Rishi Sunak claims he has ‘made progress’ on five priorities at first major campaign event – UK politics live | Politics
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- January 8, 2024
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Sunak claims he has ‘made progress’ on his five priorities as he holds first major campaign event of 2024
Rishi Sunak has just started his PM Connect event. He is in Accrington in Lancashire.
He starts by claiming he has “made progress” on the five priorities he set out last year.
(That is not the view of expert bodies like the Institute for Government, which said last week he was likely to fail to meet three of them.)
Key events
Harry Cole from the Sun says that, although Rishi Sunak dismissed the story Cole published this morning saying that he considered advocating scrapping the Rwanda policy during the summer Tory leadership campaign in 2022 (see 11.33am), he did not deny what the story actually said.
NEW: Sunak offers carefully worded response to our revelation that he discussed scrapping Rwanda during the 2022 leadership race.
Tells PM Connect event: “I did not say I was going to scrap it”
As the story made clear – he was convinced not to do it.
No denial of discussions.
NEW: Sunak offers carefully worded response to our revelation that he discussed scrapping Rwanda during the 2022 leadership race.
Tells PM Connect event: “I did not say I was going to scrap it”
As the story made clear – he was convinced not to do it.
No denial of discussions. https://t.co/PQ0N9rWsU8
— Harry Cole (@MrHarryCole) January 8, 2024
Sunak says he is open to changes that would make the Rwanda bill more effective. But he says dozens of legal experts have said that the bill as drafted will do what it is meant to do.
The entire Conservative party is supportive of the bill, he says.
(That’s not true. Around 30 of them deliberately abstained at second reading.)
And that’s the end of the Q&A.
Sunak claims the government is taking steps to improve school attendance. Making sure that children have the chance for a world-class education is the most important thing you can do, he says.
That is one of the things that brought him into politics, he says.
And he says children in England are the best readers in the western world as a result of the government’s reform. Education is one area where he is most proud of the government’s record over the past 13 years, he says.
Sunak dismisses report claiming he considered scrapping Rwanda plan for Tory leader in summer of 2022
Q: If you are so committed to the Rwanda scheme, why did you consider scrapping it when you were running for Tory leader in 2022, as the Sun reports? (See 9.57am.)
Sunak says he never said that.
(The report did not say that he ever advocated that position – just that he privately considered it as an option.)
He says he addressed this in his BBC interview yesterday; he supported deterrent, but as chancellor had to scrutinise the plan.
He says the questions are for Labour; you will only tackle this with a deterrent, and so why are they not supporting the Rwanda bill? He says it has to be the government that decides who comes to the UK.
Sunak says he wants to speed up process of paying compensation to victims of Post Office scandal
Sunak is now taking questions from the media.
Q: Why did it take an ITV drama to get your government to focus on the Post Office miscarriage of justice? And will you now quash all convictions?
Sunak says this is a scandal. But he says he predecessors started the process of putting things right. They set up the inquiry, and approved compensation. But he wants to speed up the process, he says.
What happened was wrong.
Q: What can you do to show us you are offering business certainty?
Sunak talks about full expensing. He says no other big economy in the world offers business such a generous tax break.
And it is now permanent, he says.
He concedes policy did change on net zero. But he says he did that because he felt people were being forced to change too quickly. He wanted a pragmatic and proportionate approach. The UK will still get to net zero faster than other countries, he says. He says he was criticised for this, but the move was right.
He says we can now get to net zero “in a way that saves you money”.
James Chapman, a former political editor of the Daily Mail who worked as special adviser for David Davis when he was Brexit secretary for about a year until he left convinced that Brexit was a terrible mistake, says he does not think the “back to square one” line really works as an attack line against Labour.
The trouble with Sunak’s latest slogan is that I suspect a large number of voters think Britain is so broken under the Tories that “going back to square one” sounds like a wholly positive idea
The trouble with Sunak’s latest slogan is that I suspect a large number of voters think Britain is so broken under the Tories that “going back to square one” sounds like a wholly positive idea https://t.co/eOdczpJkBP
— James Chapman (@jameschappers) January 8, 2024
John Crace makes a similar point.
Rishi Sunak thinks Labour will take us back to Square One. Because Square Two is working so well
— John Crace (@JohnJCrace) January 8, 2024
Sunak claims Starmer ‘doesn’t have a plan’ and ‘just snipes from sidelines’
On the NHS, Sunak said that the government had not made “significant enough” progress on cutting waiting lists. That was partly because of the strikes, he said. But he said, without strikes, waiting lists could come down. And he said the government was acting to strengthen the NHS.
On the economy, he said inflation had halved and the national insurance cut had just taken effect.
And he said Keir Starmer would just take the UK “back to square one”.
He’s been leader of the opposition for four years now. And in that time, he hasn’t said what he would do differently.
That’s because he does not have a plan. He just snipes from the sidelines …
He doesn’t have a plan for Britain because he’s more interested in political game playing and saying as little as possible to get votes.
That’s not my approach. I’m prepared to take the difficult decisions for the long-term benefit of our country and you saw me do that, after the pandemic, [making] a decision to reduce overseas aid given the other demands we had on our public finances, being restrained and fair on public sector pay, charting a new pragmatic course on net zero that gets us there but saves you thousands of pounds.
Labour, of course, would dispute this. The party has published five missions setting out in considerable detail what policies it would implement in key areas.
Sunak said that, year on year, the number of people crossing the Channel on small boats was down by 35%. In the last quarter of 2023, numbers were down 50%, he said.
He said “the long-term solution to this problem is to have a deterrent” and that was why he wanted to pass his Rwanda bill.
But Labour just wanted to stop the flights to Rwanda, not stop the boats, he claimed.
According to the BBC report on Saturday, government papers from 2022 recorded No 10 as thinking that Sunak’s view of the Rwanda plan at the time was “deterrent won’t work”.
Sunak claims he has ‘made progress’ on his five priorities as he holds first major campaign event of 2024
Rishi Sunak has just started his PM Connect event. He is in Accrington in Lancashire.
He starts by claiming he has “made progress” on the five priorities he set out last year.
(That is not the view of expert bodies like the Institute for Government, which said last week he was likely to fail to meet three of them.)
Starmer says government should set up scheme to allow Post Office Horizon convictions to be overturned en masse
Keir Starmer has been in Loughborough to witness the impact of the recent flooding. In an interview with broadcasters, he said there were three things the government should be doing in relation to the Post Office Horizon scandal.
These convictions, the remaining convictions need to be looked at en masse …
I think all the convictions need to be looked at because there’s a root cause of the problem here.
The government could pass legislation, so obviously we’d support that if they did.
It might be possible to get these cases back before the court of appeal quickly – I’ve done that when I was a prosecutor – but whichever way it’s done, these convictions need to be looked at.
Prof Chris Hodges, chair of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board, has also called for a collective approach to overturning convictions. He told the BBC this morning: “A civilised state should overturn these convictions and deliver compensation with people having to do as little as possible.” One option would be for parliament to pass a law pardoning or exonerating those convicted, and Hodges argued that this would not encroach on the rights of the judiciary.
I think that the prosecution should be taken out of the hands of the Post Office and given to the Crown Prosecution Service. I used to run the Crown Prosecution Service, we’ve prosecuted for other departments, we can do it here – that should be done straightaway.
Compensation needs to be paid, that’s already allocated for in the Treasury – they need to get on and pay that.
Ed Davey needs to explain how he responded to Post Office concerns when he was minister in charge, senior Tory says
The Post Office Horizon scandal relates to the unsafe prosecution of hundreds of sub-post office operators, starting in 1999, when Labour was in office, and going on until 2015, at which point the Conservatives had been in power for five years. Yet it seems to be the Liberal Democrats who are in most peril over the scandal at the moment. The Lib Dems were in coalition with the Tories between 2010 and 2015 and, as doubts about the Post Office prosecutions grew, the two postal affairs ministers were first Ed Davey (2010 to 2012) and then Jo Swinson (2012 to 2015), both serving in the business department led by Vince Cable. Davey is now Lib Dem leader, and Swinson and Cable were his two most recent predecessors.
Yesterday the Sunday Times used its splash to focus in particular on the role of Davey. In their story Caroline Wheeler and Harry Yorke said:
The Sunday Times can also disclose that Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, was warned 12 years ago that legal action against the Post Office over the accounting scandal could leave the taxpayer exposed to “astronomical” costs.
Alan Bates, the former sub-postmaster who has led the long-running campaign for justice, warned of the huge potential “financial liability” in a 2011 letter to Davey, then minister for postal affairs.
The correspondence is one of at least five letters Bates sent him between 2010 and 2012, when he was the responsible minister, as the sub-postmasters repeatedly urged the coalition government to intervene and help them secure justice.
Bim Afolami, a Treasury minister, told LBC this morning that Davey needed to do more to explain how he responded to the concerns raised with him at the time. Asked if he thought Davey should consider his position over this, he replied:
To be honest, I’m not one who goes around saying that (someone) needs to resign, but I do think he needs to do is he needs to be honest with people and explain why as a minister, he didn’t ask the right questions.
In my job, you get a huge amount of information, there are a lot of people in the civil service who are working very hard on your behalf, but what you have to do is you have to ask the key questions and interrogate what you’re told.
And I think that Sir Ed needs to explain what he was told [and] why he allowed certain things to develop in the way that they did.
Davey has said he was ‘“deeply misled” by Post Office bosses about what was happening.
Post Office scandal: more than 1m sign petition to strip ex-boss of CBE
A petition calling for the former Post Office chief executive, Paula Vennells, to lose her CBE over the Horizon scandal has attracted more than 1 million signatures, Kevin Rawlinson reports.
On Saturday the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg revealed that internal No 10 documents from 2022 showed that, when Boris Johnson’s government was considering the Rwanda deportation scheme, Rishi Sunak as chancellor had significant doubts about the plan. When Kuenssberg interviewed him on her Sunday show yesterday, he claimed that he had always been in favour of the plan in principle but was just subjecting it to proper value-for-money scrutiny.
But in the Sun today Harry Cole says that, when he was running for Tory leader against Liz Truss in the summer of 2022, Sunak considered dropping the plan altogether. Cole reports:
Rishi Sunak considered axing the Rwanda scheme in July 2022.
He “weighed up” ditching the £290m deportation plan during the Tory leadership election amid fears it would not work …
One campaign insider said: “He was told very clearly it would go down badly with the MPs who loved it and he changed his mind.”
The Sun story, and the fact that No 10 papers about the Rwanda scheme from 2022 ended up with the BBC, imply that people who worked with Sunak in government during that period, are actively briefing against him. There may also be an attempt to pressurise Sunak into toughen up the Rwanda bill, which is due to be debated by MPs later this month. Many Tory MPs think as drafted it does not do enough to close off legal challenges to deportation flights.
Former Cop26 president Alok Sharma says he won’t back oil and gas bill, saying it implies ‘UK rowing back from climate action’
Alok Sharma, the former Cop26 president and former Conservative cabinet minister, will not be voting for the Rishi Sunak’s oil and gas bill tonight, criticising it as a sign the government was “not serious” about meeting its international climate commitments. As Helena Horton reports, Sharma told the Today programme this morning:
What this bill does do is reinforce that unfortunate perception about the UK rowing back from climate action.
We saw this last autumn with the chopping and changing of some policies and actually not being serious about our international commitments. Just a few weeks ago at Cop28 the UK government signed up to transition away from fossil fuels. This bill is actually about doubling down on new oil and gas licences. It is actually the opposite of what we agreed to do internationally, so I won’t be supporting it …
The government has said this bill is about protecting energy security. But the reality is, the oil and gas extracted from the north sea is owned by private companies – the government doesn’t get to control who they sell to. And the price of oil and gas is set internationally so it won’t actually lower domestic energy bills either.
Here is Helena’s full story.
‘Stick with the plan delivering long-term change’, Rishi Sunak to say to voters
Good morning. There are three types of campaign you can run during an election: ‘it’s time for a change’ (normally an opposition message, but a governing party can also campaign like this, as Boris Johnson did in 2019); ‘give us time to finish the job’ (the standard incumbent’s message); or (the last resort option) ‘you might not like us, but at least we’re not as bad as the other lot’.
Other things being equal, the change message is normally the most powerful one, and for a few weeks last autumn Rishi Sunak tried hard to make the case that he was the candidate best equipped to offer change. Leading a party in office for more than 13 years, it was a hard sell and eventually Sunak accepted that as an argument it was implausible. Today, after some low-key meetings last week, he is doing his first major campaign event of the year, a PM Connect Q&A with voters in the north-west of England. And, according to a quote released overnight, he will formally adopt message 2 as the Conservative party’s election theme. He will say:
The choice is whether we stick with the plan that is starting to deliver the long-term change our country needs, or go back to square one with the Labour party.
The problem for Sunak is that it is increasingly questionable whether this argument is credible either. “Stick with the plan that is starting to deliver,” he will say, but as Kiran Stacey reports, some of his MPs believe that the only honest campaign message is ‘we may be rubbish, but at least we’re not Labour’. As Kiran says, the Conservative MP Danny Kruger told Conservative party members at a private event last autumn:
The narrative that the public has now firmly adopted – that over 13 years things have got worse – is one we just have to acknowledge and admit.
Some things have been done right and well. The free school movement that Michael Gove oversaw, and universal credit – and Brexit, even though it was in the teeth of the Tory party hierarchy itself, and mismanaged – nevertheless Brexit will be the great standing achievement of our time in office.
These things are significant, but, overall I’m afraid, if we leave office next year, we would have left the country sadder, less united and less conservative than when we found it.
Kruger also said that the Conservatives were at risk of “obliteration” if they did not become more responsive to the needs of the electorate.
Kruger is not just any random backbencher. He is co-chair of the New Conservatives, a new group of rightwing Tory MPs that is about to go to battle with the government in the next few weeks over amendments to the Rwanda bill.
With luck, Sunak will be asked about these comments at the Q&A – although that is not guaranteed, because most of the questions will come from members of the public, not journalists.
Here is the agenda for the day.
10am: Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, gives a speech on Scottish independence.
11am: Rishi Sunak holds a PM Connect Q&A event in the north-west of England.
Morning: Keir Starmer is visiting the victims of flooding in the east Midlands.
Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
After 3.30pm: There is likely to be a ministerial statement on flooding. Another minister may make a statement, or respond to an urgent question, on the Post Office Horizon scandal. At some point today Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, and Kevin Hollinrake, the minister for the Post Office, are meeting to discuss how convictions might be cleared swiftly.
Late afternoon: MPs debate the second reading of the offshore petroleum licensing bill.
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