Tory leadership race live: Liz Truss blames Treasury’s ‘economic orthodoxy’ for UK’s stunted growth

The role of elected mayor is to be scrapped in Liverpool – despite coming out as the favourite option in a consultation of city residents, PA Media reports. PA says:

At a meeting on Wednesday, the council voted to remove the role of city mayor and replace it with a council leader and cabinet executive.

The change will come in next May when an all-out election is held.

The role of elected city mayor was created in 2012 and held by Joe Anderson until he decided not to stand for re-election last year after his arrest as part of a fraud investigation.

It is currently held by Labour’s Joanne Anderson, no relation to her predecessor, who became the first black female mayor last May.

As well as having an elected city mayor, Liverpool also has a Lord Mayor and metro-mayor of the Liverpool city region, Steve Rotheram.

The council held a consultation with residents to ask whether they would prefer the city to be run by an elected mayor, a committee or a council leader with cabinet.

The consultation was responded to by 11,519 people, which the meeting heard is about 4% of the electorate.

Of those who responded, 40.9% wanted to keep the role of mayor, 32.9% preferred a committee model and 23.6% opted for council leader.

Truss struggling to win support of Scottish Tories who fear she’s too close to Johnson

Libby Brooks

Liz Truss is struggling to win over Scottish Tories, as many fear that a “Boris continuity candidate” will have precisely the same effect that Johnson has done on their ratings.

Amid Partygate allegations, the Scottish Tories plunged to their worst electoral result in a decade in May’s council elections.

Party sources have briefed that Truss, despite her Paisley upbringing and claims to be a “child of the union”, is “too close to Boris”.

Only one MSP – Oliver Mundell – has so far declared his support for her, while former leader Ruth Davidson has written in the Telegraph this morning supporting Rishi Sunak, saying: “Now is not the time to gamble with the nation’s bank balance.”

Both Truss and Sunak have maintained the Downing Street line that they would not grant Holyrood the powers needed to hold a legal referendum.

This morning, the supreme court confirmed that it plans to hear the case on whether the Scottish parliament can hold a legal referendum without permission from Westminster on 11 and 12 October, just after the SNP’s annual conference.

The Home Office’s response to the surge in people arriving in small boats across the English Channel is “poor” and the “system is overwhelmed”, a major report by the borders watchdog has said.

In a foreword to the report, David Neal, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, said:

The number of small boat crossings in the Channel has reached such a level that it has been described as a crisis and the number one priority for the Home Office.

The volume is unprecedented, and on some days the system is clearly overwhelmed.

The Home Office’s performance in delivering an effective and efficient response to the challenge posed by the increasing volume of migrant arrivals via small boats is poor.

In my judgment, this arises principally from a refusal to transition from an emergency response to what has rapidly become steady state, or business as usual. This refusal permeates every aspect of the Home Office’s response.

Systems, processes and resourcing pathways, which months into the crisis should be routine, codified, auditable and familiar, have been delivered at ‘best effort’. This is not good enough.

Data, the lifeblood of decision-making, is inexcusably awful. Equipment to carry out security checks is often first generation and unreliable.

Extreme operational conditions, where resources are stretched, will inevitably lead to some degradation in data. Staff on the ground are doing their very best, but they are tired.

A record surge in Britain’s borrowing costs in June, pushed up by soaring inflation, has put the government’s spending deficit on course to reach more than £100bn this year, almost double its pre-pandemic level, my colleague Phillip Inman reports.

Back to Liz Truss, and here is a summary of the main points from her interview with Nick Robinson on the Today programme.

• Truss claimed that “economic orthodoxy” followed by governments over the past 20 years has failed to deliver proper economic growth. (See 9.38am.) The Labour party is also saying that the big problem over the past 12 years has been the UK’s relatively poor performance on growth, although its analysis of why growth has been so weak is not the same as Truss’s. She blamed ideas backed by the Treasury and the Financial Times. Chris Giles, the FT’s economics editor, says he was surprised to learn he’s been running the country – not Truss and her colleagues.

• Truss claimed her tax cuts would bring down inflation. She said: “My tax cuts will decrease inflation.” When it was put to her that most leading economists think they would be inflationary, she cited Patrick Minford as an economist who supports her view.

• She claimed that the tax increases introduced by Rishi Sunak as chancellor made the UK an international outlier, because no other countries were raising taxes in the current international climate.

• She rejected claims that her plan to cut taxes was a gamble, because there was a risk tax cuts could leave the government without the income it would need for public services. She said:

What is a gamble is what we’re doing at the moment. What is the gamble is what we’re doing at the moment because, currently, the United Kingdom is projected to head for a recession. So we need to do something different in order to get growth going, in order to put money in people’s pockets.

• She said she was committed to the extra spending for the NHS promised by Boris Johnson, even though she was also planning to get rid of the health and social care levy that would have funded some of it.

I wanted Boris to carry on as prime minister. I think he did a fantastic job with the 2019 election, winning us a massive majority. He delivered Brexit, he delivered the vaccines.

Regrettably, we got to a position where he didn’t command the support of our parliamentary party.

My judgment was that he admitted that he had made a mistake, or several mistakes, over the course of the last year, but the positive side of the balance sheet was extremely positive.

• She denied that she was modelling herself on Margaret Thatcher. Asked about claims she copies Thatcher’s photo opportunities, she said: “I am my own person.”

• She ruled out sending British troops to defend Ukraine. She said:

We are doing all we can to support Ukraine. We’ve led the international coalition on sending weapons, we’re putting the sanctions in place. But I do not support the direct involvement of UK troops.

• She said she was “wrong” to vote for remain in 2016. She said:

I fully embraced the choice that the people of Britain have made. I was wrong and I am prepared to admit I was wrong. Some of the portents of doom didn’t happen and instead we have actually unleashed new opportunities.

• She claimed she was someone with “the toughness, the grit” to take on the Whitehall machine and drive through change.

The first report from the Commons privileges committee relating to its inquiry into whether Boris Johnson lied to MPs about Partygate is out – and some of its contents will be worrying for Downing Street.

The committee, which is chaired by the Labour MP Harriet Harman, has not even started the main work on its investigation, but it has published a 39-page report setting out how it will proceed. This shows that the MPs are being exceptionally thorough – which is not surprising because an inquiry of this kind is unprecedented in modern times.

Here are the main points.

• The committee will seek to take evidence from Johnson and others in public in the autumn. Previously it had said there would be oral hearings, but it had not confirmed that these would be in public.

• Johnson and other witnesses giving oral evidence will have to give evidence on oath.

• Johnson could face a recall petition, which could lead to a byelection in his constituency, if the committee were to recommend a lengthy suspension from parliament as a punishment. If an MP gets suspended from the Commons for 10 sitting days or more following a recommendation from the standards committee, the provisions of the Recall of MPs Act can apply. There was some doubt as to whether the same rule would apply if the privileges committee recommended a 10-day suspension, but the committee says legal advice says it does. It says:

Among the documents published today is a formal determination from Commons Speaker Rt Hon Sir Lindsay Hoyle MP, following independent legal advice, regarding the interpretation of the Recall of MPs Act 2015 in the hypothetical event that the privileges committee were to recommend the sanction of suspension.

The Speaker has ruled that the committee of privileges is a committee concerned with the standards of conduct of individual MPs, and therefore any suspension of the requisite length (10 sitting days or 14 calendar days) following on from a report from that committee will attract the provisions of the Recall of MPs Act.

• The committee says that, even if Johnson did not intentionally lie to MPs about Partygate, he could still be found to have committed a contempt of parliament. It says:

The report also includes a paper from the clerk of the journals, discussing the definition of a contempt in the context of the committee’s inquiry. The committee agrees with the clerk of the journals that the focus of the house’s jurisdiction is on whether or not an action or omission obstructs or impedes or has a tendency to obstruct or impede the functioning of the house, with the consequence that, looking at contempt in broad terms, intention is not necessary for a contempt to be committed. The clerk’s memo explains that while “much of the commentary has focussed on whether Mr Johnson “deliberately” or “knowingly” misled the Committee”, “this wording is not in the motion”.

In her paper, the clerk of the journals adds: “It is for the committee and the house to determine whether a contempt has occurred and the intention of the contemnor is not relevant to making that decision. Intent has been considered relevant when a committee has been considering whether or not there should be penalties for a contempt, or the severity of those penalties”; her paper gives examples of previous cases in which committees have considered intent in the course of assessing the seriousness of the behaviour concerned.

This ruling is bad for Johnson because he has already admitted that some of the comments he made to MPs about Partygate were misleading. The committee is now saying that that could have been a contempt of parliament, even if there was no intention to deceive.

But the committee is only likely to recommend a serious punishment, such as suspension from the Commons, if it concludes the contempt was intentional.

• The committee says it will apply the “balance of probabilities” standard of proof when deciding whether or not Johnson lied to MPs.

• It confirms that procedures will be in place to allow whistleblowers to give evidence to the committee without their identity being revealed.

Good morning. Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, is now favourite in the contest to be next Tory leader and prime minister and she has just given her first proper broadcast interview of the campaign, to Nick Robinson on the Today programme.

The main division between Truss and Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor and the only other candidate left in the Tory leadership contest, is that Truss is demanding huge, immediate tax cuts now. She says they are needed to jumpstart the economy and avoid recession. Sunak says tax cuts now would be inflationary, and that they should only be implemented when affordable.

What was interesting about Truss’s interview is that she doubled down on her argument, claiming that her approach was needed because the economic orthodoxy accepted by governments of both parties over the past 20 years was wrong. She told Robinson:

The fact is we’ve had economic policy – not just under this government, for the past two decades – there’s been a consensus on our economic policy, and it hasn’t delivered economic growth ….

We have had a consensus of the Treasury, of economists, of the Financial Times, of other outlets, peddling a particular type of economic policy for the last 20 years. And it hasn’t delivered growth …

What I know about the Treasury from having worked there is they do have an economic orthodoxy and they do resist change. And what people in Britain desperately need now is change.

Truss accepted that her plans for tax cuts would cost roughly £38bn a year. But she said they were affordable within the government’s current fiscal rules and, when Robinson challenged her to name a single economist who did not think tax cuts now would be inflationary, she cited one, Patrick Minford. She said she agreed with Minford’s argument, which is that tax cuts would be good for the supply side of the economy (people would have more incentive to work, or set up a business), and that this would reduce inflation.

In her attack on Treasury thinking, Truss was reflecting what Boris Johnson told MPs yesterday as he ended PMQs with advice for his successor.

But she also seems to be following another economic thinker less popular in Tory circles. Robinson put it to her that, if she favoured a big increase in borrowing to revive the economy, she should have voted for Jeremy Corbyn. Truss did not address his point directly, but last night John McDonnell, Corbyn’s shadow chancellor, suggested he agreed with the analysis. He told ITV’s Peston show:

I was then told this idea of borrowing to grow the economy then let it pay for itself is ludicrous … What have we just heard [from the Tory leadership contest is] let’s borrow to grow the economy.

It’s extraordinary they’re repeating my agenda but at the same time, doing it in a way which, to be frank, I think is completely unrelated to the real world we’re living in which is the immediate crisis of the cost of living and climate change.

There was a lot more in Truss’s Today interview. I will post a full summary shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: The Office for National Statistics publishes the latest crime figures for England and Wales.

Morning: Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak hold a private hustings with Conservative councillors from the Local Government Association.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

Afternoon: Truss is expected to hold a campaign event outside London.

I 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