New report upgrades outlook for UK economy with growth now forecast at 1.1% rather than 0.7%
The International Monetary Fund has warned the trade tariffs favoured by US presidential candidate Donald Trump could hurt global growth, as it upgraded its forecast for the UK economy.
The Washington-based organisation said tariffs trigger tit-for-tat trade wars that impoverish the economies involved in the dispute and the wider global economy.
Continue reading...Downing Street says government ‘shocked’ at inheriting prisons crisis as hundreds of prisoners get early release. This live blog is closed
The funeral of Alex Salmond, the former Scottish first minister who died suddenly earlier this month after delivering a speech in North Macedonia, will be held on Tuesday 29 October, his family has announced.
The funeral will be at Strichen parish church in Aberdeenshire. It will be conducted by Rev Ian McEwan, a friend of the family, and only family and close friends are invited. Salmond will be laid to rest in Strichen cemetery.
According to the Eurostat data, England and Wales had 144 prisoners per 100,000 head of population, the 8th highest rate among EU countries and the highest amongst western European jurisdictions. Scotland had the 9th highest with 137 prisoners per 100,000. Northern Ireland had 76 prisoners per 100,000 of population and was ranked 24th.
Continue reading...Rahima Mahmut, in exile in the UK, ‘disappointed’ at failure to describe Beijing’s crackdown on minority as genocide
A leading Uyghur activist has accused the Labour government of “falling behind” its allies in failing to stand up to China, after ministers backtracked on plans to push for formal recognition of the country’s treatment of the minority group as genocide.
Speaking after David Lammy’s first visit to China as UK foreign secretary, the human rights activist Rahima Mahmut, who has lived in exile in the UK since 2000, said she had hoped there would be a shift in UK policy once the party came into power, including following the US in declaring a continuing genocide in Xinjiang.
Continue reading...Move could raise £24bn a year say signatories including Jeremy Corbyn as polls suggest public support
A cross-party group of 30 MPs has urged Rachel Reeves to impose a wealth tax on Britain’s rich in next week’s budget rather than announce spending cuts that would hit the most poor hardest.
In a letter to the chancellor, the MPs – including the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his then shadow chancellor, John McDonnell – say she could raise £24bn a year from a 2% tax on wealth above £10m and lay the foundations for a fairer, more sustainable economy.
Continue reading...HMRC and FCA asked to look into property deals with Saifuzzaman Chowdhury now under investigation for corruption in Dhaka
British regulators have been urged by MPs to examine the relationship between London estate agents, lawyers and lenders and a former Bangladeshi government minister under investigation for alleged corruption.
Saifuzzaman Chowdhury was the land minister in Bangladesh until earlier this year, when the government of Sheikh Hasina was spectacularly toppled, after her regime’s violent suppression of student protests.
Continue reading...Loans will be repaid using interest generated by $300bn of frozen Russian assets held in the west
Britain is to lend Ukraine an additional £2.26bn and allow Kyiv to spend the money on weapons to fight off the Russian invasion as part of a wider $50bn (£38.5bn) loan programme expected to be confirmed by G7 members later this week.
The loans will be repaid using interest generated by the $300bn of frozen Russian assets held in the west, with the extra funds promised as the US heads towards a presidential election where support for Ukraine is a divisive issue.
Continue reading...Tory rightwinger may have breached ministerial code as attorney general between 2021 and 2022
Suella Braverman forwarded government documents to her private email accounts at least 127 times while serving as attorney general, in a potential breach of the ministerial code.
The Tory rightwinger routinely forwarded correspondence, with at least 290 documents attached, when she was the government’s top legal officer between 2021 and 2022, according to a freedom of information request.
Continue reading...Analysis from business and trade department says bill will significantly strengthen workers’ right. This live blog is closed
In the past the weirdest budget tradition was the convention that the chancellor is allowed to drink alcohol while delivering the budget speech. But since no chancellor has taken advantage of the rule since the 1990s (and no one expects Rachel Reeves to be quaffing on Wednesday week), this tradition is probably best viewed as lapsed.
But Sam Coates from Sky News has discovered another weird budget ritual. On his Politics at Jack and Sam’s podcast, he says:
Someone messaged me to say: ‘Did you know that over in the Treasury as they’ve been going over all these spending settlements, in one of the offices, its full of balloons. And every time an individual department finalises its settlements, one of the balloons is popped.’
There couldn’t be a more important time for us to have this conversation.
The NHS is going through what is objectively the worst crisis in its history, whether it’s people struggling to get access to their GP, dialling 999 and an ambulance not arriving in time, turning up to A&E departments and waiting far too long, sometimes on trolleys in corridors, or going through the ordeal of knowing that you’re waiting for a diagnosis that could be the difference between life and death.
We feel really strongly that the best ideas aren’t going to come from politicians in Whitehall.
They’re going to come from staff working right across the country and, crucially, patients, because our experiences as patients are also really important to understanding what the future of the NHS needs to be and what it could be with the right ideas.
Continue reading...Health secretary launches consultation on government’s move to transform NHS in England from ‘analogue to digital’
Wes Streeting is to unveil plans for portable medical records giving every NHS patient all their information stored digitally in one place on Monday, despite fears over breaching privacy and creating a target for hackers.
The health secretary is launching a major consultation on the government’s plans to transform the NHS from “analogue to digital” over the next decade. It will offer “patient passports” containing health data that can be swiftly accessed by GPs, hospitals and ambulance services.
Continue reading...Andrei Kelin says by providing weapons Britain is ‘killing Russian soldiers and civilians’
Moscow’s ambassador to London has said the UK is waging a proxy war against Russia, while predicting the “end of Ukraine” as Russian invading forces make deeper advances into the country.
In an interview with the BBC, Andrei Kelin said Ukraine continued to fight but claimed “the resistance is more feeble and feeble”.
Continue reading...UK health secretary says people will not be ‘involuntarily jabbed’ but that medications could be ‘gamechanging’
Wes Streeting has denied his plans to give new weight-loss jabs to unemployed people to help them back into work would result in a “dystopian future” where overweight people would be “involuntarily jabbed”.
The UK health secretary acknowledged that weight-loss drugs were not, on their own, the answer to the nation’s obesity crisis after he suggested this week that they could have a “monumental” impact on getting more people working.
Continue reading...The chancellor is set to announce a revenue-raising budget designed to reset Britain’s public finances
Rachel Reeves is set to use one of the most pivotal budgets of recent times to call on businesses to pay more tax to help restore the NHS, amid warnings that the health service has been left with a £9bn hole in its finances.
The chancellor is expected to stake her reputation on a tax-raising budget designed as a reset of the public finances. She has already had to deal with cabinet skirmishes over funding unveiled alongside the statement. However, Reeves is understood to believe that the public will accept a multibillion-pound hike in business taxes if it is linked to repairing the health system’s finances.
Continue reading...Film festival organisers make ‘heartbreaking’ decision not to show Undercover: Exposing the Far Right amid concerns over staff welfare
A documentary that lifts the lid on a “race science” network of far-right activists in Britain and its links to a rich American funder of eugenics research has been pulled from the London Film Festival (LFF) at the last minute due to safety concerns.
The organisers have taken the “heartbreaking decision” to cancel the planned screening of the “exceptional” Undercover: Exposing the Far Right this weekend due to fears about the welfare of audiences, staff and security working in the festival venues.
Continue reading...Foreign secretary discussed China’s treatment of Uyghurs and support of Russia as well as ‘areas of cooperation’
David Lammy pressed his Chinese counterpart on human rights concerns and China’s support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine during talks in Beijing, the Foreign Office has said.
The foreign secretary had been under pressure to take a tough line on a range of human rights issues with the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, when the pair met on Friday during Lammy’s first visit to China since taking office.
Continue reading...Ministers heralded ‘record-breaking’ £63bn total at London event but £16.5bn appears to have preceded July election
About a quarter of the investment announced by the government at its summit this week appears to have been secured or initiated before Labour came to power.
Ministers touted £63bn of investment at the summit on Monday, where they hosted hundreds of company bosses in a showcase of the UK’s pro-growth policies.
Continue reading...Whitehall source says it would only allow NHS to ‘stand still’ on waiting lists rather than reduce them
The NHS is set to get an inflation-busting 4% rise in its budget next year but health chiefs have said it may not allow them to cut waiting lists for another 18 months, the Guardian has learned.
The health service is on course to be one of the big winners in Rachel Reeves’s spending review on 30 October if it gets a proposed 4% real-terms uplift from the Treasury.
Continue reading...Policy known as ‘fiscal drag’ could bring in as much as £7bn a year after 2028, while dragging workers into paying more tax
Rachel Reeves is expected to extend a “stealth” freeze on income tax thresholds beyond the 2028 deadline set by the previous Conservative government to raise billions of pounds in the budget.
The chancellor is contemplating the move, first reported by the Financial Times, as she seeks tax-raising measures to plug a £40bn shortfall in the public finances that Labour claims was left by the Conservatives.
Continue reading...Rachel Reeves is to seek advice from City experts to ensure big projects’ value for money and reassure markets
Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is taking action to ensure her budget plan for a multibillion-pound increase in government borrowing to fund infrastructure projects avoids a Liz Truss-style meltdown in financial markets.
Ahead of her tax and spending event on 30 October, the chancellor is convening on Friday the first meeting of a taskforce of leading City figures to advise on infrastructure projects. The government will also launch a watchdog to oversee public works and ensure value for money for the taxpayer.
Continue reading...Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick took questions from Conservative party members on Thursday night
Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have faced off for what could be the only televised clash of the Conservative leadership contest. It was not actually a debate: the pair took it in turns to take questions from party members and GB News viewers.
Below are some of the things we learned.
Continue reading...Contender says ‘it is about being brave and not being scared that the Guardian is going to mock us’
Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, has told MPs that magistrates are getting powers to sentence offenders for longer – to reduce the number of prisoners being held on remand and to cut the backlog in crown courts
In a statement to MPs, she said that, although this would increase the prison population slightly, by reducing the number of offenders being held on remand it would free up spaces in reception prisons where overcrowding is particularly serious.
Unless we address our remand population, we could still see a collapse of the system, not because of a lack of cells, but because we do not have those cells in the places that we need them. It is therefore crucial that we bear down on the remand population.
This government inherited a record crown court backlog. Waits for trials have grown so long that some cases are not heard for years.
The impact on victims of crime is profound. For some justice delayed is, as the old saying goes, justice denied as victims choose to withdraw from the justice process altogether rather than face the pain of a protracted legal battle.
I have made it my personal mission to constrain the Kremlin, closing the net around Putin and his mafia state using every tool at my disposal.
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