University staff confirm strike tomorrow as more ambulance strikes announced – UK politics live

Key events

In the Commons James Cartlidge, a junior Treasury minister, is responding to the Labour urgent question on the IMF growth forecast for the UK. At the Downing Street lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson played down the significance of the prediction that the UK’s growth would be even worse than Russia’s this year. He said:

The IMF themselves have said that UK economic policy is now on the right track.

When it comes to Russia, specifically, my understanding is that their numbers are boosted largely due to oil and gas windfall, but December’s sanctions on Russian crude oil and upcoming sanctions on refined oil have the potential to severely constrain revenues needed to finance its war in 2023.

A thousand businesses have left or are leaving Russia, undoing significant foreign investment made since the fall of the Soviet Union. They are starved of key goods and technology.

UK to 'accelerate' support for Ukraine after review, Sunak tells cabinet, because stalemate 'would only benefit Russia'

Before Christmas it was reported that Rishi Sunak had ordered an audit of the war in Ukraine. This led to concerns that UK support for Kyiv might not pass Sunak cost-benefit analysis, although at the time No 10 insisted that support for the war effort was unwavering.

At cabinet this morning Sunak told his ministers that he had reviewed the war, and that he wanted to “accelerate” UK support for Ukraine because he had concluded a prolonged stalemate would only help Russia. In its readout, Downing Street said:

The prime minister said that approaching the anniversary of the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, the UK continued its leadership role, demonstrated most recently by the provision of 14 Challenger 2 tanks, which had been followed by other allies taking the same approach.

He said that since becoming prime minister he had reviewed the UK’s approach and concluded that a prolonged stalemate in the conflict would only benefit Russia, which was why he had decided there was an opportunity to accelerate UK support, working closely with our allies, to give Ukraine the best chance of success and make the most of the window of opportunity where Russian forces were on the back foot.

He said the new strategy would also see greater diplomatic efforts and planning work with the Ukrainians on how to rebuild once the conflict had ended.

According to the readout, a national security official told cabinet that the Russians were “suffering from shortages of equipment and munitions” and that they had seen “significant attrition among some of their most capable fighting forces and officer corps as well as division among the leadership of their military”.

And Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, told cabinet that 188,000 Russian soliders have been killed or injured during the war, according to US estimates. He also said that the Russians had lost two thirds of their tanks.

Downing Street says union announcement about more ambulance strikes 'deeply concerning'

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the prime minister’s spokesperson said the Unison announcement about a further strike by ambulance staff on 10 February (see 11.48am) was “deeply concerning”. He said:

Ongoing strike action is deeply concerning and will worry the public.

We are putting in place significant mitigations that have previously helped reduce some of the impact from these strikes.

But first and foremost we would ask the unions to reconsider that approach and continue discussions.

Ahead of what will be a day of mass strikes tomorrow (with teachers, train drivers, civil servants, university lecturers, bus drivers and security guards all on walking out), the spokesperson said said 600 military personnel as well as civil servants and volunteers across government have been trained to support public services during strikes.

University staff to strike tomorrow, union confirms

In the absence of any last-minute breakthrough, the University and College Union (UCU) has confirmed that lecturers and other university staff will walk out tomorrow in the first of 18 days of strike action which could affect up to 2.5m students.

The union said 70,000 staff at 150 universities across the UK will strike in the latest round of a long-running dispute over pay, working conditions and pensions, and blamed the disruption on university bosses “who have refused to make staff fair offers”.

The UCU said members were being consulted on a 5% pay award offered by employers last week, but are expected to reject it. UCU general secretary Jo Grady said:

University vice-chancellors have been given multiple opportunities to use the sector’s vast wealth to resolve these disputes. Instead, they have forced staff back to the picket line and brought disruption to students.

There are 17 further days of strike action planned but it can be avoided. For that, we need university bosses to get serious and make much improved offers. If they don’t any disruption that takes place is entirely their responsibility.

Universities UK said its members were well prepared for the strikes. A spokesperson said:

It is disappointing to once again be facing industrial action and the top priority for universities will be putting in place a series of measures to protect students’ learning.

However, we expect action to again be limited and the action faced in recent years means universities are well prepared to manage any pockets of disruption.

The universities strike comes on the day teachers and train drivers also strike. Our strike calendar shows the latest planned strikes:

Leading MEP suggests without Brexit Russia might not have invaded Ukraine

Guy Verhofstadt, the MEP, former Belgian prime minister and chair of the European parliament’s Brexit steering group when Brexit was being negotiated, has suggested that if the UK had not left the EU, Russia might not have invaded Ukraine last year.

He made the comment in an interview with LBC. After criticising Nigel Farage for arguing that EU and Nato expansion provoked the war (an argument used by the Kremlin), Verhofstadt said:

[The war] has nothing to do with the extension of Nato, has nothing to do with, in my opinion, even the European Union. It’s really an attempt by Putin to restore, I should say, the old Soviet Union. The only difference is that the Communist party is then replaced by his cronies. That is what he is trying to do.

And a united Europe, certainly on defence matters, would make an enormous difference. I think maybe without Brexit, maybe it was no invasion. I don’t know. I guess that [he would have seen] certainly a far more stronger and united Europe at the other side.

The claim that the Russian invasion would not have happened without Brexit is probably a minority view. But it is no more of a minority view than the assertion, made by Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leading Tory Brexiter, that Putin would have already won the war if it had not been for Brexit, because being outside the EU made it easier for the UK to arm Ukraine.

The number of excess deaths in England and Wales has fallen from a near-two-year peak, though levels remain high, PA Media reports. PA says:

A total of 15,804 deaths were registered in the seven days to January 20, 1,568 above average for the time of year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

This is down from 2,837 excess deaths in the previous week, which was the highest since February 2021 when the UK was still in lockdown during the second wave of Covid-19.

Excess deaths, sometimes known as extra deaths, are the number of deaths that are above the average for the same period in previous years.

This winter has seen a sharp spike in the figures, with more than 10,000 excess deaths registered in England and Wales between December 17 2022 and January 20 2023.

Deaths were particularly high in the last two weeks of December, at 21% and 20% above average.

In the most recent week, to January 20, deaths were 11% above average.

A number of factors are likely to be behind the increase in excess deaths, though Covid-19 has played only a small part.

This is from Adrian Wooldridge, the Bloomberg business columnist and former auther of the Economist’s Bagehot column, on when the benefits of Brexit might materialise.

Unison announces further strikes by ambulance staff on 10 February

Unison has announced that its ambulance staff members will go on strike on Friday 10 February across five services in England in the long-running dispute over pay, PA Media reports.

Rees-Mogg says Sunak doing 'perfectly competently' as he criticises government over NI protocol and anti-strikes bills

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former business secretary, was not exactly on message in his Sky News interview with Kay Burley this morning. As well as implying that he thought the bullying inquiry into Dominic Raab was a mistake (see 10.37am), he made at least three other comments that suggest Rishi Sunak does not have the enthusiastic support of all his backbenchers.

• Rees-Mogg said that Sunak was performing “perfectly competently” as PM. Asked how he was doing, Rees-Mogg replied: “I think he’s doing perfectly competently.” When Burley put it to him that that was not much of an endorsement, Rees-Mogg went on: “I made no bones about the fact I thought Boris Johnson was a better prime minister and I wanted him to remain.”

• Rees-Mogg criticised the government for stalling the Northern Ireland protocol bill. The bill, which is popular with hardline Brexiters but widely seen as contrary to international law, because it would allow the UK to unilaterally ignore some of the provisions in the protocol treaty, passed through the Commons when Boris Johnson was PM. But it is stuck in the Lords, where it has not been debated since October and where a date has not been set for its report stage. Sunak has shelved it because he wants to negotiate a compromise on the protocol with the EU, and passing the bill would make agreement much harder. But Rees-Mogg said the government should pass it. He said:

The government has just got to get on with it. There’s a bill that has been through the House of Commons that is waiting its report stage in the House of Lords and I don’t understand why the government hasn’t brought it forward.

• He renewed his criticism of the strikes (minimum service levels) bill. When MPs debated it last night, Rees-Mogg said he agreed with Labour criticisms of the Henry VIII powers in the bill.

On Sky News this morning he repeated the argument, saying the bill contained a “very wide Henry VIII power” and that this was “not good legislative practice”.

Rees-Mogg is right about this. This is what the legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg said in a good blog about the bill.

The government doesn’t know what changes it will have to make once this bill is passed. Under clause 3, the secretary of state would be able to make regulations that “amend, repeal or revoke provision made by or under primary legislation passed before this act or later in the same session of parliament as this act”. This is a supercharged Henry VIII clause. Why should MPs or peers pay any attention to any related legislation that may be brought before them later in this session when they know that, unless they object, a secretary of state may simply amend, repeal or revoke it?

Jacob Rees-Mogg Photograph: Sky News

Dominic Raab leaving Downing Street this morning after cabinet. Photograph: Peter Nicholls/Reuters

The Treasury will have to answer an urgent question from Labour on the economy at 12.30pm. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, will be hoping to get Jeremy Hunt to the dispatch box, but she may get a more junior Treasury minister.

Faisal Islam, the BBC’s economics editor, says that while Brexit may be one reason why the IMF growth forecast for the UK is so poor, other factors may be more significant.

Civil service morale declining, says thinktank, as Rees-Mogg says dismisses 'snowflakey' approach to bullying claims

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former business secretary, told Sky News this morning that people should not be too “snowfakey” about the claims that Dominic Raab, the justice secretary and deputy PM, bullied civil servants in three of his previous ministerial appointments. Those allegations are now the subject of an investigation that could lead to Raab losing his job.

Rees-Mogg said:

We have to be slightly careful around the bullying allegations but also we mustn’t be too snowflakey about it. People need to be able to say this job has not been done well enough and needs to be done better.

My colleague Jamie Grierson has the story here.

Rees-Mogg spoke at the Institute for Government thinktank published its annual Whitehall monitor, which monitors the performance of the civil service and suggests that it would be a mistake for ministers to get complacent about the morale of civil servants. Here are some of the key findings.

• Turnover in the civil service has reached its highest level for at least a decade, the report says. It says between March 2021 and March 2022 13.6% of civil servants either moved between departments or left the civil service entirely.

• The morale of the civil service workforce declined in 2021 and 2022 for the first time since 2015, the report says. It says:

The civil service goes into 2023 with record levels of turnover, declining morale and disrupted by widespread industrial action. Much is to be done to repair the relationship between ministers and officials, still strained by unresolved disputes over pay and the workforce, hostile press briefings against civil servants and the reverberations of the ‘partygate’ scandal that erupted a year ago. Public trust in both ministers and civil servants continues to get worse.

• Fewer than half of civil servants say their organisation motivates them to help meet its objectives, the report says. In 2021 51% said they were motivated, but last year that figure went down to 41%.

Hancock flounders in TV interview as he claims lockdown embrace that led to his resignation wasn't breach of law

Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, gave an interview to Good Morning Britain this morning. As my colleague Jessica Elgot reports, he claimed that he did not “primarily” go on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! for his £320,000 fee.

But the highlight of the interview came when Susanna Reid, the presenter, put it to him that the embrace with Gina Coladangelo (at the time his adviser, now his partner) in his office that led to his resignation was not just against Covid guidelines at the time, but against the law too. Hancock refused to accept this, but he floundered badly, and could not refute what Reid was saying. Here is the clip.

Adam Wagner, the barrister and expert in Covid lockdown law, says Reid was right.

Of course, the consensus amongst economists is that Brexit has been harmful to the UK economy. An analysis by Bloomberg Economics says it is costing the economy £100bn a year in lost output.

And my colleague Polly Toynbee has a withering assessment of the decision to leave the EU in her Guardian column today. Here’s an extract:

Look what Brexit has done: a 4% shrinkage in long-run productivity relative to remaining in the EU, expects the Office for Budget Responsibility, inflation and energy prices are higher than in the EU, trade has fallen by almost a fifth, while the government itself says the much-trumpeted Australian deal will raise GDP by less than 0.1% a year by 2035. Brexit has raised food prices by 6% says the LSE, while draining the workforce. Eurostar also deliberately leaves a third of seats empty due to crippling EU/UK border delays.

The Brexit press can’t hide these inconvenient truths. Jeremy Warner, the Telegraph’s associate editor, challenges Jeremy Hunt’s bizarrely Pollyanna-ish assessment of the economy, writing “trade with our European neighbours is faltering badly,” due to Brexit, with “the rather awkward fact that the UK is the only G7 economy yet to recover to its pre-pandemic size”. “The grim reality is that the country seems to be falling apart on almost every front” and “car production has fallen to its lowest since the 1950s”.

And you can read the full column here.

Why No 10 claims Brexit contributing to growth agenda

In its statement about the Brexit anniversary released overnight, Downing Street says Brexit is “a huge opportunity to deliver on the prime minister’s priorities to the British public”. And it identifies five areas where it claims Brexit is contributing to the growth agenda. It says:

Freeports: From Plymouth to Teesside, eight freeports across England are now open for business, galvanising emerging sectors from manufacturing to renewable energy and delivering jobs and prosperity in areas that need it the most. Crucial to the ambitious levelling up agenda, two new green freeports will be established in Scotland – expected to bring £10.8 billion of public and private investment and creating over 75,000 high-skilled jobs – while we will announce plans for at least one freeport in Wales in the coming months.

Edinburgh Reforms: In addition to the financial services and markets bill and reforming Solvency II, the government is taking advantage of the UK’s position outside the EU and going further through the Edinburgh Reforms to ensure the UK’s financial services sector is dynamic, sustainable and globally competitive – supporting businesses and powering growth right across the country.

REUL [retained EU law]: Regulatory reform is a key area where the UK can develop a competitive advantage in order to grow the economy. That’s why the prime minister recently reaffirmed the government’s commitment to review, reform, repeal or replace all retained EU law – as part of a collective cabinet drive – to boost innovation, accelerate our economic recovery and deliver tangible benefits to businesses, whilst maintaining world-leading workers’ rights and environmental protections.

R&D: While the UK continues to push for association to the Horizon Europe, we are working hard on developing a domestic alternative to progress the UK’s key strategic priorities for science and technology and to enhance collaboration with science superpowers around the globe, such as Japan and Switzerland.

UK Subsidy Regime: A new system to regulate the award of subsidies to business came into force at the start of the month. This represents the most significant change in subsidy administration in over 40 years and gets rid of unnecessary EU bureaucracy.

Brexit is a ‘complete disaster’ and ‘total lies’, says Tory billionaire

Guy Hands, a leading financier and a former Tory donor, gave a very different take on Brexit to Rishi Sunak’s in an interview on the Today programme this morning. He said:

It’s been a complete disaster. The reality is it’s been a lose-lose situation for us and Europe. Europe has lost more [in financial services] but we’ve lost as well. And the reality of Brexit was, it was just was a bunch of complete and total lies.

The only way that the Brexit put forward by Boris Johnson was going to work was if there was a complete deregulation of the UK and we moved to a sort of Liz Truss utopia of a Singapore state and that was just never going to happen.

My colleague Julia Kollewe has the full story here.

Sunak marks Brexit anniversary by claiming benefits 'empower communities' as IMF delivers damning growth forecast

Good morning. At 11pm the UK will mark the third anniversary of the moment that it left the European Union. Increasingly, by a margin of around 60% to 40%, Britons are saying that this was a mistake, but in the Conservative party conceding anything like this would amount to a thought crime, such is the grip the Brexiters have on the party, and instead ministers are marking the anniversary by talking up the supposed benefits.

Polling on Brexit Photograph: Polling on Brexit/What UK Thinks

Still, what the government is saying about Brexit is still considerably less upbeat than what Boris Johnson and his colleagues were saying, or promising, this time three years ago. This is what Rishi Sunak said about the anniversary in a statement released overnight.

In the three years since leaving the EU, we’ve made huge strides in harnessing the freedoms unlocked by Brexit to tackle generational challenges. Whether leading Europe’s fastest vaccine rollout, striking trade deals with over 70 countries or taking back control of our borders, we’ve forged a path as an independent nation with confidence.

And in my first 100 days as prime minister, that momentum hasn’t slowed – we’re cutting red tape for businesses, levelling up through our freeports, and designing our own, fairer farming system to protect the British countryside.

This is just the beginning of our plans to deliver on our five priorities, including growing the economy so we can create better paid jobs, and I’m determined to ensure the benefits of Brexit continue to empower communities and businesses right across the country.

But it is not a good day to be going on about growing the economy, with the IMF saying it expects the UK to be the only G7 country where the economy will shrink this year. My colleague Graeme Wearden has been covering the reaction to this on his business live blog.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Rishi Sunak chairs cabinet.

10am: Philippa Hird, chair of the NHS pay review body, gives evidence to the Commons health committee.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

11.30am: James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

After 12.30pm: MPs debate Labour motions, first on neighbourhood policing, and then on a binding demand for the government to publish whatever analysis it did before the autumn statement on the case for abolishing non-dom status.

2.30pm: Antonia Romeo, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice, and other officials give evidence to the Commons justice committee on the work of the department.

4.30pm: Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, is due to speak to Tory MP at the 1922 Committee.

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