Boris Johnson news – live: ‘Climate delayer’ PM in Scotland as Cummings claims he was offered peerage

Good afternoon and welcome to The Independent’s live politics coverage.

The government’s “amber list” status governing travel restrictions to Britons’ favourite holiday destinations should be abolished, a leading business organisation has demanded.

The amber list – which covers Spain, Greece, Italy and the USA, to be joined on Sunday by France, the UAE and India – is creating confusion at a time when businesses need “confidence and clarity” in order to recover from the pandemic, said the British Chambers of Commerce.

Our politics editor Andrew Woodcock reports:

Our policy correspondent Jon Stone has the story:

Donations to the Conservative Party from a wealthy group known as the advisory board should not be “painted as some sort of immoral act”, a government minister has said.

Transport secretary Grant Shapps said the wealthy group of Tory donors “have views about the things that will make the country prosper” – but denied that they could influence government policy.

My colleague Adam Forrest reports:

The leader of the Labour party, Sir Keir Starmer, has called out the way in which the government has handled the Covid-19 travel restrictions.

“Anybody who has been trying to organise a holiday this summer has got their head in their hands because almost on a daily basis we’ve had a changing system, changing colours, U-turns left right and centre,” said Sir Keir speaking on the final day of his visit to Scotland.

“We’ve been saying since the beginning of the summer have a simplified system. We may be edging towards it and I feel very strongly for those families and I hope that that helps them going forward.

“But the big question I have for the government is why on earth have we had to go through this chaos to get there?

“And it’s not the first time. Last summer we had the chaos of the exams, at Christmas we had the chaos of the Christmas mixing and now we’ve had the summer of chaos about travel and holidays.

“Every time there’s a predicable problem the government goes through a wall of chaos before it begins to sort it out.”

The risk of a repeat of riots that scarred London and other major towns and cities exactly ten years ago is “higher than ever”, Labour has said.

Sir Keir Starmer’s party accused Boris Johnson’s government of failing to tackle the conditions which led to the eruption of violence across Britain in 2011 – warning that the country remained a “tinderbox”.

A report released by Labour to coincide with the tenth anniversary found that the number of “forgotten families” where many of the young people involved came from was likely to have doubled in the past decade.

Adam Forrest reports:

Labour has further questioned the business interests of Ben Elliot, the Conservative party’s co-chairman.

This comes after it was discovered that a PR firm he co-founded has lobbied the government on behalf of Chinese telecoms company Huawei, health firm Iceni Diagnostics and subprime lender Amigo in the last twelve months.

Labour said they wanted more transparency about Mr Elliot’s ownership of a stake in Hawthorn Advisors, a PR firm which he co-founded in 2013 and which he continues to hold a minority stake in.

The public should be allowed to know what access Hawthorn has “got to the corridors of power and what it used that access to lobby for”, said Anneliese Dodds, chair of the Labour party.

She also said that details of any meetings between Hawthorn and the government should be made public.

“The lobbying rules that exist today aren’t fit for purpose under the crony Conservatives,” she said.

“We need urgent reform to ensure that it cannot be one rule for high-ranking Conservatives and their chums, and another rule for everyone else.”

Plans to require vaccine passports for entry to nightclubs and other venues from September are not a “bluff”, cabinet minister Grant Shapps has insisted.

Mr Shapps said that people considering whether to get jabbed should recognise that “there are simply things that you will not be able to do” unless they are vaccinated, including travelling outside the UK.

Clubs were allowed to reopen on 19 July without requirements for proof of vaccine status, but Boris Johnson has said that he will make them mandatory by the end of September.

Andrew Woodcock has more:

Willie Walsh, director general of the International Air Travel Association, told BBC Radio 4’s World At One programme: “I think a simpler system is definitely what is required to avoid confusion in the case of consumers, and to provide some form of certainty for people who are wanting to travel, and in some cases absolutely need to travel.

“This expensive and unnecessary testing I think needs to be challenged and I think the government should demonstrate why they require it.”

He added: “I think there is a valid reason and a concern, and I would accept that maybe for some of these high-risk countries that have been identified you can make the argument that some form of testing should be done, but I don’t think you can justify requiring 2.2 million people to undertake PCR tests when only 8,000 of those are subsequently sequenced.”

Some of the UK’s most prominent media organisations have issued a plea to Boris Johnson for help for Afghan journalists, translators and support staff who have worked with them over the 20 years of British military presence in the country.

In a joint letter to the prime minister and foreign secretary Dominic Raab, 23 newspapers, broadcasters and media organisations – including The Independent – called on Mr Johnson to follow the example of president Joe Biden, who has given Afghan journalists and media staff with US links access to a refugee programme.

They appealed for the creation of a special visa programme for Afghan media workers with UK links who are at risk as the Taliban attempts to retake the country following the withdrawal of Western troops.

Andrew Woodcock reports: