northern Ireland.

He hates the United Kingdom, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.

I just think the fact he’s coming here won’t put any pressure on the DUP at all, quite the reverse actually, because he’s seen by so many people as just simply pro-republican and pro-nationalist.

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Derry crowd petrol-bombs police vehicle as Joe Biden heads to Northern Ireland

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Land Rover was monitoring a dissident republican parade commemorating the 1916 Rising

The British and Irish governments have condemned petrol bomb attacks on police in Derry on the eve of Joe Biden’s visit to Northern Ireland.

A small crowd threw petrol bombs and other missiles at a police Land Rover during a parade by dissident republicans in the Creggan area of the city on Monday. The vehicle briefly caught fire and was withdrawn.

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Labour to take aim at Sunak’s leadership on cost of living crisis

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Party will continue to single out PM, after campaign ad last week that led to accusations of ‘dog-whistle’ politics

Keir Starmer will shift his aim this week on to Rishi Sunak’s role in presiding over the cost of living crisis after days of anger over Labour’s crime campaign.

The party will continue to single out the prime minister in the minds of voters, claiming “his fingerprints are all over their struggling household budgets”, as part of an attempt to hold Sunak – still seen by some as a change of the Tory old guard – personally accountable for 13 years of Conservative failures.

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Labour’s attack ads risk painting Starmer as just another politician

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Messaging on law and order has racist undertones, say critics, and could scupper the party’s efforts to appear to offer a ‘fresh start’

The controversy surrounding Labour’s attack advert suggesting Rishi Sunak does not support jailing child abusers dominated the headlines over the Easter break, drawing furious criticism from both the left of the party and the Conservatives.

Labour officials have insisted that the shock tactic was helping their message to cut through, putting the Tories’ poor record on crime under the spotlight. But that was not the experience of candidates doing canvassing ahead of the local elections.

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Good Friday agreement ‘based on compromise’, Sunak says on 25th anniversary

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PM says ‘work to be done’ to restore government at Stormont ahead of Biden meeting on Tuesday

The Good Friday agreement was “based on compromise”, which should be the defining message for the next chapter in Northern Ireland, Rishi Sunak has said on the peace deal’s 25th anniversary.

The prime minister said there was “work to be done” by a new generation of politicians to restore government at Stormont “as soon as possible”, as he and Ireland’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, prepare to intensify work to broker a way out of the deadlock.

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Labour strategists to press on with Sunak attack ads despite criticism

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Shadow ministers privately say they feel ‘uncomfortable’ over ‘distasteful’ ad amid calls for Keir Starmer to apologise

Labour frontbenchers have been left uneasy by a “spectacularly misjudged” advert claiming that Rishi Sunak does not support jailing child abusers, but party strategists are preparing to double down on the aggressive campaign.

Keir Starmer faced calls to personally apologise and order the retraction of the ad, which, a campaign group warned, “poisons the water that we all must drink from”.

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Labour shadow minister refuses to endorse party’s social media attack on Rishi Sunak – UK politics live

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Lucy Powell says ad ‘not to everyone’s taste’ and former shadow chancellor John McDonnell adds party is ‘better than this’

A Labour source has said the party has been advised to “fight as viciously as the Conservatives”, as a row continues over an social media advert featuring Rishi Sunak posted yesterday (see 9:42am)

HuffPostUK’s Kevin Schofield has spoken to an unnamed senior Labour staff member who is unrepentant about the advert and that it is start of a wider pattern going forward – picking up advice from the Australian Labour party and US Democrats.

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Plans for new sites in UK for asylum seekers ‘risk humanitarian catastrophe’

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About 170 organisations warn ministers not to put people in military bases, barges and ferries around the country

Ministers have been warned of a “humanitarian catastrophe” if asylum seekers arriving in the UK are accommodated in camps on military bases and on barges.

Approximately 171 organisations – including the Refugee Council, Choose Love, faith groups, city of sanctuary representatives and law centres – have written to Rishi Sunak urging him to “listen to common sense” and scrap plans for asylum camps at former RAF bases at Scampton in Lincolnshire, Wethersfield in Essex and Catterick in North Yorkshire and the site of a former prison in Bexhill in East Sussex, along with proposals to use ferries and barges.

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Rishi Sunak refuses to back Braverman’s widely criticised claim about racial nature of grooming gangs – live

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Prime minister says offenders have been protected by ‘political correctness’ as he announces ‘grooming gangs taskforce’

Starmer says he has not talked to Jeremy Corbyn for two and a half years.

Q: Is he a friend?

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No 10 denies using dog-whistle politics in grooming gangs crackdown

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Rishi Sunak claims victims previously ignored ‘due to cultural sensitivity and political correctness’

Downing Street has denied using dog-whistle generalisations to launch a crackdown on grooming gangs, after the NSPCC and experts warned that framing the issue as one based on ethnicity could hamper efforts to tackle it.

After Suella Braverman said “almost all” members of such gangs were British Pakistani men who held attitudes incompatible with British values, critics pointed to a 2020 Home Office report that concluded it was impossible to say if any particular ethnic group was disproportionately represented in such offending.

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UK ministers ‘trying to avoid scrutiny’ by releasing 150 documents in 48 hours

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Exclusive: Labour says record number of disclosures before Easter recess is effort to evade accountability

Labour has accused ministers of being “desperate to avoid scrutiny” after government departments published a record number of “transparency disclosures” over a 48-hour period before parliament rose for the Easter break.

The Cabinet Office website shows that 150 documents were released over 30-31 March, more than in the previous 44 days and beating the previous record, set exactly a year ago, when there was a data dump of 120 documents just before the recess.

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Starmer to launch local election campaign with claim Labour is ‘party of lower taxes for working people’ – UK politics live

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Latest updates: Labour leader to launch campaign for local elections with tax pledge that Conservatives have criticised as worthless

The Commons standards committee says Margaret Ferrier should be suspended for 30 days for breaches of Commons rules related to the incident where she travelled by train from London to Scotland after testing positive for Covid in 2020.

Last year a court sentenced her to 270 hours of unpaid work in relation to the offence, but the standards commmittee says a further sanction by the Commons is required.

The threshold for a breach of paragraph 17 of the code [which says MPs should “never undertake any action which would cause significant damage to the reputation and integrity of the House of Commons as a whole”] is necessarily high. However, any finding that a member’s actions have brought the house into disrepute must be considered to be a serious breach. The 2019 Code states that “members have a duty to uphold the law”; something the public rightly expect. If Ms Ferrier had been a public sector employee in a position of trust or leadership, she could have faced severe disciplinary consequences, potentially including dismissal, for these or similar actions.

We therefore recommend that Ms Ferrier is suspended from the service of the house for 30 days.

Labour’s announcement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. They have no plan to introduce this if elected. They’re taking the British people for fools.

If Labour were serious about cutting council tax Labour councils would be doing it now.

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Tory row brewing over Sunak pledge to end small boat crossings

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Tory MPs at odds with No 10 over commitment to end crossings, with PM’s office saying he set no deadline

A row is brewing within the Conservative party over Rishi Sunak’s promise to end small boat crossings in the Channel, as backbench MPs warn the prime minister not to wriggle out of a pledge he made earlier this year.

Sunak announced in January he would bring an end to the small boat crossings, which have escalated rapidly over the past four years, with more than 45,000 people having made the crossing last year.

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Ed Miliband accused of misrepresenting reason Labour banned Jeremy Corbyn from being candidate – UK politics live

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Latest updates: Diane Abbott says Miliband and Keir Starmer have given different reasons for Corbyn’s ban

Nadia Whittome, the leftwing Labour MP, has said this morning that she hopes the party’s national executive committee throws out the motion that would ban Jeremy Corbyn from being a candidate for the party.

Labour has now sent out the full text of Ed Miliband’s speech to the Green Alliance this morning. We have already covered the main points (here and at 10.55am), but it was a substantial, serious speech, and here are some futher things he said.

Miliband confirmed that Labour would issue no more licence for oil and gas fields in the North Sea. This is from my colleague Fiona Harvey.

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