Steve Reed says it is ‘perfectly normal’ for political activists to volunteer in other countries’ election campaigns
Good morning. Steve Reed, the environment secretary, has been doing the morning interview round, and he expected to be talking about the appointment of an independent commission, led by the former Treasury official and former deputy governor of the Bank of England Sir Jon Cunliffe, to consider the future of the water industry. Details were briefed out last night, here is the news release, and here is Helena Horton’s story.
But instead Reed has spent the morning fending off a rather bizarre story about the Trump campaign filing a complaint with election regulators in the US alleging that the Labour party is interfering in the US presidential election. Eleni Courea has the details here.
In an interview with the Today programme, Reed said that it was “perfectly normal” for political activists to volunteer in election campaigns in other countries. In an interview with the Today programme, he said:
It’s up to private individuals what they do with their free time, and it’s actually perfectly normal for people who are interested in politics to go from one country to campaign for a sister party in another country. I‘ve seen Americans in the UK doing that in our elections.
He also said the pro-Democrat volunteering effort had not been official organised or funded by the Labour party.
None of this has been organised or paid for by the Labour party. This is just individuals using their own time and their own money.
Asked about a post on LinkedIn from Sofia Patel, head of operations at the Labour party, inviting more people to volunteer and saying their housing would be sorted out, Reed said Today programme would have to be speak to her, but “the Labour party has nothing to do with organising this”.
When it was put to him that the fact that the post has been taken down was an admission that it was badly worded, Reed just said he had not seen it.
Reed is right, of course. Volunteering like this is routine (Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, helped out with the Bill Clinton campaign at one stage in 1992), and the Trump campaign don’t seem too bothered about British inteference when the person doing the interfering is Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader. In one respect, the most interesting feature of the story is the fact that Donald Trump and his campaign team appear to be the only people on the planet who think that Keir Starmer’s Labour party is “far left”.
But Trump may well win the US presidential election in two weeks’ time and, although Starmer has been scrupulous about being respectful towards him as PM, and describes their relationship as “good”, Trump is unpredictable and vindictive, and so this could be a story with repercussions.
Starmer is spending all day travelling to the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, so we are not going to hear much more from him on this. But we’ve got PMQs, and so the topic may come up there.
Here is the agenda for the day.
11.30am: John Healey, the defence secretary, holds a press conference with his German counterpart, Boris Pistorius, after they signed a UK-Germany defence pact.
Noon: Angela Rayner, the deputy PM, faces Oliver Dowden, the shadow deputy PM, at PMQs.
After 12.30pm: MPs debate regulations relating to the infected blood compensation scheme.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line (BTL) or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
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Key events
Opinion in the commentator class is divided as to whether the Trump/Labour election interference row is just largely confected nonsense, or whether it is really quite serious. In his Inside Politics briefing for the Financial Times, Stephen Bush inclines to the latter view. Here is an excerpt.
Keir Starmer is wholly correct when he says it is normal for Labour party staffers and former Labour party staffers to volunteer their own time in US presidential campaigns.
But the big and important difference now is that Donald Trump is a very different kind of politician. In the unlikely event that Poilievre loses the next Canadian general election, Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberals, would not freeze out a Jenrick-led British government. Clinton and John Major worked well on a range of issues, as did Tony Blair and George W Bush. Trump is mercurial, unpredictable and chaotic.
If Trump does return to the White House in November, that will, I think, be the defining moment in the life of the Labour government. Any hope of a return to “normal” politics will die alongside Kamala Harris’s presidential ambitions. Starmer’s government will have to find a new way of approaching the US-UK relationship: and what has, until now, been a “normal” exchange of volunteers between the two countries’ major centre-left parties may soon become a major diplomatic liability.
Steve Reed, the environment secretary, has said that when he accepted free football tickets from a company last year, he did not know it was owned by a firm that owns most of Northumbria Water.
Reed accepted the tickets, donated by a phone company, last year, when he was shadow environment secretary.
In an interview with Sky News this morning, asked if he knew that CK Hutchison Holdings, who donated the tickets, owned 75% of CK Infrastructure Holdings, the owner of Northumbrian Water, Reed replied:
There was nobody from a water company that was involved in offering those tickets. There was nobody from a water company at that event.
Asked if he would take the tickets again, Reed replied:
I probably wouldn’t, but I didn’t know at the time and it hasn’t influenced a single decision that I’ve taken.
Asked why he would not do the same thing again, he told the presenter, Kay Burley:
The implication, Kay, is it somehow influences the decisions that I’m taking … I wasn’t aware that there was any relationship with a water company. Water wasn’t discussed even for one second at that event.
I’m doing the best by the public: The things that we said we do in the general election. My intention is to reset a failing water sector so it serves customers and the environment in a way it hasn’t done for decades.
UK will start running short of drinking water in 10 years if infrastructure does not improve, says minister
Steve Reed, the environment secretary, has said that Britain will start running short of drinking water in about 10 years if action is not taken to improve infrastructure.
In an interview with LBC to defend the need for the review of the water industry he is launching today, Reed said:
The lack of water infrastructure is now holding back economic growth in this country, so we can’t build the homes that we need in parts of the country.
Cambridge, for instance, lacks clean water supply. Oxford lacks sewage systems sufficient to allowed house building to go ahead.
And a third point here is that by the mid-2030s unless we take action to increase water supply – reservoirs as well as infrastructure – then the demand for drinking water will start to outstrip supply, in a way that already happens in some Mediterranean countries.
We cannot allow the water system, the water sector, to continue in this way.
Steve Reed says it is ‘perfectly normal’ for political activists to volunteer in other countries’ election campaigns
Good morning. Steve Reed, the environment secretary, has been doing the morning interview round, and he expected to be talking about the appointment of an independent commission, led by the former Treasury official and former deputy governor of the Bank of England Sir Jon Cunliffe, to consider the future of the water industry. Details were briefed out last night, here is the news release, and here is Helena Horton’s story.
But instead Reed has spent the morning fending off a rather bizarre story about the Trump campaign filing a complaint with election regulators in the US alleging that the Labour party is interfering in the US presidential election. Eleni Courea has the details here.
In an interview with the Today programme, Reed said that it was “perfectly normal” for political activists to volunteer in election campaigns in other countries. In an interview with the Today programme, he said:
It’s up to private individuals what they do with their free time, and it’s actually perfectly normal for people who are interested in politics to go from one country to campaign for a sister party in another country. I‘ve seen Americans in the UK doing that in our elections.
He also said the pro-Democrat volunteering effort had not been official organised or funded by the Labour party.
None of this has been organised or paid for by the Labour party. This is just individuals using their own time and their own money.
Asked about a post on LinkedIn from Sofia Patel, head of operations at the Labour party, inviting more people to volunteer and saying their housing would be sorted out, Reed said Today programme would have to be speak to her, but “the Labour party has nothing to do with organising this”.
When it was put to him that the fact that the post has been taken down was an admission that it was badly worded, Reed just said he had not seen it.
Reed is right, of course. Volunteering like this is routine (Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, helped out with the Bill Clinton campaign at one stage in 1992), and the Trump campaign don’t seem too bothered about British inteference when the person doing the interfering is Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader. In one respect, the most interesting feature of the story is the fact that Donald Trump and his campaign team appear to be the only people on the planet who think that Keir Starmer’s Labour party is “far left”.
But Trump may well win the US presidential election in two weeks’ time and, although Starmer has been scrupulous about being respectful towards him as PM, and describes their relationship as “good”, Trump is unpredictable and vindictive, and so this could be a story with repercussions.
Starmer is spending all day travelling to the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, so we are not going to hear much more from him on this. But we’ve got PMQs, and so the topic may come up there.
Here is the agenda for the day.
11.30am: John Healey, the defence secretary, holds a press conference with his German counterpart, Boris Pistorius, after they signed a UK-Germany defence pact.
Noon: Angela Rayner, the deputy PM, faces Oliver Dowden, the shadow deputy PM, at PMQs.
After 12.30pm: MPs debate regulations relating to the infected blood compensation scheme.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line (BTL) or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. I’m still using X and I’ll see something addressed to @AndrewSparrow very quickly. I’m also trying Bluesky (@andrewsparrowgdn) and Threads (@andrewsparrowtheguardian).
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos (no error is too small to correct). And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.