Markus Andrews

The British government is getting increasingly frustrated at the failure of Joe Biden’s administration to name a precise date for the lifting of travel restrictions, with just weeks to go until air travel to the US is supposed to resume.The White House said on 20 September that fully vaccinated foreign nationals will be allowed to enter the US from “early November”, but the US Department for Transportation today told The Independent it had no further information about exactly when the change will be implemented.It leaves thousands of UK passengers in limbo waiting to hear when they can visit family and friends in the US or take holidays in popular destinations like New York, Florida or California.And it means airlines are making extensive preparations for a massive surge of demand from as early as 1 November, without any certainty over when passengers will in fact be able to travel.The source admitted the UK was “blindsided” by President Biden’s announcement last month that he was relaxing restrictions for visitors from countries around the world.The announcement came just after Boris Johnson told reporters that he had little hope of securing any easing of restrictions in an Oval Office meeting with the president scheduled for the following day.Despite having set up a joint travel taskforce with the US, Britain was given no notice of the announcement, the senior source confirmed. And the lack of communication has continued since that point.Asked when vaccinated UK travellers will be able to fly freely to the US, the senior UK government source told The Independent: “Your guess is as good as mine.“They haven’t told us anything about the date. The White House are in charge of the policy and it’s very difficult to work out what is going on.”In response to a query about the date for the resumption of travel, the US Department of Transportation said only: “We have no updates or new information at this time.”The silence from Washington appeared to reflect the lower priority placed on relations with the UK since Mr Biden’s arrival in office. It emerged as Brexit minister David Frost risked ruffling American feathers by saying that the president should not intervene in negotiations between London and Brussels over the Irish border.Virgin Atlantic announced last week it would resume daily operations on its most-booked route – from Heathrow to Orlando – as well as flights to Las Vegas from 1 November, while the airline has already restarted flights to San Fransisco after an 18-month break. BA is also laying on additional flights from the start of the month.Mr Biden’s green light to visit prompted a surge in bookings from Brits eager to go to the States, with Virgin recording an increase of more than 600 per cent. Some popular tickets have already sold out for the first days of November.Before the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, an average 100,000 travellers from the UK crossed the Atlantic to the US by air each week. The majority of those were taking holidays, but more than 20,000 were visiting friends and family.Neither BA nor Virgin made any immediate response to queries about the uncertainty surrounding the relaxation of US controls.But Simon Calder, travel correspondent of The Independent, said: “With just four weeks to go before a possible reopening of the US to UK and EU visitors, airline executives are tearing their hair out.“Having been starved for 18 months of the most lucrative aviation market in the world, they are desperate to cash in on the surge of demand that will accompany the opening up of transatlantic routes.“But they certainly don’t want to schedule any flights that then turn out to be half-empty because the ban hasn’t been lifted.” More

Five people have been arrested after former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith was allegedly assaulted by being hit on the head with a traffic cone in Manchester.Sir Iain said he was struck by the object after he was pursued by a group calling him “Tory scum” while on his way to a Brexit talk on the fringe of the Conservative Party conference.Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said three men and two women were arrested after reports of an assault at around 4pm on Portland Street.Mr Duncan Smith told The Independent: “I was walking to a meeting outside the conference venue and these five morons started following me, banging drums and chanting ‘Tory scum’ and accusing me of being responsible for killing people and destroying the environment and so on.”The MP added: “I had almost reached the place I was going to when one of them came running up with a heavy traffic cone and whacked me over the back of the head.“It was quite a shock and I staggered forward but I wasn’t badly hurt – only a graze – but I was with my wife, which makes it more concerning. I turned round and told them they were pathetic, but they were already legging it.”Sir Iain also told The Spectator after the incident that he was “about to go up and punch them, I went forward and they all backed off – I nearly knocked them out, lost my rag”.GMP said that officers were on the scene within three minutes after hearing reports of an assault. “There aren’t believed to be any serious injuries, and following a short foot pursuit three men and two women have been arrested in connection with it and remain in custody for questioning,” a police statement said.It came as a disability activist berated Jacob Rees-Mogg near the conference centre – accusing the senior Tory of being “just another Eton millionaire” who looks down on disabled people.Dominic Hutchins, who has cerebral palsy, challenged the Commons leader on the government’s record on disability rights outside the Tory conference on Monday afternoon.“I’m sorry you think that but I wish you well in your search for a job, I really do,” Mr Rees-Mogg responded.The cabinet minister shrugged off abuse received from “socialists” – telling the Tory conference that “one of the joys of political life is winding up the left.”Asked about Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner’s reference to “Tory scum”, Mr Rees-Mogg said: “Why should we mind about that?’He added: “Here we are all together – we’re great people because we’ve been scum in the socialists’ eyes, but we make a success of it. As scum always does, we seem to rise to the top.”Mr Duncan Smith said that he was not making any link between the abuse hurled at him and Ms Rayner’s use of the word “scum” to describe Conservatives at her party’s conference in Brighton last week.The backbencher said he did not know whether the individual who attacked him was linked to any particular organisation, saying: “They were the same sort of people you see at any protest. These people are pathetic and just don’t understand what democracy is all about.” More

A woman has alleged that she was “violently assaulted” while attending the Conservative Party conference.Tory officials are working with the police after Clementine Cowton, director of external affairs at Octopus Energy Group, told a fringe event in Manchester that she had been “violently assaulted in the conference zone by a man”.“This behaviour is completely unacceptable and the party has revoked the pass of the individual concerned and is working with the police,” a Tory party spokesman said.According to The Times, Ms Cowton said she was in the bar of the Midland Hotel – one of the main destinations at the autumn gathering – when an inebriated man, who she described as being in his thirties, sat in a seat vacated by her friend.The male attendee reportedly made her so uncomfortable that she asked him “several times politely to leave”, before she eventually took his phone and dropped it on the floor in a bid to get him away from her.“He went to retrieve it and then he came back and attacked me,” Ms Cowton said, describing the man as trying to punch her before being stopped by others in the bar. Her glass was smashed in the resulting scuffle, she said.Greater Manchester Police said officers “responded to an incident at the Midland Hotel at around 12.30am this morning to reports of an assault on a 33-year-old woman”.“Officers arrived quickly, there were no reports of any injures, and no arrests were made, however a man has been identified, [and] had his accreditation removed for the remainder of the Conservative Party Conference,” the force said.“Our investigation into what happened is ongoing. GMP is here to protect. Women’s safety is a top priority, and something we continue to take incredibly seriously.”The party said it had contacted Ms Cowton to offer support.Speaking on a panel hosted by the Conservative Home website on Monday about how to affordably accelerate efforts to avert climate breakdown, Ms Cowton began by addressing the incident.“Sorry to dump this on everybody,” she said. “It was a bit of a surprise but I do want to just take the opportunity to say, women are often unsafe in places where other people feel safe, and it’s really important that we start to take that much more seriously as a society, and starting with the police.”It comes as the government and police face questions over women’s safety in society, following the rape and murder of Sarah Everard at the hands of a serving officer and the killing of Sabina Nessa as she walked to a bar in southeast London.Additional reporting by PA More

Boris Johnson is facing warnings that his green agenda “won’t work” if the government imposes significant extra costs on low-income households in the transition to net zero by 2050.Despite praising the government’s plans, the prime minister was also urged by a senior Tory to “fess up” that many red wall communities will be least able to afford the drastic changes needed to reach the legally binding target.The remarks came at a fringe event during the Conservative conference and shortly after Mr Johnson said that all electricity in Britain should be produced from clean energy sources, such as wind and solar, by 2035.The government is hoping to encourage other nations to commit to net zero targets next month at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow – weeks after a major UN report warned that time is running out to save the planet.Speaking on Monday, Jake Berry, the chair of the Northern Research Group of Conservative MPs, said delivering net zero goes “hand-in-hand with creating a growing north economy”, with huge opportunities in store.However, he warned: “On the cost of it, I think there’s a bit of a pinch point towards the government. I don’t, if I’m honest, know what the answer to it is.“Everyone thinks this is a great agenda, and it absolutely is, we’ve got to look at ways of improving our planet and leaving our kids a better planet than we were born on. That all seems great until you go ‘well, you need to change your boiler’, or ‘you need buy a really expensive electric vehicle that you probably can’t afford’.“I don’t know how the government’s going to deal with that, whether it’ll be through subsidies on vehicles or boilers or whatever, but I do think we’ve got to ’fess up to the fact that it will be many of the red wall communities who are least able to afford these changes that we’re making.”Bim Afolami, the Conservative MP for Hitchin and Harpenden, also told the event hosted by The Spectator: “It’s clear to me this agenda will not work in the coming years if the government imposes significant extra costs on people who cannot afford to pay them – simple as that.”“We need to specifically look at quite localised taxes that relate to environmentally damaging carbon intensive ways of doing things – for example, we’ve got a landfill tax, we should increase that landfill tax,” he added.“We could significantly increase it and that extra money going to help local authorities going to invest and improve in local recycling – I just use that as an example. But we are going to need to raise funds in order to make sure that people do not raise out on this transition.Mr Afolami went on: “We are going to have to make sure individuals are protected from this because that is, I think, the biggest medium-term risk to this whole agenda, is people who can afford it saying to others, ‘look you’ve got to go green’ and people can’t afford it.”Elsewhere, a poll showed the Conservative party could lose up to 32 so-called red wall seats to Labour if an election were held tomorrow, with the parties neck and neck in the north of England, Midlands and north Wales constituencies.The Conservatives have dropped to 41 per cent in red wall areas – seven points down on the party’s 2019 result – while Labour are up two points to 40 per cent.According to the company’s modelling, the result puts dozens of seats back in play for Sir Keir Starmer’s party in traditional Labour-voting territory.YouGov said four red wall Conservative constituencies would be “firmly back in Labour’s hands”, while another 14 would also be “likely to fall” to Starmer’s party and a further 14 would be too close to call. More

Angela Rayner called the Conservatives “scum” because of her rough upbringing in a poverty-stricken family, Michael Gove has suggested.The cabinet minister also implied Labour’s deputy leader launched her attack – in which she also called the Tories “homophobic, misogynistic, absolute vile” – because she had been drinking.Speaking at the Conservative conference, Mr Gove first said he would not criticise her, telling an audience: “I like Angela Rayner, so I won’t see anything unmanly about her.”But he then added: “If you consider the circumstances under which she’s had to grow up, and what she’s achieved, then anyone can make a mistake.”When Mr Gove was asked if Ms Rayner perhaps meant what she said, he grinned: “It was late at night….”, without completing the sentence, amid laughter.Labour’s deputy leader has spoken powerfully about leaving school aged 16, after becoming pregnant, with no qualifications.She revealed she was once given dog food to eat as a child because her mother could not read labels on tins – and “jelly and shaving foam” because her mum looked at the pictures on products.If she had grown up in “modern times” she “definitely” would have been taken away by social services, Ms Rayner said, ahead of Labour’s conference last month.In Brighton last week, Ms Rayner told Labour activists: “We cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, misogynistic, absolute vile [inaudible] banana-republic, vile, nasty, Etonian [inaudible] piece of scum.”Afterwards, she refused to apologise, calling her words something “you would hear very often in northern, working-class towns, that we’d even say jovially to other people” – and her street language.However, speaking at a Policy Exchange fringe event, Mr Gove, the secretary of state for levelling up, told his audience: “I’m sure she realises it was a mistake.”Mr Gove was speaking after his conference address, in which he attempted to flesh out what “levelling up” means, after widespread criticism that it is a vacuous slogan.He outlined four “key principles”: strengthening local leadership, raising living standards, improving public services and enhancing “the pride people feel in the place they live”.At the fringe meeting, he defended a decade of Conservative-led austerity as necessary in order to have “laid the foundations” of better economic performance for the future.But he also admitted that savage local council cuts – leading to the closure of libraries and leisure centres, for example – had damaged “local pride”.Local government having to “cut its coat quite finely” was one of the “forces at work” in the last decade, alongside retail moving online.“Then you do have an effect on people’s sense of belonging and local pride and that has undoubtedly been the case,” Mr Gove said. More

The BBC may not exist in a decade’s time, the new culture secretary Nadine Dorries has suggested as she took aim at its “elitist” attitude and “lack of impartiality”.The cabinet minister claimed she did not want a war with the broadcaster, but said it would have to agree to changes before the government agrees to the next licence fee settlement from April 2022.“The perspective of the BBC is that they will get a settlement fee and then we will talk about how they are going to change,” Ms Dorries told a Conservative Party conference fringe event.The minister added: “My perspective is, tell me how you are going to change and then you get the settlement fee.”Asked whether the licence fee would still be compulsory in 10 or 20 years, she said: “Will the BBC still be here in 10 years? I don’t know … It is a very competitive environment at the moment.”Ms Dorries, who has only been in her role since September’s reshuffle, said she already had “an interesting meeting” with BBC director-general Tim Davie and chairman Richard Sharp.The culture secretary highlighted a whole series of issues she had with the broadcaster – including a lack of working-class diversity and perceived political bias.“We’re having a discussion about how the BBC can become more representative of the people who pay the licence fee … not just people whose mum and dad worked there,” she said.“It’s about recognising that access and lack of impartiality are part of your problem,” she added, claiming that “group-think” at the corporation had excluded people from working-class backgrounds.“Northwest, Northeast, Yorkshire – if you have got a regional accent in the BBC it doesn’t go down particularly well,” she said. “They talk about lots to do with diversity but they don’t talk about kids from working-class backgrounds and that’s got to change.”Asked how to address that, she said: “It’s not about quotas, it’s just about having a more fair approach and a less elitist and a less snobbish approach as to who works for you.”Ms Dorries said the path from a poor background to the top of a career in the media or the arts had now “completely disappeared”.She added: “If you want to do that today you need a double-barrelled name, you need to have gone to a private or a public school or your mum needs to know someone, or your dad needs to know someone, or you need to have a connection at the BBC.”Speaking at an event hosted by the Telegraph’s Chopper’s Politics podcast, the culture secretary also dismissed suggestions that a woman should replace Daniel Craig as James Bond.“Why do people think that when a man gets tired of a certain pair of shoes, maybe a woman should fill them? Let’s create a whole new role for a woman.”Ms Dorries added that her favourite author as a child was the “very un-PC” Enid Blyton.Although Blyton has been criticised for racism and xenophobia in her books, Ms Dorries said they should not be censored. “Leave it, because that’s our heritage.” More

A cabinet minister who previously denied global warming has said she did not fully “understand” climate change until her own part of the country was hit by serious flooding.International trade secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan has been under scrutiny after historic tweets unearthed last month revealed she believed “global warming isn’t actually happening”.Ms Trevelyan told the Conservative Party conference that she did not find climate change to be a “particularly urgent issue” at the time she posted the tweets disputing the science.“Ten, 12 years ago, I wasn’t particularly focused on it … I wasn’t a politician, it wasn’t even on my radar at that point,” the recently-promoted minister said on Monday.Despite warnings from climate scientists a decade ago, Ms Trevelyan said: “There was this narrative, and there was a very strong voice that was raising it, but for the rest of us getting on with our lives it didn’t really seem a particularly urgent issue, if I’m honest.”Ms Trevelyan said changes in weather patterns which brought flooding to the north east – along with learning about the science behind climate change – had helped change her mind on the threat.The Berwick upon Tweed MP told a conference fringe meeting: “I think like so many … the complexity of an IPPC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report, if you’re not tuned into it is a little bit terrifying.”She added: “But actually that broadening out of that understanding to a much more explanatory narrative and, of course, seeing the impact. The exponential curve that we talk about, and that I now understand much better, I can see.“York flooded, Morpeth flooded near where I live. It was a ‘one in a 100-year event’ – but then it flooded again five years later. That’s a bit odd. We are seeing again and again in places where there haven’t been these extreme weather impacts, they are happening again and again.”In the messages sent between 2010 and 2012, Ms Trevelyan was found to have approvingly quoted the work of groups which have rejected the mainstream scientific consensus.She stated that one such group had provided “clear evidence that the ice caps aren’t melting after all, to counter those gloom-mongers and global warming fanatics”.In one tweet, backing a campaign against wind farms in 2012, she said: “We aren’t getting hotter, global warming isn’t actually happening.”Labour’s shadow international development secretary Emily Thornberry pounced on the remarks, with the tweet: “At least the last Trade Secretary only hired climate change deniers…”She was referring to Ms Trevelyan’s predecessor Liz Truss, who hired former Australian PM and climate sceptic Tony Abbott as a UK trade envoy. More

Lord Frost has repeated his threat to pull the plug on Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal, following an ambivalent EU reaction to his previous warning.Speaking at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester the Brexit minister said the deal he negotiated had “begun to come apart” and needed to be changed.He again warned the UK government might trigger Article 16 of the deal, an emergency clause which would suspend the agreement.“We cannot wait for ever. Without an agreed solution soon, we will need to act, using the Article 16 safeguard mechanism, to address the impact the protocol is having on Northern Ireland,” he told the Tory faithful.“That may in the end be the only way to protect our country – our people, our trade, our territorial integrity, the peace process, and the benefits of this great UK of which we are all part.”Northern Ireland has faced shortages of goods imported from the rest of the UK because of the new frictions to trade added by Lord Frost’s agreement. The situation has also inflamed community tensions, with protests from some loyalists and threats against staff working at ports.But having just put the Brexit issue to bed the European Union has point-blank said it will not return to the negotiating table.European Commission vice president Maros Sefcovic said in July: “We will not agree to a renegotiation of the protocol. Respecting international legal obligations is of paramount importance.” The EU position is yet to shift on the issue. When Lord Frost and Mr Johnson originally negotiated the Brexit deal the pair publicly hailed it as a great success. The Conservatives went into the 2019 election promising no more Brexit talks and boasting of an “oven-ready” deal.But Lord Frost used his speech to conference to claim otherwise, blaming Remain campaigners for making his job difficult.“Of course we wanted to negotiate something better. If it had not been for the madness of the ‘surrender act’ [the EU Withdrawal (No 2) Act], we could have done so. And we worried right from the start that the protocol would not take the strain if not handled sensitively,” he said. “As it has turned out, we were right. The arrangements have begun to come apart even more quickly than we feared. Thanks to the EU’s heavy-handed actions, cross-community political support for the protocol has collapsed. “The protocol itself is now undermining the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Businesses, political parties, the institutions, and indeed all in Northern Ireland face instability and disruption.”Asked about Lord Frost’s comment on Monday morning, a European Commission spokesperson told reporters in Brussels: “You will not be surprised to hear that we do not comment on the sayings or the statements of our partners or any stakeholders, whatever nature they have and however lyrical or aggressive they may be. We are not going to depart from that position in these specific circumstances at all.”Another spokesperson added: “As you know we’re working intensively to find practical solutions to some of the difficulties that people in Northern Ireland are experiencing and we intend to come forward with solutions soon. It goes without saying that we remain in close contact with our UK counterparts.”Asked what would happen if the protocol was suspended, the spokesperson said: “I’m not going to comment on a hypothetical scenario. There is of course procedure set out in Article 16 read in conjunction with annex 7 to the protocol but beyond that I’m not going to comment on what could happen or what might happen.”Lord Frost, who was previously a civil servant special adviser, was appointed to the House of Lords and made a minister by Mr Johnson without facing election. He is due to appear at a number of fringe events around the Conservative conference this week. The Northern Ireland protocol is part of the prime minister’s wider withdrawal agreement. The deal was signed to prevent a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and suspending it would cause problems across that border. More