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Ministers have discussed reducing the rate at which income tax relief is applied to Britain’s 5.5 million higher-rate taxpayers from 40p to a flat rate as low as 20p. Another option being considered is to increase the number of very high earners whose income tax relief is cut even further.
The total cost of pension tax relief to the Exchequer is £42.7 billion, of which £22.9 billion is relief on income tax and £19.8 billion is on National Insurance contributions.
Thousands of people rallied in the rain in central London to demonstrate against what they called ‘Tory austerity’ and demand an immediate general election.
(27.10.2022)
The plea comes three weeks before the Government unveils its Autumn Statement mini-Budget, with six in 10 voters who backed the Tories last election calling for higher taxes on the wealthy
(27 August 2022)
Lockdown – closing schools and much of the economy while sending the police after people who sat on park benches – was the most draconian policy introduced in peacetime. No. 10 wanted to present it as ‘following the science’ rather than a political decision, and this had implications for the wiring of government decision-making. It meant elevating Sage, a sprawling group of scientific advisers, into a committee that had the power to decide whether the country would lock down or not. There was no socioeconomic equivalent to Sage; no forum where other questions would be asked.
So whoever wrote the minutes for the Sage meetings – condensing its discussions into guidance for government – would set the policy of the nation. No one, not even cabinet members, would know how these decisions were reached.
(25.08.2022)
For some time, I’ve been trying to persuade Rishi Sunak to go on the record about what really happened in lockdown. Only a handful of people really know what took place then, because most ministers – including members of the Cabinet – were kept in the dark. Government was often reduced to a “quad” of ministers deciding on Britain’s future and the then chancellor of the exchequer was one of them. I’d heard rumours that Sunak was horrified at much of what he saw, but was keeping quiet. In which case, lessons would never be learnt.
His speaking out now confirms much of what many suspected. That the culture of fear, seen in the Orwellian advertising campaign that sought to terrify the country, applied inside Government.
Three were given their old jobs – Dominic Raab, the Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary, Mr Gove, the Communities Secretary, and Steve Barclay, the Health Secretary.
Jeremy Hunt has been reappointed as Chancellor. Suella Braverman is back as Home Secretary.
Ben Wallace remains Defence Secretary and James Cleverly stays as Foreign Secretary. Dominic Raab is deputy PM and Justice Secretary.
No. 10 confirms Nadhim Zahawi is party chairman. Grant Shapps becomes Business Secretary. Penny Mordaunt remains Leader of the House of Commons. Gillian Keegan is Education Secretary.
Education Secretary Kit Malthouse, Welsh Secretary Robert Buckland, Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg and Justice Secretary Brandon Lewis are out.
Rishi Sunak arrives in Downing Street for the first time as Prime Minister.
(Streamed live 84 minutes ago)
He will now visit the King to be appointed as the UK’s first non-white and Hindu leader. The UK’s first – and only other – minority prime minister was Benjamin Disraeli, who was Jewish, in 1874. (…)
He will become the youngest PM in the modern era to enter No 10, at the age of 42 – younger even than David Cameron in 2010 and Tony Blair in 1997.
– Rishi Sunak, who launched his bid yesterday morning, has received public backing of more than 150 Tory MPs
– As of last night, 155 MPs said they are backing Mr Sunak, while 25 had spoken out in support of Ms Mordaunt
– A further 54 who were hoping Mr Johnson would return are yet to publicly reveal to whom they will now back
– Mr Johnson earlier said he had in fact reached the ‚very high hurdle of 102 nominations‘ as he bowed out
– Ms Mordaunt’s team, though, believe his decision to pull himself from the race will ‚propel her over the line‘
I set out four scenarios of how this might unfold in The Spectator earlier this month. There are two that MPs have most recently got in touch about: Rishi by Christmas or the Boris restoration.
A week is a long time in politics – and next week could be one of the most dramatic yet.
Boris Johnson is currently the most popular choice among Tory MPs to become prime minister as the race to replace Liz Truss roared into life today following her humiliating resignation after just 44 days in power.
With a quarter of MPs declaring support for their preferred candidates, Mr Johnson currently counts 38 backers, compared to Rishi Sunak’s 27 and Penny Mourdant’s 12, according to the latest tally by Guido Fawkes.
If you are a right-wing MP or ambitious wonk on the Truss campaign ‘pivot’ is such a useful word. Far better to say ‘we need to pivot from campaign mode to governing mode,’ than to blurt out that ‘now we have their votes we can forget the lies we told to win over Conservative members’. Far better for Truss herself to say, ‘I am pivoting from my previous position on tax cuts’ to ‘I admit that I was wrong’.
Pivoting calls to mind the elegance of a ballerina turning on her points. Not the cynicism of a politician breaking promises she made only a few days before.
As it will take years for culpable parties to retire, I once feared that a full generation would need to elapse before we recognised lockdowns for what they were: the biggest public health debacle in history. Yet everywhere I turn lately, still another journalist is decrying the avoidable social, medical and economic costs of this hysterical over-reaction to a virus, while deriding lockdown zealots for having vilified sceptics of a policy that may well end up killing more people than it protected. The Covid revisionism is welcome – though it’s a good deal easier to publish these opinion pieces now than it was two years ago, and I speak from experience.
(27 August 2022)
Lockdown – closing schools and much of the economy while sending the police after people who sat on park benches – was the most draconian policy introduced in peacetime. No. 10 wanted to present it as ‘following the science’ rather than a political decision, and this had implications for the wiring of government decision-making. It meant elevating Sage, a sprawling group of scientific advisers, into a committee that had the power to decide whether the country would lock down or not. There was no socioeconomic equivalent to Sage; no forum where other questions would be asked.
So whoever wrote the minutes for the Sage meetings – condensing its discussions into guidance for government – would set the policy of the nation. No one, not even cabinet members, would know how these decisions were reached.
The meetings were “literally me around that table, just fighting”, which “was incredibly uncomfortable every single time”.
At one meeting he raised the impact on children’s education: “I was very emotional about it. I was like, ‘Forget about the economy. Surely we can all agree that kids not being in school is a major nightmare’, or something like that.
“There was a big silence afterwards. It was the first time someone had said it. I was so furious.”
Setting out the problems he found with Government policy being influenced by outside academics, he said: “If you empower all these independent people, you’re screwed.”
Mr Sunak said one of the Government’s biggest mistakes was giving too much power to scientists and claimed the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) edited its minutes to hide dissenting opinions.
The former chancellor made the statements in an interview with the Spectator magazine.
“We shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did,” he is quoted as saying.
In Großbritannien findet momentan eine bemerkenswerte Diskussion über die vergangenen Lockdown-Maßnahmen statt. Einer der beiden konservativen Regierungschef-Kandidaten, der bisherige britische Finanzminister Rishi Sunak, hat diese Diskussion vor wenigen Tagen dramatisch intensiviert. Der staatliche Nachrichtensender BBC berichtete am 25.8.2022[1] über die Aussagen von Rishi Sunak gegenüber der Zeitschrift „The Spectator“: Ministern sei es untersagt worden, über Kollateralschäden (trade-offs) der Lockdowns zu diskutieren[2]; es sei falsch gewesen, eine staatliche Angstkampagne zu fahren. Das Regierungs-„Script“ sei ein ungerechtfertigtes Angst-Narrativ gewesen („the fear narrative“). Die vorgegebene Leitlinie sei gewesen: „Es gibt keine negativen Auswirkungen“.[3] Interne Kritik in dem wissenschaftlichen Beratungsgremium (SAGE) sei nicht veröffentlicht worden.
Rishi Sunak joins Liz Truss in suggesting he would be open to relocating Britain’s diplomats from Tel Aviv
Britain’s next prime minister is guaranteed to be a China hawk no matter who wins.
My comments were widely interpreted to be anti-aspirational and it was suggested that I was seeking revenge against the man who, while Chancellor, had been planning a coup for a very long time and who had ruthlessly and metaphorically stabbed Boris Johnson in the back.
Rishi had been plotting against the most electorally successful Prime Minister the Conservative Party has known since the days of Margaret Thatcher. His actions made Michael Gove’s betrayal of Boris Johnson during the 2016 leadership campaign appear like a rank amateur rehearsing for the role of Brutus in a village hall play.
(…)
I wanted to highlight Rishi’s misguided sartorial style in order to alert Tory members not to be taken in by appearances in the way that happened to many of us who served with the Chancellor in Cabinet. The assassin’s gleaming smile, his gentle voice and even his diminutive stature had many of us well and truly fooled.
In einem Beitrag für die Zeitung „Mail on Sunday“ warnte Dorries die Mitglieder der Konservativen Partei vor dem früheren Finanzminister: „Das strahlende Lächeln des Attentäters, seine sanfte Stimme und sogar seine winzige Statur haben viele von uns wirklich getäuscht“, schrieb Dorries. Zudem retweetete sie ein Bild, das zeigt, wie Sunak als Brutus den Premier als Julius Cäsar von hinten ersticht.
MP Greg Hands has branded ‘dangerous’ a retweet by culture secretary Nadine Dorries, showing Rishi Sunak stabbing Boris Johnson in the back.
To make an impression on the race, Sunak announced last night plans to charge patients £10 for a missed medical appointment to help clear the Covid backlog. He said he would revive high streets, slash the number of empty shops and backed tougher punishment for graffiti and littering, as well as additional powers for police to tackle anti-social behaviour.
Tory MPs have now voted five times to narrow the field of their leadership race down to just two candidates. Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss will go head-to-head, and the winner will replace Boris Johnson as prime minister.
Unlike the previous rounds, however, this one has a broader electorate: Tory members will get to vote on which of the pair becomes party leader.
It will be a battle of ideology, policy and personality – with Mr Sunak, the prudent, centrist, polished public schoolboy against Ms Truss, the tax-cutting, Right-wing, robotic Yorkshire lass.
– Conservative MPs have chosen the final two candidates for PM going ahead to a run-off with party members
– Liz Truss emerged victorious from a brutal battle with Penny Mordaunt for second spot in head-to-head phase
– Rishi Sunak topped the ballot in all the voting rounds but polls suggest he could struggle in the member vote
– The candidates are due to clash in a BBC TV debate on Monday night with fears it will turn nasty quickly
– The winner of the ballot is due to be declared on September 5 and take over from Mr Johnson the next day
Truss has pledged to raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP by 2030, while Sunak would keep it on its present path, rising to 2.5 per cent over the same period. Although the former chancellor gave the Ministry of Defence special treatment in his spending review, he shares the Treasury’s scepticism about getting value for money from it.
While the Truss camp suggests Sunak would be less supportive of Ukraine amid fears of the impact on the UK of sanctions against Russia, in practice they would probably adopt the same approach. However, Truss would probably be more hawkish than him towards China.
The run-off scores from our latest Next Tory Leader survey for all five candidates are as follows –
Sky News has cancelled its Conservative leadership debate after Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss refused to take part.
The debate was due to be hosted by Kay Burley tomorrow evening.
Conservative MPs are said to be concerned about the damage the debates are doing to the image of the party, exposing disagreements and splits.
His comments came despite Ms Truss being seen as the „Boris Johnson continuity candidate“ with a number of his supporters backing her in a bid to stop Mr Suank entering No10.
Her attack on the former Chancellor’s record last night was one of a number of punches swung as the Tory leadership contest gets increasingly bitter.
Second, the government would also remove the burdens of GDPR, creating in its place the most dynamic data protection regime in the world.
The EU’s Byzantine rules are preventing British tech companies from innovating and public services from sharing data to prevent crime. As any internet user can see, GDPR – with all its bureaucratic box-ticking – is clearly not working and needs to be replaced.
As things stand, Rishi Sunak is leading the way on MP nominations, but needs to win over Tory members to succeed in the final stage of the contest. Meanwhile Penny Mordaunt is the clear favourite with the bookies thanks to recent polling which suggests she is Tory members’ candidate of choice.
Tories are braced for more blood on the carpet today as another hopeful is knocked out of the leadership race – with Liz Truss allies begging rivals to recognise the ‚reality‘ they cannot win.
The results are due to be revealed at 3pm after another frenzied day at Westminster that saw the Foreign Secretary officially launch her campaign insisting she can be ‚trusted to deliver‘ after taking on the EU over Brexit and Vladimir Putin over Ukraine.
In a dig at frontrunner Rishi Sunak she said she had been ‚loyal‘ to Boris Johnson, and it was not the time for ‚business as usual economic management‘.
TUESDAY July 19 – FRIDAY July 22
– Knockout ballots will happen daily until just two candidates are left standing.
FRIDAY July 22
– The final two candidates tour the country trying to win the votes of 100,000 or so ordinary party members who will decide the next PM.
MONDAY September 5
– The results of the vote is announced and Britain’s next PM is revealed
With only 14 public backers apiece, it is unsurprising Jeremy Hunt and Nadhim Zahawi fell short of the 30 votes from MPs they needed.
The results, announced just now by Sir Graham Brady, leaves six candidates for MPs to vote on tomorrow. Rishi Sunak, as expected, is out in the lead with 88 votes, although is followed more closely expected by Penny Mordaunt, who has 67 backers.
I got into politics because I want everyone in this country to have the opportunity to be able to give their children a better future.
Our country faces huge challenges, the most serious for a generation. Someone has to grip this moment and make the right decisions. Because the choices we make today will decide whether the next generation of British people will have more opportunities than the last.
We need to restore trust in our politics. We need to rebuild our economy. And we need to reunite the country.
That’s why I’m standing to be the next leader of the Conservative Party and your Prime Minister.
Sunak: 30 MPs (+12)
Mordaunt: 18 (+11)
Hunt: 12 (+10)
Truss: 12 (+6)
Tugendhat: 12 (+6)
Badenoch: 11 (+5)
Zahawi: 10 (+7)
Braverman: 9 (-)
Chgs. w/ 24hrs ago
The memo circulated on Tory WhatsApp group reportedly attacks the former chancellor personally and accused him of having a “big tax and big spend agenda”.
According to The Telegraph, which first reported the “mucky memo”, the 424-word anti-Sunak missive was written by someone on the Thatcherite right of the party.
Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid, Grant Shapps and Mr Zahawi all promised to cut the tax burden on Sunday, while Mr Sunak has insisted it would be irresponsible to do so while the UK is still running a large budget deficit.
Ministers who are close to Mr Johnson have publicly denounced Mr Sunak’s track record and warned that he will reverse the achievements of the Government.
Jacob Rees-Mogg told Channel 4: “I will not be supporting Mr Sunak.” He has previously referred to him as “the socialist Chancellor” because of the pandemic spending he introduced.
Sign up 👉 ready4rishi.com
According to a snap poll by YouGov, 57 per cent of British adults think Mr Johnson should resign for breaching the Covid rules. The same proportion also now want his Treasury protege to follow suit.
The Chancellor will be especially disheartened to discover that while 25 per cent of Tory voters want rid of Mr Johnson, the figure rises to 30 per cent when it comes to his own future in the party.
Boris Johnson may face more woe over the coming days, amid claims Sue Gray’s report into the Partygate scandal is due next week and ‚will not make comfortable reading‘ – potentially even leading to more fines.
The Met revealed on Tuesday that at least 30 more fixed penalty notices were issued over the saga, with a spokesman for Number 10 confirming Mr Johnson, his wife Carrie and Chancellor Rishi Sunak will be among the recipients.
Speaking to MPs in the Commons this morning, the Chancellor announced a £9bn support package of loans and tax relief, including a £200 energy rebate for every British household in October.
It comes as the energy regulator confirmed this morning that the price cap on energy bills for 22m households will jump by 54 per cent from April to about £2,000 a year because of soaring gas costs.
Mandatory Covid jabs for NHS and social care workers are set to be scrapped, The Telegraph can reveal, after warnings of crippling staff shortages if the plan went ahead.
Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, will on Monday meet fellow ministers on the Covid-Operations Cabinet committee to rubber stamp the decision on the about-turn.
– Rishi Sunak ‚thinks Boris Johnson won’t survive Partygate and has built a dummy campaign website‘
– The Chancellor is said to be preparing a leadership campaign in the event the Prime Minister is deposed
– Mr Johnson is fighting for his political life as he awaits results of inquiry into ‚Partygate‘ drama
– His wife Carrie Johnson is accused of organising a cake for Mr Johnson’s 56th birthday party in June 2020
– Miss Gray is said to be furious that Scotland Yard has asked for a redacted version of her report
– The Met Police asked for only ‚minimal references‘ to ‚parties‘ at centre of the row to be in document
– Creation of extra travel alert has been opposed by Tory rebels and Rishi Sunak – who has written letter to PM
– Ministers signed off proposals last week to create ‚amber watch list‘ which could plunge holidays into chaos
– Travellers heading to the likes of Spain and Italy could see the countries suddenly move on to dreaded red list
– Whitehall source claims idea has now been shelved, amid opposition from Tory MPs and letter from Mr Sunak
Boris Johnson’s approval rating plummets https://mol.im/a/9850525 via @MailOnline
The slump also follows controversy over vaccine passports. Two months ago, the PM had a net approval rating of 55.6.
In contrast, Mr Sunak’s reputation appears to be almost unaffected. He remains the second most popular member of the Cabinet with Tory activists, with a net approval rating of 74.1.
The most recent survey also found that a narrow majority of Tory activists now believe the PM is dealing with the pandemic ‘badly’.
Offenbar ist Johnson besorgt, dass eine Teilquarantäne bei der Bevölkerung auf Unverständnis stößt.
Zuvor hatte ein Regierungssprecher erklärt, dass Johnson und Sunak sich nicht vollständig isolieren müssten. Grund sei die Teilnahme beider Politiker an einem Pilotprogramm, das tägliche Testungen vorsehe.
The pair were both pinged by the Test and Trace app telling them to self-isolate after Health Secretary Sajid Javid tested positive for coronavirus.
They were to use a little-known pilot scheme which allows people out of self-isolation every day they pass a lateral flow test.
However after just two-and-a-half hours of severe backlash from across the country, the pair have now performed a hasty U-turn and announced they will be isolating.
Sunak has long been seen as a rising star and is the person in the Treasury who No. 10 preferred to deal with. Sunak will be helped by the new No. 10/No. 11 special adviser unit. Sunak is a Brexiteer who has good relations both with the Prime Minister and his team. One insider suggests that their relationship will be a friendly one similar to that of David Cameron and George Osborne. What’s clear is that today’s changes mean No. 10 has taken control.