No 10 plays down prospect of NHS pay review body being asked to update recommendation for nurses – UK politics live | Politics

Downing Street has confirmed that the king’s speech is being delayed and that the current session of parliament, which started in May, is being extended until the autumn. The news was reported in Politico’s London Playbook briefing (see 9.47am) and at the morning lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson told journalists:

As has been reported, we are extending the third session [of parliament since the general election – the current one]. The programme is very full. And to make sure we have all the time we need to get [through] the packed agenda, the session will run until autumn 2023.

As reported earlier, this will free up more time for Rishi Sunak to pass his anti-strikes bill and his asylum crackdown bill – two pieces of legislation that are now central to his domestic agenda.

The Bank of England has raised UK interest rates to 3.5%, the highest since October 2008, my colleague Graeme Wearden reports on his business live blog.

Yesterday James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, told MPs in a written statement that the government had given the Chinese a week for six of their diplomats to comply with a request to be interviewed by the police over the beating-up of a pro Hong Kong democracy campaigner at the consulate in Manchester. He said the diplomats had all avoided police action because they have either left the country, or are about to do so.

In a Commons urgent question this morning, Alicia Kearns, the Tory chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, accused the government of letting them off. She said:

The consul general and five others brutalised a refugee on British soil and rather than being expelled or prosecuted, they’ve been allowed to slip off, flee like cowards, which makes their guilt even more evident.

By giving a week’s notice to them, which goes so far beyond the Vienna convention, we have essentially denied Bob Chan any sense of justice.

In response, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, a Foreign Office minister, said that the government had responded to the incident with “firm diplomacy” and that it was “disappointed” that the police would not get to interview the diplomats.

And the Unite union has announced that a strike by baggage handlers at Heathrow will go ahead on Friday.

The 400 Unite members work for the contractor Menzies at terminals 2, 3 and 4.

They will strike for 72 hours from 4am on Friday. This will be followed by a further 72-hour strike beginning on Thursday 29 December and ending at 4am on Sunday 1 January.

Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, said:

This is a classic case of an employer that can fully afford to pay workers a fair pay increase but has chosen not to. Menzies needs to stop making excuses and make a pay offer that meets our members’ expectations.

The workers have been offered a 4% pay increase for this year, and a 6.5% increase from January. Unite is asking for an increase of 13% for this year.

The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union has announced that it is escalating its strikes affecting public services.

In a statement, it said strikes are being added at the Department of Work and Pensions, in courts, by driving examiners and those working for Hinduja Global Services dealing with the Disclosure and Barring Service.

As PA Media reports, this is in addition to action being held or planned by Border Force officers, staff at National Highways and the Rural Payments Agency (RPA). PA says:

Last month, more than 100,000 PCS members working in 124 government departments and other bodies voted for strike action.

On Tuesday, driving examiners across Scotland and north-east England and people working at the RPA were the first to take action.

PCS said its members at DVSA [Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency] workplaces in Coventry, Grantham and Stevenage will join the action on December 28, 29, 30 and 31 and January, while those at DVSA in Aberystwyth, Basingstoke, Cardigan and Yeovil will strike from January 4-10.

Jobcentre workers in Doncaster will strike on December 23, 24, 29, 30 and 31, joining colleagues on strike in the same building and those at Jobcentres in Liverpool.

In a separate dispute, 300 PCS members working as legal advisers and court associates in 82 courts across England and Wales will take 12 days’ strike action over Christmas.

In another row, 82 PCS members employed by Hinduja Global Services on the Disclosure and Barring Service contract in Liverpool are back on strike until December 23.

Mark Serwotka, the PCS general secretary, said:

We’re delivering on our promise to escalate our action and we shall not cease for as long as the government continues to expect our hard-working members to get through the winter with just a 2% pay rise.

If ministers can shift their position on wind turbines and building houses because some Tory backbenchers aren’t happy, they can shift their position on in-work poverty.

One thing is certain: we won’t shift our position until and unless the government puts money on the table for our members, some of whom are claiming the benefits they themselves administer, thousands of whom are forced to use food banks because they can’t afford to eat and more who are burning candles at home because they can’t afford their fuel bills.

SNP defends taking £100,000 loan from its chief executive, and Sturgeon’s husband, to help with cash flow

Libby Brooks

The Scottish National party is accused of operating behind a veil of secrecy after it emerged that its chief executive – and first minister Nicola Sturgeon’s husband – Peter Murrell gave a loan of more than £100,000 to help it out with a “cash flow” issue after the last Holyrood election.

Murrell loaned the party £107,620 in June 2021, with around half repaid by October that year.

The loan was reported in the party’s 2021 accounts, which were published by the Electoral Commission in August, but brought to light by the Wings Over Scotland blog site.

The revelation raises questions not only about Murrell’s enviably deep pockets but also the party’s lack of substantial donors.

A SNP spokesperson described the loan as a “personal contribution made by the chief executive to assist with cash flow after the Holyrood election”, but opposition parties described it as “murky” as well as a “slap in the face” for voters struggling with the cost of living crisis.

MPs have observed a one-minute silence in the House of Commons to mark the 80th anniversary of the declaration on the persecution of the Jews, PA Media reports. PA says:

The declaration is described by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust as the first public announcement by the British government on the Nazis’ attempt to murder Europe’s Jewish population.

The declaration took place on 17 December 1942, and reports from the time say that in response, MPs rose spontaneously and stood for a moment in silence.

Marking the anniversary in the Commons chamber on Thursday were both prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, alongside other MPs.

Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle told the house that seven survivors of the Holocaust were present in the gallery to witness the commemoration, alongside representatives of Britain’s Jewish community and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

He told MPs: “On December 17, 1942, 80 years ago on Saturday, the then foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, read to the House a declaration issued by the wartime allies, condemning the treatment of Jewish people by the Nazis in occupied Europe.

“The declaration followed a diplomatic note sent to the allied powers a week earlier by the Polish foreign minister in exile, the first official report that the Holocaust was under way.

“The evil acts described in the declaration were and remain difficult to comprehend.”

My colleague Toby Helm wrote a good article about this anniversary in the Observer on Sunday.

And this is what Harry Boardman, parliamentary correspondent of what was then the Manchester Guardian, wrote about the minute’s silence from 1942. It was an obscure Labour MP from Islington who proposed the tribute. After describing Eden’s statement, Boardman wrote:

There followed a still more impressive manifestation of the deep feelings of the House. When it was about to pass to ‘the orders of the day’, a Labour member, Mr Cluse, who sits for South Islington, got up from the obscurity of a back bench and, in a mild voice, proposed to the Speaker that members should stand in witness of their detestation of Germany’s barbarism. Mr Cluse is an infrequent speaker, but he was inspired yesterday.

In a moment all members were on their feet, and the Lord Chancellor, in the Peers’ Gallery, with them. Nothing comparable with this has happened before. The House stood and sang God Save the King when war was declared 1914, and it rather went off its head when Mr Chamberlain announced his journey to Munich, but these were occasions when national feelings were racing at the flood.

Yesterday the Commons rose in calm to perform something like a judicial action to brand Germany for these infamies. This was the House of Commons in one of its greatest moments.

I’ve taken that quote from a selection of Boardman’s articles published in 1960 in a book called (without irony) The Glory of Parliament. Any political writer who proposed a title like that these days would be laughed out of the door by the publisher.

In her Guardian column yesterday Polly Toynbee wrote a withering assessment of the government’s justification for its pay offer to nurses. She wrote:

In every interview ministers hide behind the sanctity of the “independent” pay review bodies, claiming they set public pay. They don’t and nor are they “independent”. The government decides on pay, using PRBs as camouflage. The 60 or so members of these eight bodies covering public sectors are picked by ministers, as is their Office of Manpower Economics secretariat. I tried to speak to some members – no luck. Only two of those 60 people come from the employees’ side, says the TUC: one from the army, with no affiliated union. (The Tory press protests at the armed forces standing in for some public staff paid more than them. That’s because, banned from striking, they get short-changed by government; a recent report says Met police, likewise banned, are increasingly forced to use food banks).

These opaque PRBs are nothing like the Low Pay Commission that sets the minimum wage, whose membership is shared between academics, employers and unions: the TUC says it works well. PRBs have two main criteria to consider, both bogus. What are the current financial circumstances, and what may be needed to recruit, retain and motivate staff? But they are given a fixed spending envelope, with a set pay rise baked in. Any extra pay comes out of the departmental budget, causing cuts.

This morning the Today programme interviewed Jerry Cope, who was chair of the NHS pay review body from 2011 to 2017, and he rejected the claim that pay review bodies were not independent. He said:

I describe it as fiercely independent. I know there’s a lot of cynicism about, but all of the members of pay review bodies, and there are many of them, fiercely guard their independence and regard what they do as very important to all the stakeholders in a particular issue.

Cope said that the information given to pay review bodies by the Treasury as to what was affordable was “a parameter not a constraint”, and he said the NHS pay review body could have said to the government that its proposals were unrealistic. That sometimes happened, he said.

But he conceded that there was a problem with the recommendation on nurses’ pay because the pay review was out of date. He explained:

It took place in February and the world was a rather different place in February and therefore I think some of the evidence they considered was probably out of date by the time it was published. Because the process is very slow, the decision is a bit lagged.

Cope also said this factor offered a possible solution to the government.

I think they [ministers] should ask the pay review body to reconsider what they did last year, and not reopen last year, because I think it’s too late to do that, but actually say I want you to do a very quick turnaround for this year’s recommendations and I want you to take account on anything you might have missed last time round.

He said that could open the way to a higher offer, in a way that “respects the integrity of the pay review body” – although he also accepted that the pay review might decide not to change its recommendation.

In his TalkTV interview last night Sir Jake Berry, the former Conservative chairman, also said that Dominic Raab, the justice secretary and deputy PM, should be suspended from his cabinet post while the allegations about him bullying officials – there are now eight separate complaints, No 10 said yesterday – are investigated. Commenting on the latest developments in the story, he said:

The problem with this development is, if you work in Aldi in Rawtenstall or Asda in Rawtenstall in my constituency, and you had allegations like this against you, you would be suspended pending investigation.

And I think it’s quite a hard line from the government to maintain there are now eight allegations in relation to unacceptable behaviour in the workplace – which are denied by Dominic Raab – and they haven’t taken any further action than setting up some independent panel which I don’t think anybody, including me, really understands.

Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats have said Raab should stand aside while the allegations against him are investigated, and Berry said this was the approach he adopted to people under investigation when he was party chairman.

Good morning. Britain’s industrial dispute crisis has become notably more serious today with the start of a strike by nurses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Even in the 1970s the Royal College of Nursing never voted to go on strike, and so this is a measure of how badly the cost of living crisis is affecting the public sector workforce.

Many hospitals are not affected (nurses voted trust by trust, and in some places they did not reach the 50% turnout threshold for a ballot to be valid), but this is still a big motion – for the NHS, and patients – and my colleague Tobi Thomas is writing a separate liveblog with all the detail here.

I’ll be covering non-strike issues today, but it is impossible to write about Westminster politics without referencing the dispute and so it will get some coverage here too. And one of the most notable interventions has come from Sir Jake Berry, who was chairman of the Conservative party when Liz Truss was prime minister and before that chair of the Northern Research Group, the influential caucus for “red wall” Tory MPs. In an interview with TalkTV last night, Berry said the government should offer the nurses a better deal. He said:

The government is going to have to improve its offer.

The nursing union itself is asking for 19%. That does not seem like a realistic figure to people working in the private sector, to people working in other parts of our public sector.

They’ve described it themselves as a negotiating position. And we all know how this works. They ask for 19%, the government offers them 3 or 4, or whatever it is, and they’re going to meet somewhere in the middle.

We need to find a way, as a government, and the union too, to get to that centre point, that point of agreement, straight away.

Berry also said that nurses were “brilliant public servants” and that a compromise was essential. He went on:

Both the government and the nurses’ union need to come up together [with] a compromise position straight away. And that has to involve the government increasing its offer.

Asked by how much, Berry initially said “by a lot”, and then said he did not want to put a figure on it. But 19% was too high, he said.

Berry has become one of the most troublesome Tory backbenchers for No 10. He spoke out publicly about Rishi Sunak’s decision to give Gavin Williamson a cabinet job (successfully – Williamson resigned) and about his decision to reappoint Suella Braverman has home secretary (unsuccessfully – she is still there). He also joined a revolt over onshore windfarms (he was was in favour), and he has publicly speculated about the prospect of Boris Johnson returning to save the party from electoral oblivion.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Kemi Badenoch, the international trade secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

Morning: Stephen Barclay, the health secretary, visits a London hospital, where he will speak to the media.

11.30am: Downing Street holds its lobby briefing.

2.45pm: John Swinney, Scotland’s finance secretary, presents the Scottish government’s budget for 2023-24.

At some point today Huw Merriman, the rail minister, is holding a meeting with the RMT about the strike.

Also, people are voting today in the byelection in Stretford and Urmston to elect a replacement for Labour’s Kate Green, who is leaving parliament to become Greater Manchester’s deputy mayor for policing and crime.

I try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions and, if they are of general interest, I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.

If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter. I’m on @AndrewSparrow.

Alternatively, you can email me at andrew.sparrow@theguardian.com.