So, it’s PMQs day again and Theresa May will be feeling pretty well-armed thanks to the impending announcement that NHS staff will get a 6.6% pay rise over three years. For his part, Jeremy Corbyn could go off-piste: he could highlight Trump’s nuclear arms controls olive branch to Putin, the Tories’ preliminary talks with Cambridge Analytica ahead of the 2017 election, benefits errors, free school meals or council cuts (see below).
If May does trumpet the new pay deal for health staff, you can bet the Labour leader will take credit, along with the trade unions, for forcing her hand. He will also be wary of taking at face value any headline commitments. Tory MPs are sure to cheer however at the news that more than a million staff (except doctors) will finally see the end of austerity, especially if the lowest paid get the biggest rises. It also looks as though staff won’t have to give up a day’s holiday.
Just how the Treasury pays for the £4bn cost is unclear, especially as Jeremy Hunt promised productivity increases would have to be made. The devil may be in some of the detail, with new pledges to reduce rates of sickness. There’s even talk of changes to automatic pay rises, so called increments, that many NHS staff will defend robustly. Other public sector workers will wonder when their rises will arrive too.
Still, if May can somehow neutralise health as a negative (and Hunt started to grasp the the social care nettle yesterday), she may bequeath to a new leader a post-Brexit Tory party that is in decent shape. Only yesterday another poll put them on 44% and Labour on 41%. Corbyn is convinced he can make further advances, but after eight years in power, those are pretty good numbers.
The Cambridge Analytica story for a long time made many eyes glaze over but the past few days has produced some dizzying revelations. Last night the firm’s chief exec was suspended after the Channel 4 News investigation and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has now formally been asked to appear before DCSM Select Committee to give evidence on its own data and privacy safeguards. On cue, former Facebook operations manager Sandy Parakilas appears before the committee via video link from 3.30pm. He’s told the Guardian that he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach – and they didn’t listen. As for the political fallout, Tory sources say CA approached the party in 2016 about possible general election work but their services were not used.
This morning the academic who created an app which harvested data from 50 million users has told the BBC he has been made “a scapegoat” for Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Dr Aleksandr Kogan completed work for CA in 2014, but said he had no idea the data would be used to benefit Donald Trump’s campaign. Kogan also disputed Cambridge Analytica’s claim that he had approached them. The personality test app was the firm’s idea, not his, he said. He pointed out that it paid up to $800,000 to recruit people to use it. He added that he was told that the scheme was legal, but accepts he should have questioned its ethics.
We cover a damning new Amnesty International report that describes how Twitter is failing to keep women safe from violence and abuse and allowing a “toxic” environment to flourish. The Sun has another story that again highlights how social media and online giants are failing in their social responsibilities, with YouTube Kids app distributing videos that include conspiracy theories and a practical guide to making a gun. Politicians are slowly catching up with the digital world, and are having to fast.
For years, business ran rings round Whitehall on public-private contracts and IT projects. Do MPs and civil servants have enough knowledge to make informed decisions and to get the right balance of rights/responsibilities, privacy/transparency, benefits/costs online? They may not yet, but the political mood is certainly changing. As US Senator John Kennedy put it on Newsnight: “Facebook, Twitter, Google; they’re not companies any more. They’re countries. They know more about you than you.” More worrying for Zuckerberg, last night, the founder of Whatsapp tweeted: “It’s time. #deleteFacebook”.
Theresa May decided not to play Moscow’s tit-for-tat game yesterday, and it appears that the UK is keeping in reserve any further diplomatic expulsions for future squalls. But the PM may not be over the moon about Donald Trump’s decision to ring Vladimir Putin personally yesterday. The Washington Post has the scoop that the President ignored a briefing note that said ‘DO NOT CONGRATULATE’. “Trump also chose not to heed talking points from aides instructing him to condemn the recent poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain with a powerful nerve agent”.
Jeremy Corbyn loathes direct comparisons with Trump, but the President’s realpolitik means that it’s tougher for May to slam the Labour leader in PMQs over his own remark that he would “do business” with Putin. (I asked No.10 yesterday if it “engage but beware” was still UK policy and the PM’s spokesman said it was.) And it’s not just Trump. Germany’s Angela Merkel telegrammed Putin to say it was “more important than ever that we pursue dialogue”. Which sounds very much like Corbyn’s own ‘robust dialogue’. I wonder the Leader of the Opposition is tempted to mix it up at PMQs by asking May if she agrees with Trump that fresh arms control talks are now needed? Boris Johnson is before the Foreign Affairs Committee at 2pm. Can he be diplomatic about Trump?
European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker’s letter of congrats to Putin was the initial lightning rod for complaints of sucking up to Moscow yesterday, with even Guy Verhofstadt tweeting: “This is no time for congratulations”. But Tory MEP Charles Tannock pointed out that that global strategic politics meant sometimes dealing with those you disagree with, citing Churchill and Stalin, Liam Fox and Philippines Pres Duterte, and state visits for leaders from China and Saudi Arabia. May has slightly more trouble than the Juncker letter, with Brexiteer MPs this morning staging their fishing boat stunt on the Thames. They appeared to back down yesterday, but have now written to the PM to insist we pull out of the EU Common Fisheries Policy on March 29, 2019. No.10 yesterday told us an ‘independent’ fisheries policy would start on December 31, 2020.
These American teens have gone viral after balancing coins, burgers, flip flops and phones outside their car windows. Here’s a quick version (for the full vid click here).
It was the least surprising news of the week, but for Labour it’s nonetheless very significant. Yes, Unite’s Jennie Formby was yesterday appointed by the NEC (by 35 votes to two) as the party’s new general secretary. Read our ‘Who Is Jennie Formby?’ piece HERE. The left are now set to control the leadership, Shadow Cabinet, the NEC and the party HQ’s senior posts. ‘Centrists’ still dominate the PLP and local government, but the whole point of Momentum is to embed Corbyn’s politics across the country at all levels so this is a long game. I’m told Formby’s first request yesterday was to ask HR if all staff could wear name-badges.
The NEC also ruled yesterday that MPs could not hold more than one elected office at the same time. This was seen by allies of Dan Jarvis as a sneaky way of torpedo-ing his candidacy for South Yorkshire Mayor. I recall Ken Livingstone was both Mayor of London and an MP for more than a year (though he ran as an independent and had whip withdrawn until his return). MPs have been allowed to be councillors and MEPs and MPs all at the same time, but the NEC clearly thinks two-jobs politicians should be a thing of the past. Jarvis and rival Ben Curran find out on Friday which of them has won the nomination ballot. I’m told the MP will not be making any public statement until then.
There was tumbleweed on the Tory benches in a Westminster Hall debate yesterday on an NAO report on council funding cuts, with not a single Conservative backbencher turning up. The timing was apt as Sajid Javid’s department admitted during the day that 27 town halls would receive less cash than expected due to an “error” in a business rate retention scheme. His Labour Shadow Andrew Gwynne says: “There is little wonder that Tory Councils are going bust, when the Secretary of State gets his maths wrong twice”.
The DWP is under fire after the NAO revealed 70,000 benefit claimants were underpaid by an average of £5,000 each since 2011. 20,000 could be owed around £11,500 each and “a small number of people” could have been underpaid by £20,000. Meanwhile, there was political payback time last night as the Government lost several votes in the Lords. One was on a regret motion (167 votes to 160) which calls on the government to delay implementing changes to its free school meals policy until a full impact assessment is carried out. Labour’s Steve Bassam recalled how free school meals helped him and his single mum hugely back in the 1960s.
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