Sam Tarry says it would have been ‘dereliction of duty’ not to stand on picket line after accusing Starmer of ‘car crash’ – live

Keir Starmer has been urged not to abandon a key leadership pledge of abolishing the House of Lords, with Gordon Brown warning that plans to “gerrymander” parliament’s upper chamber by flooding it with dozens of Tory peers proved the need for drastic reform.

Alarm was raised by the former Labour prime minister over a proposal drawn up by a political lobbying group for Boris Johnson to appoint up to 50 new Conservatives to ram contentious legislation through given a series of embarrassing defeats by peers.

Brown said the leaked document he had seen from CT Group – run by Lynton Crosby, a key adviser to Johnson – “legitimises straightforward bribery” by recommending those who vote loyally be rewarded with special envoy positions, honours and lunches at Chequers.

Nicknamed “Operation Homer”, the plan also said new peers would have to give a written undertaking to support the government in key votes on controversial legislation, likely to include the Northern Ireland protocol bill that would unilaterally override the Brexit deal.

Under the cover of levelling up the Lords by picking peers from under-represented parts of the UK, the paper admitted it was the “perfect excuse” to ensure a swathe of loyalist law-makers are ennobled.

Writing in the Guardian, Brown said the proposal “makes no bones about the defenestrated prime minister’s aim to pack the House of Lords” that would see him “ride roughshod over every convention and standard of propriety in an effort to secure political nominees who will vote for the Tory government”.

He added that the paper’s claim the media could be easily blindsided by the appointment of a few controversial figures or celebrities to avoid criticism of the sheer number of “cronies” appointed would amount to “gerrymandering”.

“The solution is to reform the Lords, not reinforce its unrepresentativeness,” Brown said, calling for Starmer to pick up the mantel of trying to abolish the un-elected upper chamber in parliament.

Read the full story here:

Heather Stewart

Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have clashed vehemently over tax and spending, immigration and the UK’s stance on China in their acrimonious battle to become prime minister – but have had little to say about many other pressing issues. Here are some largely overlooked key issues of the contest so far.

Standards in public life

Boris Johnson was swept out of office when his own MPs could no longer defend or explain the repeated untruths emanating from No 10. He had breached Covid regulations, allowed an alleged serial sexual harasser to be appointed to the whips’ office and seen two ethics advisers resign in disgust.

Yet cleaning up politics has barely featured in the debate – and indeed, Sunak and Truss have felt the need to defend Johnson, with Sunak saying at his launch event that the outgoing prime minister has “a good heart”.

There have been some hints at change – Truss said at Thursday’s hustings that she would move the Tory whips’ office back into No 12 Downing Street, to allow MPs’ conduct to be more closely monitored, and Sunak has said he would appoint a new ethics adviser. But neither has fully addressed the need to rebuild public trust in politics after the Johnson era.

Read the full story from my colleague Heather Stewart here:

Dan Sabbagh

The Evening Standard owner, Evgeny Lebedev, sought to organise a private weekend trip in Russia in June 2014 for Boris Johnson when he was London mayor, according to emails newly disclosed under freedom of information laws.

The unusual excursion, at one point discussed over dinner in Moscow by Johnson’s then chief of staff, Edward Lister, and Evgeny’s father, Alexander, would have been tacked on to the end of an official visit to Moscow and St Petersburg.

Ultimately, the proposed trip, with its two-day “personal leg”, did not go ahead. But emails sent the previous autumn show there was enthusiasm on both sides for a holiday that sheds fresh light on the relationship between Johnson, Evgeny Lebedev and his father, a former colonel in the KGB.

Evgeny Lebedev’s chief of staff wrote directly to Lister on 7 August 2013 to begin outlining a trip by Johnson to Russia in June the following year. The email makes clear the two had already discussed the idea.

“He is very happy to agree to a June date for the proposed visit to Russia,” the aide wrote. “In terms of the personal leg of the trip, he [Evgeny] was keen this happened at the tail end – ie the weekend following the ‘formal’ business.”

An email from Lister on 16 September indicated plans were developing: “Boris has it in his diary for the 23 June [2014] for a week and I have told him that the end of the week and weekend will be private with Evgeny (I hope that’s right) so we need to build a programme around the rest?”

It is not clear from the correspondence why the trip did not go ahead as discussed, but it appears to have become politically impossible after Russia’s invasion of the Ukrainian province of Crimea in spring 2014.

An article in the Evening Standard in March 2014 reported that Johnson had been invited by his mayoral counterpart in Moscow for a “short trade and cultural trip in early October” – but said it could be cancelled after “events in Ukraine”.

Johnson has known Evgeny Lebedev for well over a decade, a relationship marked by the politician’s regular attendance at parties hosted by the Evening Standard proprietor in London and Italy. When Johnson was foreign secretary, he visited the proprietor’s Italian palazzo without security for a weekend party in April 2018 – and while he was prime minister handed his friend a peerage.

But a trip to Russia, even before the Crimea crisis, would probably have been different.

Read more here:

Patrick Wintour

The UK Foreign Office has admitted a catalogue of errors over its handling of Britain’s exit from Afghanistan, but has shut the door on many Afghans who helped the UK prior to the Taliban takeover last August, saying it will not provide false hope that they will be given the chance to come to the UK.

Foreign Office officials say it is difficult to judge whether Afghans who worked on UK-funded civilian schemes, such as the British Council, are truly in danger from the Taliban, saying the evidence is that the threat primarily applies to those who provided security support to the UK.

Officials said the slow progress in processing cases this year had been caused by the high number of rejected applications, as well as legal cases challenging UK refusals to provide a right of abode. So far, only 5,000 Afghans have been given permission to come to the UK, in addition to the 15,000 evacuated at the time of the fall of Kabul last year.

The Guardian has been given details by individual Afghans who worked for UK-funded NGOs now in fear for their lives in underground shelters. They say members of their family have already been executed due to their connections with the UK, but have been unable to get a response from the Home Office.

But in its formal response, published on Friday, to a scathing foreign affairs select committee report released in May on the Afghan evacuation, the Foreign Office said: “If the government were obliged to offer in extremis resettlement to the UK to anyone working on programmes it funded in fragile states where there was a risk of an evacuation being needed, that could severely inhibit the provision of funding to NGOs delivering vital development programming.”

Read the full story here:

The former shadow transport minister Sam Tarry has written a comment piece for the Guardian in which he says it would have been a dereliction of duty for him as a Labour MP to refuse to join a picket line.

The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, sacked Tarry on Wednesday for giving a series of interviews from a rail union picket line outside Euston station in central London that were not in line with party policy.

He points out that that during the three lockdowns we had at the height of the pandemic, Rail employees “put their own safety and wellbeing in jeopardy” to ensure other key workers were able to get to work, and that medicines and other provisions could be transported.

He writes:

These Covid heroes had the right to expect Labour, the party of working people, to stand with them and speak out against the war that the Tories have declared on them.

That’s why I stood on the picket line at Euston, with my friends and allies in the RMT and TSSA transport unions, and why I gave media interviews in support of these workers.

That was my duty, as a shadow transport minister for the Labour party. It was an extension of my role as the Labour MP for Ilford South, and the job I did for eight years before entering parliament as an official for the Transport and Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA).

It’s a crime that in the 21st century so many of Britain’s rail workers, are living in conditions of in-work poverty, where even after a full day’s hard and stressful work they are often unable to afford the basics of food, rent and fuel, among other essentials.

However, victory could soon be within the grasp of the rail workers, and Labour can and should play a critical role in inflicting a defeat on the Tories over this.

The overwhelming majority of Labour party members have been utterly resolute in their support of the rail workers. Only this week on the picket line, I spoke to Labour members from across London, who turned out to show their solidarity with the RMT and TSSA.

Banners from local Labour parties were photographed and posted online, from coast to coast, during the last day of strike action. That support and solidarity can assert itself in the Labour party in the weeks and months ahead.

Constituency Labour parties, and other affiliates, must pass emergency motions in support of the striking rail workers, to go to the Labour party conference in Liverpool in late September.

Labour party members taking part in the selections for parliamentary candidates must challenge would-be MPs to commit to supporting the rail strikers, and other industrial disputes in the seats that they seek to represent. Labour needs to show it is on the side of workers across Britain, that we have a plan for a pay rise, and to rebalance the economy in favour of the vast majority.

Read the full piece here:

Full story: Sacked shadow minister accuses Keir Starmer of ‘complete car crash’

Ben Quinn

Keir Starmer’s ban on Labour MPs going on picket lines was a “fundamental mistake” that caused a “complete car crash” in a week when the party should have been talking about increasing workers’ wages, Sam Tarry has said after he was sacked from his role as a shadow minister following media appearances at an RMT picket line.

In a defiant riposte to the Labour leadership as he once again joined a picket line, the MP rejected Starmer’s statement that he had been sacked for making up policy “on the hoof” as he stood alongside striking workers during rail action. Trade unions were the ones “showing true leadership at the moment”, he added.

“At the end of the day I thought it was time we were really clear about who’s side we were on, and I am on the side of ordinary British workers,” said Tarry, giving fresh interviews after joining striking workers from the Communication Workers Union (CWU) on Friday morning in central London.

“I didn’t make up policy. All I said is that surely it should be right that we make an offer to workers in this country that matches inflation, because otherwise all they are getting offered is a real-terms pay cut,” he told Sky News.

Tarry’s comments came as thousands of BT and Openreach workers were striking across the UK on Friday in a dispute over pay. The CWU said it would be the first national telecoms strike since 1987 and the biggest ever among call centre workers.

Another strike will be held on Monday, after union members voted in favour of industrial action in protest at a £1,500 pay rise.

Strikes, ‘food banks’, takeover fears: the sea of troubles circling BTRead more

Starmer, who removed Tarry from the party’s frontbench earlier this week as shadow minister for buses and local transport, has previously warned shadow ministers not to join picket lines, although several did so during the last rail strikes in June and did not lose their jobs.

Read more here: