Lili Stebbings www.devonlive.com 

Police have warned people to stay away from an East Devon beach following a large cliff fall. Rural East Devon Police posted a tweet to remind people not to walk on the beach due to the unstable cliffs.

The tweet said: “Another large cliff fall this morning. Reminder to beach users not to walk on the beach East of #Sidmouth due to unstable cliffs which could fall at any time.”

Emergency services are at the scene this morning including police and coastguards.

We are facing an economic storm alone, the government is missing in action.

Observer editorial www.theguardian.com 

The UK’s cost of living crisis is set to get much worse. Last week, the Bank of England raised interest rates by 0.5 percentage points to 1.75% and forecast that inflation would spike at 13% by the end of the year. It also said that Britain would experience a prolonged recession and living standards would drop by 5% in the next year or so, the biggest fall since records began.

This comes after 15 years of stagnant living standards: the poorest fifth of households experienced zero growth in average household incomes between 2005 and the start of the pandemic. The energy price cap, just over £1,200 in 2019, is now forecast to reach £3,600 in the autumn; rising energy costs account for around half of the inflation rate. It will leave families on low incomes unable to meet basic housing, heating and food costs and many parents facing existential choices around how to house and feed their children. Russian president Vladimir Putin is responsible for the global energy price shock that is driving up inflation everywhere. As a result of the war in Ukraine, global gas prices have spiked as Russia has cut supply to Europe via the Nordstream 1 pipeline. Putin has threatened further consequences if the west imposes more sanctions.

But the UK, forecast to have the lowest growth of any wealthy nation next year by the IMF and OECD, has been left particularly exposed. We have barely any gas storage capacity as a result of government decisions and the economy has suffered from a long-term crisis of productivity. Productivity growth dropped significantly after the 2008 financial crisis and has never recovered. The sluggish growth in the decade that followed was propelled instead by consumer spending, fuelled by resurgent house prices. A decade of public spending cuts has left low-paid people further exposed as tax credits and benefits have been eroded, public services unable to meet demand and widened regional inequalities.

Brexit has compounded these structural economic issues. What Britain needed after the financial crisis was a plan to rebalance the economy away from its reliance on the housing bubble and towards investment- and export-led growth. Those countries that have enjoyed tentative recoveries after Covid have done so as a result of exports. Britain, on the other hand, has seen business investment and exports contract as a product of Boris Johnson’s hard Brexit. One estimate has suggested that the economy is already 5% smaller than it would have been had the UK remained part of the single market and customs union. This amounts to billions of pounds lost each year from household incomes and public services’ budgets. It is an indulgence Britain can ill afford, a decision that will be looked back on as a ludicrous act of economic self-harm at a time of global economic crisis.

Many people will be experiencing a financial crisis by the autumn, facing defaulting on their mortgage or being unable to pay their rent. Yet the prime minister and the chancellor are now abroad on holiday. Meanwhile, the contest between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss to become the next Conservative leader continues to play out. One will be selected by Conservative party members on 5 September and will become responsible for leading the country through this economic emergency. Yet their proposed solutions are geared towards attracting the support of fewer than 200,000 members rather than the pressing needs of the country.

Sunak remains a deficit hawk who would leave the NHS, schools and other public services horribly exposed to the real spending cuts that would result from double-digit inflation and who, it last week emerged, has boasted about diverting funding away from the country’s poorest areas. Truss has pledged to loosen fiscal policy by £30bn, but by handing out tax cuts that will disproportionately benefit the more affluent and do nothing for people who do not earn enough to pay tax. She has explicitly said she is opposed to the targeted measures so desperately needed to ease the burden for low-income families. The Bank of England’s rate rise, which aims to lower inflation by increasing unemployment and suppressing growth further, risks making an already painful recession even worse.

The Conservative party is failing the country. It matters not that Boris Johnson is a caretaker prime minister or that MPs are caught up in a bitter leadership contest. The government urgently needs to introduce a new support package before the autumn, which increases levels of universal credit and targets more one-off support at low-income households. It must also increase spending on public services in the face of the inflationary cost pressures that will amount to significant real cuts, with huge implications for the NHS, social care, schools and the police. It should increase the revenues from the windfall tax Sunak introduced on North Sea oil extraction while he was chancellor, by eliminating the generous tax breaks he included.

Britain is facing an economic storm that could be even worse than the economic impact of Covid. Yet the Conservative government is missing in action. If the new prime minister fails to act on the first day they take office, voters will not be quick to forgive them.

Conservatives MPs want to do a deal with Boris Johnson for him to quit parliament and in return axe the inquiry into whether he misled them over Partygate, as allies of the prime minister branded it a “witch-hunt”.

Owl – Why the inquiry must continue: “Boris absolutely will stay in politics. You won’t get rid of Boris.” Nadine Dorries.

Aubrey Allegretti www.theguardian.com 

Although he is due to leave No 10 in less than a month, a Commons privileges committee inquiry is still ongoing into the prime minister’s initial denials in December last year that any Covid laws were broken during lockdown.

Some of Johnson’s critics want him to stand down as an MP, to avoid the process keeping the spotlight on a deeply embarrassing issue for the party that has strained relations between colleagues.

The investigation, which is being led by a committee with a Tory majority that chose Labour’s Harriet Harman to chair it, is expected to drag on for months.

A tranche of evidence has been demanded by the committee, including Johnson’s diaries covering the 12 days on which parties were held in Westminster in defiance of Covid rules, as well as emails, WhatsApp messages, photographs, internal notes and a list of deleted documents.

If Johnson is found to have misled parliament, he could face suspension from the Commons and a recall petition, which, if signed by 10% of his Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituents, would trigger a byelection.

Unlike when Conservative MPs were whipped to save Owen Paterson, which sparked unrest within the party’s ranks over sleaze and scandal, some of Johnson’s fiercest Tory opponents said they would happily support ending the Partygate investigation if Johnson stepped down as an MP.

One source said: “I think there’s a case – not just for the parliament party, but for everyone – that we just move on from this psychodrama.”

The “quid pro quo” for backing a motion that would effectively wind up the probe would be Johnson “getting out of the Commons”, they added.

Another Tory MP who helped bring down Johnson said if the incoming prime minister decided to spare Johnson’s fate by tabling a motion in the Commons to end the investigation and asked for colleagues’ support, “that’s fine”.

“I can see the benefit of him going being satisfactory,” they said. “The overriding political objective has been achieved. It depends if our next leader wants to continue this internecine warfare in the Conservative party or will just take the hit.”

If Johnson did quit as an MP, a byelection would be triggered. He won the west London seat in 2019 with a majority of just 7,210. As the Conservatives have not held a poll lead since December 2021 and lost a string of safe Tory seats over the past year, holding Uxbridge and South Ruislip would not be a certainty.

One of Johnson’s closest allies, the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, insisted he would stay in politics, but suggested the privileges committee inquiry should be ended anyway.

“If this witch-hunt continues, it will be the most egregious abuse of power witnessed in Westminster,” she tweeted on Sunday. “It will cast serious doubt not only on the reputation of individual MPs sitting on the committee, but on the processes of parliament and democracy itself.”

Dorries also accused the seven MPs behind the investigation of operating a “kangaroo court”, and said Johnson had been “brutally removed”.

She called for fellow supporters of the outgoing prime minister to unite behind Liz Truss, the frontrunner in the Tory leadership race.

Asked what Johnson would do next, Dorries told the Sunday Express: “Boris absolutely will stay in politics. You won’t get rid of Boris.”

Zac Goldsmith, another Johnson ally who was made a peer by the prime minister when he lost his seat in 2019, said the Partygate investigation was “clearly rigged”.

“It is a jury comprised of highly partisan, vengeful and vindictive MPs, nearly all of whom are already on the record viciously attacking the person they are judging,” he tweeted. “It is an obscene abuse of power.”

The Tory backbencher Bill Cash has drafted a motion calling for the scrapping of the inquiry, claiming it is “unnecessary” given Johnson’s departure from Downing Street at the start of September.

Chris Bryant, a Labour MP who recused himself from chairing the inquiry after publicly criticising Johnson, said he was “not aware of a single historic instance when a privileges inquiry was abandoned”.

“Arguing for it to be abandoned shows an extraordinary degree of complicity in Johnson’s wrongdoing and a very casual attitude towards standards and truth-telling in parliament,” he said. “If the government tables a motion to rescind, the Tories will all be lashing themselves to the Johnson mast all over again.”

A spokesperson for the privileges committee said the inquiry was being conducted properly and denied there had been any change to the rules or terms of reference.

They said a background paper on whether Johnson could be found in contempt of parliament was prepared by a senior clerk, all of whom “are strictly politically impartial”.

They added that advice had been taken from the former court of appeal judge Sir Ernest Ryder, which was published for transparency.