If you were wondering why Rishi Sunak suddenly decided to attend the COP 27 climate change summit after all – and you’re not convinced that it was because Boris Johnson said he’d be going, then here’s an alternative (but even less convincing) explanation:
… or IS it less convincing?
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Rishi Sunak: he’s attending COP 27 for “political management” reasons, not because he wants to be there.
Rishi Sunak has u-turned on his decision not to attend the COP 27 climate change summit.
After saying he was too busy preparing for the November 17 budget to attend the event that starts in Egypt on Sunday, he has caved in to criticism by climate campaigners, opposition parties and his own climate adviser, Alok Sharma.
It is also possible that he’s going after learning that former prime minister Boris Johnson said he would be attending the summit, yesterday (November 1).
So he’s being dragged to the table when he should have leapt at the opportunity. This is not leadership. This is, as Keir Starmer (of all people) pointed out: “political management”.
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Liz Truss’s new Chancellor – old Health Secretary Germy C- er, Jeremy Hunt – announced in his very first media interview that he will be imposing further austerity on the UK in order to balance the books after the unforced errors of Kwasi Kwarteng.
Wow.
More austerity, of course, means the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Let’s have some analysis:
We all know this isn’t the first u-turn of the Truss administration.
But do you know the full extent of her dithering?
Here’s a clip that lays out the situation for you:
She has created a huge problem for herself, electorally, with this.
We know that she has thrown away Boris Johnson’s 2019 manifesto; most of the plans in that document won’t materialise now (and that’s a good thing, by and large).
But by announcing policies on the hoof – and then u-turning on them – Truss is leaving the electorate in limbo.
What does she stand for? Does even she know?
Well, if she doesn’t work it out soon, she’ll self-destruct because the public won’t support a politician with no policies.
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Russell Howard has focused on the Tory government’s crackdown on protest. Should Liz Truss u-turn on it?
Liz Truss seems to be the u-turning prime minister.
Her latest reversal is on her claim that she would not impose more austerity, voiced in Prime Minister’s Questions last Wednesday (October 12). New Chancellor Germy C- er, Jeremy Hunt went back on that one in his very first TV interview.
So here’s an idea for her: why not reverse a policy that people actually hate?
Here’s Russell Howard, talking about the Tory crackdown on protest. His point? That, if progressive change is ever to take place, the voice of the people must be hard.
And his methodology is hilarious (apologies to those who are offended for the profanity in the image):
There’s no opposing what Russell is saying here.
And Truss would certainly improve her popularity if she changed this law – which hasn’t succeeded anyway, as the clip demonstrates.
So why not do it? Or is she simply too stupid?
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For those of you who love the detail, here’s a full video clip of Liz Truss’s press conference this afternoon (Friday, October 14) in which she u-turned on cutting Corporation Tax and… didn’t do much else.
If you stick it out to the end, you can enjoy the sound of a stunned reporter asking, “Aren’t you going to say sorry?”
It’s the highlight of the event.
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First, here’s a selection of Conservative MPs (including a wonky-spectacled Chancellor Queasy Kwarteng) working hard to justify themselves:
Now let’s see what their own voters think of them…
… Oh dear.
The best that can be said is that they all approve of the tax u-turn. But that means they’re admitting that their government – that they chose – got their first big decision wrong.
And some of the comments were a lot less positive.
And Kwasi Kwarteng’s speech didn’t get the ovation he would have wanted. Most people stayed in their seats and This Writer has a suspicion that many of them didn’t even bother to clap.
I think these Tories are in deep, deep trouble. But they’re all working hard to avoid admitting it.
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Clueless: Liz Truss actually put forward a plan to cut public sector pay in the UK’s regions – contradicting the ‘Levelling Up’ policy on which her Conservative Party won the 2019 general election – at a time when we are facing the worst cost-of-living crisis in most of our lifetimes. And let’s remember that this crisis was also caused by the Tories.
Here’s a curious contradiction of Conservative pay policy: why has Liz Truss backtracked on a plan to introduce “regional pay boards” for public sector workers when that was a huge part of a recent NHS reorganisation?
The 42 new Integrated Care Systems that now comprise NHS England are “postcode lottery” systems intended to lower the quality of the health service you receive, based on your location.
Part of that service reduction is the ability to vary pay for NHS workers, ensuring that those living in particular parts of England receive much less for their hard work than those living elsewhere.
Truss, yesterday, announced a plan for “regional pay boards” that would spread this policy to other public sector employees.
She said that this would save billions of pounds a year in government spending – and opponents immediately sprang to point out that the only way of achieving this would be by cutting the pay of not only nurses but teachers and other workers outside England’s wealthy southeast, as the nation faces a worsening cost-of-living crisis.
The plan would rip up the pledge on which the Conservative Party won the 2019 general election – to reduce regional inequalities. “Levelling up” would instantly become “kicking down”.
That’s not the wisest policy position to take, if a leader wants to go on winning general elections, as the backlash showed:
British foreign minister Liz Truss, the front-runner to replace Boris Johnson as prime minister, was forced to backtrack on one of her most striking pledges a day after announcing it following a backlash from fellow Conservatives and opposition parties.
Sunak supporter Ben Houchen, the Conservative mayor of Tees Valley in northeast England, said he was “speechless” at the proposal.
Millions of nurses, police officers and soldiers would have had their pay cut by 1,500 pounds ($1,830) a year, Sunak’s campaign said.
Rachel Reeves, Labour’s finance spokesperson, said Truss’s plan would have sucked money out of local communities.
So now we know what Liz Truss wants to do to communities – and local economies – up and down the UK.
But will it make a difference to the way Tory party members vote in their leader election? The only policies on offer are those from Truss and her rival Rishi Sunak, and neither will help you, or reduce the cost burden their government has inflicted on you by a single farthing.
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The bribery brothers: Rishi Sunak has u-turned on his opposition to a windfall tax for fossil fuel companies because he will use the cash to bribe you into supporting the Tory government again, after Sue Gray’s revelations about Boris Johnson’s wild Downing Street parties brought it into disgrace.
It’s a huge u-turn from the Chancellor who couldn’t care less a week ago.
At a time when the government has been enjoying record tax receipts – having raised taxes 15 times since Boris Johnson became prime minister and due to inflation that increases the tax attached to certain commercial items (like fuel) – Sunak had rejected proposals to reduce the tax burden on ordinary people.
Only days ago, Tory MPs rejected calls for a 40 per cent cut in fuel duty and VAT after a petition received more than 102,000 signatures, thereby forcing a discussion in the Commons.
The Government used a false argument that drivers are already saving £1,900 on their annual fuel bills compared with what they might have been paying had a pre-2010 fuel duty escalator remained in place. The pre-2010 rates were altered because times had changed; times have changed again.
And Sunak himself has been dodging the issue, claiming he could not affect the global circumstances driving the crisis. But that isn’t what he has been asked to do.
He had been asked to respond to the crisis in a way that saves ordinary people from impoverishment and prevents a recession and, until today, he had shown no interest in either goal.
George Dibb, in The Guardian, claimed solutions were staring Sunak in the face. He said:
Sunak’s first step should be investing in social security via increases in universal credit and legacy benefits to prevent families falling into destitution.
Second, we need a serious industrial strategy to boost confidence, give long-term business certainty and restore investment in the UK’s productive capacity. Sunak promised to increase private investment with a “super-deduction” incentive, but in fact it fell in the last quarter. To make this long-term vision work, Sunak should break up the Treasury and form a new Ministry for Economic Strategy with the target to drive investment-led, green growth.
Third, rather than continuing to slip on our green ambitions, every home should be insulated and more wind turbines erected across the UK in an investment needed before 2050 anyway. Green power is now the cheapest way of generating energy.
Next, the government must make clear to businesses that just as they were supported in the pandemic, now companies must themselves act responsibly by reducing their profits to keep prices down. Profits have gone up, particularly in uncompetitive, concentrated sectors – so for example petrol stations haven’t passed on the fuel duty cut to customers, benefiting their bottom line at the public’s expense. Evidence from the US suggests that recent rising prices have been disproportionately driven by rising profits, not wages.
Finally, as fossil fuel companies pile up huge, unexpected profits from the crisis that is pushing millions into absolute poverty, it is fair for the government to redistribute these into welfare and income support via a windfall tax.
Well, as I was typing this, Sunak u-turned on his opposition to a windfall tax and will impose a 25 per cent levy on oil and gas firms’ soaring profits, for precisely this purpose.
This isn’t a display of leadership; he has merely caved in to a reasonable proposal that he has previously – unreasonably – rejected.
Sunak is saying that his one-off charge will “tax extraordinary profits fairly and incentivise investments” – so it seems likely he will offer firms a chance to avoid paying the full amount by diverting the money into investment in green – unpolluting – fuel development.
This is another admission of failure, of course. Boris Johnson and others have spent weeks – months? – telling us they didn’t want a windfall tax because they wanted these companies to make the investments on their own initiative. Clearly they have not and, having ignored the carrot, must now endure the stick.
Sunak is using the money to scrap his hugely unpopular and controversial plan to provide £200 to everyone in England, Scotland and Wales in October – and then force us all to pay it back over the following five years.
Instead, he is doubling the amount to £400, which will be non-repayable; we get to keep it.
The poorest households will also get a payment of £650 to help with the cost of living. Eight million households on means-tested benefits will get the money paid directly into their bank accounts in two lump sums – one in July, the other this autumn.
There will also be separate one-off payments of £300 to pensioner households and £150 to individuals receiving disability benefits – groups who are “most vulnerable to rising prices”.
The whole package of payouts will be worth £15 billion – to be partly paid by the windfall tax. We know that inflation is set to increase UK tax receipts by £12.5 billion per year. And of course the National Insurance increase will bring £13 billion into the Treasury.
So the Tory government will still be quids-in and the offer to the people is, to quote Boris Johnson, “chickenfeed”.
But it looks good – and that is all Sunak hopes to achieve.
Remember: prime minister Boris Johnson took a huge hit to his credibility when Sue Gray published her report on the party culture he promoted at Downing Street while the rest of us were enduring Covid-19 lockdowns.
Johnson attended and fully participated in these parties and then lied about them to Parliament and to the public. His claim that he was assured they were permissible because they were “works events” is nonsense because such gatherings were not exempted from lockdown rules when he himself announced them – and he must have known that (otherwise he would be admitting he is too stupid to run the UK).
So Johnson currently stands exposed as unprincipled, untrustworthy and corrupt – a despot who habitually ignores his own laws and treats those he forces to conform to them with contempt. That’s you, by the way.
He desperately needs to bribe the public with an incentive to support him again.
So today, here’s Sunak with a handout for us all. How utterly cynical.
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Owen Paterson: he won his vote in Parliament, but did he already realise that it wouldn’t do him any good?
The Conservative government has u-turned over its plans to stop corrupt MP Owen Paterson from being suspended and to change the system that demanded it.
Tories were under a three-line whip from Boris Johnson to support yesterday’s (November 3) decision – but it has backfired in their faces, prompting massive public and political protest.
The Conservatives expected the Standards Commissioner, Kathryn Stone, to resign after they showed such blatant disregard for her work, making it easy for them to dissolve the role and replace it – but she has not.
And now the Tories have realised that they cannot credibly impose a new system for investigating MPs without cross-party support, because the public would recognise it as corrupt Tories letting corrupt Tories off the hook. None of the other parties in Parliament have supported the plans.
So the plans are changing radically, as Sam Coates lays out in the video below:
BREAKING: The government has signalled a U-turn over the controversial blocking of a Conservative MP's suspension.@SamCoatesSky has the details.
The really good news is that Owen Paterson will now face another vote over his suspension, that he is likely to lose. This means he will probably be suspended from Parliament for 30 days after all. A Liberal Democrat MP has already secured a debate for Monday (November 8).
This makes him vulnerable to a recall petition and a by-election that he may lose – and it seems more likely that this will happen after yesterday’s debate and vote, because more people in his North Shropshire constituency now believe he has brought shame upon them.
The Tories still want to change the MPs’ disciplinary system in favour of their corruption, but they have accepted that linking it with Paterson’s case is too obvious; it makes that corruption plain.
Leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees Mogg, has said the link between the two issues needs to be severed.
But he is likely to be foiled in this, because that link has already been forged – by him and the other incompetents in the Tory leadership.
So the end result of all this jiggery-pokery is that Paterson is likely to be ousted from Parliament after all – and all the Tories who tried to save him, along with their government, have been tarred with the filth of their own corruption.
Good. It’s exactly what they deserve.
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How humiliating for Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak that they have to follow the rules for the plebs and self-isolate after being in contact with Health Secretary and Covid case Sajid Javid.
It says everything about the UK’s pitiful protections that Javid hasn’t been in post for more than a month yet, and already he has contracted the virus. He’s out of the picture for the moment because he’s getting treatment.
But both Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson are also having to take action, because they have been in contact with Javid during the incubation period.
Johnson has already had the virus. What does it say about the body’s natural immunity, let alone the various vaccines that we’re all having pumped into us, when the prime minister is still having to isolate himself – despite having developed the former and received the latter – for fear of spreading the infection?
Worse still is the fact that both Johnson and Sunak wanted to take the Michael Gove route and opt into a privileged scheme whereby they could keep working but would be tested for the virus on a daily basis.
Nobody had ever heard of this scheme before Gove went to Portugal to watch the Champions League final and mixed with people who had Covid-19.
On being told about the contact, he promptly announced that he wouldn’t be self-isolating like a member of the common crowd – and that is how we learned about the daily test regime for the elite.
It can hardly be surprising, then, that after Downing Street announced that they would be on the same scheme – and the same criticisms started – Johnson and Sunak gave up and accepted the inevitable.
They only did it because they were caught.
Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth [said] it was unfair politicians appeared to have access to “VIP testing” to avoid self-isolation, while Liberal Democrat Leader Ed Davey asked if it was only available to the “privileged few”.
The u-turn means that Michael Gove should now have to answer some uncomfortable questions, especially after Johnson said it was “far more important that everybody sticks to the same rules”.
Gove didn’t!
And neither Johnson nor Sunak were going to.
So it seems Johnson didn’t make the change because of any principles, but because of shame.
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