Category Archives: Politics

Treasury to delay publishing OBR forecast by six weeks after 7 October delivery – UK politics live

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Budget watchdog to give assessment of fiscal plans next week but public will have to wait until chancellor’s November statement

Following a meeting with the prime minister, Liz Truss, and the chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, the Office for Budget Responsibility has confirmed it will deliver an initial forecast on 7 October.

A spokesperson for the OBR said:

[The forecast] will, as always, be based on our independent judgment about economic and fiscal prospects and the impact of the government’s policies.

We discussed the economic and fiscal outlook, and the forecast we are preparing for the chancellor’s medium-term fiscal plan.

We will deliver the first iteration of that forecast to the chancellor on Friday 7 October, and will set out the full timetable up to 23 November next week.

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How Truss’s post-Brexit farming policy descended into chaos

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Rumours rife as farmers fear PM plans U-turn on financial subsidy measures to improve environment

The chaos in the English countryside began with the click of a civil servant’s mouse. At the end of last week, farmers who had been working with the government on environmental subsidy schemes saw that their regular meetings about it had been removed from their online diaries without warning.

This appeared to hint at what had been feared – that the new post-Brexit farming subsidy scheme was in danger of being scrapped.

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Truss and Kwarteng to hold back OBR forecasts for six weeks

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PM and chancellor say they will not publish projections until late November despite them being ready next week

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng will refuse to release forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) until more than six weeks after receiving them, despite calls for them to be published as soon as possible.

The prime minister and chancellor said they would only publish the independent forecasts on 23 November alongside a fiscal statement, despite them being ready on 7 October.

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Arab diplomats urge Liz Truss not to move British embassy to Jerusalem

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Private letter says ‘illegal’ plan could jeopardise free trade deal between UK and Gulf Cooperation Council

Arab ambassadors in London are urging Liz Truss not to go ahead with “an illegal and ill-judged” plan to move the British embassy to Jerusalem.

Some Arab diplomats have even said the plan could jeopardise talks on a highly prized free trade deal between the UK and the Gulf Cooperation Council due to be completed this year.

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OBR: we offered to update forecasts in time for ‘mini-budget’ – live

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Watchdog said it was ready to supply information, but was not asked to do so by Kwasi Kwarteng

Q: Can you reassure listeners that your judgment is better than that of people like the IMF and the Bank of England, who have criticised the mini-budget?

Truss says:

I have to do what I believe is right for the country and what is going to help move our country forward.

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Liz Truss to attend first meeting of European Political Community

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Inaugural summit of EU initiative that aims to unite Europe on issues such as security and energy to take place in Prague

Liz Truss will attend the inaugural summit of the European Political Community (EPC) next week, an initiative by the EU aimed at uniting the continent to work together on security and other common projects.

The prime minister plans to attend the first EPC summit in Prague on 6 October, a No 10 source told the Guardian, despite her scepticism about the EU-led initiative.

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Germany unveils €200bn help for consumers and says it won’t follow UK’s route

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Finance minister announces €200bn fund to protect citizens from rising gas prices driven by Russia’s war in Ukraine

Germany’s finance minister has vowed that he will not follow the UK “down the path of an expansionary fiscal policy” as his government announced a €200bn (£177bn) fund designed to protect consumers and businesses from rising gas prices driven by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Europe’s largest economy will reactivate an economic stabilising fund previously used during the global financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, said the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, at a joint press conference with the finance minister, Christian Lindner, and the economic minister, Robert Habeck, on Thursday afternoon.

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Treasury watchdog to ask Kwarteng to hand over growth forecasts

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Tory chair Mel Stride says watchdog needs to hear how chancellor will boost growth, and suggests one option might be via immigration

Kwasi Kwarteng will be called before parliament’s Treasury watchdog and asked to hand over independent growth forecasts, as its chairman said there is “not a very broad path” out of the current economic situation.

Mel Stride, a Conservative MP and chair of the Treasury committee, said Kwarteng was “very, very unlikely to reverse” the £45bn of unfunded permanent tax cuts he announced last Friday, even though that is an option. The alternative, he said, was to act quickly to “demonstrate to the markets that growth is realistic”. The third option would be deep cuts to public spending, but that would be difficult given the current pressure of inflation, Stride said.

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English district councils warn support services for poorest face axe

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Services such as debt advice and hardship funds under threat amid £400m bill caused by inflation

A network of councils in England is warning support services for families hit hardest by the cost of living crisis face being axed amid an unexpected £400m bill caused by soaring inflation.

Services that district councils have no legal obligation to provide – such as debt and benefits advice, hardship funds for families, homelessness prevention projects and help hubs for people facing poverty – are under threat.

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Most students think UK universities protect free speech, survey finds

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King’s College London finds 65% believe campuses places of ‘robust debate’ – but growing number disagrees

Most UK students say their universities are places of free speech and debate – although a growing number are aware of free speech being restricted on campus, a study published by King’s College London has found.

The analysis, by KCL’s Policy Institute, found that 65% of students agreed that “free speech and robust debate are well protected in my university”, a higher proportion than the 63% who felt that way in a survey three years ago.

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Bank of England in £65bn scramble to avert financial crisis

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Bank of England left with no action but to intervene after Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget

The Bank of England has been forced into emergency action to halt a run on Britain’s pension funds after the impact of Kwasi Kwarteng’s ill-received mini budget prompted fears of a 2008-style financial crisis.

Threadneedle Street said the fallout from a dramatic rise in government borrowing costs since the chancellor’s statement had left it with no choice but to intervene to protect the UK’s financial system.

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EU biometric entry system could multiply delays at Dover

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Additional requirements would be time-consuming and threaten capacity, Dover port boss says

Post-Brexit Channel border delays could multiply from next May, with a five-person vehicle being held for up to 10 minutes if the EU goes ahead with a planned biometric entry system, the Port of Dover has said.

The entry-exit system (EES), which is due to start in May 2023, will require all non-EU nationals to register their fingerprints and be photographed before entering the bloc.

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Truss ‘standing by Kwarteng’ as Treasury defends plans despite market turmoil – as it happened

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No 10 says PM has faith in chancellor, as Treasury minister says tax cuts are the ‘right plan’. This blog is now closed

Q: When would you get debt falling as a proprotion of GDP?

Starmer says Labour does want to get that down.

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Will Labour’s energy plans work?

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While there are questions about the pace of Labour’s proposals, criticism in rightwing newspapers is bizarrely wide of the mark

Labour’s ambitious plan for zero-carbon power by 2030 raises legitimate questions – which we’ll come to shortly – but the commentary in rightwing newspapers is bizarrely wide of the mark.

Perhaps the strangest was a Daily Telegraph editorial that claimed Labour’s plan “would make the country more dependent on imported gas, not less”. As should be obvious, the opposite is true.

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Labour promise of free breakfasts ‘first step on the road to rebuilding childcare’

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Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson to announce plan to fund breakfast clubs in every primary school

Labour will rebuild a new childcare system to ease the pressure on parents from the “end of parental leave right through to the end of primary school”, shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson said, starting with a pledge on free breakfast clubs.

Phillipson will announce on Wednesday that fully funded breakfast clubs for every primary school in England would be funded by the revenues raised by restoring the top rate of income tax to 45p, if Labour were elected.

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‘Great British Railways is dead’: rail industry at lowest ebb since the days of Railtrack

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Grant Shapps ‘revolutionary’ GBR plan faces huge challenges

Barely 18 months have elapsed since a starry-eyed Grant Shapps unveiled the blueprint for a “revolutionary” Great British Railways, but it already has the flavour of an optimistic misnomer. Even an adequate British railway would be welcomed by those passengers stranded by everything from Avanti’s collapse to failing infrastructure and unprecedented strikes.

Only a fraction of the timetabled trains continue to run between London and Britain’s biggest cities, though operator Avanti has pledged to start its recovery to full service this week. National strikes, the likes of which had not been seen for 30 years, are now a regular occurrence, with little sign of breakthrough in talks. Infrastructure projects have been pared back or shelved, with the public all but gaslit with reannounced schemes for new railways.

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Truss and Kwarteng had row over sterling crisis response, say Whitehall sources

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First signs of friction between PM and chancellor emerge as pound falls to historic low following mini-budget

The first signs of friction between Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng over how to deal with the tanking pound have emerged, after the pair met in No 10 to thrash out how to respond on Monday.

Downing Street rebuffed talk of a split between No 10 and No 11 over how to deal with the market reaction to the mini-budget, and denied that there was a row.

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Homeowners warned of ‘significant’ rise in UK interest rates

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Bank of England’s chief economist speaks out after mini-budget, with financial markets expecting rates to reach up to 6%

Britain’s homeowners have been warned to brace themselves for a “significant” increase in interest rates from the Bank of England in response to Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax-cutting mini-budget last week.

Huw Pill, Threadneedle Street’s chief economist, added to the concerns of millions of mortgage payers who have already seen hundreds of home loan products pulled by lenders in anticipation of a big increase in the cost of borrowing.

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Great British Energy: what is it, what would it do and how would it be funded?

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The details behind Keir Starmer’s proposed publicly owned energy company when Labour take power

The key pledge of Keir Starmer’s Labour conference speech was the proposed launch of Great British Energy, a publicly owned energy company to invest in clean UK power as part of the party’s commitment to “fight the Tories on economic growth”. But how does it work, and is it the same as renationalising energy?

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‘Fiscal sustainability’ plus rising borrowing costs could add up to cuts

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To make the sums work, some suggest Kwasi Kwarteng may include deep spending reductions in his medium-term fiscal plan

When Kwasi Kwarteng met City figures on Tuesday, the Treasury said he had “reiterated the government’s commitment to fiscal sustainability”: though the grim faces of attendees in the official photos suggested they may not have been terribly reassured.

Some analysts are now warning that with borrowing costs rising sharply, and the chancellor determined not to water down his radical tax plans, “fiscal sustainability” points to one thing: spending cuts.

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