Prime minister says ‘the best tax cut we can give is to cut inflation’ after Michael Gove says taxes should be cut before general election
The BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg is starting. As well as Rishi Sunak, Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, is also being interviewed.
Q: Do you still think we’ve had enough of experts?
Economic forecasting was invented to make astrology look respectable.
Continue reading...Wes Streeting says announcement of £250m to provide 900 extra beds ‘comes nowhere near the 12,000 beds’ cut in the last 13 years
Back on the PSNI data leak for a second, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has questioned how the details of PSNI officers and staff were all kept in one system.
“What’s happened, why it’s happened, I don’t know, I don’t get it – how 10,000 people were all in one system, particularly intelligence people – but I’m sure that will all come out in the wash,” PA Media reports he told Newstalk.
Continue reading...MP said she felt ostracised and accused male colleagues of shouting her down for opposing transgender reforms
A senior member of the Labour frontbench has offered an apology to a fellow MP, Rosie Duffield, who has said she felt ostracised by the party because of her views on gender reforms.
Duffield had also accused male party colleagues of trying to shout her down in the Commons earlier this year when she spoke to back the government’s move to block gender reforms proposed in Scotland.
Continue reading...Advisory committee on business appointments says it has seen ‘no evidence’ that Gray’s decision-making was affected despite ex-PM’s claim
NHS England has just published its 150-page long-term workforce plan. It’s here.
The government is keen to present it as an NHS plan, not a government plan, and at the moment you cannot find it prominently on the No 10 or Department of Health and Social Care websites.
This is our longer-term, strategic approach to workforce planning. In a nutshell we will:
1. Train more staff
Continue reading...NHS England could have 12,500 extra doctors and nurses by 2028 under the service’s first long-term workforce plan
Thousands more doctors and nurses will be trained in England every year as part of a government push to plug the huge workforce gaps that plague almost all NHS services.
The number of places in medical schools will rise from 7,500 to 10,000 by 2028 and could reach 15,000 by 2031 as a result of the NHS’s first long-term workforce plan.
Continue reading...Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting says the PM should ‘comply with the inquiry and do it today’
Here is a round-up of the day’s headlines so far:
The Labour party has accused Rishi Sunak of being “slippery” in the row over whether the government will hand over Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages and other documents to the Covid inquiry. The shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, has told Sky News the prime minister should “comply with the inquiry and do it today”.
The government has “absolutely nothing to hide” from the Covid inquiry and intends to be “absolutely transparent”, a cabinet minister has said, after Rishi Sunak faced accusations of attempting to cover up the actions of senior MPs during the pandemic. The Covid inquiry, led by the retired judge Heather Hallett, has used its powers to request unredacted notebooks, diaries and WhatApp correspondence between Boris Johnson and 40 senior government figures.
Labour’s plans to ban ex-ministers from lobbying the government for five years after leaving office are “encouraging” but need to go further, lobbyists have said. Along with the lobbying ban, the party is considering a five-point plan that would see former ministers fined for breaking lobbying rules and a new Integrity and Ethics Commission with the power to enforce standards across public life.
Rail services in parts of England have ground to a halt with the first of three train strikes this week taking place as the long-running dispute between the unions and the government over pay, jobs and conditions continues. A 24-hour strike by members of the driver’s union Aslef is under way and a further day of industrial action is planned for Saturday, the day of the FA Cup final.
Rishi Sunak should resurrect the help to buy scheme and lower national insurance in a bid to woo younger voters, a Tory MP has said. Bim Afolami, MP for Hitchin and Harpenden, said graduates under 40 should be paying a lower rate of tax as he claimed younger voters were more concerned with money than social issues.
Britain’s future is outside the EU, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, has said, as he promised to make Brexit work. Writing in the Daily Express newspaper, Starmer – who campaigned for Remain in the 2016 referendum – also said he would not be seeking a return to freedom of movement.
The British businessman Dale Vince is a “perfectly legitimate person” to take money from and his donations to Just Stop Oil do not change Labour’s position on the climate activist group, the shadow international trade secretary has said. Nick Thomas-Symonds said his party had been “extremely clear on our views on Just Stop Oil” and that Vince was perfectly entitled to “give money to other causes”, PA reported.
Keir Starmer has been told by trade union Unite that any plan to block new North Sea oil and gas developments must not leave workers “paying the price”. Unite, the party’s single biggest donor, told the Labour leader that such a move could risk a “repeat of the devastation” caused by the closure of coalmines, PA reported.
Scotland’s deposit return scheme (DRS) could be scrapped if the UK government does not U-turn on its decision to exclude glass from the plans, Humza Yousaf has warned. The first minister said the Scottish government is looking at options on how the scheme can progress without damaging Scottish businesses, but if no alternative can be found, the proposals may not continue, PA has reported.
Continue reading...Armed officers at the scene but no reports of injuries, Metropolitan Police says
Rishi Sunak is being interviewed on ITV’s This Morning.
He says immigration levels are too high, but he rejects claims it is out of control. This is from the Daily Mirror’s Lizzy Buchan.
Continue reading...Raab resigns as deputy prime minister and justice secretary after report finds he displayed ‘persistently aggressive conduct’
There is quite a contrast between the overnight briefing on behalf of Dominic Raab (see 9.06am and 9.24am). That could be explained by his allies talking complete rubbish to journalists. But a much more likely explanation is that last night Raab thought he could stay in office, but that by this morning – presumably after direct, or indirect, contact with Rishi Sunak – he realised that if he did not resign, he was going to sacked.
This is not so much a resignation letter as a “resignation” letter. It reads as if it was written by someone pushed out.
Mr Tolley concluded that I had not once, in four and a half years, sworn or shouted at anyone, let alone thrown anything or otherwise physically intimidated anyone, nor intentionally sought to belittle anyone.
In setting the threshold for bullying so low, this inquiry has set a dangerous precedent. It will encourage spurious complaints against Ministers, and have a chilling effect on those driving changen on behalf of your government – and ultimately the British people.
I am genuinely sorry for any unintended stress or offence that any officials felt, as a result of the pace, standards and challenge that I brought to the Ministry of Justice.
Continue reading...Prime minister urges public to judge him on whether he delivers on new pledges but Labour says most ‘were happening anyway’. This blog is now closed
Lucy Powell, the shadow culture secretary, has issued a statement welcoming the government’s proposal to abandon the privatisation of Channel (without actually putting it in those terms). She says the government should never have floated the plan in the first place, and that it has been a “total distraction” for the broadcaster. She says:
The Conservatives’ vendetta against Channel 4 was always wrong for Britain, growth in our creative economy, and a complete waste of everyone’s time.
Our broadcasting and creative industries lead the world, yet this government has hamstrung them for the last year with the total distraction of Channel 4 privatisation.
Continue reading...Labour highlights issue to back up pledge to invest heavily in addressing shortages
The number of operations cancelled by the NHS in England because of staff shortages may have doubled in three years, with an estimated 30,000 not proceeding because no staff were available to perform them.
At least a third of cancelled operations were those that were deemed urgent, according to the analysis by Labour. It suggested at least 2,500 cancelled operations for cancer patients and 8,000 on children.
Continue reading...Royal College of Nursing says Steve Barclay refused to discuss pay at meeting on Monday; Welsh nurses to strike after last-minute talks fail. This blog is now closed
Pat Cullen, the Royal College of Nursing’s general secretary, told ITV this morning that there was no point talking to Steve Barclay, the health secretary, if he was not prepared to discuss pay. She said
What I’m saying … to the health secretary this morning, is if you don’t want to speak to me directly about nurses’ pay, we have engaged with the conciliation service Acas, they can do that through Acas, but our door is absolutely wide open and it appears at the minute that theirs is totally shut …
Fundamentally, I need to get to a table and talk to them about pay. This isn’t just me, it’s the 320,000 nurses that voted for strike action … They voted through an independent ballot that we carried out and surely to goodness you couldn’t look at one of those people this morning in the eye and say: ‘You’re not worth an extra brown penny’. In my mind they absolutely are.
I think it’s a very challenging international picture. About a third of the world’s economies are predicted to be in recession, either this year or next.
We’re no different in this country and truthfully, it is likely to get worse before it gets better, which makes it even more difficult when we have big public sector strikes going on at the moment.
Continue reading...No 10 says PM has faith in chancellor, as Treasury minister says tax cuts are the ‘right plan’. This blog is now closed
Q: When would you get debt falling as a proprotion of GDP?
Starmer says Labour does want to get that down.
Continue reading...Latest updates: the Labour party leader used his conference speech to spell out his plan for the UK
The decision to pay Liz Truss’s new chief of staff, Mark Fullbrook, through a private company has been dropped after criticism from within the Conservatives as well as from opposition parties.
The government admitted over the weekend that Fullbrook would be paid through his lobbying firm, a move that could have helped him avoid paying tax. He had previously claimed the firm had stopped all commercial activities.
The world we are heading for is a bumpy few weeks. The chancellor is now going to have quite a tough time because he has now set out plans to balance the books in November. That is going to be very hard.
Actually balancing the books in November is going to be harder than it would have been to show you are balancing the books last week because higher interest rates will make it harder to do. You might need £15bn worth of tough choices now that you didn’t need last Friday.
In the end, lower taxes will mean worse public services, or other people’s taxes having to go up, and it is those choices and ducking those choices that markets are looking at and saying that is not what serious policymaking looks like.
Continue reading...Shadow health secretary condemns Kwasi Kwarteng’s ‘reckless gamble’ and says Labour ‘cavalry is coming’
The shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, has said the “cavalry is coming” with the Labour party as he warned that the current turmoil on financial markets was “just the tip of the iceberg”.
Streeting criticised last week’s mini-budget from the chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, as a “reckless gamble”.
Continue reading...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...Exclusive: shadow health secretary says service in England would be brought in over several parliaments
Labour will aim to bring in a national care service in England with just as much ambition as the 1945 government that brought in the NHS, the shadow health secretary has said, launching a review of how it would work.
In an interview with the Guardian, Wes Streeting said he had asked the Fabian Society to look at how the service would be funded and structured, with a view to bringing it in over the course of several parliaments.
Continue reading...Trusts reveal only five wholly new hospitals planned, as Labour says the scheme ‘exists only in PM’s imagination’
The government’s official spending watchdog is to launch an inquiry into Boris Johnson’s claim that 40 new hospitals will be built by 2030, as concerns grow in Whitehall that the pledge is unaffordable and has been greatly oversold to the public.
In a move that could prove hugely embarrassing for the prime minister, the independent National Audit Office (NAO) has decided to conduct a “value for money review” into the entire scheme, which was a cornerstone of the Conservative party’s 2019 general election manifesto.
Continue reading...A fundraising event held for the shadow minister sparks rumours that he is readying himself to replace Keir Starmer if he resigns over Beergate
Labour rising star Wes Streeting has denied preparing a leadership bid to replace Keir Starmer after it emerged that the wealthy party donor Waheed Alli hosted a recent fundraising event for him and another MP at his central London home.
The Observer has been told that the actors Ian McKellen and Michael Cashman, as well the businesswoman and LGBTQ+ activist Linda Riley, were among 20 to 30 people present at the event in March, where Lord Alli picked up the £4,600 bill for a buffet and drinks.
Continue reading...Boris Johnson indicates last restrictions could be eased from next week and free testing will end soon
The country is “in a different world” from when the Covid pandemic started, Boris Johnson has said, meaning the last remaining restrictions can begin to be lifted from next week.
Ahead of an announcement on Monday about the government’s “living with Covid” strategy, the prime minister signalled free mass testing would end imminently and told people to return to the office and “get their confidence back”.
Continue reading...