Q: Only 10% of people have confidence in you as chancellor? Why is that?
Reeves says she is dealing with challenging economic situation.
Q: I interviewed you last year, and you said this was a dream job. Is it now a nightmare for you?
No, says Reeves.
She says as chancellor you do not get to choose the circumstances in which you serve.
In difficult circumstances, she says it is even more important to have a chancellor with the right priorities.
She says most of her career as an MP she was in opposition. She prefers being in government.
Q: Has being in government been harder than you expected?
Reeves says there have been challenges, like the need for higher defence spending, and Trump’s tariffs policy.
Q: Have any of your decisions made things worse?
Reeves says every decision has an impact. She did put up taxes, she says. But if she had not done that, there would have been a need to borrow more.
She says, as a result of her decisions, they have brought down waiting lists and interest rates.
Doing nothing was not an option, she says.
Rachel Reeves interviewed on Radio 5 Live
Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is being interviewed by Matt Chorley on Radio 5 Live.
Chorley starts with the BBC story.
Q: Do you have confidence in the BBC?
Yes, says Reeves. She says it is respected the world over.
Q: What do you think about President Trump’s legal threat?
That is not a matter for me, Reeves says.
DUP education minister Paul Givan survives no confidence vote under cross-community rules, after unionists back him
The bid to force Northern Ireland’s DUP education minister Paul Givan from office through a vote of no confidence following controversy over his recent visit to Israel (see 10.58am) has failed, PA Media reports.
The no-confidence motion was supported by 47 out of 80 MLAs who voted, but fell because it did not gather support from a majority of both nationalist and unionist representatives, as required by the rules of the Northern Ireland assembly.
During a heated debate, the motion brought by People Before Profit MLA Gerry Carroll was supported by Sinn Féin, the Alliance party and the SDLP.
It was opposed by the DUP, the Ulster Unionist party and TUV MLA Timothy Gaston.
The Commons isn’t sitting today, but the Lords is, and at about 3.15pm there will a private notice question there about prisoner release mistakes. It has been tabled by Lord Hayward, a Conservative.
Donald Trump is now threatening the BBC with legal action over the way it edited the speech he gave before his supporters attacked the US Capitol, Frances Mao and Yohannes Lowe are reporting on our BBC live blog.
Farage says he's still in favour of PR - but he suggests he would prioritise allowing voters to trigger referendums on policy
At a press conference last week Nigel Farage dodged a question from the Guardian’s Pippa Crerar about whether Reform UK is still committed to proportional representation, as it was at the time of the last election.
Today the Guardian’s Eleni Courea asked Farage again if the party was still in favour of PR. At the election last year Reform would have benefited hugely from PR, but now that has a substantial lead in the poll, it is arguable that it could win big under first past the post, as Labour did in 2024.
Today Farage replied:
On electoral reform I’ve always favoured AV Plus, which would mean significant minority voices would get a vote in the House of Commons.
But the really big electoral reform that I favour – and it would need to be a high bar – but I do think the British people have a right, if they feel the political class are out touch with them substantially on a major issue – I do believe the British people should have the chance – it’s got to be verified, yes – but a chance through petition to call a national referendum on a subject of their choosing.
This made it sound as if Farage is less keen now on PR than he was a year ago; he did not disavow the policy, but he did not imply it is guaranteed a slot in the next manifesto either.
And he did imply that he is far more committed to legislating to create a trigger mechanism for referendums. This is a policy particularly associated with Switzerland.
But has Farage thought this one through? If the Guardian gets a question at Farage’s next press conference, perhaps someone might point out that there is an important constitutional issue where a Reform government would be “substantially” out of step with public opinion.
And parliament does have a petition mechanism. The most popular petition ever attracted six million signatures. It was launched in 2019, and it called for the UK to remain in the EU.
Another very popular petition, attracting almost 2m signatures, called for Donald Trump to be banned from making a state visit to the UK – another cause Farage would not want to support.
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At his press conference Nigel Farage was also asked what other world leaders, apart from Donald Trump, he was speaking to.
Farage said that he knew some leaders, and that he expected to be talking to more of them after the next election cycle in Europe. He said he knew Viktor Orbán, the rightwing, populist Hungarian prime minister.
He also said that he had been developing “some relationships in other parts of the world”, which he was not able to disclose at this point.
In his recent interview with Mishal Husain for her Bloomberg podcast, Husain told Farage she had been told by Nick Candy, the Reform treasurer, that Farage was now spending time with “presidents, prime ministers and kings from the Middle East”.
Farage did not deny this. He just told Husain: “One of the reasons I’ve survived so long in public life is I’m very discreet and if I have private meetings with people, I never discuss it.”
Q: Under your plans for the BBC, would you keep a small licence fee to fund the slimmed down news service you are talking about (see 11.49am), if the rest of it is being funded by subscription?
Farage said the BBC World Service was funded by the Foreign Office, which he said was “right and proper”.
He said most BBC services should be funded by subscription.
He went on:
Should be a small subvention for news? I just think we’re moving towards a world where we pay for everything.
And if BBC News was good, would people pay a reasonable amount for it, just as they’re paying for other channels, or other new services? I think they probably would.
He said Nadine Dorries, the former culture secretary who has defected from the Tories to Reform UK, would help the party develop policy on this.
Farage suggests Reform UK would scrap Office for Budget Responsibility
Back to the Reform UK press conference, and Nigel Farage was asked if he would get rid of the Office for Budget Responsibility. It was put to him that Zia Yusuf, Reform’s head of policy, has described them as “a bunch of morons”.
Farage said he was surprised that Yusuf used language like that; he would expected Yusuf to be much more critical, he joked.
He went on:
I’m not sure the OBR served any useful purpose over the course of the last few years. I think we elect governments to make decisions, not to rely on everybody else as an excuse.
The party would look at this issue, he said.
BBC apologises for 'error of judgment' in TV edit that implied Trump made 'direct call' for violent attack on US Capitol
The Commons culture committee has now published the letter it has received from Samir Shah, the BBC chair, responding to questions about the leaked Michael Prescott memo that led to Davie’s resignation.
The letter runs to four pages, and covers various points, but it includes an apology for the way the Panorama programme about Donald Trump edited extracts from the speech he gave before his supporters attacked the US Capitol.
Shah says the BBC accepts that the edit make it look as if Trump was making “a direct call for violent action” and he says “the BBC would like to apologise for that error of judgment”.
A congressional inquiry subsequently concluded that Trump was to blame for the attack on the Capitol. It said:
That evidence has led to an overriding and straight-forward conclusion: the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed. None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.
Updated
Farage says BBC should have to compete against other broadcasters via subscription model
Q: Under your plans, would be BBC stop showing programmes like The Traitors?
Farage said, under his proposal (see 11.49am), it would not need to. The BBC would compete on the market, and people would pay for the TV programmes they wanted.
Q: What else did you talk about in your conversation with Trump?
Farage said they talked about the British political scene. He says he will not talk about some of what was said, but he said Trump said the UK should be drilling for more oil and gas. He said Trump said UK police was “self-destructive”, and he added: “And I agree with him 100%.”
Q: Will you get an organisation like the Institute for Fiscal Studies to cost your manifesto?
Farage said Reform UK would have a costed manifesto. But he said he did not think they would trust the IFS to do it.
Q: Your comments (see 11.32am) could be intrepreted today as an attack on big business. Are you worried that could discourage investment?
Farage said he was very happy for big business to invest in the UK.
I’m not anti-big business. I’m just anti-big business having such a say over government policy that small business doesn’t get a look in.
And, believe me, small business has not had a look in for years and years and years. It has become the most neglected sector of the British economy.
Farage says VAT threshold for businesses 'far too low'
Q: What policies have you got for small busineses?
Farage said today was just the start. They would develop policy over time, he said. But he said he thought the VAT threshold (the turnover at which firms have to register for VAT) was “far too low”.
When it was put to him that some economists say the threshold should be lower (because at the moment it is at a point where it disincentivises some firms from growing), Farage said the threshold should be “significantly higher”.
There are so many businesses, there are so many one and two-man bands who find themselves literally on that cusp [for VAT registration]. They’re literally on that cusp. And that’s why the argument for increasing the threshold makes sense.
Q: Would Reform UK stop ministers taking hospitality from business?
Farage said there was nothing wrong with accepting a cup of tea. The important thing was to ensure that hospitality was declared, he said.
Q: Is Reform UK anti-worker?
Farage said he objected to the idea that businesses were anti-worker.
Let me tell you something. Most people that run family businesses treat their staff as well as they treat their own families.
Farage says BBC's Panorama edit was 'election interference', and Trump reacted 'not in quotable form'
Q: Are you concerned about Donald Trump intervening in the debate about the future of the BBC?
Farage replied:
If I was the president of the United States of America, if I was the person making sure that the United Kingdom had security guarantees that meant that it could be defended, – whereas on its own it would be helpless – and I’d been stitched up on the eve of a national election …
People talk about election interference. What the BBC did was election interference.
If you put yourself in Donald Trump’s shoes, I think you’ll understand why, when I had a chat with him on Friday, he made his feelings on the subject known to me in no uncertain terms and not in a quotable form.
Q: Are you worried about the impact on British culture if the BBC becomes weaker?
Farage claimed the problem with the BBC was “they’re not reflecting the country we’re living in”.
Q: Who do you think should be the new director general of the BBC?
Farage said the problem with the BBC was that it employed people from a narrow section of society, with a particular worldview.
He said the new DG should be “someone dynamic, someone from the private sector, but somebody with a history of turning around cultures”.
Farage says Trump complained to him about BBC in conversation they had on Friday
Farage is now taking questions.
Q: What do you think needs to change at the BBC?
Farage says the BBC has been “institutionally biased for decades”.
He says he spoke to Donald Trump on Friday.
He just said to me, is this how you treat your best ally?
It’s quite a powerful comment, isn’t it? It’s quite a powerful comment. So there’s been too much going for too long.
Farage says last year half a million people stopped paying the licence fee. He says, if the culture there does not change, millions more people could start doing this
He say he would like to see the BBC “slimmed down”.
When it comes to entertainment, when it comes to sport and many other areas like that, they should compete against everybody else [with] a subscription model. That’s the modern world that we live in.
So the licence fee, as currently is, cannot survive. It is wholly unsustainable.
Farage says he is not saying he does not want the BBC to survive. The BBC World Service is “very important”, he says. He says it should just focus on doing “straight news”.
Farage thanks Lord Bamford for JCB's £200,000 donation to Reform UK
Farage thanked Lord Bamford from JCB for the £200,000 that the firm has given to Reform UK.
The firm has also given the same amount to the Tories. At the weekend JCB said:
Both the Conservative party and Reform UK believe in small business and it’s for that reason JCB has donated £200,000 to each in recent weeks.
In the past Bamford has been exclusively a Conservative supporter.
Farage introduced his first guest, Kevin Byrne, who founded the Checkatrade website.
Byrne claimed the lack of support that small business owners had had from this government, and from the previous government, was “absolutely staggering”.
He claimed that the US economy was succeeding because it celebrated entrepreneurs. But the situation in the UK for small business was “madness”, he claimed.
Farage claims UK living under 'global corporatism', not capitalism, and that entrepreneurs aren't respected
Farage said the problems facing small businesses were not a failure of capitalism.
Some will tell you, well, the economy is failing because capitalism is failing.
No, we’re not living in capitalism. We’re living in an age of global corporatism.
We’re living in an age where the big businesses virtually control and own the political arena.
Capitalism is what these people do. Free enterprise is what these people do. These people take risks. They risk their own money. They go to the bank and borrow money. They’ve no idea at the start whether their business concept will work or not. And many of them will have failures along the way. But that’s what free market enterprise is about. It’s about risk. It’s about reward. It’s about failure.
And some of them who, despite everything, go on to succeed, make lots of money – well, they’re almost treated in Britain as if they’ve done something wrong, as if morally it’s wrong to be successful, morally it’s wrong to make money.
Well, a Reform government will do is everything we can do, from the education system onwards to change that culture.
Farage says small business owners who thought Brexit would cut regulation have been betrayed because opposite happened
Farage says small business owners thought that Brexit would cut the regulatory burden they were facing. But that did not happen, he says.
The other great betrayal is that is every one of these millions of businesses, every one of these 5.6 million businesses, believed that, with Brexit, the regulatory burden on their shoulders would become less.
I can tell you, a decade on, almost from the referendum, in every single industry, from financial services to fisheries, the burden of regulation and the threat of the regulator is worse now than it was then.
Farage says Reform UK would champion small businesses, claiming they don't 'get look in' under Labour or Tories
Nigel Farage is speaking now. He says there are 300 small business owners in the audience, and he says he is launching Small Business for Reform.
He set up his first small business in 1993, he says.
But other parties do not understand the needs of small business, he says.
The sheer level of disconnect between the frontbenches in Westminster and what these men and women do in their lives has never been greater at any time in our history.
This Labour government has absolutely no comprehension of what it’s like to set up a run a small business and to meet a monthly payroll. None of them have ever done it. None of them get it.
And as for the Conservative party, which over the years would have said that it did stand for small business, well, in their time in office, all they did was punish small business again and again.
He says the IR35 rules for the self-employed have made life very hard for small businesses, and should be scrapped.
He criticises the Tories for putting up corporation tax.
And he says Labour’s plans requiring small businesses to file quarterly returns to HM Revenue and Customs, not annual returns, will make life harder for them too.
And he says the employment rights bill will harm them as well. Big companies will be able to deal with the extra costs, but not small businesses, he says.
There is no understanding of the impact of legislation. And that is because government only listens to big business.
I saw this myself in my 20 years in Brussels. The big companies have their own lobbying offices and it’s not dissimilar here in Westminster. It’s the big businesses that take you to Wimbledon. It’s the big businesses that take people out for dinner. It’s the big businesses that shape policy. And the small businesses, frankly, don’t even get a look in.
Updated
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is about to hold another of his regular Monday morning press conferences. He will be focusing on small business policy and, according to the Telegraph, he will be joined by a “famous figure who knows what it’s like to build up a business from nothing”.
There is a live feed here.
DUP education minister Paul Givan faces no confidence vote at Stormont over trip to Israel
Rory Carroll is the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent.
The Stormont assembly is to hold a no confidence motion in Northern Ireland’s education minister, Paul Givan, over a controversial visit to Israel.
Sinn Féin, Alliance, the Social Democratic and Labour party and People Before Profit said they will back the motion today against the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) politician but support from fellow unionists is expected to keep him in office.
Stormont rules require cross-community support to oust a minister so even if most assembly members back the motion Givan can retain his job.
The row erupted after Givan accompanied other unionist politicians on an Israeli government-funded six-day trip during which they visited a Holocaust memorial, met victims of Hamas and toured a school in Jerusalem.
Critics accused Givan of violating the ministerial rule of conduct by going in an official capacity and using his department’s resources to share images of his visit to the school. Others said it was wrong to accept hospitality from the Israeli state amid attacks in Gaza widely deemed to be genocide. The minister said it was a “fact-finding tour” that broke no rules.
The independent unionist Claire Sugden said she would support the motion but the DUP, the Ulster Unionist party and Traditional Unionist said they will oppose a “performative” measure.
The SDLP has tabled a separate motion to reform Stormont rules to make it easier to remove ministers from office.
Tories urge Met police commissioner to reject report he commissioned saying culture of force leads to racial harm
At the end of last week the Metropolitan police published an independent report by Dr Shereen Daniels looking at how the force responded to complaints of racism. The report said:
Anti-black outcomes in policing are not random. They have been built in. And they have been named, again and again, by families in grief, frontline officers, unions, activists, whistleblowers, campaigners, and formal investigations.
Vikram Dodd wrote it up here.
And Sir Mark Rowley, the Met commissioner, praised the report, describing it as “powerful” and saying it showed that “further systemic, structural, cultural change is needed”.
Today the Conservative party has strongly condemned the report. In an open letter to Rowley, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, objects to the suggestion in the report that stop and search should be scaled back, and he challenges its claim that black people are significantly more at risk of being tasered. But he particularly objects to its use of the term “whiteness”. He says:
The report talks about ‘whiteness’ which is an offensive, divisive and obviously racialised (and therefore racist) concept. Daniels writes: “Whiteness here is not a synonym for white racial identity. It is a way of thinking, organising and maintaining power. It is a logic. One that can be adopted, performed and enforced by anyone, irrespective of their racial identity. It centres white comfort, demands neutrality, and reacts defensively to Blackness and other challenges to its order.”
I think this terminology is completely inappropriate and should be expressly rejected by the Met Police. I urge you to disregard the many elements of this report which lack evidence, which are divisive or would, if implemented, lead to substantially more crime including against the black community themselves.
The way to restore trust in policing is to catch more criminals and make the streets safer. It is not by commissioning and apparently accepting (or at the very least failing to call out) an ideological and extreme report which is based on divisive identity politics and which in many places is not supported by any evidence – and in some cases directly contradicted by real databased evidence.
According to Dan Bloom and Bethany Dawson in their London Playbook briefing for Politico, Labour MPs have taking a keen interest in this article by Kitty Donaldson for the i at the end of last week about the Labour leadership. Donaldson said some Labour MPs were actively discussing replacing Keir Starmer, although she also concluded “for now at least, Starmer appears safe in post, despite the chuntering of backbenchers”.
In a report with multiple examples of chuntering, Donaldson said:
A fresh Labour MP said Starmer and his supporters are in denial about the peril they face as the PLP is “feral”, despite Starmer’s attempts to connect.
The MP added: “It’s a mix of everything. It’s the botched reshuffle. It’s all the poll ratings. It’s having to break the manifesto commitment to raise income tax in the Budget. It’s Peter Mandelson. It’s a belief among the PLP that the Prime Minister and Downing Street don’t really like them or respect them. Eventually, that feeling becomes mutual.”
A third Labour backbencher said: “There’s one question on the timing of when he’s replaced and there’s another question on the process. In the last couple of weeks, both conversations have stepped up again, so people are now talking about what the process might look like and what timings would be best, rather than it just being grumblings.”
Bloom and Dawson report:
Two frontbenchers told Playbook that MPs have been sharing Kitty Donaldson’s eye-watering Friday piece about leadership murmurings in WhatsApp groups, even though many of them think talk of a challenge before May is absurd and point out the soft left don’t have a clear candidate. The first frontbencher warned slashing the salary sacrifice tax break on pension contributions (as floated over the weekend) could alienate voters with young families: “They’re the last ones still f*cking voting for us.” The second frontbencher told Bethany Dawson they went door knocking over the weekend and found Starmer was “about as popular as cholera.”
Updated
The resignations of the BBC’s director general and its head of news over claims of bias were “a coup” orchestrated from the inside, David Yelland, a former editor of the Sun, has claimed. Kevin Rawlinson has the story.
Updated
Around 300,000 households experienced acute homlessness in 2024, up 21% over 2 years, Crisis charity says
The homelessness charity Crisis is going to become a landlord for the first time in its 60-year history, saying the housing crisis in the UK has reached a “catastrophic scenario”, Jessica Murray reports,
As Jessica reports, Crisis has released research saying “almost 300,000 families and individuals across England are now experiencing the worst forms of homelessness”. The charity defines this as sleeping rough, or sleeping in temporary accommodation like a B&B.
The state of the nation report, commissioned by Crisis and led by Heriot-Watt University, shows that 299,100 households in England experienced acute homelessness in 2024. This is an increase of 21% since 2022 (when there were 246,900 households) and a 45% increase since 2012 (206,400 households).
The numbers of people having to sleep rough and households having to stay in unsuitable temporary accommodation increased by around 150% each since 2020 levels, with more than 15,000 people sleeping rough last year alone.
Updated
Labour could suffer Lib Dem-style election drubbing for breaking manifesto promise if they raise taxes, Reeves warned
Good morning. The news is dominated today by the repercussions from the resignation last night of the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, and its head of news, Deborah Turness. This is far bigger than just a media personnel story; the BBC has been in the middle of the warzone in the battle between rightwing populism and liberalism, not just in the UK but beyond, and ousting Davie is a victory for the right. We are covering all the developments on a separate live blog.
It is also, in part, a victory for Donald Trump; even if he was not actively implicated in the manoeuvring that led to Davie’s resignation, those who were demanding “heads must roll” professed to be concerned about protecting the president’s reputation. Trump has already cowed much of the US media and last night he claimed the BBC was run by “corrupt” and “very dishonest” people who tried to stop him being elected.
Our full coverage of this will be on the separate live blog, but lots of politicians are speaking out, and so there will be some mention of it here.
Otherwise, the focus is probably on the budget, which is now less than three weeks away. The Commons is not sitting, because of a mini-recess, but Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is due to give an interview to Matt Chorley on Radio 5 Live this afternoon.
Reeves is likely to be asked about the Labour backlash to the speech she gave last week, which implied it is all but certain that she will break the manifeso promise and raise income tax. (A 2p rise in income tax, offset by a 2p cut in national insurance, is “nailed on”, one source told the Observer.) Last night Catherine West, the Labour MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet in north London, who was a Foreign Office minister until she was sacked in the September reshuffle, told Radio 4’s the Westminster Hour that, if Labour did break its manifesto promise, it could be punished by the voters just as the Liberal Democrats were over their tuition fees broken promise. She said:
If I were Rachel, I think I wouldn’t be breaking the manifesto promise …
I just think back to the Liberal Democrats and the university fees, because that was, you know, the big one for me that I remember and was very important for me. That’s how I won my seat, because I won that from the Liberal Democrats. So I think those big ones, they do come back to haunt you.
In 2010 the Lib Dems won 57 seats, after a campaign during which candidates signed a pledge not to vote for a rise in tuition fees. In coalition with the Tories, the party did back a tuition fee increase and some Lib Dem MPs (but not all) even voted for it. After the 2015 election they were left with just eight MPs.
In the Times Aubrey Allegretti says ministers are also making exactly the same point in private. He reports:
Cabinet ministers have privately warned Rachel Reeves that increasing income tax in the budget may spell electoral disaster for the Labour party …
One cabinet minister called for Reeves to set out an “off-ramp” for reducing taxes …
Another minister said: “My concern is there hasn’t been enough consideration of the consequences of breaking the manifesto commitment. This could do to us what happened to the Liberal Democrats after the 2015 election, given voters are already extremely despondent with us.”
Here is the agenda for the day.
11am: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, holds a press conference.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.35pm: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is interviewed on Radio 5 Live.
And at some point today the Commons culture committee will publish a statement from Samir Shah, the BBC chair, responding to questions about the leaked Michael Prescott memo that led to Davie’s resignation.
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