‘If she’s going to go she should go,’ ex-Tory whip says of Nadine Dorries
John Penrose has become the latest Tory figure to voice their frustration at Nadine Dorries’ refusal to step aside, having promised to do so.
The former Conservative party whip told Times Radio:
If she’s going to stay, she should stay; if she’s going to go, she should go. She needs to make sure everybody who voted for her and who she represents knows what she’s doing.
He said Dorries has left herself in a “very difficult position”, adding that she has to make up her mind “quite quickly” and be clear with her constituents in Mid Bedfordshire.
Fellow Tory MP Tom Hunt earlier accused her of showing “extraordinary” entitlement for failing to formally quit.
In a brief statement on Tuesday, Dorries insisted she and her staff “are working daily with constituents”.
The ex-culture secretary has not spoken in the Commons since June 2022 and last voted in April.
Dorries, who is a staunch Boris Johnson loyalist, pledged to quit “with immediate effect” when the former prime minister stood down as an MP and she failed to secure a peerage. But she has still not handed in her formal resignation.
“She needs to make clear to her constituents what she’s doing, and do it fast.”
Nadine Dorries ‘should go,’ Tory MP @JohnPenroseNews tells @MattChorley. https://t.co/FWt41A3vNX
— Times Radio (@TimesRadio) August 25, 2023
Key events
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You can read the latest developments about the war in Ukraine here:
A fund to support organisations doing suicide prevention work has been relaunched with £10m, the government has said.
The Department of Health and Social Care said it has made the cash available to support suicide prevention activities delivered in England by voluntary, community or social enterprise organisations from this year until to 2025.
A similar £5.4m fund was launched in 2021, which the government said supported more than 100 organisations.
People who live in flats or one-bedroom houses will generally end up worse off this winter than they were during the last one after Ofgem revealed its new price cap on Friday (see earlier post at 11.20).
Figures analysed by the PA Media news agency suggest the average annualised bill for a flat or one-bedroom house with one to two people will be £1,346 between October and December this year.
Last year the same flat’s annual bill was £1,306 after government grants were counted, leaving them £40 worse off in the final three months of this year than they were last winter.
Meanwhile, houses with four or more bedrooms, with around four and five people in them, will be about £433 better off. Their typical bills will fall from £3,483 to £2,650 even when taking grants into account.
The analysis is based on Ofgem’s estimates of how much gas and electricity different categories of household use. It splits the categories into typical high, medium and low-use households.
Afternoon summary
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The government has launched a six-week consultation on “reasonable steps” unions should take to ensure minimum service levels are provided during strike action. Cleaners, security guards and support staff working in three Whitehall departments are to strike for five days next month in a dispute over pay, it has been announced.
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The energy price cap has fallen below £2,000 a year for the first time in 18 months but consumer groups have warned that households will feel little relief from high energy costs this winter.
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MPs will try to oust Nadine Dorries as an MP in her Mid Bedfordshire constituency next month, with the Liberal Democrats poised to table a bill when parliament returns on 4 September that they hope will result in her suspension. A number of Conservative figures, including a former party whip, have voiced their frustration at Dorries’ refusal to step aside, having promised to do so.
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Thirty-nine asylum seekers who were briefly accommodated on the Home Office’s controversial Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset have said conditions onboard were so bad that one was driven to attempt suicide.
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Departing MPs will get bigger payouts for winding up their offices, with the sum doubling to £17,300, the UK parliament expenses watchdog has announced.
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A group of 30 families are suing the UK government, care homes and hospitals over the deaths of their relatives in the early days of the Covid pandemic.
Cleaners, security guards and support staff working in three Whitehall departments are to strike for five days next month in a dispute over pay.
The Public and Commercial Services union said its members employed by the contractor ISS were angry about a 3.5% pay offer, which it pointed out was well below inflation.
PCS members at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, Department for Business and Trade and Department for Science, Innovation and Technology will strike from 4 to 8 September.
Government launches consultation on ‘reasonable steps’ unions should take over strike service levels
The government has launched a six-week consultation on “reasonable steps” unions should take to ensure minimum service levels are provided during strike action, PA media reports.
The move follows the recent passing of a new law on how unions have to make sure of a certain level of services during strikes in sectors hit by the wave of industrial action in the past year, including the railways.
Unions have vowed to campaign against the law and Labour has pledged to repeal it if it wins the next general election.
The government said it wanted to produce a statutory “code of practice” providing “clear guidance” that would ensure trade union members complied with work notices given by employers prior to strike action, as required under the new law.
The government said it believed that the ability to strike was an important part of industrial relations in the UK, rightly protected by law, and understood that an element of disruption was inherent to any strike.
But it added that the public expected ministers to act when essential services were put at risk.
Reacting to the announcement, the TUC general secretary, Paul Nowak, said:
No matter how much the government tries to spin it, the Conservatives are brazenly attacking the right to strike.
This is a sham consultation. Ministers have ignored a mountain of evidence on how these laws are unworkable and will escalate disputes.
They are ploughing ahead despite their anti-union drive being slapped down by the UN workers’ rights watchdog, and their recent high court defeat over the use of agency workers during strikes.
This government seems intent on breaching fundamental rights guaranteed by international law.
That’s why we will fight this legislation all the way, exploring all avenues, including legal routes.
Some voters in Nadine Dorries’ Mid Bedfordshire constituency have given their verdict on the former culture secretary, who has not spoken in the Commons since June 2022 and last voted in April.
“I always had respect for Nadine, but over the last few years, the fact that she’s nowhere to be seen has left a sour taste in my mouth,” said one voter, Philip Kelly, 45, from his pub in the village of Shillington.
Kelly said it was “despicable” that Dorries was blocking a byelection by delaying her resignation while she waited for an explanation as to why her nomination for a peerage by Boris Johnson had been denied.
“She’s letting her ego run riot while neglecting her constituents. She’s not turning up to parliament, she’s not anywhere to be seen in her constituency, yet she’s still taking a salary.”
You can read the full story, by my colleagues Emine Sinmaz and Peter Walker, here:
The Coventry MP Taiwo Owatemi has called for a statutory inquiry into medical research in the 1960s on south Asian women in the city, who were given chapatis containing radioactive isotopes.
A total of 21 Indian-origin women, identified through a Coventry GP, were given the bread containing Iron-59 (an iron isotope with a gamma-beta emitter) as part of a research trial in 1969 into iron deficiency in the south Asian population.
After consuming the bread, the women were taken to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in Oxfordshire where their radiation levels were measured as a way of judging how much iron had been absorbed.
The women are assumed to have been recent immigrants with limited English and the few who were identified in the 1990s, when the trial first came to light, said they did not give informed consent and were not aware of the use of radioactive isotopes.
Owatemi said:
My foremost concern is for the women and the families of those who were experimented on in this study. I know that there is deep worry among the south Asian community here in Coventry because of this.
I am deeply disturbed that a community here in Coventry was targeted for research without them being able to give informed consent.
You can read the full story, by my colleague Jessica Murray, here:
The Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, has delivered his verdict on Humza Yousaf’s time in power, saying the first minister and SNP leader is a “really nice guy” but not “up to the job”.
Sarwar also said the general election expected next year will be a “stepping stone” in his party’s efforts to defeat the SNP in Scotland.
The PA News agency reports that Sarwar discussed his relationship with the Scottish first minister during an in-conversation event with the journalist Graham Spiers at the Edinburgh festival fringe.
The two party leaders went to the same prestigious fee-paying school, Hutchesons’ grammar in Glasgow, with Sarwar describing Yousaf as “amenable, positive and good company”.
However, he took aim at the FM’s time in the top job after he replaced Nicola Sturgeon in March.
He said:
I have no questions on his character. I think he’s a really, really nice guy. I just don’t think he’s up to the job.
I don’t think he has a clear sense of direction about what it is he believes in, what it is he thinks the government is for, and what the purpose of his SNP government is, and I think people are losing out on that.
I think we need a sense of direction in our country to address that.
Rail passengers will face fresh travel disruption on Saturday because of another strike in the deadlocked dispute over pay, jobs and conditions, the PA Media news agency reports.
Around 20,000 members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union at 14 train operators will strike, affecting services across England.
The latest stoppage in the row, now in its second year, comes as no progress has been made with rail operators, which the union says are “hamstrung” by the government refusing to give them a mandate to make a revised pay offer.
The RMT is also planning a strike on 2 September, while members of the drivers’ union Aslef are taking strike action on 1 September, threatening days of disruption.
Trains will start later on Saturday and finish earlier – and some areas will have no services.
The strike will affect those travelling to events such as the Notting Hill carnival in London and the Reading and Leeds festivals.
The RMT general secretary, Mick Lynch, said:
The government is not serious about settling this dispute, which is leading to further disruption for passengers.
Rail operators are not being given a mandate to make a new offer that we can put to members in a referendum to settle this dispute.
‘If she’s going to go she should go,’ ex-Tory whip says of Nadine Dorries
John Penrose has become the latest Tory figure to voice their frustration at Nadine Dorries’ refusal to step aside, having promised to do so.
The former Conservative party whip told Times Radio:
If she’s going to stay, she should stay; if she’s going to go, she should go. She needs to make sure everybody who voted for her and who she represents knows what she’s doing.
He said Dorries has left herself in a “very difficult position”, adding that she has to make up her mind “quite quickly” and be clear with her constituents in Mid Bedfordshire.
Fellow Tory MP Tom Hunt earlier accused her of showing “extraordinary” entitlement for failing to formally quit.
In a brief statement on Tuesday, Dorries insisted she and her staff “are working daily with constituents”.
The ex-culture secretary has not spoken in the Commons since June 2022 and last voted in April.
Dorries, who is a staunch Boris Johnson loyalist, pledged to quit “with immediate effect” when the former prime minister stood down as an MP and she failed to secure a peerage. But she has still not handed in her formal resignation.
“She needs to make clear to her constituents what she’s doing, and do it fast.”
Nadine Dorries ‘should go,’ Tory MP @JohnPenroseNews tells @MattChorley. https://t.co/FWt41A3vNX
— Times Radio (@TimesRadio) August 25, 2023
More than one in 10 flats, terraces and semi-detached homes in some areas of England are officially considered overcrowded, with the proportion rising to at least one in five in parts of London, figures show.
PA Media reports:
There are also sharp contrasts in levels of overcrowding across different religious and ethnic groups, which may reflect differences in age and background among households.
The data is the latest to be released from the census, which took place in England and Wales on 21 March 2021.
It shows the proportion of flats considered overcrowded was highest in the London boroughs of Barking and Dagenham (22.7%), Newham (21.8%) and Redbridge (20.0%), along with Slough in Berkshire (20.8%).
There were 38 local authorities where at least one in 10 flats met the criteria for being overcrowded on the day of the census, 28 of which were in the capital and all in south-east England, except for Leicester (16.0%).
London boroughs also came first for overcrowding in terraced housing, with Newham (18.6%) and Barking and Dagenham (13.6%) recording the highest proportions.
Fall in energy price cap will offer little comfort to many households across Scotland, minister warns
The reduction in the energy price cap will bring little comfort to thousands of households in Scotland who will still face “significant hardship”, Holyrood’s energy secretary has said.
Neil Gray was speaking after the regulator Ofgem announced its new cap on gas and electricity would reduce the average annual bill from £2,074 to to £1,923, from 1 October.
The average bill for customers with a prepayment meter should fall to £1,949 a year – with these figures based on the estimate that a typical household uses 2,900 units of electricity and 12,000 units of gas.
However, experts say the reduction in support from the UK government, together with a small increase in standing charges, means many households could pay more than they did last winter when the price cap was higher.
Gray said average energy bills will still be “nearly twice what they were two years ago”.
The energy secretary said:
This small reduction will be of little comfort to the many thousands of households who continue to face significant hardship – particularly as we head into the winter months and people need a warm home most …
Only the UK government has the fiscal and policy levers with which to truly address this unacceptable situation.
He said the Scottish government has trebled the cash available for its fuel insecurity fund, with most of the money supporting those “most at risk” of self-disconnecting or limiting their power use over the winter, PA Media reports.
Farmers in England are being left without crucial nature recovery payments and unsure of what to plant after delays to a post-Brexit scheme.
The sustainable farming incentive (SFI) is part of a package of payments that is replacing the EU’s common agricultural policy, which paid land managers for the amount of land in their care.
The aim of the SFI is to pay farmers to look after nature, soil and other public goods, rather than simply for farming and owning land.
The 2023 scheme was supposed to roll out in August but is being delayed, and farmers are not expected to receive any payments until 2024.
Because the rules regarding SFI payments have changed since last year, land managers are unsure whether to continue with the scheme from 2022, or to follow guidance laid out in proposals for the 2023 scheme.
You can read the full story by the Guardian’s environment reporter, Helena Horton, here:
A majority of the public expects Sir Keir Starmer to become prime minister, a new poll has found.
Fifty-six per cent of people told the pollster Ipsos UK they thought it was “likely” the Labour leader would succeed Rishi Sunak, with only 28% saying they thought it was unlikely.
That figure equals the previous high point for Starmer recorded in October 2022, amid chaos on the bond market and the collapse of Liz Truss’s government, PA Media reports.
The poll of 1,038 British adults, conducted between 11 and 13 August, painted an almost universally positive picture for Labour, and a bleak one for the Conservatives.
As well as public expectation that he will become prime minister, Starmer continued to lead Sunak on favourability by 30 points to 27, and outpolled his opponent on all but three of 12 key traits Ipsos asked about.
Lib Dems and Labour urged to form ‘non-aggression pact’ to oust Tories in Mid Bedfordshire
The centre-left pressure group Compass is urging Labour and the Liberal Democrats to forge an electoral pact in the pending Mid Bedfordshire byelection.
Compass tweeted that the two parties should “unite in a non-aggression pact to oust the Tories and give a progressive candidate the best chance of success”.
The ghost of Uxbridge should loom large over Mid Bedfordshire. Labour and the Lib Dems should unite in a non-aggression pact to oust the Tories and give a progressive candidate the best chance of success.
Read us in @Independent 👇https://t.co/L1s1PINi8S
— Compass (@CompassOffice) August 25, 2023
Compass’s director, Neal Lawson, was quoted as saying:
The ghost of last month’s byelection in Uxbridge should loom large over Mid Bedfordshire. There, the progressive vote outnumbered the Conservative vote, but the Tories retained the seat because support for progressive parties was divided …
This must not happen in Mid Bedfordshire. Progressives can’t only do deals and work together when it’s easy; they must also do so when it’s hard.
Compass has previously championed a progressive alliance of parties at general elections, where Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens stand down in favour of each other to have the best chance of defeating the Conservatives.
In June, Nadine Dorries announced she was stepping down “with immediate effect”.
But the Tory MP is yet to formally resign, meaning there will be no election in her Mid Bedfordshire seat until MPs in the House of Commons return from their summer recess.
The Liberal Democrats will table a bill when parliament returns on 4 September that they hope will result in Dorries’ suspension as an MP (see post at 10.55).
Asylum seekers say Bibby Stockholm conditions caused suicide attempt
Thirty-nine asylum seekers who were briefly accommodated on the Home Office’s controversial Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset have said conditions onboard were so bad that one was driven to attempt suicide.
A three-page letter sent to the home secretary, Suella Braverman, also sets out the asylum seekers’ fear and despair at being trapped on the barge and appeals to her to help them in their search for safety and freedom in the UK.
They describe the barge as “an unsafe, frightening and isolated place” but said that as law-abiding people they were fearful of not obeying Home Office instructions. The asylum seekers described the barge as “a place of exile” and said the conditions were “small rooms and a terrifying residence”.
Some of the asylum seekers have told the Guardian they are too traumatised to return to the barge in Portland. According to the letter some people fell ill on the barge.
The letter says:
Also in a tragic incident one of the asylum seekers attempted suicide but we acted promptly and prevented this unfortunate event. Considering the ongoing difficulties it’s not unexpected that we might face a repeat of such situations in the future.
My colleague Diane Taylor has the full story here:
Home Office data shows that Channel crossings have exceeded 19,000 for the year so far, despite Rishi Sunak’s vow to voters that he will “stop the boats”.
Some 208 people arrived in the UK on Thursday after crossing the Channel in four boats, taking the provisional total for 2023 to date to 19,382, PA Media reports.
The prime minister has insisted his “stop the boats” pledge would cut the “unacceptable” cost of the asylum system. Home Office spending on asylum rose by £1.85bn, from £2.12bn in 2021/22, to £3.97bn in 2022/23.
Sunak told the Daily Express:
The best way to relieve the unsustainable pressures on our asylum system and unacceptable costs to the taxpayer is to stop the boats in the first place.
That’s why we are focused on our plan to break the business model of the people smugglers facilitating these journeys, including working with international partners upstream to disrupt their efforts, stepping up joint work with the French to help reduce crossings and tackling the asylum backlog.
Sunak’s strategy to tackle Channel crossings has been repeatedly marred by blunders and humiliation, including the forced evacuation of the Bibby Stockholm barge.
Labour said the record high asylum backlog amounts to a “disastrous record” for Sunak and the home secretary, Suella Braverman, while campaigners called for claims to be processed more efficiently.
Rishi Sunak has been speaking about the changes to the energy price cap announced by Ofgem this morning, saying the reduction in the typical energy bill to £1,923 is “good news for families up and down the country”.
The prime minister said it would help ease cost-of-living pressures.
He was then asked about people who are worried they will struggle again to pay their bills this winter. Sunak responded:
It is really important that we do target our support to the most vulnerable in society and that is what we are doing.
So the National Living Wage has gone up by around £1,400 for those on the lowest earnings; pensioners are receiving an extra £300 this winter alongside their Winter Fuel Payment.
And everyone on Universal Credit is receiving £900 in direct cost-of-living support because I want to make sure the most vulnerable in our society do get that extra help.
Even as the energy prices are coming down we want to keep providing that help because bills are still high.
The average household in Britain will still pay almost double the rate for their gas and electricity than before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a global energy crisis.
Many will see little difference in what they pay because the £400 support from the government given to all homes last winter is no longer available, and standing charges have risen from an average of £186 a year in October 2021 to just over £300.
If you are struggling, contact your supplier as soon as you can. Under Ofgem rules, suppliers must work with you to agree on a payment plan you can afford. There are different things you should do if you can’t afford to top up your prepayment meter. You should be able to get temporary credit from your supplier. Other options include applying for an energy grant.