Party leader seeks to win back British Indian voters after anger over party’s perceived support for Pakistan in Kashmir dispute
Keir Starmer has promised to reset relations between the Labour party and India after years of tension between the two.
The Labour leader said on Monday that his party had made mistakes in its approach to relations with the world’s most populous country, and that it would seek closer ties if elected to power next year.
Continue reading...PM likely to be questioned during Nottingham visit on King’s Fund report that says NHS is ‘more a laggard than a leader’
Lord Bethell, the former health minister, has welcomed the announcement from the government today about targeted lung cancer screening. But he thinks the government should go further.
The review by Javed Khan, published last summer, recommended raising the age at which people can buy cigarettes “by one year every year until no one can buy a tobacco product in this country”. Many Tories strongly oppose measures like this on libertarian grounds, and the government has not adopted the plan.
Continue reading...Party’s first female general secretary, who has died aged 61, was essential part of team behind party’s 1997 landslide victory
Margaret McDonagh, Labour’s first female general secretary, has been hailed as a “tour de force” and an essential part of the team that secured the 1997 landslide election victory for the party, after it was announced that she had died at the age of 61.
Baroness McDonagh, who was elevated to the House of Lords in 2004, was, in effect, Peter Mandelson’s deputy during the 1997 election and went on to oversee a second dominant campaign in 2001. She became the party’s general secretary in 1998. She had been diagnosed with brain cancer in 2021.
Continue reading...Prime minister says he knows people will be anxious about rate rise but ‘it is going to be OK’
Rishi Sunak has posted a thread on Twitter setting out what the government is doing to help people with the cost of living. It starts here.
He ends by saying “if we can hold our nerve” he is confident the plan will deliver.
Continue reading...Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves says party would force banks to take a range of steps to protect borrowers
Labour has piled further pressure on Rishi Sunak to take action to help struggling mortgage holders as the Bank of England prepares to raise interest rates again to levels not seen since before the 2008 financial crash.
Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, said on Wednesday that if Labour were currently in power, it would force banks to offer a range of support to borrowers, including letting them move on to interest-only mortgages and extending their repayment period.
Continue reading...Motion to bring back legislation on puppy smuggling and live exports that was part of Tory manifesto rejected in Commons
MPs have voted down an attempt by Labour to revive the government’s animal welfare bill.
Last month ministers announced they were dropping the kept animals bill, which was part of the Tories’ 2019 manifesto. The legislation aimed to clamp down on puppy smuggling and dog theft, as well as banning the live exports of farm animals.
Continue reading...Party reportedly looking to increase share in Lords, as Tory majority ‘could make life difficult’
Labour is reportedly devising plans to appoint dozens of peers to the House of Lords to prevent a Keir Starmer government being stymied by the upper chamber.
There are 174 Labour peers, making up 22% of the Lords, compared with 263 Conservatives and 183 unaligned crossbench peers.
Continue reading...Speech in Scotland shows willingness to face energy dilemma head-on, but green groups say fossil fuel end date must come soon
Scotland was a brave choice as the venue for the launch of Keir Starmer’s new energy and climate policy. Back in March, Rishi Sunak was planning to hold his “energy day” in Aberdeen, the UK’s oil and gas capital, but after criticism he switched to the much safer Oxfordshire.
Starmer knows that Labour needs to win back lost seats in Scotland, so visiting the Scottish capital for an important speech was a canny move. More than that, though, taking the launch to Edinburgh showed a willingness to face head-on Labour’s energy dilemma: how to shift the UK economy to a low-carbon footing, as net zero demands, without destroying high-quality jobs in carbon-intensive industries.
Continue reading...Theresa May says parliament must punish MPs who break rules as Penny Mordaunt says Johnson ‘undermined democratic process’
At the Labour event Keir Starmer is now speaking. He starts with a jibe at the SNP, saying the tide is turning in Scotland.
Turning to energy policy, he says Labour wants to promote security.
Can we still achieve great things? Can we unite and move forward? Can we still change, can we grow, can we get things done, can we build things? New industries, new technologies, new jobs; will they come to our shores, or will the future pass us by?
You can put it even more starkly. Around the world people want to know, are we still a great nation? If the question is about the British people, the answer is emphatically: yes.
Continue reading...Jonathan Reynolds and new DG Rain Newton-Smith hold ‘warm’ meeting after party cut ties due to sexual misconduct scandal
The Labour party has moved closer to ending its boycott of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), in an early sign that steps to rehabilitate the crisis-hit UK lobby group may be working.
Labour on Sunday confirmed its shadow business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, had met the new CBI director general, Rain Newton-Smith, last week.
Continue reading...Opposition finds fallout of Liz Truss mini-budget has raised average mortgage interest payments by £150 a week in two years
Homeowners are being hit with a “Tory mortgage penalty” of £7,000 a year with interest rates triple what they were two years ago, according to Labour.
Pat McFadden, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, blamed what he called the “reckless economic gamble” taken by the Conservatives during September’s mini-budget when Liz Truss was prime minister.
Continue reading...Leader Ed Davey says party will fight for both seats after resignations of Boris Johnson and Nadine Dorries
Sir Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, has ruled out a formal pact with Labour to encourage tactical voting in order to beat the Conservatives in the byelections triggered by Boris Johnson and Nadine Dorries’ shock resignations.
Dorries, one of Johnson’s fiercest cheerleaders, quit parliament on Friday after being told she would not be elevated to the House of Lords in Johnson’s resignation honours list. Johnson followed suit hours later, ditching his outer-London seat with a bitter resignation statement accusing Rishi Sunak of leading a government that is “not properly Conservative” and attacking the Partygate investigation.
Continue reading...Deputy Labour leader says former PM has ‘no respect’ for Tory voters and ‘knows he is in the wrong’
Boris Johnson is a “coward” who has “no respect” for the 2019 Conservative voters who put their faith in him, Labour’s deputy leader has said, after he dramatically quit parliament before the findings of a cross-party investigation into whether he lied to the Commons had been published.,
The former prime minister resigned on Friday night after learning that an investigation into the Partygate scandal found he misled parliament, and he was likely to face a lengthy suspension from the Commons.
Continue reading...Former prime minister to be suspended for 10 days and will not stand again in Uxbridge and South Ruislip
Responding to Rachel Reeves’s comments about Labour’s green investment on the Today programme (see also 9.24am and 9.45am) Rebecca Newsom, Greenpeace UK’s head of politics, said:
Any U-turn would be a huge mistake. Without the necessary immediate investment, we will lose out on the creation of thousands of jobs needed as we phase out fossil fuels, and we will lose out on the opportunity to put green tech industries at the centre of our economy.
Rachel Reeves rightly cites the opportunities of green growth, but this prevarication on confirming the scale of investment needed from the start of a new Labour government risks throwing in the towel on the global race in green tech, with the US, China and the EU already far ahead.
Should this letter be ignored, and negotiations are not in place by the 17 June the NEU national executive will be discussing our next steps. This will include the consideration of NEU teacher members in England taking further strike action in the week beginning 3 July.
There are six school term weeks until the summer holiday. Up and down the country, head teachers are trying to plan their school budgets for next year and trying to cope with the rapidly growing problem of recruiting enough teachers to fill their classrooms.
By not publishing the STRB report, your department is withholding vital information about what proposals that body has made on teacher pay, which may or may not help with the recruitment difficulties. It is also withholding vital information about the funding of pay rises.
Continue reading...Lawyer for Covid inquiry announces ‘regrettable’ delays in handing over of information by government
Q: What would the minimum wage for workers be under your fair pay agreement for care workers? (See 10.47am.)
Starmer says his sister is a care worker. He knows how hard the job is.
Continue reading...Exclusive: party calls for developers without a licence to be barred from working on advanced AI tools
The UK should bar technology developers from working on advanced artificial intelligence tools unless they have a licence to do so, Labour has said.
Ministers should introduce much stricter rules around companies training their AI products on vast datasets of the kind used by OpenAI to build ChatGPT, Lucy Powell, Labour’s digital spokesperson, told the Guardian.
Continue reading...Labour leader to address union’s conference after its leader attacks plan to ban new North Sea oil and gas extraction
Keir Starmer will pledge to put “good, union jobs” at the heart of Labour’s energy policy during a speech to one of its biggest donor unions after its general secretary criticised a proposed ban on oil and gas expansion.
He will speak at the GMB’s annual conference on Tuesday, a day after he tried to calm a growing rift with its leadership over Labour’s energy policy.
Continue reading...Mayor of North of Tyne was told on Friday he is not on the longlist to be party’s candidate for North East
The Labour party’s decision to exclude a sitting Labour mayor from contesting a forthcoming mayoral contest has been described as a “major error” by Unite, the UK’s leading trade union.
Jamie Driscoll – often described as “the last Corbynista in power” since becoming the first mayor for North of Tyne since 2019 – learned on Friday that he had not made the longlist to be Labour’s mayoral candidate for the new north-east region.
Continue reading...Unless Britain develops a closer relationship with the EU it will continue to haemorrhage investment and jobs, says the GMB
The leader of one of the country’s biggest unions has urged Labour to conduct an “honest debate” about the economic damage being caused to working people by Brexit, as evidence grows that it is fuelling inflation and driving jobs and investment abroad.
In an interview with the Observer, Gary Smith, the general secretary of the GMB union, which is one of Labour’s biggest financial backers, giving more than £1m a year, said politicians of all parties had been too afraid to admit the adverse consequences that leaving the EU was having on jobs and life in working communities.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Ms A’s comments come as another MP, Geraint Davies, faces allegations of sexual harassment
A woman who was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a Labour MP has condemned the party’s complaints procedures as “fake” and “a political stunt” after the launch of a separate inquiry into claims against Geraint Davies.
The former member for Hartlepool, Mike Hill, was found by a tribunal last year to have victimised his former staff member, known as Ms A, after she spurned his advances. She said the party had initially ignored her complaints, then tried to cover them up, and had offered her little support during a four-year fight for justice.
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