Labour has challenged Rishi Sunak to say how much money he “wasted” by using a jet to travel from London to Leeds yesterday. (See 12.31pm.) Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, said:
Families will be rightly angered by this show of extravagance by Rishi Sunak.
Patients and staff are crying out for action from this government in the midst of a crisis in our NHS while the prime minister jets from London to Leeds for a photo op.
The prime minister must come clean about how much taxpayers’ money was wasted on this 36-minute plane journey for a three-hour visit at the height of a cost of living crisis.
As the Mirror’s Dan Bloom points out, even though government ministers have repeatedly described this as legislation for “minimum safety levels” rather than “minimum service levels”, which is the standard term for this sort of law (the acronym, MSL, is the same), the word safety does not appear in the bill at all.
The strikes (minimum service levels) bill only runs to 12 pages (which, for a major government bill, is very short). It sets an outline for how minimum service levels would work, but the exact details of what minimum service levels would be (for example, how many ambulances would have to be available during an ambulance strike, or how many teachers would have to work during a teachers’ strike) are matters for consultation, and are not set out in the bill.
Under the current law, provided a union organises a strike in accordance with rules set out in the Trade...
The SP chief also dismissed the govt’s claims of mobile phone manufacturing in the state, saying only the assembly of devices was taking place with components imported from China, Taiwan and Korea ...