Emergency legislation giving government power to instruct British Steel to keep plant open passed unopposed
Proposals to save British Steel’s Scunthorpe blast furnaces have been granted royal assent after an extraordinary parliament sitting on Saturday.
Emergency legislation giving the government the power to instruct British Steel to keep the plant open passed the Commons and Lords in a single day unopposed.
Continue reading...Ministers and more than 70 MPs attended photo call with Yuan Yang and Abtisam Mohamed whose travel ban was called unacceptable
Cabinet ministers and more than 70 parliamentarians staged a show of solidarity with two MPs who were detained and barred from entry to Israel in what was the first time British MPs had been banned from the country.
The health secretary, Wes Streeting, and the chief secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, joined the photocall in Westminster Hall on Monday with the MPs, along with Hamish Falconer and housing minister Rushanara Ali. It was organised by the Rochdale MP Paul Waugh.
Continue reading...Prime minister says ‘no one is pretending tariffs are good news’ during speech on car industry
In his Times article Keir Starmer describes the Trump tariffs as “the beginning of a new era”. He has been saying this at least since last Thursday, when he spoke about the tariffs at a Q&A with journalists at Labour’s local elections campaign launch. The speech this afternoon is being described as the PM’s most considered response so far to the global economic turmoil generated by the tariffs, but we have already heard quite a lot from Starmer on this topic already, in a Sunday Telegraph article yesterday and in No 10 briefings on the calls he had with world leaders about the situation over the weekend.
Is there a coherent strategy? On the basis of what he has said so far, there are at least five elements in the mix at the moment.
John Ryan is a local hero and we are truly humbled that he has publicly endorsed Reform UK ahead of May’s elections in Doncaster.
Continue reading...Economic impact assessment is one concession aiming to head off opposition from MPs, peers and creatives such as Paul McCartney and Tom Stoppard
The UK government is trying to placate peer and Labour backbencher concerns about copyright proposals by pledging to assess the economic impact of its plans.
Creative professionals including Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Tom Stoppard and Kate Bush have strongly criticised ministers’ proposals to let artificial intelligence companies train their models on copyright-protected work without permission, unless the rights holder opts out.
Continue reading...It’s almost as if KemiKaze herself believes Labour’s mantra that the Tories are the source of all hopelessness
There will come a moment when the Labour claim that the Tories are to blame for everything will no longer stick. People will start shaking their heads and reckon that Labour have something to answer for. But we’re not quite there yet. At least not at prime minister’s questions. For half an hour in the Commons every Wednesday the Conservatives remain the villains of the piece.
Partly it’s the size of the Labour majority. The sheer volume of half-witted Labour MPs who are happy to bounce up and down to ask Keir Starmer whether he agrees with them that the Tories left the country in a shocking mess and only the prime minister can save their constituents. The Lib Dems and the SNP are only slightly fiercer critics of the present government. They too hate the Tories more than anyone else.
Continue reading...Committee hears about ‘insane’ lack of provisions and arcane, time-consuming procedures
MPs with disabilities have spoken about the challenges they face working in parliament, criticising the “insane” lack of provisions and arcane, time-consuming procedures.
Lucy Powell, the Commons leader, who also chairs its modernisation committee, said she would be “very in favour of” bringing in call lists for when MPs will speak, one of the adjustments called for by MPs in the committee. Such lists are used for ministerial questions but not for debates, beyond a period during Covid.
Continue reading...Watchdog accepted Taiwo Owatemi’s claim for landlord’s surcharge to let her keep dog in London flat
Ministers will ask the Commons authorities to consider changing rules that allowed a Labour whip to claim £900 in expenses to rent a pet-friendly flat in London.
The government will lobby the independent expenses regulator to look at allowance rules after Taiwo Owatemi claimed for a pet surcharge demanded by her landlord to allow her to keep her dog in the property.
Continue reading...Department for Work and Pensions says thousands, including children, will be hit by chancellor’s announcement, as OBR forecasts UK growth to halve in 2025
Rachel Reeves will not be raising taxes in the spring statement today, even though there are many people on the left who would prefer taxes to rise as an alternative to public spending being cut. Reeves came into office promising only one budget-type event a year, and that is one reason why she is not hiking taxes today. But mainly it’s because she thinks Britons are relatively highly taxed already, because Labour was elected on a manifesto ruling out most of the obvious possible tax rises and because she’s not convinced a sweeping wealth tax would work.
But that has not stopped campaigners calling for a wealth tax, and yesterday about 300 people attended a ‘Tax the Super-Rich’ rally outside the Treasury. It was organised by charities and social justice campaign groups, but one of the speakers was Carla Denyer, co-leader of the Green party, which is in favour of a wealth tax.
Across the country, inequality is soaring and people are being left behind, struggling to make ends meet and dealing with broken public services, all while the very richest get richer. Choosing to make cut after cut to the poorest and most marginalised, while leaving the vast resource of the extreme wealth of the super rich untouched, is immoral, harmful, and will not deliver for our communities or the economy.
Continue reading...Group received emails about Ahsan Mansur, the central bank official investigating money laundering allegations
British MPs believe they may have been targeted by a “disinformation” campaign aimed at discrediting the man leading efforts to trace funds allegedly laundered from Bangladesh into the UK.
MPs raised the alarm after receiving emails about Ahsan Mansur, who was installed as the central bank governor of Bangladesh last year, after a student-led revolution swept away the autocratic government of Sheikh Hasina.
Continue reading...Stephen Timms, social security and disability minister, says ‘who knows what will happen in next five years’ as welfare bill is increasing even with cuts
Matt Hancock, the former Tory health secretary, has just started giving evidence to the Covid inquiry as part of its inquiry into PPE procurement.
There is a live feed here.
Of course people who can work should work - no one is questioning that - but for my relatives, friends and neighbours, and your constituents who have the misfortune to suffer from a chronic, debilitating, long-term condition that leaves them bed-bound, unable to leave their home or crushed by mental illness, these cuts will not motivate them to get back to work, it will instead scare and humiliate them and strip them of their dignity and self respect and for some it will send them to an early grave. The blame for this will lie squarely with you and the sycophants within your party who passively support these dreadful cuts.
Continue reading...Lady Falkner, chair of the EHRC, says moves run the risk of positive discrimination
Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.
PMQs is about to start.
Continue reading...Committee warns of serious injustice to disabled motorists and those reliant on public chargers
The rollout of electric vehicle chargers across Britain is “patchy”, behind deadline and ignores the needs of disabled drivers, the parliamentary spending watchdog has found.
A report published by the public accounts committee (PAC) warned that the charging points needed to give drivers confidence for the switch to EVs were still lacking, particularly on Britain’s biggest roads.
Continue reading...Interventions follow US vice president’s comments about ‘20,000 troops from some random country that has not fought a war in 40 years’. This live blog is closed
In response to a question about intelligence cooperation with the US, Sir David Manning, a former ambassador to Washington, said he thought this would become “more difficult” because there was a problem of trust. He explained:
If you have some of Trump’s appointees in these key jobs who have very strange track records, and have said very strange things about Nato allies, the Nato alliance and so on, and you have people in the administration who seem to be, let’s say, looking for ways of appeasing Russia, then you have a problem on the intelligence front, because these are not the values that we have.
Continue reading...PM fields questions on his announcement that the UK will raise defence spending and cut the foreign aid budget
PMQs is about to start.
Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.
The threat from the far right is real, but that leaves me all the more convinced that working together is not only the right choice, but the only choice …
More unites us than divides us. Now is the moment to make that real by uniting behind shared values, shared standards of behaviour and shared political norms, and unite against the rise of the far right.
I want us to work together to agree a common approach to asserting the values of our country, to bringing people together and creating a cohesive society where everyone feels at home …
It is time to come together, to draw a line in the sand, to set out who we are and what we believe in, because a politics of fear is a politics of despair …
I want to work with other political parties to set out clearly and boldly to the public what we can agree on as the norms and the values of our society and how we can protect those because I think they are under threat, I think they’re under very, very vigorous threat, from the politics of Farage.
Farage has been for years leading the argument which has been hostile to migration. And I think it’s based on a fundamentally racist view of the world. I reject that. I think migration is an advantage for Scotland.
There is a very live and active threat to our security from the aggression of Russia, and I think Farage is an accomplice to the Russian agenda and an apologist for the Russian agenda.
So to anybody in this country who thinks that Farage represents a means of protecting this country from the external threats that we face, I would say, have a good close look at what Farage has been connected with and what his MPs are saying about the Russian threat and their trivialisation of the Russian threat.
I’m simply making the point today that it’s important that those of us who are repulsed by the politics of Farage and the far right come together to … stress the importance of the values that we hold dear.
Continue reading...Cottrell, who served eight months for fraud, paid £15,000 for Reform party leader’s flight to US in December
Nigel Farage’s trip to Florida where he met Elon Musk was part-funded by his friend and former fraudster George Cottrell, who paid for his £15,000 flight.
The Reform leader accepted the flight for his visit in December last year, when he was pictured smiling with Musk and the Reform party treasurer, Nick Candy.
Continue reading...MP was sacked as a minister and suspended from Labour party after messages were revealed
Parliament’s standards watchdog has launched an investigation into Andrew Gwynne, who was sacked as a minister over offensive comments made on a WhatsApp group.
The MP was also suspended from the Labour party after messages were revealed in which he said he hoped a pensioner who did not support him would die before the next set of elections.
Continue reading...Spokesperson says Keir Starmer’s previously stated view that military action needs consent of MPs has not changed
Keir Starmer has not ruled out holding a parliamentary vote on committing UK troops to a peacekeeping role in Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire, after calls from some within Labour and the Lib Dems.
Downing Street hinted that a US-backed guarantee would be needed in order for the UK to send ground troops, saying it was an “essential” part of any ceasefire deal with Russia.
Continue reading...Opposition leader says PM was wrong when he said that the decision was taken under the last government
After PMQs there will be an urgent question in the Commons, tabled by the Lib Dem MP Christine Jardine, on “the potential security implications of the involvement of Chinese companies including Mingyang in energy infrastructure projects”. After that Dan Jarvis, the security minister, will make a statement to mark the publication of the report into Prevent’s dealings with Ali Harbi Ali, the man who killed the Conservative MP David Amess.
Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan police commissioner, has blamed Home Office foot-dragging for a failure to change the rules to allow forces to sack officers who fail vetting procedures, Matthew Weaver reports.
Continue reading...Lord Foulkes believes rules must change after series of scandals involving Prince Andrew
Rules banning scrutiny of the royal family in parliament must be changed in light of the continuing scandals about Prince Andrew, a Labour peer has said. Lord Foulkes is seeking a meeting this week with the clerk of the parliaments Simon Burton, who is head of the House of Lords administration, to discuss what Foulkes says is a growing list of concerns about the activities of the royal family.
Foulkes, a junior minister under Tony Blair, said he has been refused permission to table a question proposing a public register of royal interests.
Continue reading...General secretary highlights ‘legacy of 14 years of falling living standards under the Tories’
In an article for the Guardian, the Labour MP Clive Lewis said Rachel Reeves’ growth speech this week means the party has abandoned its pre-election green commitments.
Here is an extract.
A growing suspicion looms that our government lacks a coherent governing philosophy or ideological compass beyond the vague pursuit of “growth”. But if growth at any cost is the mantra, the costs will soon become painfully clear. Why pledge to be clean and green, only to undermine that commitment with a Heathrow expansion promise six months later? Burning the furniture to stay warm doesn’t signal confidence – it reeks of panic.
Regardless of the motivation, Labour has crossed the Rubicon. Approving Heathrow expansion is an irreversible break with our pre-election pledges. In 2021, Reeves stood in front of the Labour party conference and declared that she would be the “first-ever green chancellor”. Now, Labour is accused of obstructing the climate and nature bill and abandoning its ambitious decarbonisation plans. The rapid turnaround is striking …
I do a bit. There are nine million working age adults who are not working. And as we compete globally with countries like, you know, South Korea, China, India, you know, we need a work ethic. We need everybody to be making a contribution. … we need to lift our game and to up our game.
Chris Philp was the architect of the Liz Truss budget which crashed the economy and sent family mortgages rocketing.
After the Conservatives’ economic failure left working people worse off, it takes some real brass neck for the Tory top team to tell the public that it’s really all their fault.
I was making the case that tax cuts…need to be accompanied by spending control or spending reductions … in order to show that the books are being balanced and to avoid the market reaction that we saw …
I made that case internally … but it wasn’t unfortunately listened to. I think had my suggestions been listened to a bit earlier, then there was a there’s a much higher chance that [the mini-budget] would have worked. And it’ll be always a matter of regret that those points weren’t taken on board.
Continue reading...