Category Archives: UK news

Keir Starmer unveils green growth plan to counter Liz Truss’s tax cuts

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Labour pledges a revolution in green energy to ‘boost jobs and slash emissions’

Keir Starmer will pledge to deliver a new era of economic growth and permanently lower energy bills by turning the UK into an independent green “superpower” before 2030, through a massive expansion of wind and solar energy.

Announcing details of the plan exclusively to the Observer, the Labour leader says he will double the amount of onshore wind, triple solar and more than quadruple offshore wind power, “re-industrialising” the country to create a zero carbon, self-sufficient electricity system, by the end of this decade.

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Kwasi Kwarteng could borrow for the right reasons. These are the wrong ones

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Money spent on the green transition or skills would reap a dividend. But this cash is just going to the rich

The billions of pounds of extra borrowing signalled by Kwasi Kwarteng in his not-so-mini budget can be justified as long as the money isn’t flushed down the toilet.

Funds for renewable energy projects or to boost skills training would generate a return over the next decade.

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Birmingham broods over Tory treachery as Conservative party conference looms

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Tax cuts for the rich have not gone down well in Ladywood, the city constituency due to host the Conservatives’ annual gathering

Only the most bullish Conservative party strategist would have dared forecast the centre of Britain’s second-biggest city turning Tory anytime soon.

Yet as the real-life implications of the government’s mini-budget continued to crystallise on Saturday, anyone even contemplating a Conservative victory in central Birmingham should now be judged beyond delusional.

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The Crown series five to launch in November, Netflix confirms

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Royal drama, which will star Imelda Staunton as the Queen and Jonathan Pryce as Philip, will be streamed from 9 November

The fifth series of Netflix’s royal drama The Crown will launch on 9 November, it has been announced.

The date was shared during Netflix’s Tudum global fan event, which showcased upcoming series and films from the streamer – including a sneak peek at the third series of Bridgerton and a first look at Shonda Rhimes’ Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, a prequel centred on Queen Charlotte’s rise to prominence and power.

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Cut ‘symbolic gestures’, Braverman tells police in England and Wales

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Home secretary directs police chiefs to focus on ‘common-sense’ policing over diversity and inclusion initiatives

Suella Braverman has ordered police chiefs to spend less time on “symbolic gestures” and more time on policing.

In an open letter to police leaders in England and Wales, in which she set out her policing agenda, the new home secretary said diversity and inclusion initiatives “should not take precedence” over tackling crime.

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Services for county lines victims in England and Wales get funding boost

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Up to £5m allocated to help young people escape drug gangs, with money also going to helpline

Up to £5m has been allocated by the Home Office to support victims of county lines exploitation over the next three years.

Hundreds of victims will be helped to escape drug gangs following the expansion of support services in London, the West Midlands, Merseyside and Greater Manchester.

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Tories gambling with the finances of British people, says Starmer

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Labour leader attacks ‘casino economics’ in wake of £45bn package of tax cuts announced by chancellor

Sir Keir Starmer has accused the government of “gambling the mortgages and finances” of the British people with its “casino economics”.

Speaking before his party’s conference in Liverpool, the Labour leader tweeted: “Tory casino economics is gambling the mortgages and finances of every family in the country. Labour will secure growth for working people, that benefits all communities. My government will deliver a fairer, greener future.”

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Buzz stops: bus shelter roofs turned into gardens for bees and butterflies

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Bee bus stops first appeared in the Dutch city of Utrecht. Now the UK is planning for more than 1,000 and there is growing interest across Europe and in Canada and Australia

Butterflies and bees are getting their own transport network as “bee bus stops” start to pop up around UK cities and across Europe. Humble bus shelter roofs are being turned into riots of colour, with the number of miniature gardens – full of pollinator-friendly flora such as wild strawberries, poppies and pansies – set to increase by 50% in the UK by the end of this year.

Leicester is leading the charge with 30 bee bus stops installed since 2021. Derby has 18, and there are others in Southhampton, Newcastle, Sunderland, Derby, Oxford, Cardiff and Glasgow. Brighton council installed one last year after a petition was signed by almost 50,000 people.

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Police in Highlands find body of missing man in crashed car

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Police watchdog has been called in to investigate death of John Winton McNab, 86, found near Invermoriston

The police watchdog has been called in to investigate the death of an elderly man whose body was found in a crashed car two days after he was reported missing.

John Winton McNab, 86, was the driver of a grey Mercedes B discovered in the Highlands at about 1.20pm on Sunday 18 September.

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Forget Oxbridge: St Andrews knocks top universities off perch

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Latest Guardian University Guide shows leading trio are in league of their own for undergraduate courses

Oxbridge is being replaced at the apex of UK universities by “Stoxbridge” after St Andrews overtook Oxford and Cambridge at the top of the latest Guardian University Guide.

It is the first time the Fife university has been ranked highest in the Guardian’s annual guide to undergraduate courses, pushing Oxford into second and Cambridge into third.

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Tory MP Charles Walker expected to join Partygate committee

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Exclusive: Walker is to be involved in the inquiry into whether Boris Johnson misled MPs

The veteran Tory MP Charles Walker is expected to be handed a spot on the committee investigating Boris Johnson over claims he misled MPs over Partygate.

A well-respected, long-serving backbencher, who was vice-chair of the 1922 Committee for about a decade, Walker was quietly nominated by the Liz Truss government as the House of Commons went into conference recess.

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Time is against Liz Truss as she bets big on plan to turn economy around

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With an election two years away, any failure of her radical approach could shred the Tories’ credibility

When Liz Truss flew to the US this week on her first foreign trip as prime minister, she was unequivocal about how she would achieve her mission in office: “Lower taxes lead to economic growth, there is no doubt in my mind about that.”

There was not a quiver of self-doubt in her voice as she gave a round of television interviews at the top of the Empire State Building expanding on her plans for the economy and saying she was “willing to be unpopular” to push them through.

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Truss axes national security council, sparking ‘talking-shop’ concerns

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Labour says new merged foreign policy council could reduce Whitehall policy-makers’ focus on security

Liz Truss has scrapped the national security council and merged it with two Boris Johnson-era foreign policy committees in a structure that Labour warned risked diluting the government’s security focus.

Created in 2010 under the coalition, led by David Cameron and Nick Clegg, to better coordinate security policy after the disaster of the Iraq war, the NSC is now to be replaced by a broad eight-strong foreign policy and security council (FPSC).

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Mini-budget 2022: pound crashes as chancellor cuts stamp duty and top rate of income tax – live

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Tax cuts to cost Treasury around £37bn in 2023-24, official figures reveal

There are no urgent questions in the morning, and so Kwasi Kwarteng, the chancellor, will be delivering his statement soon after 9.30am.

The Commons starts sitting at 9.30am, but they always begin with prayers in private, and so Kwarteng will be up a few minutes later.

The last time they did it one third of the beneficiaries were people buying second homes or buy to let, so we are sceptical that this is the magic bullet to increase homeownership. What we really need to do is to build more houses and to help get people onto the property ladder by increasing the supply of housing.

When this has been done before, it has often fuelled an already hot market and many of the beneficiaries have been people buying a second or third home, rather than the first time buyers that we really want to help who are often trapped in private rented accommodation where they’re paying as much in rent every month as they would in a mortgage.

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Kwarteng accused of reckless mini-budget for the rich as pound plummets

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Strategy of sweeping tax cuts gets hostile reception from markets and economic thinktanks, leaving some Tory MPs aghast

Kwasi Kwarteng has been accused of delivering a reckless mini-budget for the rich after his £45bn tax-cutting package sent the pound crashing to its lowest level against the dollar in 37 years.

In a high-risk strategy designed to revive Britain’s stagnant economy, the new chancellor announced more than £400bn of extra borrowing over the coming years to fund the biggest giveaway since Tony Barber’s ill-fated 1972 budget.

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Disabled woman wins legal challenge against DWP over automatic benefit deduction

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High court rules DWP scheme to deduct money without consent is illegal and breaches ‘obligation of fairness’

A disabled former police officer has won a legal challenge against the Department for Work and Pensions over its policy of allowing utility companies to automatically deduct hundreds of pounds a year from individuals’ benefits without their consent.

Helen Timson, 51, of Leicester, argued it was unlawful and immoral that the DWP enabled water and energy firms to draw down up to 25% of a claimant’s monthly benefit income at source without undertaking any form of check with the claimant. Hundreds of thousands of claimants are understood to be subject to the deductions.

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Saudi foreign minister defends role in securing Ukraine prisoner swaps

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Prince Faisal bin Farhan al Saud decries as ‘cynical’ accusations his country was trying to improve its image after Khashoggi killing

It would be cynical to see Saudi Arabia’s efforts to secure the release of international prisoners held by Russian proxies in Ukraine as an attempt to improve the country’s image after the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, its foreign minister has said.

Prince Faisal bin Farhan al Saud said on Friday that Riyadh had first approached the UK government in April, shortly after Aiden Aslin, a British citizen, and others were captured at Mariupol, and had acted for compassionate reasons, hoping to negotiate their release.

This story was amended on Friday 23 September 2022 to correct the name of the Saudi foreign minister.

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Can I Tell You a Secret, episode 1: the beginning – podcast

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In the first part of a new series, the Guardian journalist Sirin Kale takes us to a small town in the north of England to uncover how one man began a decade of cyberstalking

In this new six-episode podcast, the Guardian journalist Sirin Kale investigates the story of Matthew Hardy, a cyberstalker who terrified people in his hometown and beyond for more than a decade.

His harassment would often start in the same way, a fake profile posing as a young woman with a simple message: “Hey hun, can I tell you a secret?”. This series attempts to untangle his web of deception to find out how and why he wreaked havoc over so many people’s lives.

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Tintagel among castles at risk unless England can hold back the tide

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English Heritage identifies six most vulnerable sites as climate change intensifies coastal erosion

The wonderful wildness of the spot, a rocky Cornish headland pounded relentlessly by Atlantic breakers, has inspired poets, artists and dreamers for many a century.

But Tintagel, immortalised in British mythology as the place of King Arthur’s conception, is one of a string of castles at risk of tumbling into the sea as climate change increases the pace of coastal erosion.

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Sunday roasting dwindles as cost of cooking crisis hits home

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Annual Good Food Nation survey finds a fifth of Britons no longer turn on their oven to save money

Families have crossed Sunday roasts, stews and home baking off the menu and in drastic cases no longer use their oven, as soaring energy costs force big changes in the kitchen.

One in four home cooks said they were less likely to prepare a roast dinner, while a fifth were not baking as many cakes or biscuits, according to the annual Good Food Nation report.

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