Boris Johnson news: Government used public money on polling, emails reveal as Raab enters RNLI row

Good morning, and welcome to The Independent’s rolling coverage of all things UK politics. Stay tuned as the government receives yet another warning over the fallout in Northern Ireland and Dominic Raab takes a stand against China.

The Northern Ireland Protocol risks becoming a constant irritant in future EU/UK relations unless both sides change their “fundamentally flawed” approaches to resolving the dispute, peers have found.

A House of Lords committee set up to examine the controversial post-Brexit trading arrangements for the Irish Sea has warned that Northern Ireland could become a “permanent casualty” of Brexit unless compromise is found urgently.

The EU and UK remain at odds over the implementation of new checks and processes on goods being shipped into Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK.

The committee has published an introductory report on the arrangements that have created the economic barriers on Irish Sea trade.

Lord Jay of Ewelme, who chairs the committee on the Protocol, said there was an urgent need for compromise.

“That won’t be easy, but it is an absolute necessity that the UK and the EU should now work together urgently to identify solutions if Northern Ireland is not to become a permanent casualty of the Brexit process,” he said.

“The tensions over the Protocol currently seem insoluble. Yet that was also true of the political situation during the Troubles. But the peace process ultimately took root and flourished, through a process of time, patience, dialogue, and most of all trust. Those same qualities are now needed to address the problems that Brexit and the protocol present.”

The chancellor should use his visit to Scotland on Thursday to apologise for “prematurely withdrawing furlough and risking thousands of unnecessary redundancies”, the SNP has said.

Rishi Sunak will visit Edinburgh, Glasgow and Fife on Thursday to meet people supported by the UK government’s “plan for jobs” scheme, which he said has supported one in three jobs in Scotland and tens of thousands of Scottish businesses.

Mr Sunak hailed the strength of the Union and Scotland’s “innovation and ingenuity” ahead of the visit, saying: “We’ve come through this pandemic as one United Kingdom.”

But the SNP’s shadow chancellor Alison Thewliss urged him to explain “why he is short-changing us on youth jobs” and going ahead with Universal Credit cuts that will “plunge half a million people into poverty”.

She went on: “I would urge Rishi Sunak to explain to the people of Scotland why he is shortchanging us on youth jobs, and ploughing ahead with Universal Credit cuts that will undermine the Scottish Child Payment and plunge half a million people into poverty, when at the same time he can find £250m for a UK government yacht.

“It is increasingly clear that the only way to keep Scotland safe from Tory austerity is to become an independent country with the full powers needed to protect jobs and secure a strong, fair and progressive recovery.”

The Treasury has said that through the pandemic, 900,000 people in Scotland were furloughed, more than 90,000 businesses have received loans, and £1.535bn has been paid in self-employment support.

From 1 July, though, employers had to pick up 10 per cent of their furloughed workers’ salaries, with the government paying 70 per cent. This will decrease further in August and September, when the government will move to pay 60 per cent and employers 20 per cent.

The UK’s foreign secretary has said it was “highly unlikely” he would go to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, citing great sensitivities around the situation in Xinjiang.

Boris Johnson’s government has resisted opposition calls for a political boycott of the event in China, but Dominic Raab suggested ministers could decide to reduce Britain’s political “representation”.

Asked by Sky News on Thursday if he would attend the Beijing games next year, Mr Raab said: “I doubt it … Of course, there are great sensitivities around Xinjiang and things like that. We’ll decide our level of representation at a political-diplomatic level in due course … It’s highly unlikely I would go.”

Our political reporter Adam Forrest has more:

Here’s the clip of Dominic Raab telling Sky’s Kay Burley he is “unlikely” to attend the Winter Olympics in China:

The government has been advised to introduce a daily exercise campaign, similar to “5 a Day”, amid concerns over the decline in physical activity during the pandemic.

A nationwide “Work Out to Help Out” campaign, which will incentivise people to get involved in organised sport, should also be launched, MPs on the the cross-party Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee said.

It comes after the committee heard evidence that more than 100,000 fewer children in England met the minimum 60 minutes’ daily activity recommended by the chief medical officer last year compared with the year before. There was also a warning that the proportion of children and young people not achieving the minimum recommended level of activity is “of significant concern”.

Just over half of children and young people achieved the minimum recommended level of an average 60 minutes activity a day in 2020, the report said.

“Despite the government allowing people to exercise outside for one hour a day, either alone or with their household, during lockdowns, team sport and group exercise was halted; gyms, leisure centres and swimming pools were closed down,” it read. “After each successive lockdown, sport has been one of the first things to return but activity levels for 2020 fell below the figures for the previous year among adults, young people and children.”

A Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport spokesman responded: “Over the past year-and-a-half we have prioritised the importance of sport and physical activity, and they will remain at the heart of the government’s coronavirus recovery plan as we build back fitter.”

At a meeting of Newmarket Town Council this week, councillors passed a vote of no confidence in West Suffolk MP and former health secretary Matt Hancock, with five voting for, five against and four abstentions.

Mr Hancock resigned last month after he was captured on camera kissing his close aide Gina Coladangelo in his ministerial office.

Unsurprisingly, no Conservative councillor supported the motion. But the town’s mayor Michael Jefferys, who is a member of the Labour Party, used his casting vote to pass the vote, reports Joe Middleton.

Doing the media rounds this morning, Dominic Raab was quizzed on the furore around fake Covid vaccination certificates that US and EU travellers allegedly might try and use to enter the UK.

The government “cannot guarantee” this will not happen, he said, but he told BBC R4’s Today programme he thought it was “highly unlikely”.

It comes following the government’s decision to allow fully jabbed people from the EU and US not to have to isolate when they arrive in England, Scotland and Wales from 2 August.

“The point here is that, with both the European countries and the US, we are talking about high-trust countries with whom we have not just an intuitive level of high trust, we have active co-operation, so we know that we can straighten out any discrepancies we might come across pretty quickly,” he said.

Mr Raab added there is a “double lock” of written certification and proof of US residency for American travellers, which he said could allow “further checks if there is any suspicion of fraud”.

“Both domestically with our rollout but also internationally we want to open up, we want to move the country forward, but we want to do it irreversibly and we need to take solid, surefooted steps forward,” he said. “We feel this is a modest opening up of international travel but one that has the reassurances that we can take further steps forward as we build confidence in the system.”

Following his live Q&A with Independent readers, political commentator John Rentoul has rounded up the debate to give you a sense of people’s opinions.

He writes:

“I started by saying I thought that the UK government’s position is a reasonable one, and that the EU is being inflexible – suggesting, for example, that sending sausages to Belfast supermarkets undermines the integrity of the EU single market – but I hoped that these were the opening negotiating positions and that good sense will prevail.

This proved to be a controversial view that provoked debate.”

An edited version of the debate can be read here:

The foreign secretary has said he doesn’t think a “robust approach” to small boats crossing the English Channel is at odds with the “heart and soul” of the RNLI.

It comes after recent reports that some of the institution’s volunteers received abuse for rescuing migrants in the Channel.

“The RNLI do an incredible job, they have got this great heart and soul to them and they do an amazing job,” Mr Raab told LBC this morning.

“I think they operate within the legal rules and that is part of this country. We are a big-hearted country. At the same time, if we are talking about the wider small boats issue, that is something where, absolutely at the same time, we need to come down as hard as is humanly possible, working with our French partners,” he said.

Mr Raab spoke later in the programme about the “threat” of “criminal gangs” transferring their business to the UK.

“To see the threat of the criminal gangs trying to launch from France to the UK as early as possible, that is partly intelligence, it is partly technology, and secondly have the strongest criminal action including prosecution sentences against those criminal elements that feed like parasites off the human misery of those people making that journey,” he said, adding: “I don’t think that is inconsistent, that robust approach, with what the RNLI do.”