Tony Blair, the former prime minister, has said he thinks there’s a 30% chance of Brexit not happening. (See 3pm.)
Phil Hogan, the Irish European commissioner for agriculture, has accused Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, of “behaving and acting and speaking strangely” and of being “completely out of the loop” in relation to UK government Brexit policy. (See 12.05pm.)
Guy Verhofstadt, the European parliament lead Brexit spokesman, has said the government’s plan to avoid the need for border controls between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic after Brexit is not workable. On a visit to Belfast he said the government would have to propose a workable solution before Brexit talks could proceed to the next stage, covering the future trade relationship. He also floated the prospect of Northern Ireland staying in the customs union while the rest of the UK left as one possible solution. (See 10.18am.) Diane Dodds, a DUP MEP, said this would be unacceptable. After meeting Verfhofstadt with other DUP figures, Dodds said:
We would not countenance and indeed it would be calamitous for the economy in Northern Ireland if there were barriers to trade with our largest partner which is the rest of the United Kingdom.
Guy Verhofstadt on Ormeau Avenue in Belfast. Photograph: Brian Lawless/PA
Blair says he thinks there's 30% chance Brexit will not happen
Tony Blair has said he thinks there is a 30% chance of Brexit being reversed. He made the assessment in an interview on Bloomberg TV yesterday. Asked what were the chances of Brexit not happening, he replied:
It’s really difficult to say. Most people would tell you, and I should say to you I think it is likely it happens.
On the other hand, I still have some difficulty seeing how after the general election, which produced a hung parliament in the UK, this government is going to get its form of Brexit through. Because I think there are a lot of Labour MPs who will oppose it, and a lot of Conservative MPs who will oppose a hard Brexit. So there’s maybe, I sometimes say, a roundabout 30% chance that it’s changed. But the truth is a lot will depend on how the debate develops over this year.
Tony Blair. Photograph: Bloomberg
Darren Murphy, who was one of Blair’s advisers in Downing Street, went even further when speaking at a London event hosted by Dods Group. As PoliticsHome reports, he said he did not think Brexit would happen because he did not think the government had the votes to get it through.
George Osborne has been tweeting out a picture of the Evening Standard front page, splashing on the interview with Phil Hogan, the Irish European commissioner for agriculture, denouncing Boris Johnson. (See 12.05pm.)
This week the whole world has been treated to the shambolic spectacle of the cabinet negotiating with itself in public.
Britain’s diplomatic mission to the United Nations in New York looks like something that Alan Ayckbourn could have written: the dishevelled foreign secretary who gives a press conference trapped in a hotel lift; the prime minister who’d rather have a meeting with Ivanka Trump than with Boris Johnson.
The truth is that more than a year after the referendum and the creation of the May government, there is still no agreement on what we are asking the Europeans for — and the arrogant assumption is that once we finally decide among ourselves, the Europeans will give it us.
Once again in the Brexit talks it is worth listening to the actual words of the EU. It makes it very clear that if Britain wants a transition agreement after we leave in 2019 — and it is universally agreed across Whitehall that we do — then we will have to accept an existing, off-the-shelf arrangement.
If we want to remain trading in the single market and customs union, then we will have to make annual financial contributions, accept free movement of people and acknowledge the jurisdiction of the European court of justice.
That is what Mrs May was sensibly shaping up to offer in Florence, until Mr Johnson suddenly realised it would run counter to all the promises he made a year ago.
Birmingham bin strike suspended after Unite wins court hearing
The long-running Birmingham bin strike has been suspended after trade union leaders won a High Court battle over council redundancy notices, the Press Association reports.
Unite said it had agreed to call off industrial action by bin workers for the time being, pending a trial later this year.
The announcement followed a ruling in London in favour of the union, following a two-day hearing.
Unite, Britain’s biggest trade union, brought a court action to block redundancy notices, issued by Labour-controlled Birmingham city council, while the local authority opposed the move.
But Mr Justice Fraser granted an interim injunction, pending a trial ruling on the underlying legal dispute over the local authority’s planned waste collection service shake-up.
Earlier this week Unite’s members voted strongly in favour of extending almost 12 weeks of strikes until Christmas.
The Press Association also says the judge spoke of an “extraordinary” and “astonishing” state of affairs at Birmingham city council in the wake of the dispute over plans to save money by reorganising rubbish collections.
Mr Justice Fraser said large amounts of rubbish had accumulated on the streets of Birmingham after refuse collectors took industrial action.
He said the dispute had led to the creation of a “schism” between councillors and council officers who, he said, were “positively working against one another” at times.
The judge raised concern as he ruled on the latest stage of a High Court fight between the council and leaders of the Unite union which has developed in the wake of reorganisation proposals.
He said plans to make binmen redundant should be shelved until the case has been analysed at a trial scheduled for November.
Rubbish bags piled up in front of bins in Moseley Road, Birmingham. Photograph: Aaron Chown/PA
Tebbit criticises cabinet for not having agreed policy on Brexit
Lord Tebbit, the veteran Conservative former party chairman, has told Radio 5 Live that one of the problems the government has on Brexit is that it has not agreed a policy. He said:
What is wrong is that there was not an agreed line which had been endorsed at the cabinet, having been fully discussed in a cabinet committee, on what people should be saying.
If there is a songsheet, then you expect everyone to sing from it. But if there is not a songsheet, then people sing their own songs.
I think that the leadership is not well-organised, that’s the thing.
But Tebbit also dismissed the prospect of Boris Johnson taking over from Theresa May any time soon.
Does anybody seriously want to overthrow the prime minister - in the Conservative Party that is - and have another period when the leadership is in doubt -- who’s going to get it and all the rest of it? No they don’t.
Suppose [Johnson] were to bring down the prime minister, and suppose he were to get into Number 10, what would his position be? He couldn’t demand loyalty from his colleagues.
Peter Foster, the Telegraph’s Europe editor, has a good Twitter thread on the the reports that Theresa May will offer the EU at least €20bn. (See 11.12am.)
Open Britain, the group campaigning for a “soft” Brexit, has put out this statement about the OECD forecasting low growth in the UK next year. (See 12.08pm.) It is from the Labour MP Wes Streeting and it blames Brexit.
The hard Brexit enthusiasts at the heart of government seem determined to reclaim Britain’s title as the ‘sick man of Europe’.
A combination of falling real wages, stalled investment and the prospect of new trade barriers between the UK and our largest market, is clearly taking its toll. And at the heart of this is the uncertainty and anxiety caused by the Government’s flawed Brexit strategy.
The Prime Minister could begin to address these challenges on Friday, by committing to long-term membership of the single market and customs union.
John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, has also put out his own statement about the figures. McDonnell is relatively pro-Brexit, in Labour terms, and his response did not even mention Brexit. Instead he blamed Conservative economic policies for growth slowing. He said
This report exposes Philip Hammond’s failed approach that has resulted in our economy growing slower than our European neighbours, and with the OECD predicting that 2018 looks set to see slow economic growth continue unless the government changes direction.
Previously, the OECD has been supportive of the government’s policy but today they reveal that productivity and wages continues to lag, and the report further highlights that despite the economic crash of 10 years ago our economy is still at risk of a bubble in the housing market.
Only Labour has a plan to protect working families from rising prices, while providing the serious infrastructure investment our country needs, underpinned by our fiscal credibility rule, to build the high wage, high skill economy of the future for the many not the few.
John McDonnell with striking McDonald’s workers at a rally at Westminster earlier this month. Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz / Barcroft Im/Wiktor Szymanowicz / Barcroft
Italy, France and Germany will grow faster than Britain next year as Brexit uncertainty continues to weigh on consumer confidence and deter much-needed business investment, according to the latest economic forecasts by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, my colleague Phillip Inman reports.
EU commissioner says Boris Johnson 'acting strangely' and 'completely out of the loop'
George Osborne, the pro-remain former Tory chancellor who now edits the Evening Standard, isn’t fond of Boris Johnson. He has also just appointed a new Brussels correspondent, Sarah Collins.
Collins (who on the basis of her understanding of internal newsroom politics is clearly destined to go far) has secured an interview with Phil Hogan, the Irish European commissioner for agriculture and rural development. Happily for all concerned, he’s used it to slag off Johnson.
Clearly, [Johnson] is not directly involved in the negotiations on behalf of the British government with the EU. He certainly has made very strange statements that are completely contradictory, and completely at odds with his own government’s position as well as the possibility of being reasonable with the EU in finalising a deal.
So it strikes me that he is completely out of the loop in relation to the type of concrete proposals that are required and that are being considered by the UK government ...
Mr Johnson is behaving and acting and speaking strangely. It’s clear that his reputation is not good and he is a diminished figure in the government.
Hogan also complained that Johnson’s Telegraph article about Brexit last week failed to address the issue of the Irish border.
It’s amazing that the UK’s foreign secretary can publish a 4,000-word article about the UK’s Brexit future and not mention the Irish border. You’d think that the foreign secretary would have ideas about how to manage the UK’s main land border with the European Union, but obviously not.
And he said it would be worrying if Theresa May is equally vague on the subject of Ireland in her speech on Friday.
So if Mrs May is as vague on the three questions as Mr Johnson was in her speech in Florence then the signs will not be good.
Phil Hogan. Photograph: Michael Gottschalk/Photothek via Getty Images
Theresa May will give a speech to the UN general assembly later, focusing on issues like internet extremism and modern slavery. On Sky’s All Out Politics Lord Malloch-Brown, a former UN deputy secretary general and a foreign office minister in the last Labour government, delivered a withering verdict. Asked what the UN would make of her raising issues like this, he replied:
Second tier powers tend to talk about these kind of issues. This is a speech a Norwegian prime minister might give. But we have to cut our suit to our new status ... This is all about trying to find some props for the claim there’s a big British role post Europe.
Malloch-Brown also said that increasingly France was being seen as a more important power than the UK at the UN HQ in New York. France and the UK are both permanent members of the UN security council. But “France de facto speaks for that broader European power bloc in the security council going forward,” he said.
Here are some of the most interesting stories and comment around this morning about Theresa May’s forthcoming Brexit speech and Boris Johnson’s manoeuvring.
Germany’s Angela Merkel has been told by the British government to expect Theresa May this week to offer to fill a post-Brexit EU budget hole of at least €20bn, the first attempt by London to meet European demands to settle its divorce bill.
Olly Robbins, the prime minister’s top EU adviser, has contacted his counterparts in several European capitals to reassure them Mrs May’s Friday speech in Florence would include the financial offer, according to officials briefed on the discussions.
Mrs May’s team is hoping the offer will break a three-month deadlock in Brexit talks with Brussels and allow them to move to a second phase of negotiations that would open discussions about a future trading relationship between the EU and the UK.
UK officials have indicated Britain would ensure no member state would have to pay more into the EU budget or receive less money from it until 2020, the end of EU’s current long-term budget planning period. The expected hole in those two years after Brexit would be at least €20bn when payments the UK receives back from Brussels are excluded.
The FT also says May’s initial offer will not be enough. It reports:
“We will at least have something to talk about,” said one EU diplomat involved in Brexit. “But it is not where the landing zone is.”
Downing Street has described the FT story as “pure speculation” - which is often Whitehall code for “true”.
Constituency chairmen contacted by The Telegraph accused him of “damaging” the party, with more than half of those spoken to saying his article was wrong or unhelpful.
Some described him as an “oaf” or a “buffoon” while others said they wished he would “keep quiet”.
Bernard Bateman, chairman of the Skipton and Ripon Conservative Association in North Yorkshire, said that public interventions by ministers over Brexit were “losing us support in the country” ...
Chris Howorth, chairman of Mr Hammond’s Runnymede & Weybridge Association in Surrey, said: “There are specific people who are meant to be leading our negotiations. The Telegraph article added to the noise in a way that doesn’t seem particularly helpful.”
Only seven out of 24 chairmen who spoke to The Telegraph said they supported Mr Johnson.
The Telegraph also says May will say in her speech that she is not planning to turn the UK into a low-regulation tax haven after Brexit.
The Telegraph understands that Mrs May’s speech will repeat recent broad assurances to the EU that the UK is not seeking to become a Singapore-style low-regulation tax haven.
The payment of around £10 billion a year during the transition period would not settle all of the UK’s accounts in Brussels’ eyes, but would be a gesture of Britain’s commitment to pay its dues, with the intention that the final amount would be negotiated alongside a trade deal.
Friends of the foreign secretary had suggested that he could quit the cabinet before the end of the week if Mrs May pursued a soft Brexit. The Times understands that her speech will avoid talking in detail about the shape of the final relationship, though, if anything, it is expected to lean more towards Mr Johnson’s vision of a Brexit endpoint. It will concentrate on ensuring that EU-UK trade talks can begin this autumn.
One source claimed Mrs May was never wedded to the prospect of a Swiss-style deal and was never likely to spell out the final EU-UK relationship. This left Mr Johnson open to the charge that he had backed down without a meaningful concession. The prime minister’s chief of staff, Gavin Barwell, who accompanied her to New York, is being credited with pulling the foreign secretary back from resignation. He has been carrying out “shuttle diplomacy” with secretaries of state before the speech. After resignation hints from Mr Johnson’s camp on Monday, Mr Barwell is thought to have intervened.
In its inside write-through (paywall), the Times also says that Johnson’s allies claim Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, is mobilising against him.
To add spice to this narrative some around Mr Johnson even blame Sir Jeremy for the attack by Sir David Norgrove, head of the UK Statistics Authority, who questioned the renewed use of the £350 million figure that Brexiteers claim would return to Britain after leaving the EU.
“It’s got Heywood’s fingerprints all over it,” one ally said. Another said: “Boris is at war with Jeremy Heywood.”
Sir Jeremy, Britain’s most senior civil servant, issued a formal denial of his involvement last night. “David Norgrove, as chairman of the National Statistics Authority, is independent of government. The cabinet secretary was not involved in this letter in any way,” a Cabinet Office spokesman said.
First, it is not at all obvious that Tory MPs want him to lead them - and he is no longer the darling of the 150,000 mostly older people who are Tory members and will have the final say on who eventually replaces May.
Or to put it another way, a leadership battle any time soon would almost certainly see him embarrassed - which he presumably knows.
Peston also thinks Johnson could end up resigning because he is not enjoying his job.
When I saw him this morning in the lobby of his New York hotel, sweaty after his morning run, he was unwontedly diffident. His normal bombast was not quite there. He had shadows under his eyes.
Maybe the burdens and cares of office have caught up with him, implausible as that my seem. He looks like someone who is not enjoying his current life.
I cannot shake off the notion that his recent behaviour is that of someone who just wants out - and perhaps even he does not quite know why.
Matt Chorley in his Times Red Box morning briefing says there was something familiar about Johnson’s behaviour yesterday.
It is party conference season. Boris Johnson’s leader has backed a policy, but unable to resist the lure of publicity, he publicly opposes it. There is a media scrum in which Johnson claims to not know what all the fuss is about.
“If I was in charge,” the blond bombsite declared. “I would get rid of Jamie Oliver and tell people to eat what they like.” It was an early prototype of his “have your cake and eat it” philosophy and flew in the face of David Cameron’s praise for the TV chef’s war on Turkey Twizzlers.
Back in 2006 Johnson knew how to make news. Having stirred up the row at the Conservative conference in Bournemouth, the junior shadow minister kept a typically low profile by walking straight into the press room, surrounded by a huge crowd of journalists, photographers and TV cameras, before confecting surprise at the hullabaloo: “What is the story?”
I was reminded of this pattern – act of rebellion, “accidentally” meeting journalists, claiming to be baffled by a media storm, before falling into line – when I watched the foreign secretary’s behaviour in New York.
For all the sound and fury at Johnson for claiming £350 million a week will be available for the U.K. to spend after Brexit, the foreign secretary also used his Telegraph piece to accept the money would only be available ‘once we have settled our accounts’ with the EU. Aides close to Johnson made clear over the weekend that the foreign secretary accepts the idea of continuing payments to the EU during a transition period — a major concession which clears much of the ground in the way of a potential interim deal.
Verhofstadt floats prospect of Northern Ireland staying in customs union while rest of UK leaves
Guy Verhofstadt, the European parliament’s chief Brexit spokesman, has dismissed the UK’s post-Brexit proposals for Northern Ireland as unworkable. In interviews at the start of a two-day visit to Northern Ireland and Ireland, he said:
For the moment we don’t see a workable solution being put forward by the UK government.
Verhofstadt was referring to proposals - dubbed “technology and trust” by some critics - set out in the government’s paper (pdf) about how border controls could operate between Northern Ireland and Ireland after Brexit. Britain, Ireland and the EU all want to avoid the return of a hard border, but if the UK leaves the EU customs unions, some sort of customs controls would be inevitable.
Verhofstadt said one solution might be for Northern Ireland to stay in the customs union even if the rest of the UK left. But it was up to the UK to come up with an answer to the problem, he said.
There are possibilities, for example you could imagine one proposal on the table that Northern Ireland continued to be part of the customs union and even of the single market. The point is it is the UK government that has to come forward with such unique solutions.
Since we’re talking about Ireland and Brexit, Fintan O’Toole’s essay in the New York Review of Books, Brexit’s Irish Question, is a brilliant read on this topic. Here’s an excerpt.
For at its heart, this is not really a technocratic problem of borders and customs, of tariffs and passports. Running beneath it is a problem of national identity—how it is to be conceived and expressed, how it is to be given political and institutional form. It is not a problem on which the two sides in the negotiations can simply set their masters and mistresses of the arcana and minutiae of the laws of trade. It is a large-scale conceptual clash. To put it bluntly, Ireland has evolved a complex and fluid sense of what it means to have a national identity while England has reverted to a simplistic and static one. This fault line opens a crack into which the whole Brexit project may stumble.
Aslef, the train drivers’ union, has announced that it is backing Richard Leonard for next Scottish Labour leader. Mick Whelan, Aslef’s general secretary, said:
Richard shares our values and we’re proud to support his campaign. He’s a committed trade unionist and recognises that the people of Scotland are hungry for change. I know that under Richard’s leadership, train drivers will have a robust voice in Scotland.
Keeping 1% public sector pay cap could damage public services, says IFS
Downing Street has tentatively announced the end of the 1% cap on public sector pay increases. Earlier this month it said that the police and prison officers would get pay rises worth more than 1%, but what is going to happen to other public sectors is as yet unresolved, and we are not expecting clarity until the November budget.
Today the Institute for Fiscal Studies has published a briefing paper that will strengthen the hand of those saying the cap should be lifted across the board. It is relatively understated (it is headlined “Public sector pay: still time for restraint?”) and it acknowledges that lifting the cap could cost around £6bn a year by the end of the decade. But it does say that retaining the pay cap could harm public services.
If the government maintains the 1% pay restraint for most or all public sector workers, the difference between public and private sector pay would be likely to fall further. This would likely increase recruitment, retention and motivation problems in the public sector, and risk leading to lower-quality public services. Increases in line with prices (the Consumer Prices Index) or private sector earnings would be likely to mitigate some of these problems.
If pay restraint does continue, we might expect the recruitment problems to be particularly severe in areas where the equivalent pay in the private sector is now relatively higher. That is particularly the case for highly educated professionals and those in London and the South East. If these are the areas where recruitment problems are most severe, a government interested in public service quality should target any pay rises towards these areas.
And this is from Jonathan Cribb, the IFS senior research economist who wrote the report.
The government is considering lifting the public sector pay cap for at least some workers. If it decides to maintain the 1% cap, we should expect increasing difficulties in recruiting, retaining and motivating high quality public sector staff, reducing the quality and quantity of public services. But increasing pay for these workers implies substantial extra costs to public sector employers. The Treasury could provide extra funds for this by raising taxes, cutting other spending or borrowing more. Asking the NHS, for example, to fund higher pay increases from within existing budgets would be very challenging.
I will post more from the report later.
The Boris Johnson ‘will he, won’t he?’ resignation pantomime seems to have resolved itself, as the Guardian reports this morning, but there is a lot of analysis of that in the papers and I will be taking a look at that later. And, of course, Brexit is going to come up.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9am: The National Institute of Economic and Social Research publishes a briefing on financial services.
10am: Guy Verhofstadt, the European parliament’s lead Brexit spokesman, holds talks with political leaders in Northern Ireland. Later he will visit the border.
On my way to Belfast, Dublin & the border for meetings w/ all the political forces involved to discuss #Brexit. Updates will follow pic.twitter.com/JqjHRZ2IEX
Theresa May is still in New York. She is giving a speech to the UN general assembly and holding a meeting with tech companies including Google, Microsoft and Facebook, but both of those will after 6pm UK time, which will be out of my time.
As usual, I will be covering breaking political news as it happens, as well as bringing you the best reaction, comment and analysis from the web. I plan to post a summary before I wrap up mid-afternoon.
You can read all today’s Guardian politics stories here.
If you want to follow me or contact me on Twitter, I’m on @AndrewSparrow.
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