Markus Andrews

Rishi Sunak has urged Boris Johnson to ease holiday travel restrictions in order to boost the economy and save he summer travel plans of thousands, it has been reported.The chancellor has written to the prime minister warning that the UK’s border rules were damaging the economy and tourism, according to The Sunday Times.His warnings come ahead of a crucial meeting of ministers on Thursday to decide the travel rules for August and amid growing concern that Britain has saddled travellers with more “draconian” rules than other countries.In the letter, Mr Sunak said that the country’s border policy was “out of step with our international competitors”, adding that the restrictions had a detrimental effect on jobsA source familiar with the letter told The Sunday Times: “Rishi has called time on the travel restrictions.”Overseas travel hopefuls are awaiting new travel rules that will dictate whether people will have to undergo Covid-19 tests or isolation if they travel to popular summer holiday destinations such as France, Italy and Spain. About 10 to 12 countries are expected to move from the amber to the green list, while France is expected to move back to the regular amber list after being put on a special “amber plus” list. A senior government source told the paper: “Rishi and the PM are concerned that we’ve got the benefit from vaccinating so many people and yet we are an outlier in terms of how draconian we are about travel.”Meanwhile, transport secretary Grant Schapps said it was essential to have “painful” travel restrictions and a cautious approach to countries such as France to avoid the spread of a coronavirus variant that vaccinations might be less effective against. More

The government is hoping that offers of taxi rides and takeaway food will help overcome hesitancy among younger age groups about getting the Covid-19 vaccine.Companies including ride-sharing app Uber and food delivery service Deliveroo have been recruited to drive uptake.Other incentives being discussed by ministers also include vouchers and discount codes for people attending pop-up vaccine sites and booking through the NHS, social media competitions and promotional offers for restaurants.The move comes after ministers ditched plans to require university students to show vaccine certification to access lectures and halls of residence.Prime minister Boris Johnson is said to have been “raging” about low take-up of the free jabs by younger age groups, whose vaccination rates have lagged well behind older people.Just 67 per cent of 18-29 year-olds in England have received a first dose, compared to the UK total of 88.5 per cent of adults across all age groups. With a total of 84.9 million doses administered in the UK, some 38.1m people have now received both doses – 72.1 per cent of adults.Official figures released on Saturday showed 200,068 daily vaccinations, including 35,773 first jabs and 164,295 second doses.New infections fell again to 26,144, with a seven-day total of 192,251 down 33 per cent on the previous week.And the rate of increase in fatalities slowed, with 71 daily deaths bringing the weekly total to 488, just over 9 per cent up on the previous seven-day period.As part of the new drive, Uber will send reminders to users to get the jab in August, along with discounts on rides and Uber Eats meals for young adults who get vaccinated.Rival ride app Bolt will offer free credit for trips to vaccination centres.And Deliveroo and Pizza Pilgrims are offering discounts and incentives to customers who protect themselves from Covid-19.Health secretary Sajid Javid said: “I’m delighted that more than two-thirds of young people in England have already had a first dose of a vaccine, helping to build a wall of defence around our country.“Thank you to all the businesses who are stepping up to support this important vaccine drive. Once available, please go out and take advantage of the discounts.“The lifesaving vaccines not only protect you, your loved ones and your community, but they are helping to bring us back together by allowing you to get back to doing the things you’ve missed.”Companies will not ask for or hold any health data for the incentive scheme.More than 600,000 people were vaccinated last weekend at pop-up walk-in clinics, from London’s Tate Modern Gallery to a Primark in Bristol. Further sites have been made available this week – including at Thorpe Park in Surrey and Circus Extreme in Yorkshire.The government has also partnered with dating apps and social media platforms to deliver ads and incentives to get the vaccine, as well as working with film stars Jim Broadbent and Thandiwe Newton and sporting heroes like Gareth Southgate, Harry Redknapp and Chris Kamara to get the message out.The latest data from Public Health England and the University of Cambridge shows that around 60,000 deaths, 22 million infections and 52,600 hospitalisations have been prevented by vaccines up to 23 July. More

Conservative governments have left the sporting legacy of the London 2012 Olympic Games “in tatters” by slashing grassroots funding by nearly half since coming to power, Labour has claimed.As Boris Johnson congratulated Team GB for a slew of medals at this year’s Tokyo Games, Labour released research showing a 47 per cent cut in government support for sports and recreational facilities.Labour pointed to Tory cuts in funding for free swimming and the dropping of a target to increase sporting participation by 2 million as examples of the legacy of the London Games being put at risk.Shadow sports minister Alison McGovern said that during its final full year in office, 2009/10, Labour spent more than £1 billion on sports and recreation facilities – the equivalent of £1.24bn at today’s prices and almost double the £657m spent by Mr Johnson’s Conservative administration in 2019/20 in real terms.Ministers have also cut local government funding to maintain swimming pools, parks and other leisure facilities, while the number of PE teachers has also fallen, according to party research.The warning came as Great Britain stood in sixth place on the medals leader board for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, with a particularly strong showing in the swimming and diving pools.Ms McGovern said: “Team GB have performed brilliantly in these games so far and our athletes are fantastic ambassadors for our country – brave and determined, pushing the boundaries, winning medals and breaking records.“Sadly, the Olympics legacy that should have been built on from 2012 onwards – not in medals, but in a country that puts health, physical and mental, first – is not there.“That is because of the actions of the Tory Government from 2010 onwards.“A Labour government is urgently needed to meet the country’s ambition for sport and fitness.”A recent parliamentary question showed that under the Conservatives, the number of PE teachers is down from 26,005 in 2011 to 23,513 in 2020.Cutbacks to council budgets in England have also had a wide-ranging impact on grassroots sport, Labour said, with local authorities responsible for the upkeep of a third of swimming pools, 31 per cent of grass pitches, 13 per cent of sports halls and almost a fifth of health and fitness facilities.The party said a future Labour government would use its Children’s Recovery Plan to help build physical activity into the school experience by using school facilities to deliver a range of before- and after-school clubs and activities, including sport.It is also calling for sports to be put at the heart of a post-pandemic education recovery, citing the example of its own National Education Recovery Plan. More

Ministers should look at the merits of paying people to receive a coronavirus vaccination to boost uptake, Sir Ed Davey has suggested.The Liberal Democrat leader pointed to the US, where Joe Biden this week promoted financial rewards of $100 for people who get inoculated.With the Delta variant driving a vast new surge of infections across the US, and unvaccinated people accounting for 99 per cent of fatalities in June, the US Treasury Department has said that state, local and territorial governments will be able to dip into their allocated $350bn of coronavirus aid to pay Americans who come forward for a jab.“I know that paying people to get vaccinated might sound unfair to folks who have gotten vaccinated already. But here’s the deal: if incentives help us beat this virus, I believe we should use them,” Mr Biden said on Thursday, also introducing new rules requiring federal workers to provide proof of vaccination or face regular testing.In the UK, where the most recent figures suggest just 66 per cent of 18 to 29-year-olds have had their first dose – a statistic reported to be alarming ministers. Although Boris Johnson’s government is understood to have climbed down from proposals to bar unvaccinated university students from accessing lectures and residence halls. But plans to use mandatory vaccination in nightclubs as a coercive tool to boost uptake are still set to go ahead, with Tory MP Damian Collins telling Times Radioon Saturday that “it might be unreasonable for someone who has decided not to get vaccinated to expect to be treated in the same way as someone who has been vaccinated twice”.Insisting that using vaccine passports for nightclubs was the “wrong approach”, Sir Ed said: “Look at what President Biden’s doing. He’s taking an incentivising approach … should we not be looking at that?”Pressed by LBC presenter Iain Dale that he was “surely not suggesting that we should be paying people to be vaccinated”, Sir Ed responded: “I think we should look at that model – why has he done that? Why has Biden done that?“At the moment, going down the government’s road, we’re going to pay for that as well. They’ve just put out a tender which they reckon will cost at least £23m. “That means you can add a [zero] onto that, with this government. So they’re going to spend millions and millions of pounds on a Covid ID system, and they could spend that money on incentivising it.”Earlier on Saturday, the Lib Dem leader accused the government of an “abuse of democracy” by making changes to the NHS app to allow it to double up as an electronic vaccine passport – while parliament is in recess.“We’ve all agreed that for international travel you’ll need to have Covid options,” the Lib Dem leader told Times Radio. “But domestically – sort of Covid ID cards … this would be a real attack on people’s freedoms and particularly hit businesses and young people – it is unworkable, it is expensive and it is divisive.“That’s why the government haven’t gone ahead with it previously. Now we hear, in the recess when parliament can’t debate it, they’ve by stealth changed the rules so your NHS app could be used as a Covid ID card across venues.”He added: “It is an abuse of democracy, it is an abuse of power and it threatens taking people’s freedoms away and stigmatising young people, hitting businesses – that is not acceptable.”The Department for Health and Social Care has been approached for comment. More

Prime minister Boris Johnson’s wife Carrie has announced she is pregnant with their second child.In a message on Instagram, Ms Johnson also revealed that she suffered a miscarriage earlier in the year which left her “heartbroken”.She said that she was expecting to give birth to the new child in December.Ms Johnson wrote: “At the beginning of the year, I had a miscarriage which left me heartbroken.“I feel incredibly blessed to be pregnant again but I’ve also felt like a bag of nerves.“Fertility issues can be really hard for many people, particularly when on platforms like Instagram it can look like everything is only ever going well.“I found it a real comfort to hear from people who had also experienced loss so I hope that in some very small way sharing this might help others too.”The announcement suggests that Ms Johnson was pregnant at the time of her marriage to the 57-year-old prime minister on 29 May in a secret ceremony at Westminster Cathedral.As Carrie Symonds, she had been the first unmarried partner of a PM to move into 10 Downing Street in 2019.The Johnsons’ first child together, Wilfred was born on 29 April last year. Mr Johnson has at least five other children. More

Labour is demanding answers from Boris Johnson over whether big-spending Conservative donors were able to lobby him for changes in the law via a secretive club open to backers giving at least £250,000 a year.Party chair Anneliese Dodds said it appeared the so-called Advisory Board was a means for a “select group of elite donors to gain privileged access” to the prime minister and chancellor Rishi Sunak.The club’s existence was revealed by the Financial Times, which reported that it was developed by Tory co-chair Ben Elliot to connect financial backers with senior political figures.Mr Elliot is a founder of the Quintessentially concierge service, which arranges luxury lifestyle experiences, such as travel packages, access to exclusive restaurants and hotel bookings, and was appointed co-chair by Mr Johnson in 2019 to modernise the party’s fund-raising operations.The FT quoted businessman and Tory donor Mohamed Amersi as saying the Advisory Board was “like the very elite Quintessentially clients membership: one needs to cough up £250,000 per annum or be a friend of Ben.”The club was said to hold monthly meetings or conference calls with either Johnson or Sunak, with one donor suggesting that members used the discussions to call for lower taxes and spending cuts.The Conservatives said an advisory board meets occasionally and receives political updates, but denied that it had influence over government policy.Ms Dodds said: “This appears to be less of an advisory board than a means for a select group of elite donors to gain privileged access to the prime minister and the chancellor.“Whether it is crony contracts or links to controversial developers, Conservative ministers always seem to be acting in the interests of their donors rather than the British people.“The Conservative Party needs to explain what access this group had to the prime minister and chancellor, what they have used that access to lobby for, and why they think it’s OK for there to be one rule for high-ranking Conservatives and another rule for everyone else.”A Conservative Party spokesperson said: “Donations to the Conservative Party are properly and transparently declared to the Electoral Commission, published by them, and comply fully with the law.“Fundraising is a legitimate part of the democratic process. The alternative is more taxpayer funding of political campaigning, which would mean less money for frontline services like schools, police and hospitals.” More

The government has dropped proposals for university students to be required to show Covid vaccine passes to attend lectures.The climbdown comes just five days after Downing Street floated the idea of demanding proof of vaccination or a negative test to allow access to lecture rooms and halls of residence when autumn term begins in September.The proposal sparked an angry backlash among Conservative MPs, with as many as 50 believed to be considering rebelling against legislation on mandatory certification for venues such as nightclubs and conference centres – and with some threatening to boycott the party’s annual conference in Manchester if they are forced to show Covid passes.Government sources today said there are now “no plans” for mandatory passes for students, and that universities will instead be asked to encourage them to get their jabs.Boris Johnson is thought to have suggested the plan himself, after reportedly “raging” in a Zoom meeting with ministers over the low take-up rates of vaccines among young people.But the scheme met pushback from ministers who warned the government could face a legal challenge if it was seen to attempt to deny young people access to education after universities have entered a contractual obligation to provide it.MPs warned the idea was potentially discriminatory, and Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey called for a recall of parliament to debate what he said was the introduction of ID cards by stealth.The rapid backtrack from the proposal will fuel suspicions that it was always intended as part of a series of efforts to nudge young people into taking up the jab, rather than a practical policy plan.It is understood that pop-up rapid testing centres are to be installed on campuses before term begins this September, and students may be encouraged to take tests twice weekly.While plans were never formally launched, No 10 said on Monday that the government was “looking at the scope for vaccine certification” in universities, and education minister Vicky Ford said ministers wanted to “look at every practicality to make sure that we can get students back safely and make sure that we can continue to prioritise education”.But the deputy chairman of the Covid Recovery Group of Tories, Steve Baker, said it was an “outrageous proposal” that would risk “splitting the Tory Party irretrievably”.Speaking after it emerged the idea was being dumped, Sir Ed Davey told Times Radio it was another instance of “shambolic” messaging by the Johnson administration.“One day they’re briefing there will be restrictions on students, the next day they’re briefing there won’t be,” said Sir Ed.“I think people overall, with the way the government is managing this, are just left confused. And that’s one of the things I’m so shocked at.“One would have thought the government would have learned by now that when you’re dealing with a public health crisis, the most important thing is to get your messaging clear.“It’s shambolic. They’re failing our nation in a really serious way. I’m surprised people aren’t more angry about how Boris Johnson is failing.”Conservative MP Damian Collins said those who had chosen not to get vaccinated could not expect “to be treated in the same way” as those who had.“We don’t force anyone to have a vaccine in this country, it is up to their individual choice,” said the Folkestone and Hythe MP.“But, at the same time, it might be unreasonable for someone who has decided not to get vaccinated to expect to be treated in the same way as someone who has been vaccinated twice.”He told Times Radio: “I think we need to look venue-by-venue at the practicalities of introducing that, but I can see certain venue owners, who are putting on large and major events for which they themselves may be trying to get insurance in order to protect their investment in those events, it may well be this is something those venues actively want to encourage so they’ve got that extra level of certainty.” More

A former head of the UK armed forces has called on Boris Johnson to set out a new strategy for Afghanistan to prevent the country once more becoming a haven for international terror following the West’s “defeat”.General Lord Richards said he was “fed up” with government silence over what comes next after the withdrawal of Western troops from the country, where he commanded the International Security Assistance Force between 2006 and 2007.The pull-out represented the culmination of “a pretty sorry tale of Western failed geo-strategy over the last 20 years”, not only in Afghanistan but also in Iraq, Libya and Syria, he said.And he warned that with European troops gone and US deployment set to follow within months, cities like Kandahar are likely to fall to the Taliban, creating “ungoverned space” which could provide a haven for the planning of future terrorist outrages like the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.Gen Richards, who served as chief of defence staff from 2010-13, said that he accepted a “share of the blame” for the failure to secure Afghanistan from eventual recapture by militant fighters. But he said Western politicians bore much of the responsibility because of a failure to pour in political and economic resources following the initial fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.Gen Richards told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We have invested – as a country, as the West and the United States particularly – 20 years of time and much money and many lives in Afghanistan.“I’m getting a little bit fed up that I’ve not heard from our government – indeed from the prime minister – as to why we have reached this nadir.“It’s really not good enough, and I would like to hear from the government – I think it’s a prime ministerial obligation now – as to why we’ve got into this position and what we are now going to do about it.”The former army chief has been active in the campaign to allow Afghan military interpreters to resettle in the UK, but warned that this must not be allowed to deflect attention from the wider issues around the future of the region.“It’s deflecting attention from our defeat,” said Gen Richards. “Added to what happened in Iraq, Libya, Syria, it’s a pretty sorry tale of Western failed geo-strategy over the last 20 years.“And it’s time we had an explanation of why and what are we now going to do about it, to prevent it from happening in the way we all now fear might occur.”Gen Richards said that the “light-touch” political and economic approach pursued by United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi meant that the international community failed to consolidate the military gains of the 2001 campaign to oust the Taliban, allowing the militant group to return as a threat in 2006-07.“As all soldiers will tell you, we know we can’t win these things by military means alone,” he said.“What we hoped we were doing was providing an opportunity for governments, the whole of the West, to act in the way they needed, not just militarily but politically and economically.“That didn’t happen… At the very moment, in 2002 to 2005, when the West should have poured in assets – and I’m talking primarily non-military by the way – we didn’t do so. The Taliban sensed an opportunity, they came back.”Gen Richards said it was “inevitable” that Afghanistan’s second city Kandahar will fall to the Taliban forces unless circumstances change.And he said the capture of the “totemic” city would pave the way for the whole of the south of the country to fall into the group’s hands.“My biggest worry at the moment is, with the Western forces having pulled out with no adequate explanation of what is going to replace them, we are going to see a potential collapse in Afghan Armed Forces morale,” he said.This “most certainly” raised the risk of a return of Islamist terror groups similar to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida, which planned the 9/11 attacks as guests of the Taliban in Afghanistan, he said.“There will be ungoverned space… and in that ungoverned space terrorist acts may yet again be planned and executed,” warned Gen Richards.“I think we all forget too readily the scenes of 9/11, the Twin Towers and the attack in Washington.“That is actually why we went into Afghanistan, and we’ve been spectacularly successful in achieving what we aimed to do. That is now being put at risk, along with all the wonderful gains in terms of education, health, and democracy, allowing people to hope for the future.“All that is now, I’m afraid at great risk. We don’t have a substitute strategy and I want to hear what it should be.” More