The Labor left accuses Keir Starmer of double standards over the sacking of Sam Tarry
Good morning. Tonight, Liz Truss will debate Rishi Sunak in the first of the Conservative party’s official calls for members. Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary and Truss supporter, was on the airwaves this morning and despite being told by Truss’ team to tone down her comments about Sunak, she found it hard to resist, and his interviews have included several studies. increase attacks against the former chancellor. On LBC, she accused him of “blaspheming” in Monday’s BBC debate and said it was a “terrible look”. And to the BBC Breadkfast defended its decision to test him for his expensive clothes, saying “it’s about judgment and it’s about who voters can relate to”.
But the Labor party is also going through an infighting, sparked by Keir Starmer’s decision last night to sack Sam Tarry as shadow transport minister after he joined an RMT picket line (defying Starmer’s orders) and then proceeded to give a series of interviews which had not been authorized by the leadership and in which he flatly contradicted the party’s policy on public sector pay (the real reason he was fired, says Labor). My colleague Jessica Elgot has all the details here.
As Jess reports, union leaders have criticized Starmer’s move, arguing it shows Labor is not committed to standing up for workers. This morning, lefties in the parliamentary party also accused Starmer of double standards, saying Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, also gave an interview this week in which she quit party politics, but she was not dismissed Reeves said Labor was opposed to rail renationalisation, but the party later said it remained its policy.
John McDonnell, shadow chancellor when Jeremy Corbyn was leader, told Sky News:
Rachel Reeves gave an interview and concocted a policy on rail nationalization that the shadow transport spokesman had to contradict within hours. I didn’t see Rachel Reeves get fired.
Diane Abbott, Corbyn’s shadow home secretary, made the same argument in an interview on the Today programme.
McDonnell also told Sky News that Starmer had sparked a “completely unnecessary row”. He said:
Just at a time when the Tories are falling apart, and I think we have the best chance to get a head start in the polls that will build the support to get us into government, we are doing it completely unnecessarily. row
Sam took to the picket lines as shadow minister after shadow minister over the years in support of workers demanding a decent pay rise. It’s a just cause…
The Tory leadership election is showing how the Tories are tearing themselves apart. This is the time when we should have maximum unity and maximum solidarity in support of workers who are desperate for a decent pay rise because they have been hit hard by this cost of living crisis.
The Tory hustings don’t start until 7pm this evening. Not much in the paper until then, although Starmer is visiting Birmingham and Sadiq Khan, the Labor mayor of London, is making a phone call to LBC at 10am.
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John McDonnell on Sky News this morning. Photograph: Sky News
Updated at 09.21 BST
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Truss rejects think tank report that says Foreign Office under his leadership lacks Russia experience
Liz Truss, the foreign secretary and front-runner in the Tory leadership contest, has rejected claims that the Foreign Office under her leadership lacked experience in Russia.
The claim is made in a report on how the Foreign Office works published by the Institute for Government think tank. My colleague Patrick Wintour wrote about it here.
Speaking to reporters on a trip to Leeds, Truss said the claim that the Foreign Office lacked experts on Russia was “completely false”. She continued:
We have led the world in confronting Russia. We were the first country to send weapons to Ukraine in Europe, we put the toughest sanctions on Russia of any country, and we’re also making sure that no one allows Ukraine to give up its sovereign territory, and we’ve worked with our allies to get it
I’m proud of our record, but we need to do more, and one of the key areas in bringing down the cost of living is dealing with Russia – making sure they can’t force the world to bail out its gas supplies, and I’m going to be tough facing Putin
Here is an extract from the report explaining why the IfG believes Russia has been neglected by the Foreign Office. This is just one of several areas where the IfG believes the department’s performance could improve.
The Institute has argued that the war in Ukraine requires the UK, and democratic nations more generally, to review their approach to Russia. But this is hampered by the relatively small team dedicated to it. This is not new; As many interviewees for this article noted, and observers have commented publicly, after the Cold War there was a “moment of hope” and a belief that the worst of the Russian threat was over. Diplomatic expertise on the countries of the former Soviet Union was reduced. Ambitious members of the Foreign Office specialized in other fields, such as the Middle East and China. This decline in expertise about Russia and its neighbors was noted in 2014 after the invasion of Crimea by Sir Nigel Sheinwald, former UK ambassador to Moscow, who said: “When the [Crimea] a crisis happened, there was a problem in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the old Cold War crowd just wasn’t there.”
By 2016 the comparative lack of resources devoted to Russia was well established. Between 2016 and 2022, the Eastern Europe and Central Asia unit was consistently ranked among the worst resourced geographic units in the FCO and then the FCDO. The number of UKB staff at the Moscow embassy has also been slowly reduced; Exact figures are not available for recent years, but staff numbers dropped from 30 in 2016/17 to somewhere in the 20s in 2020/21.
Other elements of the Foreign Office’s Russian expertise have continued to be downgraded. Although the Foreign Affairs Committee highlighted Russian language proficiency as a “weakness” in 2015, the number of department staff who could speak it at an “advanced” level fell from 83 in December 2017 to less than 60 in February 2022.
More than 100,000 people fleeing the war in Ukraine have reached the UK on visas, according to the Home Office.
More than 100,000 people fleeing the war in Ukraine have been granted sanctuary in the UK through its visa schemes, PA Media reports. PA says:
Some 104,000 people had arrived in the UK on Ukraine’s visa scheme as of Monday, figures released by the Home Office and UK Visas and Immigration show.
This includes 31,300 people in the family scheme and 72,700 people in the Homes for Ukraine sponsorship program.
The figures also show that as of Tuesday, some 198,200 visa applications had been submitted and 166,200 visas had been issued.
These include 55,000 family applications, of which 47,200 visas have been granted, and 143,200 sponsorship applications, of which 119,000 visas have been granted.
Updated at 10.19am BST
Liz Truss speaking to supporters at a campaign event at a private home in Woodford Green, London, last night. Photograph: Carlos Jasso/PA
Coordinated union strike ‘inevitable’, says John McDonnell
Yesterday Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the RMT, suggested that if Liz Truss becomes Prime Minister and tries to implement her plans to restrict the ability of unions to call strikes, the trade union movement should respond with a general strike in the style of 1926.
In his interview on Sky News this morning, John McDonnell, the former shadow chancellor, was asked if he would support a general strike. He suggested he would, saying it was reasonable for unions to coordinate action. He said:
If you look at the ballots being cast across the trade union movement, we are talking about millions of workers now voting for industrial action. So naturally, what people are saying as well, why not coordinate it?
I support co-ordinated action, because if this results in a decent pay rise for people, they are protected against the cost of living crisis. I think this is the most effective.
McDonnell said the strikes would not be necessary if workers were paid properly. But, since the government was not listening, the coordinated strike was “inevitable”, he said. He said:
But, you know, that’s completely unnecessary. What it needs is for the government to recognize that people can’t be expected to stand by when their pay is cut….
You can understand why the unions say that if we go on strike, we might as well coordinate that action. So I think coordinated action will be inevitable, and I just hope the government starts listening.
John McDonnell (centre) supporting striking RMT members at Euston station yesterday, with Jeremy Corbyn (left). Photograph: Guy Smallman/Getty Images
Nadine Dorries suggested in another interview this morning that Rishi Sunak was part of a “coup” that…