Afternoon summary
Keir Starmer has welcomed the news that the first small boat migrants have been detained prior to potentially being sent back to France under the “one in, one out” returns scheme. (See 9.58am and 10.10am.) And the Home Office has published details of how migrants able to come to the UK under the scheme will be selected. (See 4.59am.)
Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has suggested that she is open to the idea of raising taxes on the gambling sector to fund the removal of the two-child benefit cap. (See 2.04pm.) The idea is being promoted by Gordon Brown, the former Labour PM, who has also urged Reeves to create extra budget “headroom” by exempting some defence spending from her fiscal rules. (See 9.14am.)
For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.
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Home Office reveals how migrants will be chosen to come to UK from France under 'one in, one out' returns scheme
And here is a Home Office paper with further details of what it is calling the UK/European applicant transfer scheme will work.
With the government expected to accept around just 50 migrants per week when the scheme starts, it is expected that only a small proportion of applications will be accepted.
The document says people will be chosen via a three-stage process.
First, they must be from a group with an 80% or higher chance of being granted protection status in the first instance. Judging by asylum claim figures for the year ending March 2025, that would mean they would have to be from Sudan (99% success ragte), Yemen (98%), Syria (98%) or Eritrea (86%). (The figures for Syria have probably changed since the fall of the Assad regime.)
Second, applicants will have to show they have a connection with the UK, defined as having “previously been in the UK with permission for more than 6 months continuously in the last 5 years and have not overstayed or breached the conditions of their permission”.
And, in the third stage, people will be chosen at random out from applicants who have passed the first two stages.
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Home Office opens website for migrants wanting to come to UK under 'one in, one out' returns scheme
The Home Office has launched a website inviting people who are in France and who want to come to the UK to apply for asylum to apply for entry under the “one in, one out” scheme. The details are here.
Only 18% of people think Starmer represents change, poll suggests
YouGov has released some polling about how the public view Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn. Starmer may be moderately pleased about the fact that he beats the other two quite easily on who represents the UK on the world stage. But the most damaging figure in the chart is the one saying only 18% of people think Starmer represents change, while 71% think he doesn’t. Given that “Change” was the title of Labour’s manifesto at the election, and every government press release contains a compulsory reference to its “Plan for Change”, the fact that people don’t see the PM in these terms is a serious problem.
In his cover story for the Spectator this week (mostly about Reform), Tim Shipman, the magazine’s political editor, says Starmer knows this is a problem. He writes:
The prime minister has been at Chequers this week summoning aides for crunch discussions. Senior figures say Starmer has been warned he has just six months to turn things around or be ‘timed out’. Speechwriter Alan Lockey and head of strategy Paul Ovenden are working on a party conference speech which will warn voters there has to be ‘profound change to the way we do things’, but also spell out a more optimistic vision of what Britain looks like if Labour gets it right. He will pitch the government as the friend of those who work hard and earn their money.
Insiders say Starmer is ‘furious’ about the lack of progress on deregulation and building. Expect a new planning bill to combat that. The PM also wants the autumn budget to be bold rather than simply plug gaps in the government’s spending plans. He met Rachel Reeves last week. His argument against Reform will be that he is plotting a revolution for the quiet majority, while a vote for Farage means ‘decline and grievance’.
Liberal Democrats urge ministers to block application for Chinese "super-embassy" in London
Ministers have asked China to send them the unredacted designs for its proposed “super-embassy” in London or justify why some of the drawings have been blacked out, Eleni Courea reports.
The Liberal Democrats are urging the government to block the application for the “super-embassy”. Luke Taylor, the party’s spokesperson for London, said:
It looks like the government is finally cottoning on to the grave threat this embassy poses. But rather than dithering, it needs to take the bull by the horns and finally block China’s application.
It is staggering that only now, at the 11th hour, the government is finally asking fundamental questions about what Beijing is planning. This is despite the huge and obvious security risks the embassy poses to our city and our nation.
Anything less than an unequivocal rejection of this application would send a dreadful message to Hong Kongers in the UK, who already face a campaign of transnational repression directed by President Xi.
Treasury says more than 130 disused coal tips in Wales to be secured with £143m funding from Westminster
The Welsh government has lobbying Westminster for years for money to help it deal with the problem posed by disused coal tips in the country. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is in south Wales today to publicise Treasury funding that will address the problem, although some council leaders claim the sum allocated “only scratches the surface”.
In its new release the Treasury says more than 130 coal tips will be secured as a result of the £143m it is spending. It says:
Disused coal tips remain a legacy of Wales’ coal industry, and present severe risks for Welsh communities from landslides or flooding. Just last November, a disused coal tip in Cwmtillery, Blaenau Gwent, partially collapsed, forcing around 40 homes and families to be evacuated.
The £118m provided at the spending review by the chancellor to protect Welsh communities comes in addition to £25m from last year’s autumn budget, amounting to £143m to deliver the essential funding to protect existing homes whilst enabling new areas of land to be secured for future housebuilding by the Welsh government. When combined with funding from the Welsh government, £220m has now been invested to make coal tips in Wales safe.
Reeves says interest rates coming down under Labour in part because it has returned 'stability' to economy
Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has also welcomed today’s interest rate cut. She told broadcasters:
I welcome the fact that interest rates have come down today.
That’s good news for homeowners, good news for businesses.
Interest rates have now come down five times since Labour came into office, in part because of the stability that we’ve managed to return to the economy after the chopping and changing, the mini-budget under the Conservatives and Liz Truss.
What that means, that fifth cut in interest rates, is that if you’re taking out a mortgage for £215,000, you’re going to be paying on a variable rate around £140 less a month than when we came to office just over a year ago.
So, this is good news for people wanting to get on the housing ladder, people remortgaging and also businesses borrowing to grow.
Reeves confirms Treasury reviewing gambling taxes, hinting she is open to Brown's plan to use them to tackle child poverty
Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has suggested that she is open to the idea of raising taxes on the gambling sector to fund the removal of the two-child benefit cap.
The idea is being strongly promoted by Gordon Brown, the former Labour PM who also spent 10 years as chancellor. He has been making this case today, in an interview on the Today programme and with an article in the Guardian. (See 9.14am.)
Asked on a visit in Port Talbot if she was considering Brown’s plan, Reeves said:
I talk to Gordon regularly, and saw him last week when I was in Scotland.
Like Gordon, I am deeply concerned around the levels of child poverty in Britain. No child should grow up hungry or parents not be able to afford the basics for their family.
We’re a Labour government. Of course, we care about child poverty. That’s why one of the first things we did as a government was to set up a child poverty taskforce that will be reporting in the autumn and [will] respond to it then.
On gambling taxes, we’ve already launched a review into gambling taxes. We’re taking evidence on that at the moment, and again, we’ll set out our policies in the normal way, in our budget later this year.
Reeves was speaking during a visit to a coal tip, where she was promoting an announcement about £143m being spent securing coal tips in Wales.
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Tories call for Rushanara Ali's resignation over rent hike after tenants told they would have to move
The Conservative party is now calling for the resignation of Rushanara Ali, the homelessness minister, after she told tenants in a house she owns they would have to move, and then increased the rent by £700 a month when it was relet after they had moved out. Ali says she wanted to sell the house, and only relisted it for rental when she could not find a buyer, but she has been accused of hypocrisy because the government is legislating to stop landlords who evict tenants on the grounds they want to sell from then swiftly re-letting.
In a post on social media, Kevin Hollinrake, the Tory chair, said:
This is staggering hypocrisy from Rushanara Ali.
It is totally unacceptable for the Government minister in charge of Labour’s new renters laws and homelessness to have turfed out her own tenants in order to hike the rent (by over 20%)
I’m sorry, but she must resign.
A spokesperson for Ali said: “Rushanara takes her responsibilities seriously and complied with all relevant legal requirements.”
Matthew Weaver has the full story here.
JD Vance reportedly set to start family holiday in UK by staying with David Lammy at Chevening
JD Vance, the US vice president, will start his summer holiday in the UK by staying with David Lammy, the foreign secretary, at Chevening, Lammy’s grace-and-favour country home, the Telegraph reports.
In his story, Rob Crilly says Vance and his family will arrive on Friday and that, as well as staying with Lammy, they will visit Hampton Court before heading for the Cotswolds, where they are spending most of their break.
Lammy knew Vance before he became vice president and he descibes him as a friend. Speaking about the relationship to the BBC last year, he said:
We share a similar working-class background with addiction issues in our family. We’ve written books on that. We’ve talked about that. And we’re both Christians, so I think I can find common ground with JD Vance.
Tories call for asylum seekers caught working to be automatically disqualified from having claim accepted
The Conservative party is also calling today for all asylum seekers caught working illegally to be automatically disqualified from having their claim accepted. In a news release, the party says:
The Conservatives are setting out new proposals that would mean asylum seeker caught illegally working should have their claim rejected automatically and face immediate deportation, either to their country of origin or to a safe third country.
The scale of this failure was laid bare when Chris Philp MP, the shadow home secretary, exposed this issue after a visit to a taxpayer-funded asylum hotel in June and found it operating as a delivery hub. Illegal working was taking place in plain sight, security guards did nothing, and the platforms continued to profit from this racket despite previous Home Office agreements.
Chris Philp MP also wrote to Deliveroo, Just Eat, Uber Eats, and the home secretary calling for an immediate crackdown on illegal working by asylum seekers. His demands included urgent enforcement against any company failing to uphold immigration law, the removal of all illegal workers from delivery platforms, and action to stop illegal working from Home Office-run asylum accommodation.
The following month, the home secretary announced a measly agreement between delivery companies and the Home Office to share information on the location of asylum hotels. It does nothing to punish offenders or close loopholes, such as account sharing, and therefore, did absolutely nothing to tackle this problem.
Labour’s failure to enforce the law is creating a pull factor for illegal immigration, leading to record crossings, a collapsing border, and a booming black market in taxpayer-subsidised gig economy jobs.
The alternative view is that asylum seekers should be allowed to work in the UK while their claim is being considered. It is one of the arguments that the journalist Nicola Kelly makes in her excellent book Anywhere But Here: How Britain’s Broken Asylum System Fails Us All. She says:
By allowing asylum seekers to volunteer and use the skills they have – and loosening, or ideally lifting, the ban on the right to work – research shows that the government could save £1bn over a 10-year period. Germany and France allow asylum seekers to work after six months; Sweden after just one day. The US, too, gives people permission to work while their claims are being processed. We could do the same. There is a net benefit to the economy from immigration.
Kelly’s book is well worth reading. It explains in detail how the asylum system in the UK does, or rather doesn’t, work, but it’s a book about people, not policy, with vivid, compassionate, first-hand reporting, and a strong narrative pull. I found it powerful and revealing. Emine Saner wrote about it in much more detail in an interview with Kelly we published earlier this year.
Bank of England cuts interest rate for fifth time in a year to 4%
The Bank of England has cut interest rates for a fifth time in a year amid mounting concern about the strength of the economy, Richard Partington reports. The Bank’s monetary policy committee voted by a majority to reduce its key base rate from 4.25% to 4%.
The Conservatives say they are not impressed by the news that the first small boat migrants have been detained under the “one in, one out” deal with France. In a statement, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said:
Keir Starmer’s promise last year to ‘smash the gangs’ has turned out to be nothing more than a gimmick that didn’t work, and this is just the same.
They are detaining a token handful of arrivals and in return we accept unvetted migrants from France. The whole thing is riddled with loopholes, opt-outs and legal escape routes that will make removals near-impossible.
One clause exempts anyone with a claim certified as ‘clearly unfounded’ pending court proceedings, creating a field day for human rights lawyers. Anyone claiming to be under 18 or making a modern slavery claim gets to avoid the scheme too.
94% of illegal arrivals will still remain in the UK under this deal. How exactly is that supposed to deter anyone?
DfE welcomes improvement in school absence figures for England, though problem still worse than pre-Covid
Richard Adams is the Guardian’s eduction editor.
School attendance in England continued to slowly improve last year, according to new data published this morning by the Department for Education which claimed it was a “dramatic improvement”.
The figures for the autumn term of 2024-25 showed that absence rates in state secondary schools fell by half a percentage point to 7.7% compared with the year before, while primaries also showed a slight improvement to 5%. Persistent absences - the proportion of pupils who missed 10% or more of time in the classroom - also fell, from 19.5% in 2023-24 to 17.8% in 2024-25, and well below the 24% rates seen around 2022.
However all the indicators remain above the rates of absence seen before the Covid pandemic, while severe absence - pupils missing 50% or more - rose slightly to 2%, and remains at record levels, as do absences caused by unauthorised family holidays.
The DfE emphasised that 140,000 fewer pupils were persistently absent in autumn, including 45,000 children and young people from deprived backgrounds.
Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, said:
The record improvement in school attendance shows we are turning the tide on a crisis that saw a generation go missing from England’s schools.
Getting children back in classrooms, where they belong, is non-negotiable if we are to break the unfair link between background and success so we can build a fairer country ...
When we tackle attendance head-on, everyone benefits – pupils get the consistent education they deserve, teachers can focus on driving up standards, and we build the stronger workforce our economy needs.
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Green party backs Brown's call for taxes on gambling industry to fund abolition of two-child benefit cap
The Green party has backed Gordon Brown’s call for new taxes on the gambling industry to fund the abolition of the two-child benefit cap. The party issued this statement from Natalie Bennett, a Green peer and former party leader.
Having been at the heart of the New Labour government, which unleashed the toxic, destructive gambling industry that we have today with the 2005 Gambling Act, it is good to see Gordon Brown now calling for fair taxation of the massive cash cow.
And excellent that he is calling for that to money to be used to end the two-child benefit cap, a policy deliberately causing child poverty that is astonishingly still in place a year into this Labour government.
And this is from Adrian Ramsay, the current co-leader.
Gordon Brown is right: we can’t let Reeves’s obsession with her fiscal rules push more children into poverty The answer is simple: tax wealth fairly
Homelessness minister Rushanara Ali accused of hypocrisy by Tories over hiking rent after removing tenants
Rushanara Ali, the homelessness minister, is facing criticism for hiking rent on a property she owns by hundreds of pounds, reportedly just weeks after the previous tenants’ contract ended, PA Media reports. PA says:
Four tenants who rented a house in east London from Ali were sent an email last November saying their lease would not be renewed, which also gave them four months’ notice to leave, the i newspaper reported.
Ali’s property was then re-listed with a £700 rent increase within weeks, the newspaper said.
A spokesperson for the minister said: “Rushanara takes her responsibilities seriously and complied with all relevant legal requirements.”
The house, rented on a fixed-term contract, was put up for sale while the tenants were living there, and it was only re-listed as a rental because it had not sold, according to the i.
But the minister’s actions are now facing scrutiny from rental rights campaigners, as the government seeks to clamp down on what it sees as unfair rental practices.
The renters’ rights bill includes measures to ban landlords who end a tenancy to sell a property from re-listing it for six months.
The bill, which is nearing its end stages of scrutiny in parliament, will also abolish fixed-term tenancies and ensure landlords give four months’ notice if they want to sell their property.
Ben Twomey, chief executive of Generation Rent, described the allegations as “shocking and a wake-up call to government on the need to push ahead as quickly as possible to improve protections for renters”.
He added: “It is bad enough when any landlord turfs out their tenant to hike up the rent, or tries their luck with unfair claims on the deposit, but the minister responsible for homelessness knows only too well about the harm caused by this behaviour.
“These allegations highlight common practices that the government can eradicate.
“The renters’ rights bill would ban landlords who evict tenants to sell the property from re-letting it within 12 months, to deter this kind of abuse – but unfortunately members of the House of Lords have voted to reduce this to six months.”
Tom Darling, director at the Renters’ Reform Coalition, said: “It’s mind-boggling that we have a homelessness minister who has just evicted four people in order to rake in more rent – something that will soon be illegal under the Renters’ Rights Bill her own department is bringing through Parliament.
“The government are currently considering an amendment to the legislation from the House of Lords which reduces the ban on re-letting after eviction from 12 months to six months. The government must remove this amendment, and at the very least minister Ali must recuse herself from any discussions on this within government.”
Shadow housing secretary James Cleverly told the i that Ali should consider her position as a minister, as the allegations “would be an example of the most extreme hypocrisy”.
Miliband announces biggest ever renewable energy auction
Helena Horton is a Guardian environment reporter.
Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, has opened the application process for what he hopes will be the “biggest renewable energy auction” in history. To meet his self-imposed 2030 goal to decarbonise the electricity grid, Miliband needs to secure around 8GW of offshore wind during this auction. Last year, a record 5.34GW was secured.
The process includes agreeing a “strike price” with bidders, which is a guaranteed amount they will be paid per mw/h throughout the duration of the deal. Miliband is offering a pretty sweet deal to renewables companies - extending the contracts to 20 years, locking in those prices for that length of time, and hiking the maximum strike price cost to £113/mwh compared to £102 in 2024, which was for a shorter length of time, 10 years.
Floating offshore wind has been hiked to £271/MWh, up from £245, and onshore wind has risen from £89/MWh to £92.
The current wholesale electricity price in the UK is approximately £68.22 per MWh, though it does rise in winter as it is set by gas, so when demand is hiked by people heating their homes the price goes up. In December, January and February this year, for example, the average wholesale electricity price was around £110/MWh.
These more expensive contracts could put Miliband’s promise to lower bills in peril, as my colleague Nils Pratley has explained.
Critics of Miliband have said that announcing firm targets, with this needing to be the biggest auction ever, has meant renewable companies have been able to negotiate high prices as his reputation is staked on whether they participate in the auction.
When Conservative shadow energy secretary Clare Coutinho ran an auction in 2023, it failed to attract any offshore wind bids, and she was roundly criticised for not setting the strike price high enough.
Miliband said:
Last year’s auction round secured funding for the largest floating offshore wind project in the world, as well as a record number of solar projects.
This year, we want to build on that success as we continue our mission to make Britain a clean energy superpower - ending our reliance on volatile global gas prices so we can bring household bills down for good.
Full details of the CfD allocation round can be found here.
Brown says two-child benefit cap functions as 'built-in escalator' for child poverty figures, pushing them towards 5m
In his Today programme interview Gordon Brown, the former Labour prime minister, said that child poverty would get worse over the coming years if the two-child benefit cap remains because it functions as an “escalator” for poverty. He said:
We’re dealing with a social crisis. We’re dealing with poor children that are living what you might say are separate lives. If I tell you that a million children will be trying to sleep tonight without a bed of their own, that two million children are in homes which don’t have either a cooker or a fridge or a washing machine, and certainly are not being able to spend money on hygiene goods like toothpaste and soap and shampoo, and that three million children are skipping meals …
This problem is getting worse. It’s going to worsen over the next few years because there’s a built in escalator in the poverty figures, because of the two-child rule. By the early 2030s five million children would be in poverty. And these are record figures, unprecedented since figures [started being] collected in the 1960s.
Under the two-child benefit cap, which was introduced by the last Conservative government, families are not able to claim key child-related benefits for the third child and subsequent children. The policy was introduced in 2017 and it functions as a poverty “escalator” because when it was introduced it was not retrospective, and families only started being affected as new children were born.
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Brown suggests review should consider future of pension triple lock
In his Today programme interview, Gordon Brown was repeatedly asked by Amol Rajan if he favoured keeping the pension triple lock (which is widely seen by experts as overly-generous to pensioners – although the main political parties are terrified of the electoral consequences of saying they will get rid of it). Brown largely avoided the question, saying that it would not be reasonable to comment on one welfare measure without reviewing the whole system, but he end up saying a review would be a good idea. Responding to Rajan’s question, Brown said:
You’re now asking me to go into the whole area of welfare expenditure. And if I were to do that, I would have a complete review of that …
I‘m not going to say, look, let’s take this one measure at the expense of others. Let’s look at it as a whole …
If you want to look at the future of pensions, then I think you’ve got to have a review on it, as we did about 20 years ago, and came up with some conclusions. It probably is right to have that kind of review for the future, but not to cherry pick one measure against another.
Brown also refused to say whether he thought it was sensible for Labour to rule out raising income tax, national insurance or VAT in its election manifesto last year. When first asked if this was a good idea, he just said it was a manifesto commitment. When asked if it was a “wise” commitment, he laughed briefly, and said that the plan he was proposing, for gambling taxes to fund the abolition of the two-child benefit cap (see 9.14am), did not break the manifesto commitments.
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Keir Starmer has also issued a statement about the detention of small boat arrivals (see 9.58am) on his social media feed. He says:
We have detained the first illegal migrants under our new deal before returning them to France. No gimmicks, just results.
If you break the law to enter this country, you will face being sent back.
When I say I will stop at nothing to secure our borders, I mean it.
Cooper says she expects first migrant returns to France under 'one in, one out' deal to happen within weeks
Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, declined to say how many migrants arriving on small boats had been detained as she spoke to reporters about the launch of the “one in, one out” returns deal with France today. (See 9.58am.) She said:
The transfers to immigration removal centres are under way as we speak, so we won’t provide operational details at this point that criminal gangs can simply use and exploit.
But no-one should be in any doubt: anyone who arrives from now on is eligible for immediate detention and return.
She said the first migrants could be sent back within weeks.
The pilot has now begun, so the first migrants who have arrived on the small boats are now in detention. We will then swiftly make the referrals to France and that process will now start to be able to return people to France.
It’s the beginning of the pilot and it will build as well over time, but we’re also clear that France is a safe country, so we will robustly defend against any legal challenge that people try.
We do expect for people to start being returned in a matter of weeks.
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Yvette Cooper says first migrants have been detained under 'one in, one out' deal, prior to potentially being sent back to France
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel have been detained under the new “one in, one out” deal, PA Media reports. PA says:
The first detentions came as people arrived in Dover on Wednesday, the first day the pilot scheme came into force.
Pictures showed the migrants wearing life jackets disembarking from Border Force boats.
The Home Office said detentions began for those who arrived on Wednesday afternoon and they will be held in immigration removal centres until they are returned to France.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper said: “Yesterday, under the terms of this groundbreaking new treaty, the first group of people to cross the Channel were detained after their arrival at Western Jet Foil and will now be held in detention until they can be returned to France.
“That sends a message to every migrant currently thinking of paying organised crime gangs to go to the UK that they will be risking their lives and throwing away their money if they get into a small boat.”
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Brown says having Europe-wide borrowing plan for extra defence spending would give markets assurance they need
This is what Gordon Brown said in his Today programme interview when asked to give more details of his plan to exempt from extra defence spending from the fiscal rules. He said other European countries were already looking at this, and that having a European-wide initiative would persuade the bond markets that in this case the rise in borrowing was justified. He said:
If you look around Europe at the moment, you’ll see that the Germans are looking at what they can do outside the fiscal rules. The European stability and growth pact is exempting a lot of defence money from the normal fiscal rules. The French are looking at other ways of doing it. The Polish have already done that.
What I’m actually asking for is a European-wide initiative where individual countries will come together and say, Look, we all have to do this. We all have to find, let’s say, an extra 1%, because 5% of course is building on some of what’s already been spent.
So let’s say we’ve got to find another 1% – that’s £30bn in Britain’s case. Let’s do it jointly – either jointly issued bonds or individually issued bonds that are simultaneous and therefore seen by the markets as an extraordinary issue.
Remember, if we can prevent war by defence expenditure, we’re not actually only preventing war, we’re preventing damage to the economy. This is a long-term risk. It has to be deal with differently.
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Bank of England poised to cut interest rates
The Bank of England is poised to cut interest rates today despite a growing divide between its policymakers over the dangers to the economy from high inflation and rising unemployment, Richard Partington reports.
Gordon Brown urges Reeves to create budget 'headroom' by making rise in defence spending exempt from fiscal rules
Good morning. In every era in politics there are claims that the current generation of politicians aren’t as impressive as the ones that came before. A lot of this is just false memory warped by nostalgia, but in the UK at the moment there are eight former prime ministers and they provide a sub-set that does, sort of, stand up the theory.
Five of them were in office after 2010 – David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak – and their contribution to public life at the moment is, frankly, minimal, or negative. But the three who were in office before 2010 – John Major, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown – remain serious voices. Major is 82, he does not speak out much, but when he does, he is always worth hearing. Blair is running a thinktank actively trying to shape policy in the UK and around the world. And Brown is perpetually engaged in trying to implement change for social justice, as he has been for most of his life.
Today Brown is renewing his call for the government to abandon the two-child benefit cap. As usual with Brown, there is always a plan, and the former PM is promoting a report from the IPPR thinktank explaining how fairer gambling taxes could raise £3.2bn that would pay for the two-child benefit cap to be scrapped. He has written about this in an article in today’s Guardian.
And he was promoting this in an interview in the 8.10 slot on the Today programme.
Brown was chancellor for 10 years and Amol Rajan, the presenter, was keen to get him to talk, not just about gambling and child poverty, but the government’s wider fiscal problems. Mostly Brown tried to avoid being sucked into this debate. But at one point he could not hold back, and he suggested that some parts of defence spending should be exempt from the fiscal rules, to ensure the security budget could rise without cuts having to be made elsewhere. This was interesting not just as a stand-alone policy idea, but as an example out-of-the-box thinking could help Rachel Reeves dig herself out of the hole she is currently in.
Brown said:
Look, there’s one thing that’s happened over the last few months that has been quite unprecedented – to spend 5% on defence expenditure, as we want to spend [into the] 2030s.
But this is a Nato initiative. This is a European initiative. We should be doing this jointly.
We should have either jointly issued bonds or a Nato defence fund, and we should be sharing the cost across the continent, and that should be regarded as something extraordinary and exceptional, outside the fiscal rules, and that would create the kind of headroom that Rachel Reeves needs.
We should be negotiating with our Nato partners to do this at the moment. And I believe these are the kind of things that we can do to sort out some of the problems that we have for the future.
Reeves is on a visit where she is due to speak to the media later. Presumably, we will get her response then.
I will post more from Brown’s interview shortly.
The main event in the diary today is the interest rate announcement from the Bank of England at noon, followed by Andrew Bailey, the governor, holding a press conference at 12.30pm. Graeme Wearden will be covering this on his business live blog.
Reeves is on a visit in south Wales, and she is due to speak to the media around lunchtime. There may also be some politics coming out of the Edinburgh fringe, where Ian Murray, the Scottish secretary, and Kate Forbes, the Scottish deputy first minister, are both due to be speaking at events.
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