Angela Rayner faces Alex Burghart at PMQs
With Keir Starmer still on his way back from the G20 summit in Brazil (they were on the ground refuelling at Cape Verde about two hours ago), Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, is standing in for him. Kemi Badenoch does not have a deputy, but today she has asked Alex Burghart, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, to lead for the opposition.
Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.
Key events
Burghart says inflation is going up. It has delivered “high tax, high inflation, low growth, low reform”. She goes on: “There’s a word for that – it’s Starmerism.”
He asks what the government is doing to help farmers.
Rayner says the government is supporting farmers. The last government could not even get money out of the door for farmers, she says.
Burghart says the government is stoking inflation. He says it has given above-inflation pay rises to public sector workers, and the budget was inflationary.
Rayner says inflation was at 11%, and it is now at 3%.
Alex Burghart says he agrees with Rayner’s remarks on Ukraine.
He gets on to his question, and it is a short one. What is the government doing to cut inflation.
Rayner welcomes Burghart to his place, and points out that he was a growth minister under Liz Truss. This government is doing better, she says.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Lab) asks if the government will stop auction houses being allowed to sell human remains.
Rayner says this practice is “abhorrent”. She promises Ribeiro-Addy a meeting on this.
Angela Rayner starts by saying Keir Starmer has been at the G20 summit.
And she says this week marks 1,000 days since Vladimir Putin’s barbaric war in Ukraine. The UK will stand with Ukraine “for as long as it takes”.
And she says it’s equal pay day.
Angela Rayner faces Alex Burghart at PMQs
With Keir Starmer still on his way back from the G20 summit in Brazil (they were on the ground refuelling at Cape Verde about two hours ago), Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, is standing in for him. Kemi Badenoch does not have a deputy, but today she has asked Alex Burghart, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, to lead for the opposition.
Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.
Trump won’t back peace deal for Ukraine that amounts to victory for Putin, David Lammy claims
Donald Trump’s re-election as US president has prompted fears that he will cut off American support for Ukraine, forcing it into peace talks with Russia that would culminate in a settlement on terms favourable to Vladimir Putin. In an interview with the New Statesman, David Lammy has argued that Trump would not go that far.
That might sound like wishful thinking, but Lammy and Keir Starmer did have dinner with Trump in the autumn. Lammy discusses that too in the interview with George Eaton. Here are the key lines.
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Lammy argued that Trump would not accept a deal over Ukraine that would look like a victory for Putin. Asked about Trump’s stance on Ukraine, Lammy said:
I’ve been a politician for 25 years and I understand the different philosophies at play. There’s a deep philosophical underpinning to friends in the Republican party that I’ve known for many years, thinking back to people like [former US secretary of state] Condoleezza Rice. Donald Trump has some continuity with this position, which is ‘peace through strength’.
What I do know about Donald Trump is that he doesn’t like losers and he doesn’t want to lose; he wants to get the right deal for the American people. And he knows that the right deal for the American people is peace in Europe and that means a sustainable peace – not Russia achieving its aims and coming back for more in the years ahead.
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Lammy said he found Trump “very funny, very engaging and very charismatic” when he and Starmer met Trump for dinner at his home in New York. He also said Trump was “a consummate politician” and very interested in learning how Labour won the election in the UK.
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Lammy said he was confident that the Trump administration would back the UK deal giving Mauritius sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has claimed Trump’s team are strongly opposed to the deal. But Lammy said:
The most important thing about that deal was securing the [US-UK] naval base and securing that naval base well beyond any of our lifetimes [99 years]. That secures global security in many, many ways and it certainly keeps that important part of the Indian Ocean out of play for the Chinese.
I’m very confident that when the new administration looks at the detail of this deal that they will stand behind it because Donald Trump knows what a good deal looks like [a reference to his 1987 book The Art of the Deal] – and this is a good deal.
When I spoke to friends in the Democratic Party, and I raised this privately, I just felt that they hadn’t centred the economy in the way that we [Labour] had done just coming into our own election cycle.
It felt that the campaign was very focused on 6 January [the pro-Trump riot at the Capitol building in 2021], very focused on Donald Trump personally, very focused on abortion rights. But my view is that you don’t get permission to talk about those things unless you have satisfied the bread and butter – the economy and issues of immigration.
Peter Kyle announces review of impact of social media on children, saying ban for under-16s not ruled out
A ban on social media for under-16s is “on the table” if companies do not take action to protect children, Peter Kyle, the science secretary, has said. PA Media says:
Kyle made the warning while telling Ofcom to be more assertive with tech firms, as both he and the regulator ready themselves for new legal powers in the Online Safety Act to commence from the start of 2025.
The act will see new safety duties placed on social media platforms for the first time, requiring them to protect users, and in particular children, from harmful content. This will include a crackdown on under-13s having access to age-restricted content.
Speaking to the Telegraph newspaper, Kyle suggested the UK would have to move to “another level of regulation” if tech companies do not get together to enforce the Act.
He said he did not want to pursue further law changes until he sees how the Online Safety Act works. But he signalled he had been speaking to politicians from Australia where social media restrictions for under-16s have been considered.
Asked if the UK could push its age limits up to 16, Kyle told the Telegraph: “When it comes to keeping young people safe, everything is on the table.”
As the government prepares to enforce the Act, Kyle has published for the first time a statement of strategic priorities for watchdog Ofcom.
This says Ofcom should ensure the concept of “safety by design” is being followed by platforms from the start so more harm is caught before it occurs, and pushes for more transparency from tech firms on what harms are occurring on their platforms.
Kyle also announced ministers will launch a research project aimed at helping it understand the impact of smartphones and social media use on children.
The British embassy in Ukraine remains open despite the US shutting its own mission in Kyiv because of a “potential significant air attack” from Russia, the government has said.
Police ‘losing confidence’ to use their powers to protect public for fear of prosecution, Tories claim
Frontline police are losing the confidence to use their full powers after lengthy prosecutions like the trial of the officer who shot Chris Kaba, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary has said.
Speaking at a policing conference in Westminster, Philp said that if the government did not act, the opposition would present plans to parliament itself. He said:
Many officers I’ve spoken to … feel their reasonable use of force or other police powers is treated disproportionately or unreasonably after the event, in a way that doesn’t reflect and recognise the pressures of dealing with an incident or the split second decision making, which is inevitably required.
Some incidents go into lengthy and bureaucratic Independent Office for Police Conduct investigations, or even prosecutions, where common sense says that is not appropriate.
Martyn Blake was cleared of the murder of Kaba in three hours by a jury at the Old Bailey last month. Philp also cited the case of Pc Paul Fisher, who was cleared of dangerous driving after crashing on the way to a terrorist incident in Streatham, south east London. Philp said:
We need police officers on the front line to be prepared to take the lawful action necessary to protect themselves and the public.
We need them to drive quickly to the scene of an attack by terrorists and save lives.
We need stop and search to be used to take knives off our streets, we need force to be used where necessary to detain suspects, and I’m concerned that officers are losing the confidence to exercise those powers as required to keep the public safe.
Philp said he wanted the government to allow officers to use the fact they were acting in line with their training as a defence to a criminal or misconduct charge. And he said he wanted this in legislation.
If the government doesn’t make those changes, then at the next opportunity, as the shadow home secretary, I will seek to introduce those measures as an amendment to the next piece of legislation that goes through parliament.
Housing minister tells MPs building 1.5m homes ‘essential’, but will be ‘more difficult’ than originally expected
Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, has just started giving evidence to the Commons housing committee. The hearing is about the government’s plan to build 1.5m new homes over the course of this parliament.
Asked if this was deliverable, Pennycook said it was not just deliverable, but also “essential”.
He said it was “an incredibly stretching target”. But he said anything less would have been an inadequate response to the housing crisis. A generation of people were being priced out of home ownership, he said. He went on:
We’ve got millions of low to middle income households forced into insecure, unaffordable and far too often substandard private rented housing. We have 1.3 million people languishing on social housing waiting lists, and to our utter shame as a nation, more than 150,000 homeless children right now living in temporary accommodation. That is the price we’ve paid for not being serious about house building rates.
But Pennycook also said that building 1.5m homes over five years would be “more difficult” than Labour expected when it set the target in opposition. He said the OBR was predicting a fall in housing supply.
Angela Rayner to take PMQs as Tories attack BBC for questioning farming lobby’s inheritance tax claims
Good morning. Keir Starmer is travelling back from the G20 summit in Brazil, but he won’t be in the Commons in time for PMQs, and so Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, will be taking questions on his behalf. In line with recent practice, Kemi Badenoch, the new Conservative leader, won’t go up against a deputy, and she will miss the session too. The Tories don’t have a deputy leader, but Badenoch is getting Alex Burghart, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, to stand in for her.
The PM might not be answering, but that does not mean the questions get any easier. The situation in Ukraine is looking increasingly perilous, inflation is going up, and figures out yesterday have reignited the row about the government’s decision to cut the winter fuel payment. But the Conservatives may also want to ask about farmers, and the plan to extend inheritance tax to some farms. Traditonally the Tories have liked to think of themselves as a pro-countryside, pro-farming party, and they will have been reassured by the fact that, when they lined up alongside farmers at yesterday’s rally, they did not just have Jeremy Clarkson with them; the Liberal Democrats, the Green party, Greenpeace and even Just Stop Oil were on the farmers’ side too.
Now the Tories have combined backing the NFU with another deep-seated rightwing obsession – attacking the BBC. In comments that have provided the Daily Telegraph with its splash, Stuart Andrew, the shadow culture secretary, has attacked the BBC for producing a factcheck analysis saying that some of the claims made by the pro-farming lobby about the impact of the inheritance tax change are exaggerated. He said:
The job of BBC Verify is to do exactly that but they’ve failed on their own terms.
The government is refusing to say how many family farms are subject to their tax raid, only offering partial and out of date statistics which fail to account for the full scale of their reforms.
The taxpayers pay for the BBC to be independent and free from bias, not for them to regurgitate Labour lines.
This matter should be immediately looked into and corrected.
The Telegraph story also makes much of Jeremy Clarkson, the TV celebrity and farmer, accusing the BBC of bias because a BBC reporter had the temerity to ask him at yesterday’s rally about the fact that he bought a farm at least in part to dodge inheritance tax – something that he has been happy to boast about in the past.
Andrew’s broadside against the BBC seems to have been inspired by this BBC Verify article and this video summary by Ben Chu, a BBC Verify correspondent, in which he said that claims from the Country Land and Business Association that 70,000 farms would be affected by the change was “almost certainly an overestimate”. Chu had sound grounds for saying this, for the reasons set out in a Treasury letter to the Commons Treasury committee, and the BBC is standing by its story. As it should; most reasonable commentators would agree these reports were fair, not biased. But the row illustrates how hard it can be for a governing party to win an argument when attacking media institutions trying to report impartially becomes part of the opposition’s modus operandi.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9am: Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, gives a speech to the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s conference.
9.30am: Lord Darzi, the leading surgeon and former health minister, gives evidence to the Commons health committee about the report he wrote for the government on the state of the NHS.
10am: Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, gives evidence to the Commons housing committee about the government’s housebuilding plans.
Noon: Angela Rayner, the deputy PM, faces Alex Burghart, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, at PMQs.
3.20pm: Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, gives evidence to the Commons women and equalities committee about non-consensual intimate image abuse.
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