PM urged to block Boris Johnson’s honours list amid reports it is set to be published – UK politics live | Politics

Responding to Rachel Reeves’ comments about Labour’s green investment on the Today Programme (see also 9.24am and 9.45am) Rebecca Newsom, Greenpeace UK’s head of politics, said:

Any u-turn would be a huge mistake. Without the necessary immediate investment, we will lose out on the creation of thousands of jobs needed as we phase out fossil fuels, and we will lose out on the opportunity to put green tech industries at the center of our economy.

Rachel Reeves rightly cites the opportunities of green growth, but this prevarication on confirming the scale of investment needed from the start of a new Labour government risks throwing in the towel on the global race in green tech, with the US, China and the EU already far ahead.

It would be simply bad economics to say that we can’t afford this now when it would pay for itself. Green infrastructure investment is now one of the best economic growth generators, and with it the opportunity to lower bills and tackle the climate crisis. Labour mustn’t let this go.

England’s largest teaching union threatens strikes before summer

Richard Adams

England’s largest teaching union is threatening to hold strikes before the end of the school term this summer unless the government restarts talks over pay, school funding and working conditions.

In a letter to education secretary Gillian Keegan, the National Education Union’s general secretaries give the government until 17 June to resume negotiations or risk further school closures.

The NEU said:

Should this letter be ignored, and negotiations are not in place by the 17 June the NEU national executive will be discussing our next steps. This will include the consideration of NEU teacher members in England taking further strike action in the week beginning 3 July.

The NEU’s letter notes that Keegan has not responded to an earlier request to publish the recommendations of the independent School Teacher Review Body (STRB), which are said to advise a 6.5% pay rise.

The NEU’s letter to Keegan states:

There are six school term weeks until the summer holiday. Up and down the country, head teachers are trying to plan their school budgets for next year and trying to cope with the rapidly growing problem of recruiting enough teachers to fill their classrooms.

By not publishing the STRB report, your department is withholding vital information about what proposals that body has made on teacher pay, which may or may not help with the recruitment difficulties. It is also withholding vital information about the funding of pay rises.

Rishi Sunak has been urged to step in to block former prime minister Boris Johnson from handing honours to a “carousel of cronies”.

The prime minister is reportedly set to sign off Johnson’s honours list, which is understood to include about 50 names and could lead to two byelections, within weeks.

Labour has renewed its calls for the list to be stopped. It comes amid reports that the list is likely to be made public today.

Stephen Kinnock, the shadow immigration minister, said Sunak had “caved in” to appease his divided party, accusing the prime minister of being “too weak” to block them.

“Some of the people on that list, it just looks like a carousel of Boris Johnson’s cronies and frankly the Prime Minister has caved in yet again because there’s warring factions in the Conservative Party.

“They’re so divided and fragmented and the Prime Minister realises that if he wants to keep the sort of Johnson wing of his party quiet he’ll need to… Some of the names on there are very, very dubious indeed and the Prime Minister should not be accepting them.”

Meanwhile, the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has offered the North Sea oil and gas industry a “get-out” clause from the windfall tax on fossil fuel profits if wholesale energy market prices fall back to normal levels.

Jillian Ambrose reports:

The chancellor hopes to boost investment in the North Sea by agreeing to suspend the windfall tax on oil profits if the market price for Brent crude falls below $71.40 a barrel, and gas prices fall below 54p a therm, for a period of six months. The global oil price is now about $75 a barrel, and the UK’s gas price is about 64 p/th.

The Treasury has put forward the change a little over six months after raising the energy profits levy from 25% to 35%, on top of the usual 40% rate of tax, and extending the regime by two years until 2028. It is expected to raise tens of billions of pounds to help cover the cost of the government’s support for energy bills.

The government said its levy had raised about £2.8bn to date, and it did not expect the new changes to have an impact on the tax receipts based on current forecasts for energy market prices.

The levy attracted fierce criticism from the North Sea industry, which claimed it could put the brakes on new investment in oil and gas projects at a time when the government hopes to increase domestic fossil fuel production.

Labour has admitted that its £28bn green prosperity plan may have to be watered down.

Blaming the Tories, who she said had “crashed our economy”, Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, this morning said she could not supply a “final set of numbers” on spending until a further fiscal statement from the government.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

The other thing that has happened in last two years is the Tories have crashed our economy, and as a result interest rates have gone up 12 times, inflation is now at 8.7% and I’ve always said our fiscal rules are non-negotiable.
Economic stability, financial stability, always has to come first and it will do with Labour. That’s why it’s important to ramp up and phase up our plans to get to the investment we need to secure these jobs so that it is also consistent with those fiscal rules to get debt down as a share of GDP and to balance day-to-day spending.

The £28bn figure, previously given by Labour, would instead be a target to work towards, she said, rather than the initial sum allocated for the plan in the first year of government, as the party had previously pledged.

She also said she is “staggered” that the prime minister has returned from the US with “no industrial plan” for Britain after Rishi Sunak and the US president, Joe Biden, announced the Atlantic declaration:

I’m staggered, frankly, that he’s come back with no industrial plan for Britain to seize the opportunities that they are seizing in the US.

I’ll be looking after the politics blog today. Please get in touch with any tips or suggestions: miranda.bryant@theguardian.com