Yousaf defends including minister for independence in his new team
Douglas Ross, the Scottish Tory leader, asks why Humza Yousaf appointed a minister for independence in his reshuffle yesterday, when posts like social security and tourism were abolished.
Yousaf says he is delighted to have appointed a cabinet with a majority of women, and many members under 40. He defends the appointments he made.
I make no apology whatsover for having a minister for independence because, my goodness, we need it more than ever before.
Ross says he was hoping for another interruption from the gallery, because Yousaf’s “rant” was going on for so long.
There is another interruption, and proceedings are suspended.
(The minister for independence is Jamie Hepburn.)
Key events
Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, goes next. He asks about mental health provision for children. Will Yousaf apologise for the children and families let down by the problems that arose when Yousaf was health secretary?
Yousaf says Sarwar has not mentioned the pandemic. He says he has offered not just an apology, but deep regret. But the number of young people starting treatment under CAMHS is the highest on record, he says.
Sarwar says in 16 years the SNP has never met its CAMHS targets. He quotes from a parent describing how difficult it has been to get treatment for their son. If Yousaf failed the family as health secretary, why will he deliver as first minster.
Yousaf says he is the first to acknowledge there are challenges. But the figures are improving. CAMHS waitings lists have reduced by more than 700, he says. The number of 18-week waits has also gone down, he says. But he accepts that does not help the family mentioned by Sarwar.
Sarwar says the 18-week target has never been met. Why won’t Yousaf accept that more of the same won’t help.
Yousaf says he has never claimed that there were not problems before the pandemic. CAMHS is important. But early interventions are important too, he says. And he says in Scotland the NHS has not lost a single day to strike action.
FMQs is resuming. Douglas Ross, the Scottish Conservative leader, accuses Humza Yousaf of forcing Kate Forbes out as an “act of petty vengeance”. He says Yousaf is even more divisive than Nicola Sturgeon.
If Humza Yousaf cannot even unite his own party, how can he possibly unite the country?
Yousaf says Ross should not question the economic literacy of this government. Scottish GDP has grown more than UK GDP, he says. And he says Ross wanted the Scottish government to follow Liz Truss’s economic policies.
And he says the Tories tore themselves apart over Brexit. They have had more leaders in recent months than Ross has jobs, he says. The SNP will work every single day to earn, and re-earn, people’s trust, he says.
The Scottish parliament proceeedings are resuming. The presiding officer, Alison Johnstone, says it is very regrettable that she had to clear the gallery.
But she says some young people who have come to the parliament today to watch FMQs have been allowed to stay.
Another MSP raises a point of order, and mentions another group of young people visiting for FMQs who have been excluded. Can they be allowed in?
Johnstone says she will suspend for a bit longer to see if they can find a solution.
According to STV’s Colin Mackay, this is the first time the public gallery has had to be cleared at Holyrood because of disruption.
Presiding officer ordering the public gallery cleared because of protests during FMQs. I think that’s the first time that’s happened at Holyrood
— Colin Mackay (@STVColin) March 30, 2023
First minister’s questions suspended at Holyrood after protests lead to public gallery being cleared
Ross says independence is not a priority for people across Scotland right now. He quotes an SNP MSP as saying the government needs to reset its relationship with business. And he quotes another former minister as saying the best economic brains in the party have been sidelined. If members of Yousaf’s party do not have confidence in his ability to manage the economy, how can the country?
Yousaf says Ross must be desperate. He says people have repeatedly shown confidence in the SNP in elections. He says Tory MSPs would not even make it onto his subs bench.
He says the Scottish Tories are in third place, so Ross is “a third-rate politician leading a third-rate party”.
There are more interruptions, and the presiding officer, Alison Johnstone, says they will have to clear the public gallery.
Ross suggests Yousaf should not have abolished the post of social security minister.
Instead of looking for areas of cooperation with Westminster, Yousaf is “looking for a fight”, he says.
Yousaf says he was only sworn in yesterday. He has tripled the fuel insecurity fund, because fuel poverty in the country is a disgrace, he says.
He says “that is speaking to the priorities of the Scottish people”.
The cabinet secretary for social justice will cover social security, he says.
Yousaf defends including minister for independence in his new team
Douglas Ross, the Scottish Tory leader, asks why Humza Yousaf appointed a minister for independence in his reshuffle yesterday, when posts like social security and tourism were abolished.
Yousaf says he is delighted to have appointed a cabinet with a majority of women, and many members under 40. He defends the appointments he made.
I make no apology whatsover for having a minister for independence because, my goodness, we need it more than ever before.
Ross says he was hoping for another interruption from the gallery, because Yousaf’s “rant” was going on for so long.
There is another interruption, and proceedings are suspended.
(The minister for independence is Jamie Hepburn.)
Humza Yousaf takes first minister’s questions for first time
Humza Yousaf is about to take first minister’s questions for the first time in Edinburgh.
But before he started proceedings had to be halted shortly because of protesters in the public gallery.
How four MPs on standards committee wanted to stop Ferrier’s suspension being long enough to trigger recall byelection
Three Conservative MP who will have a say over Boris Johnson’s political fate tried to reduce the suspension of Margaret Ferrier to avoid a potential by-election, the standards committee report reveals.
But the three Tories, who were joined by the one SNP MP on the committee, were outvoted by the other members, who decided that Ferrier should face a 30-day suspension, making a recall byelection likely.
The standards committee, which adjudicates on MPs who break the code of conduct, and the privileges committee, which deals with contempt of parliament complaints, are two separate bodies. But in the past they used to be combined and six of the seven MPs on both committees are the same.
Until last year all seven MP members were the same – but Chris Bryant quit the privileges committee, to be replaced by Harriet Harman, because he decided that his past comments about Boris Johnson meant he could not judge the former PM fairly.
Johnson’s fate will be decided by the seven MPs on the privileges committee. But, as well as seven MPs, the standards committee has seven lay members, and that is why the four MPs who tried to stop Ferrier facing a 30 day suspension were outvoted.
The minutes printed at the back of today’s report show that the Tories Alberto Costa, Sir Bernard Jenkin and Sir Charles Walker, and the SNP’s Allan Dorans, all proposed a nine-day suspension – which would have avoided a recall byelection.
Those four MPs voted against publishing the report as a whole, but were outvoted by everyone else.
The fourth Tory on the committee, Andy Carter, joined his three Tory colleagues and Dorans in proposing an addition to the report explaning why Ferrier deservied leniance. It would have said:
Ms Ferrier was a woman on her own in London, not her home city. There were no family or close friends to assist her. Her actions were not designed to enrich her or give her any form of benefit in kind. Her behaviour and judgement was directly affected by her distress and panic in her health condition and loneliness.
This was also voted down, and does not appear in the final report.
The Commons privileges committee is expected to conclude that Johnson committed contempt of parliament by giving misleading answers to MPs about Partygate, and that he was recklesss as to establishing whether or not what he said was true.
But whether or not that would merit a suspension of 10 days or more is less clear – partly because there is no obvious precedent for the appropriate punishment for a PM recklessly misleading MPs.
Although the cases are very different, the Ferrier case suggests at least four members of the privileges committee have some concerns about punishments that trigger the recall petition process.
Starmer says Labour would freeze council tax for next year if it were in power, he says. (See 9.13am.)
This is similar to an approach pursued by the SNP, which for many years froze council tax in Scotland.
Starmer has now finished his speech. And the live feed on Labour’s YouTube channel has cut out.
Starmer describes Rishi Sunak as “Mr 1%”. He explains:
1% of asylum claims from those arriving on small boats actually processed.
1% of the fraud that was lost during Covid actually recovered.
0% of the windfall tax that could have helped working people actually collected.
And his new tax policy, same as his old tax policy, a tax cuts for the richest 1% whilst working people pay the price.
Keir Starmer is speaking now. He says these elections matter.
At the heart of it is a simple question – do you think Britain deserves better, he asks.
If the answer is yes, there is something you can do about it – vote Labour, he says.
Angela Rayner says most of her casework as an MP relates to what happens at local government level.
When Rishi Sunak was chancellor, he took money away from the areas that need it most, she says.
She says Labour councils have fought hard to protect services. So having a Labour council matters, she says.
She says she is biased, because it was a SureStart centre that helped her when she was a young mum, it was Labour that ensured she had access to adult education, and it was Labour that meant she did not need to rely on a food bank.
This is from Katie Neame from LabourList.
Next to speak is deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner. “Local government matters. Having a Labour council matters,” she tells attendees pic.twitter.com/n5KPdxfSMy
— Katie Neame (@katie_neame) March 30, 2023
Labour launches its campaign for local elections
Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, is speaking at the start of the launch of Labour’s campaign for the local elections.
She starts with the Ronald Reagan question, which she has posed before:
The question that I want to pose this morning is a really important one after 13 years of Conservative government – are you and your family better off?
She says real wages are falling, taxes rising and public services crumbling.
The government should use a windfall tax on energy companies to fund a freeze in council tax, she says.
And she introduces the next speaker, Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, saying she was the person who destroyed Dominic Raab at PMQs yesterday.
As mentioned earlier (see 9.13am), Keir Starmer’s pitch for the local elections suggests he wants to fight the next general election outflanking the Tories on cutting tax for workers. This is generally assumed to be wise electorally. In 1959 Hugh Gaitskell said he would not raise income tax if Labour won the election, and this was subsequently seen as a mistake, that contributed to the Tory victory, because the pledge has not seen as credible. But since then fighting an election on a low-tax platform has, more often than not, been associated with success, not failure.
But is this wise in policy terms? One person who probably thinks it isn’t is Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, who has recently published an superb book on public spending, Follow the Money. He is gloomy about the state of public services, which in many respects he argues are run badly, and he thinks rising health and welfare demands will make higher taxes inevitable. He says:
The truth is, the bill for health and other public services in the years to come will fall on you and me. If, as I think is inevitable, we will in the next decade or so need to raise taxes by another couple of per cent of national income, raising £50 billion or so a year, on top of the increases already in the pipeline, then we are going to have to do what all other countries which have bigger tax burdens than we do. We will have to have higher taxes on the bulk of the population, on those with middling sorts of incomes. For it is not the case that those countries, in Western Europe (especially), which have higher taxes and spending than we do, raise those taxes from the rich or companies or ‘someone else’. They raise them by having higher taxes on average earners.
Johnson’s book is well worth reading. Even if you know a lot about how government works, you will learn something new, and it is written with great clarity, and constrained rage about the “pervasive failure” of Westminster in so many policy areas. My colleague Polly Toynbee wrote more about it here.
Grant Shapps says energy strategy is not a ‘rip-out-your-boiler moment’
Grant Shapps, the energy secretary, has said the government’s energy security blueprint is not a “rip-out-your-boiler” plan, despite measures aimed at shifting households away from gas, PA Media reports. PA says:
The plan confirms measures aimed at making it cheaper to buy and run a heat pump rather than a traditional gas boiler.
But Shapps admitted he did not own a heat pump and insisted “we’re not forcing anyone to remove their gas boilers”.
The strategy confirms that the government will set out plans during 2023-24 to “rebalance gas and electricity costs” – which could cut the cost of electricity, which can be generated cleanly, at the expense of gas.
Homes will move from gas to cleaner energy “over the next decade or two”, Shapps said.
He told Sky News: “We all know that electricity can be a big way to decarbonise, but we also know these are big changes. So this is not a sort of rip-out-your-boiler moment. This is a transition over a period of time to get to homes which are heated in a different way and also insulated much better.”
He admitted “we’re in the low numbers still” of heat pumps, with around 42,000 installed last year and “there are technical issues that people are having to deal with in order to meet the switchover”.
Listing steps taken in his own home, including turning down the boiler flow temperature, Shapps said: “I’m gradually doing things. I’m not sort of some eco-warrior in this. I just want to try and save money on my energy bills like everybody else.”
The Government is extending a scheme offering £5,000 grants towards heat pump insulation to 2028 instead of its previous 2025 cut-off.
The package has been criticised by some as offering little more than reannouncements of existing plans.
Reeves says Labour has no plans to raise capital gains tax, saying it wants UK to be ‘best place to start business’
After Rishi Sunak published his tax returns, Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, posted a message on Twitter saying that he was paying “a far lower tax rate than working people” because most of the money he makes comes in the form of capital gains, and capital gains tax (CGT) is lower than income tax.
Rishi Sunak’s much delayed return reveal a Tory tax system where the PM pays a far lower tax rate than working people – who face the highest tax burden in 70 years.
His latest handout to the richest 1% shows you exactly who he puts first.https://t.co/nPs0MdKjPU
— Angela Rayner 🌹 (@AngelaRayner) March 23, 2023
Conservatives claimed this showed Labour is planning to raise capital gains tax after the election. CGT was aligned to income tax until Gordon Brown cut it in 1998. His successor, Alistair Darling, put it back up, introducing a top rate of 28%, but in 2016 the Tories reduced that to 20% (for gains other than those related to residential property, where a 28% rate applies). The 2016 cut is estimated to have saved Rishi Sunak more than £300,000.
In an interview on the Today programme Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, said Labour was not planning to raise CGT. Asked why, in the light of the fairness argument made by Rayner, she replied:
There are people who have built up their own businesses who maybe at retirement want to sell that business.
They may not have had huge income through their life if they’ve reinvested in their business, but this is their retirement pot of money.
And we also have said we want Britain to be the best place to start and grow a business.
Margaret Ferrier set to be suspended from Commons for 30 days over Covid rule breach, creating possible byelection test for SNP
The Commons standards committee says Margaret Ferrier should be suspended for 30 days for breaches of Commons rules related to the incident where she travelled by train from London to Scotland after testing positive for Covid in 2020.
Last year a court sentenced her to 270 hours of unpaid work in relation to the offence, but the standards commmittee says a further sanction by the Commons is required.
Ferrier currently sits as an independent, but she was elected as an SNP MP and the 30-day suspension means she could face a recall election if 10% of voters in her constituency sign a petition calling for one. At the last election she had a majority of 5,230 over Labour in Rutherglen and Hamilton West and a byelection would indicate whether the recent resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, and the divisive SNP leadership contest, really is paving the way for a Labour combeack.
In its report the standards committee says:
The threshold for a breach of paragraph 17 of the code [which says MPs should “never undertake any action which would cause significant damage to the reputation and integrity of the House of Commons as a whole”] is necessarily high. However, any finding that a member’s actions have brought the house into disrepute must be considered to be a serious breach. The 2019 Code states that “members have a duty to uphold the law”; something the public rightly expect. If Ms Ferrier had been a public sector employee in a position of trust or leadership, she could have faced severe disciplinary consequences, potentially including dismissal, for these or similar actions.
We therefore recommend that Ms Ferrier is suspended from the service of the house for 30 days.
Starmer to launch local election campaign with claim Labour is ‘party of lower taxes for working people’
Good morning. Keir Starmer is launching Labour’s campaign for the local elections today with a pledge that is simultaneously complete nonsense, but also an interesting piece of political positioning.
In an overnight press release Labour says Starmer will announce that the party “would freeze council tax this year if in government, a move funded by a proper windfall tax on oil and gas giants”.
But, as Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has confirmed in interviews this morning, the party is not promising to do this if it wins the election, expected next year. It will publish its manifesto nearer the time.
Greg Hands, the Conservative party chair, says this pledge is worthless. He says:
Labour’s announcement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. They have no plan to introduce this if elected. They’re taking the British people for fools.
If Labour were serious about cutting council tax Labour councils would be doing it now.
Instead across the country it’s Labour-run councils with higher council tax, Labour-run Wales where bills have quadrupled and Labour-run London where council tax has gone up 9.7 per cent.
And Stephen Bush, the Financial Times columnist, has made much the same point on Twitter.
I am torn between finding it engaging to make a commitment that you absolutely won’t have to kepe because you are *not* in power now, and finding it obnoxious.
— Stephen Bush (@stephenkb) March 29, 2023
I mean, knock me sideways, if ‘time travel’ is a revenue raiser, why stop there?
— Stephen Bush (@stephenkb) March 29, 2023
And yet – even nonsense announcements can convey a message that has some sort of foundation, and what Starmer is actually saying is that he wants to go into the next election outflanking the Tories on tax cuts for working people. In a statement issued overnight he says:
There is a choice on tax. A Tory choice – taxes up for working people, tax cuts for the 1%.
Or a Labour choice. Where we cut business rates to save our high streets and where, if there was a Labour government, you could take that council tax rise you just got and rip it up.
A Labour government would freeze your council tax this year – that’s our choice.
A tax cut for the many, not just for the top 1 per cent.
So take this message to every doorstep in your community: Labour is the party of lower taxes for working people.
That’s the difference we can make. That’s the choice in May. A better Britain.
I will post more on this, and Reeves’ morning interviews, shortly.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Rishi Sunak is visiting a research laboratory to promote the govenrment’s energy security plan published today. In our story on the plan, Fiona Harvey and Jillian Ambrose say the government defying “scientific doubts to place a massive bet on technology to capture and store carbon dioxide in undersea caverns, to enable an expansion of oil and gas in the North Sea”. The energy department’s news release is here, and a longer summary is here.
11am: Keir Starmer launches Labour’s campaign for the local elections at an event in Swindon. Later, at 2.30pm, he will do a Q&A with students on Radio Wiltshire.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
After 11.30am: Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, is expected to make a statement to MPs saying the government will not bring forward the age at which the state pension age is increased to 68.
12pm: Humza Yousaf takes first minister’s questions for the first time in Scotland.
I’ll try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions, and if they are of general interest I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.
If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter. I’m on @AndrewSparrow.
Alternatively, you can email me at andrew.sparrow@theguardian.com.
