Markus Andrews

City bonuses are rising six times faster than wages, according to new analysis released today by the TUC.The trade union organisation’s general secretary Frances O’Grady said that “obscene” payouts in the financial and insurance industries had returned to the levels of before the 2008 crash, with bonuses totalling £5.9bn paid out in March alone.Ms O’Grady called for the introduction of maximum pay ratios to limit bonuses to 10 per cent of total pay, as well as the appointment of workers to company boards to give them a say on remuneration decisions.Bonuses paid in March were 27.9 per cent up on the same period in 2021, compared to a rise in average wages over the year of just 4.2 per cent.And the average City bonus of £6,327 that month – paid on top of often generous salaries – was 2.4 times the size of the average worker’s £2,665 monthly pay packet, according to TUC analysis of figures from the Office for National Statistics.Meanwhile, the value of average wages is being eroded as pay fails to keep pace with inflation running at more than 9 per cent. After inflation is taken into account, the real value of the average wage is down by £68 a month – or £131 in the public sector – compared to a year ago.“There is no justification for such obscene City bonuses at the best of times – let alone during a cost of living crisis,” said Ms O’Grady. “While City executives rake it in, millions are struggling to keep their heads above water.”She added: “Ministers have no hesitation in calling for public sector pay restraint, but turn a blind eye to shocking City excess. It’s time to hold down bonuses at the top – not wages for everyone else.“The government needs to clamp down on greedy bonus culture by putting workers on company pay boards and introducing maximum pay ratios.“And it’s time for the government to get wages rising across the economy by boosting the minimum wage immediately, funding decent pay rises for all public sector workers and introducing fair pay agreements for whole industries.”The TUC research also uncovered a trend in sectors outside the City for businesses to offer one-off bonuses to key staff, though of a much smaller size than the bumper payouts in the finance and insurance world.The organisation believes that bonuses are being used as a way to retain staff in areas of the economy like construction, real estate or accommodation instead of offering permanent pay rises to match inflation.The TUC warned that this was a “sticking plaster approach”, which would not fix the fundamental problems in the labour market causing worker shortages. More

A secret rebellion by disgruntled government ministers could finish off Boris Johnson as Conservative leader, Tory MPs plotting his ejection believe.The prime minister could face a no-confidence vote as early as this week, in which he would need the support of 180 Tory MPs – half of the current total of 359 – in order to hold on to his job.Backers have suggested that he is all but certain to win any ballot, as the “payroll vote” of 173 ministers and parliamentary aides is almost enough to get him past the threshold.But one backbencher, who has called for Mr Johnson’s resignation, told The Independent that the PM cannot take the votes of members of his own government for granted. Two parliamentary private secretaries (PPS) have already quit over Partygate, and rebels believe that other government figures are privately ready to join the drive to unseat him.“It is a secret ballot, and in the privacy of the polling booth it is far from certain that all of his ministers will vote to keep him in office,” said the MP.“Some of them have very small majorities and will be worried for their seats. Some of them may think they would prosper better under another leader. And some of them just don’t like what he is doing to the party.“It’s obvious that the majority of backbenchers will vote to remove him, but the secret to getting over the line will be how many ministers and PPSs – who of course have said nothing in public, because it would cost them their jobs – will join them.”Mr Johnson’s critics have been circulating a briefing paper among Tory MPs over the bank holiday weekend, warning that 160 or more of them could lose their seats in a “landslide” defeat if he leads them into the next election.“The only way to end this misery, earn a hearing from the British public and restore Conservative fortunes to a point where we can win the next general election is to remove Boris Johnson as prime minister,” the note said.One MP said the result of a confidence vote was likely to be “very close”, and predicted that even if Mr Johnson scrapes home by a narrow margin, he will be terminally wounded.“At that point, I think it is ‘men in grey suits’ time, and members of the cabinet will be telling him it is time to go,” said the backbencher. “Any normal person would resign.”Some Tory rebels believe that the chair of the backbench 1922 Committee, Sir Graham Brady, has already received the 54 letters required to trigger a no-confidence ballot, with one source suggesting the tally could be as high as 67.Sir Graham always maintains a scrupulous silence over the true figure, and some in Westminster believe he may have been waiting for the end of the platinum jubilee weekend to tot up the total, after he said that counting letters was “not a regular pastime” for him.If the threshold is passed on Monday, he will be expected to inform the prime minister before calling a vote as early as Tuesday or Wednesday.If it is not, many MPs expect it to be passed after the by-elections in Wakefield and Tiverton & Honiton on 23 June, when polls suggest Conservatives will face a torrid night.A survey by JL Partners for The Sunday Times gave Labour a 20-point lead over Tories in the West Yorkshire seat, one of the highly symbolic red wall constituencies that fell to Mr Johnson in the 2019 election.James Johnson, co-founder of JL Partners, said the Tories could also face defeat in Devon, with focus groups suggesting that even Leave voters are now ready to help the Liberal Democrats overturn a 24,000 majority in a by-election triggered by MP Neil Parish’s resignation after he admitted watching pornography in the Commons.“Partygate has changed everything, and that trust has now completely gone in Boris Johnson,” said Mr Johnson. “Also that feeling that he is strong and can get things done has gone. I think these by-elections, and the polls, and the local election results show that Boris Johnson is no longer the asset he once was.”With voters showing little enthusiasm for Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, the Conservatives could recover their lead in the national polls “quite quickly” with a new face at the helm, said James Johnson.One former major donor to the Conservatives predicted that the party was heading for “obliteration” in the general election and a decade in the wilderness unless Boris Johnson is ditched.Financier Michael Tory, who has given more than £300,000 to the party since 2010, said: “I was a loyal and long-standing donor, but can only resume donating if there is an immediate change of leadership.“And it has to be now, before it’s too late to avoid a richly deserved obliteration at the next election, followed probably by a decade in opposition.”Meanwhile, there was anger from some backbenchers at what they regard as “macho” briefing from the prime minister’s supporters.Loyalists are reported to have been characterising the drive to remove the PM as a plot to reverse Brexit, after prominent Johnson critic Tobias Ellwood published an article calling for a return to the single market.Other signatories of no-confidence letters have been branded “childish” and “turncoats” in anonymous briefings to Tory-backing newspapers.“It is madness,” said one MP. “Nasty stuff of this kind is the opposite of what they should be doing. They ought to be reaching out to people.”Transport secretary Grant Shapps said that he did not expect a vote to take place in the coming week, and that he believed Mr Johnson would survive if it came.Mr Shapps played down the significance of the booing directed at the prime minister by crowds at the platinum jubilee thanksgiving service on Friday.Recalling the jeers faced by George Osborne at the Paralympics in 2012, he told BBC1’s Sunday Morning: “I remember booing going on at the Olympic Games in 2012, and it didn’t mean that the election wasn’t won in 2015.”Mr Shapps added: “Politicians by their very nature … will of course divide opinion. That’s what politicians do. That’s because we argue about different sides of issues.“You will always get people who approve, and people who disapprove. That’s the point of a free and democratic society. It’s also the point of having a monarchy, where everyone can join together and support the Queen regardless of their politics. Frankly, I think that demonstrates one of the beauties of our system.”Elections guru Professor Sir John Curtice, of Strathclyde University, said there was no sign of public anger abating over the lockdown-breaching parties at 10 Downing Street.Recent polling showed that around three quarters of voters – including half of those who voted Conservative in 2019 – believe Mr Johnson lied about Partygate, said Prof Curtice. The same polling found that a quarter or more of Tory supporters want the PM to quit.“It is now very, very unlikely that the public are ever going to come to the conclusion that what the prime minister did during lockdown with the various gatherings was reasonable, let alone within the law,” he told Times Radio.“If you lose a quarter of the people who voted for you last time, then you’re in trouble.” More

Brexit is to blame for the chaos at Britain’s airports, which has seen hundreds of flights cancelled and thousands of people’s half-term travel plans disrupted, London mayor Sadiq Khan has said.Mr Khan called on the government to relax immigration rules to allow airport and airline workers who returned to their EU countries of origin following Brexit to come back to the UK, where the travel industry has been hit by staff shortages.But transport secretary Grant Shapps denied that the problems were caused by the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, and rejected calls for aviation workers to be added to the list of shortage occupations, which would mean that those wishing to work in the industry would be subject to lighter immigration controls.Steve Heapy, the CEO of airline Jet2, confronted Mr Shapps over the impact of Brexit at an emergency meeting on Friday, telling him that EU withdrawal had taken “hundreds of thousands, if not millions” of people out of the jobs market.But Mr Shapps today insisted that the shortages were due to the aviation industry cutting staff numbers “too deep” during the Covid pandemic, and said it was up to companies to attract home-grown workers by offering higher pay.Mr Khan said that the crisis was a “self-inflicted” problem caused by the government.“The government should recognise that there are shortages in this occupation, of those who work in aviation,” the mayor told BBC1’s Sunday Morning. “What you can do very easily is to make sure those who were in those jobs before, who’ve gone back to their country of origin in the EU, are encouraged to come back.“What the government’s got to do is get around the table with the aviation sector, the airports, those who run the airlines, to see what exactly their problems are. If there is a shortage, change the list to make sure those [workers] can come easier than other occupations.“This is self-inflicted from the government. It isn’t about Covid. This is about Brexit plus Covid.”But asked if the government would relax post-Brexit immigration rules for aviation workers, as it did in response to shortages of HGV drivers and butchers, Mr Shapps said: “The answer can’t always be to reach for the lever marked ‘More immigration’.”He told interviewer Sophie Raworth: “We are seeing the same problems across Europe. If it were only to do with Brexit, then there wouldn’t be a problem at Schiphol [airport in Amsterdam] or elsewhere. So that clearly can’t be true.“If anybody’s solution is that all we need to do is employ cheap labour from somewhere else – I didn’t vote for Brexit, but the country did and we made our choice.“We want a high-wage, high-skill economy. That means the aviation sector, like all other sectors – as the HGV lorry-driver sector has now done – must train people domestically.“Airports across Europe have also had the same queues, so if it was just a Brexit issue, then that wouldn’t be the case.“As with lorry drivers, we found the solutions were actually in making sure decent salaries were paid, that people were trained here in this country, that people were attracted to a job not just by better salaries, but also better conditions as well.“That’s the sort of economy we want to run in this country, that’s what the country voted for, and that’s what we’re delivering.”Mr Shapps said he had introduced changes to make it quicker for new airport recruits to get security clearance and start training, but insisted it was “principally” the responsibility of the industry to sort out problems in time for the summer holidays.He dismissed a call from Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary for the army to be called in to speed up operations in airports. And he said he would take action to speed up compensation claims from passengers.The transport secretary said he wanted a “proper dispute resolution, a proper charter for passengers”, to make sure that they have access to a quick and straightforward system for claiming compensation, or can be put on alternative flights.“It can’t be acceptable that it’s so complicated sometimes to get a flight rearranged, to get your money back,” he said. “I want it to be more like ‘delay repay’ works on trains, where it’s an automatic process.” More

The Metropolitan Police is facing “real problems” of systemic sexism, racism and homophobia within the service, London mayor Sadiq Khan has said.Mr Khan said that the force’s new commissioner must have a plan to address these challenges in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer, the botched investigation of Stephen Port’s killing of gay men and misogynistic behaviour at Charing Cross police station and elsewhere.And he said the Met’s new leader must show that he or she is able to win back the trust and confidence that many Londoners have lost in the capital’s police force.The mayor, who forced former commissioner Dame Cressida Dick out in February by declaring he had lost confidence in her, was asked on BBC1’s Sunday Morning whether the Met was “a failing police force”.He replied: “We’re losing trust and confidence. So if that’s the criteria of measurement, then you could say so.”Mr Khan added: “I think it has real challenges.“It’s possible to recognise the dedicated, decent, brave officers we have in the police service but to also say we’ve got real problems – real problems that have been shown recently in relation to evidence of overt systemic sexism, racism, homophobia, discrimination, misogyny – which need to be addressed.“What’s really important is that the new commissioner appointed by the home secretary (Priti Patel) – and she’ll be consulting me – understands the challenges we have as a police service and takes steps to address those challenges, but also to win back the trust and confidence of too many Londoners that has been lost.”He added: “One of the reasons why I lost confidence in the previous commissioner was my lack of confidence in her plans to address the two big issues – addressing the systemic racism, sexism, homophobia and misogyny, but also the trust and confidence required from our public when you police by consent.“That’s one of the things that we’ll be checking the new commissioner for, does he have a plan to address those two issues at the same time as continuing to make further progress in bringing down crime?”Mr Khan said he had not been given detailed explanations by the Met over why they fined some people involved in lockdown-breaching parties at 10 Downing Street, or why prime minister Boris Johnson was fined in relation to one event but not others.Asked whether it was the case that the police investigated Partygate allegations less thoroughly than they might have done because they did not want to upset No 10, he replied: “I don’t know whether it’s true, but that perception has got to be addressed. Why? Because the police must police without fear or favour.”He said he hoped the issue would be addressed in a court case being brought by former Met deputy assistant commissioner Lord Paddick, who alleges that the force’s Operation Hillman team acted “irrationally” in their decisions on fixed penalty notices for lockdown breaches. More

Conservatives are facing “obliteration” at the general election and a decade in the wilderness unless they dump Boris Johnson as leader, a former major donor to the party has warned.Financier Michael Tory, who has given the party more than £300,000 since 2010, said he would not make further donations unless Mr Johnson is removed.His comments come as speculation mounts that a vote of confidence in the prime minister could be announced as early as Monday, with a ballot of Tory MPs in the following days.The chair of the backbench 1922 Committee, Sir Graham Brady, must call a vote if 54 Tory MPs send him a letter requesting one.Some 17 MPs have stated publicly that they have submitted letters, but more than 40 have called for Mr Johnson to go. Some believe that Sir Graham already has the necessary 54 letters but is waiting for the Platinum Jubilee weekend to end before announcing it. The PM must win the support of 180 MPs – more than half the 359-strong parliamentary party – to hold onto his job.Mr Tory told the Sunday Times: “I was a loyal and long-standing donor but can only resume donating if there is an immediate change of leadership.“And it has to be now, before it’s too late to avoid a richly deserved obliteration at the next election, followed probably by a decade in opposition.”But transport secretary Grant Shapps said that he did not expect a vote in the coming week, but said he believed Mr Johnson would win it if it came.Mr Shapps played down the significance of the booing directed at the prime minister by crowds at the Platinum Jubilee thanksgiving service on Friday.Recalling the jeers faced by George Osborne at the Paralympics in 2012, he told BBC1’s Sunday Morning: “I remember booing going on at the Olympic Games in 2012 and it didn’t mean that the election wasn’t won in 2015.”Mr Shapps added: “Politicians by their very nature … will of course divide opinion. That’s what politicians do. That’s because we argue about different sides of issues.“You will always get people who approve and people who disapprove. That’s the point of a free and democratic society. It’s also the point of having a monarchy, where everyone can join together and support the Queen regardless of their politics. Frankly, I think demonstrates one of the beauties of our system.”Elections guru Prof Sir John Curtice, of Strathclyde University, said that recent polling showed that around three-quarters of voters – including half of those who voted Conservative in 2019 – believe Mr Johnson lied about lockdown-busting parties at 10 Downing Street.Prof Curtice was speaking as a poll suggested that Conservatives trail Labour by 20 points in Wakefield ahead of the 23 June by-election which will be seen as a test of Mr Johnson’s popularity in the Red Wall seats in the Midlands and North won by Tories in 2019.He said that six months on from the first Partygate stories, there was no sign of public anger on the issue abating.Prof Curtice said that the Conservatives now have to accept that the PM’s efforts to explain and justify what happened in No 10 have failed.“It is now very, very unlikely that the public are ever going to come to conclusion that what the prime minister did during lockdown with the various gatherings was reasonable, let alone within the law,” he told Times Radio.“Therefore, the question the party has to face is what it should do about it.”It was possible that the public may have moved on from Partygate by the time of the election likely to take place in 2024, said Prof Curtice.But he added: “The alternative, of course, is that actually the brand of the Conservative Party – let alone the popularity of the prime minister – has been so severely damaged by this that we are now talking about whether or not he will have credibility on other issues, given the public don’t believe him on this one. Therefore, they might come to conclusion he should be replaced.”Prof Curtice said: “The interesting thing here is I think it’s the first time that we’ve had a situation where the prime minister’s personal actions and ethics are being questioned. We don’t really have a historical precedent for where it will go.“Around a half of Conservative voters think he wasn’t telling the truth, but it’s not as many as half of Conservative voters think he should resign. It is somewhere between a quarter and two fifths.“Undoubtedly there are voters out there who say he delivered Brexit, he got the calls right on Covid, he’s dealing with the cost-of-living crisis, we shouldn’t get rid of the prime minister during Ukraine – all those considerations are there.“The problem is – at the moment at least – there is at least a minority of people who voted for the Conservative Party who say ‘This is a deal breaker for me, and therefore I am not willing to vote for the Conservatives again, so long as Boris Johnson is leader’.“If you lose a quarter of the people who voted for you last time, then you’re in trouble.“Actually, at the moment if you look at the level of support for the Conservatives amongst Leave voters, it looks as though the party has lost the support of around one in three of those people who voted for Boris Johnson over Brexit back in 2019. That’s an awful lot of territory to regain amongst the people who were essential to delivering Boris Johnson his super-majority in 2019.” More

The Conservatives are in for a crushing defeat in the Wakefield by-election according to new polling, as reports suggest Boris Johnson could face a vote on his future. The prime minister secured his majority of 80 seats at the 2019 general election off the back of scalps in the so-called red wall – traditional Labour-supporting areas in the north of England, the Midlands and Wales.But with Wakefield scheduled to go to the polls on 23 June to elect a new MP after former Tory incumbent Imran Ahmad Khan was found guilty of sexual assault, fresh polling is likely to make for worrying reading in the Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ). More

Labour is making a bid to snatch leadership on “levelling up” from Boris Johnson, accusing the beleaguered prime minister of ditching flagship promises to revive disadvantaged “Red Wall” communities which he made in the 2019 election campaign. Shadow levelling up secretary Lisa Nandy told The Independent that a weak and “easily distracted” prime minister had used the slogan to win Tories a foothold in former Labour areas in the Midlands and north, only to backslide on his pledges in power in the face of opposition from his own side.She revealed that Labour will table amendments to the government’s Levelling Up Bill to restore the PM’s abandoned commitments, challenging Tory MPs to vote down their own manifesto pledges when the legislation comes to the Commons on Wednesday.And she said that, rather than denouncing the failure of levelling up at the next election, Labour will tell voters that a change of government is needed to deliver on the ambitions it represented.“We will be a levelling up government,” she said. “The country just can’t go on like this.” She revealed that Labour has been talking to the teams around US president Joe Biden and newly elected Australian PM Anthony Albanese about how to respond to the wave of discontent with political and economic models across the democratic world.“There was a moment a few years ago where there was the possibility that there might be a political consensus built around the fact that places that within living memory powered this country have for too long been disrespected and discounted and barred from making a contribution to the future of the country,” said the Wigan MP.“It’s got to change. It will change in the end. The people always win. If the Tories aren’t going to do this – and it’s increasingly clear that they’re not – then Labour will.”Speaking as Mr Johnson comes under continuing Tory pressure over Partygate and the cost of living crisis following last month’s U-turn on a windfall tax, Ms Nandy said that the PM’s weakness in the face of his own party had fatally undermined his levelling up agenda.Despite the efforts of communities secretary Michael Gove to keep the levelling up concept alive, she said it was “pretty clear it has been comprehensively killed off in government”.“We’ve got a Levelling Up Bill that doesn’t have any levelling up in it, that has 12 ‘levelling up missions’ which the bill allows the government to change if it can’t achieve them,” she said.“Gove has banged up against Treasury orthodoxy that says that London and the southeast is the engine of growth and other regions, at best, are in a state of sort of managed decline.“And he has banged up against the strong strand of thinking in the Thatcherite wing of the Tory party that the way that you boost productivity is to cut jobs out of the workforce and sweat the remaining workers harder. So rights, wages, security, planning, a strategic approach to the economy, become the enemy of productivity.“Gove has lost that argument in government. The moment when No 10 decided that they were backing the Treasury, I think that’s the moment that levelling up was decisively killed off in government .”Johnson had initially been excited by the prospect of major infrastructure projects such as railways and bridges, but lacked the determination to overcome resistance from the Treasury and Tory MPs, she said.“He is easily distracted by big shiny things, but when it comes to the hard graft of investing in people and in places in order to help them build, he’s got no interest whatsoever,” said Ms Nandy.“He used levelling up to win the last election, but his next challenge is to shore his position up with his own backbenchers.“It’s become victim of Johnson’s decision to take the route of trying to win the next election by pursuing a very rigidly traditional conservative agenda with red meat for his back benches, and an unhealthy dollop of culture wars.“The good news is, it hasn’t been killed off in the country. People will not put up with this any more.”Recent research by Bloomberg indicated that 86 per cent of the Red Wall seats won from Labour in the election had fallen further behind London and the southeast economically since 2019.Ms Nandy said that Labour amendments to the bill would attempt to restore the “radical devolution of power” promised by the prime minister when he first floated his levelling up proposals.Councils could be empowered to run bus services and skills training, to levy tourism taxes to fund local regeneration, to back community-led housing projects and take on rogue landlords. Decision-making could be devolved in all parts of the country, rather than just those approved by Mr Gove and chancellor Rishi Sunak, she said.“Every single Tory MP that put ‘I’m going to support the regeneration of our town centre’ on their election leaflet ought to be backing the amendments that we’re proposing,” she said. “These things were absolutely central to the last general election and the promises that Boris Johnson made.“These Red Wall MPs may only have a few years to make a difference. And if they really want to make a difference to their communities, here’s a chance to do it.”Ms Nandy said that, rather than relocate a relatively small number of Whitehall jobs out of London, as Johnson has done, Labour’s approach to levelling up would involve more power for local communities to take their own decisions on regeneration.She pointed to Birmingham, where a Labour-run council gave land to a community association to build and renovate homes, and Grimsby, where the Regional Development Agency – abolished by David Cameron – drove early investment in offshore wind.“You can go to Grimsby and from the East Marsh estate – the most deprived estate in the country – you can see the offshore wind turbines of an industry that is powering the world, but you can’t actually get from the estate to the docks for lack of a functioning bus network,” she said.“We need to tilt the system back in favour of those who have a long-term stake in the outcome of those communities because that’s how you get better decisions.”And she added: “The anger that we’ve seen expressed through the ballot box in various ways in recent years hasn’t been born out of despair or hatred, it’s been born out of ambition. People are far more ambitious for themselves, their families, their communities and their country than the politicians that they’ve had.“They need to see that the same level of ambition from the Labour Party.“Come the next election, we won’t be trailing around in the north of England and saying the Tories haven’t kept their promises.“We will be parking our tanks firmly on the Tories’ lawn, walking back into Burnley and Grimsby and Wigan and Barnsley and Great Yarmouth and saying to people: ‘This is how it could be different. If you vote Labour, our commitment to you is that we’ll realise the level of ambition that you have for your own community.’” More

Keir Starmer has said he was “not surprised” that Boris Johnson was booed by crowds who gathered outside St Paul’s Cathedral to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee on Friday.The Labour leader said that the crowd’s reaction to the prime minister’s appearance was a reflection of how “fed up” voters are with the Conservative government.But he said that it was the failure to respond adequately to the cost of living crisis that was driving public dissatisfaction with Mr Johnson, rather than the scandal over lockdown-breaching parties in 10 Downing Street. More