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Key events:
Afternoon summary
- Leo Varadkar, the Irish taoiseach (prime minister) has escalated his warning about a no deal Brexit, saying everyone in the UK and Ireland should be “afraid” of this outcome. (See 2.46pm.)
That’s all from me for today – and probably for the rest of the month.
Have a good August everyone.
Thanks for the comments.
Ipsos MORI has published its latest Political Monitor polling round-up. You can read the whole thing here, but Keiran Pedley has posted a good summary on Twitter.
And, on the subject of byelections, prisoners are to be given the right to vote in the Shetland byelection, the Press Association reports. The move, announced by the Scottish government, will ensure compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights. A European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling in 2005 said the UK government’s blanket ban on prisoner voting breached human rights laws. However, successive UK governments resisted changing the law in order to allow prisoners the right to vote. A dispute between the UK and the European court on the issue finally ended in 2017 when voting rights were given to around 100 inmates in England and Wales released on “temporary licence”. Powers over the franchise for Scottish parliament elections were devolved in 2017, with Holyrood and the Scottish government legally obliged to comply with the ECHR.
As the Press Association reports, the Shetland by-election will be held on August 29, having been triggered by the resignation of Scottish Liberal Democrat MSP Tavish Scott. Ahead of the vote, Scottish constitutional relations Secretary Michael Russell said he will make a remedial order to bring the franchise for the by-election into line with the ECHR ruling. It will allow prisoners who meet the wider franchise criteria, and who are serving sentences of 12 months or less, to register for a vote in the byelection in time for the August 13 deadline. It is estimated the order will extend the franchise to fewer than five people.
The Brexit party bus has been out in Brecon and Radnorshire, where a byelection is taking place today. The bus hit the headlines at the weekend when it broke down. But it will probably take more than an engine repair to help the party because it is not seen as a contender in this seat where, as my colleague Jessica Elgot explained in an article on Monday, the Liberal Democrats are expected to win.
The byelection was triggered after the sitting MP, the Conservative Chris Davies, was convicted of expenses fraud. Davies is standing again, saying that his conviction related to an administrative error from which he made no financial gain and that constituents had urged him to stand again.
A poll in the constituency conducted by the Number Cruncher Politics consultancy last month suggested the Lib Dems were well ahead.
These are from the BBC’s Faisal Islam on one of the lines to emerge from the Mark Carney press conference.
Note to readers: I’ll be wrapping up the blog in about an hour or so, and then after that Politics Live will probably be closed for the next four weeks. I will be back on Monday 2 September. At the moment there is no plan to run a daily politics blog over August, but if something particularly newsy or dramatic happens, it may come back. I hope you all get some holiday too. In the absence of the blog you can find lots of excellent political reporting at Guardian politics. And if you miss the minute by minute updates, then do feel free to take a break, read a book, ring your mum, or just generally tune out from the Brexit horror show for a while. You will probably feel much better as a result – and you can pick up again in September, when it will (almost certainly) all still remain unresolved.
‘We should be afraid’ – Irish PM Leo Varadkar steps up warning about no deal Brexit
Yesterday Arlene Foster, the DUP leader, accused the Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, of engaging in “project fear mark two” because he has suggested a no deal Brexit could lead to the break-up of the UK. Asked about her comment today, Varadkar said that he did not accept the criticism at all, and that in fact everyone should fear a no deal Brexit. He said:
In terms of fear, I think we should be afraid of a no-deal Brexit …
A no-deal Brexit would have very serious impacts on the economy, north and south, and on Britain. It could have security implications as well and it could have constitutional implications. It’s something that we have to prepare for nonetheless. It is something we should be afraid about.
Varadkar also said that he had invited Boris Johnson to visit him in Dublin for talks “without any preconditions”.
Asked about claims (made by Sinn Fein in particular) that Johnson was incapable of being impartial when mediating between Sinn Fein and the DUP on the issue of power-sharing in Northern Ireland, Varadkar implied he was not yet convinced Johnson would be neutral. He replied:
I think that remains to be seen.
He’s only just started in the job and I think we need to give him a fair wind and a decent chance.
But you know we shouldn’t also ignore what’s there in the Good Friday agreement and I hear a lot of talk about the Good Friday Agreement in recent weeks and months and often wonder if some of the people who quote the Good Friday agreement have actually read it.
The Good Friday agreement is very explicit that the sovereign government, the UK Government must be rigorously impartial in how it administers Northern Ireland and we all need to respect the fact that the aspirations about unionist people and nationalist people are equal.
In an interview with BBC News about the Treasury’s £2.1bn no deal planning announcement, Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said this was relatively small sum compared to what a no deal Brexit could cost the economy.
If some of that is spent on things which are only needed in the event of no deal, and we don’t end up with no deal, then of course it will be wasted money. But I think we should probably see it, and the government would see it, as a form of insurance policy. If in the end it is not needed, it is not wasted, because it has at least insured us to some extent against what might happen.
The important thing is, in the context of what the impact on the public finances overall would be of a no deal Brexit, and they would be very significantly negative, as the Office of Budget Responsibility said just a couple of weeks ago, actually a couple of billion is rather little compared with the tens of billions we would probably lose as a result of a smaller economy.
Johnson also claimed there was “complete consensus, including among Brexit supporters” that the economy was about £40bn smaller today than it would have been had the UK voted remain in 2016. There was also consensus that, in the short and medium term, a no deal Brexit would shrink the economy further, he said.
Here is the Evening Standard’s take on the Bank of England’s inflation report.
In an interview with BBC Sajid Javid, the chancellor, was asked if he was comfortable spending so much money on no deal planning, and potentially increasing the deficit, when previously he was part of a Cameron/Osborne government that worked hard to cut borrowing. Javid suggested that was not a problem because the economy was now robust. He replied:
Well, our economy is very strong. The effects of the hard work of the British people [have been] incredibly strong. In fact, this year we are forecast by the IMF to grow faster than France, than Germany, than Italy, and we want to make sure we use the strength of the economy to meet the needs of the British people. And we can afford to make many choices. Eventually, at some point, we will have a budget and we will set out exactly how we’re going to do that.
But Javid refused to say when the budget would be.
Talking of the Financial Times, it has published a useful report today (paywall) about how prepared the EU and the UK are for a no deal Brexit. It includes this telling graphic.
This is from Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times.
At its regular press conference this morning the European commission said that “both sides reiterated their positions” when David Frost, Boris Johnson’s chief Brexit adviser, met EU officials for talks in Brussels this week. The commission’s spokeswoman Mina Andreeva said:
We will continue our contacts and, at the latest, the G7 in Biarritz will be an opportunity for the two leaders – president [Jean-Claude] Juncker and Prime Minister Johnson – to meet.
Asked if the UK put forward any ideas to break the Brexit deadlock, Andreeva said:
This question is best addressed to the UK authorities, if they have other proposals in mind.
From the commission’s side the EU position is clear because it has been provided by the European council.
The withdrawal agreement is not up for reopening while we are open to work on the political declaration should the UK wish so.
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