Category Archives: Michelle Donelan

Diane Abbott says it is ‘frightening’ to hear what Tory donor Frank Hester said about her – UK politics live

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Hackney MP says she feels more vulnerable after Tory donor said looking at her makes you ‘want to hate all black women’

Kwasi Kwarteng, the Conservative former chancellor, has said that the remarks about Diane Abbott attributed to Frank Hester were clearly racist and sexist. But he said he did not know for sure that Hester actually used those words.

Speaking on the BBC’s Politics Live, Kwarteng said:

[Those comments] are clearly racist, and they’re clearly sexist.

And I think Diane [Abbott] was right to point out that the call to violence, even in a flippant way, is really inappropriate. So they were very stupid remarks.

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Michelle Donelan set to face more questions over taxpayer-funded £15,000 payout

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Cross-party group of peers expected to ask for more details about why minister made and withdrew claims about two academics

The cabinet minister Michelle Donelan is to face more questioning this week over her judgment after taxpayers funded a payout to an academic she had falsely accused of supporting Hamas.

The science secretary will appear before a cross-party group of peers on Tuesday, when she is expected to be questioned on the process that led her to make the accusation, which she has since retracted. The decision to leave taxpayers with the £15,000 bill is also likely to be raised. The sum was paid “without admitting any liability”, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said.

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UK science secretary received government advice before Hamas tweet

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No 10 refuses to say how Michelle Donelan was advised over accusation against academic who then sued her for libel

The science secretary, Michelle Donelan, received government advice before she tweeted a letter in which she accused an academic of supporting Hamas, Downing Street has said.

No 10 refused to say what advice officials had given her and whether she actually followed it, but insisted she had “acted in line with established precedent”.

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UK politics: Sunak refuses to say how abolition of national insurance would be funded – as it happened

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PM says ‘people trust me on these things’ and refuses to be drawn on whether government would forgo entire £46bn raised from measure

Keir Starmer has accused Jeremy Hunt of repeating the budget mistakes made by Liz Truss during her disastrous premiership.

In comments on the budget during a visit to a building site this morning, Starmer focused on Hunt’s proposal to abolish employees’ national insurance over time, saying that this was a bigger unfunded tax promise than those in Truss’s mini-budget. (See 9.28am.)

How humiliating was that for the government yesterday?

We’ve argued for years that they should get rid of the non-dom tax status, they’ve resisted that. And now, completely out of ideas, the only decent policy they’ve got is the one that they’ve lifted from us.

Nothing that Jeremy Hunt did yesterday, nor anything the OBR said, changes anything very significantly. Which is a shame. Because that means we are still:

-heading for a parliament in which people will on average be worse off at the end than at the start,

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Taxpayers foot the bill after academic’s libel action against UK minister

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Michelle Donelan had urged Research England to cut ties with a member of its advisory group over alleged Hamas support

UK taxpayers have financed a £15,000 payout to an academic after the science minister wrongly accused her of supporting Hamas, the department has said amid growing political anger at why public money was used.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said £15,000 had been paid after a statement on Tuesday by Michelle Donelan, about a “clarification” from Prof Kate Sang, of Heriot-Watt university in Edinburgh, about her views.

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UK science minister apologises and pays damages after academic’s libel action

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Michelle Donelan had accused two members of Research England’s advisory group of ‘sharing extremist views’ in letter to UKRI

Michelle Donelan, the science minister, has apologised and paid damages after accusing two academics of “sharing extremist views” and one of them of supporting Hamas.

In a statement posted on X, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology said she had deleted a tweet and letter published last year, and accepted what she termed a “clarification” from one of the academics, Prof Kate Sang at Heriot-Watt university in Edinburgh.

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Social media urged to act on violent content after Hamas attack

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UK minister calls urgent meeting to discuss coverage as X comes under scrutiny over disinformation claims

The UK technology secretary has summoned social media executives to demand the removal of violent content from their platforms related to the Hamas attack on Israel.

Michelle Donelan called the meeting as the European Union criticised Elon Musk’s X platform about coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict on its platform including fake news and the use of repurposed historical footage.

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Labour dismisses Rishi Sunak’s five new pledges as mostly ‘so easy it would be difficult not to achieve them’ – as it happened

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Prime minister urges public to judge him on whether he delivers on new pledges but Labour says most ‘were happening anyway’. This blog is now closed

Lucy Powell, the shadow culture secretary, has issued a statement welcoming the government’s proposal to abandon the privatisation of Channel (without actually putting it in those terms). She says the government should never have floated the plan in the first place, and that it has been a “total distraction” for the broadcaster. She says:

The Conservatives’ vendetta against Channel 4 was always wrong for Britain, growth in our creative economy, and a complete waste of everyone’s time.

Our broadcasting and creative industries lead the world, yet this government has hamstrung them for the last year with the total distraction of Channel 4 privatisation.

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