Rachel Reeves, before the autumn budget, Richard Partington reports.
main announcement from No 10 this morning is “thousands of jobs in green industries announced as the UK government welcomes more than £24bn of private investment for pioneering energy projects ahead of the International Investment Summit on 14 October”.
In his London Playbook briefing for Politico, Stefan Boscia says a lot of this is not strictly new.
The government’s big announcement going into this morning was the news that private sector firms have poured £24 billion in new investment into green energy projects. This includes a £12 billion investment from Spanish firm Iberdrola and £8 billion from Denmark’s Ørsted.
Not so fast: However, Politico’s Senior UK energy correspondent Charlie Cooper texts in to say most of the money involved is not actually new. He points out that the Iberdrola and Ørsted investments were publicly announced more than a month ago and came through Britain’s contracts for difference scheme. Nice try, though!
To be fair, ‘strictly new’ is a high hurdle. If newspapers, and news websites, refused to report things that have been written about somewhere already, they would all be a lot more empty.
a report in the i suggesting that Jenrick’s rightwing stance is just tactical. The story says “senior Tories have cast major doubts over the chances of Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick leading the Conservatives into the next election amid growing fears over party unity” and it includes this quote.
Some moderates hope the candidates will tack back to the centre ground, should they succeed in convincing the Tory party membership to elect them.
One member of the Shadow Cabinet said they had assurances Jenrick would rein in his right-wing polemic if elected party leader. “He has promised me he will turn to the centre,” they said. “I suspect he has told other people the same.”
After reading out the bit about turning to the centre, and telling other MPs the same, Webb said: “Have you?”
Jenrick replied:
I don’t know where that quote comes from, and I wouldn’t believe everything that you read in the papers.
When Webb tried again, and asked if Jenrick had promised anyone that he would return to the centre, Jenrick replied:
I haven’t said that, no.
But it is interesting that it took a second go to get a firm negative, and his first reponse was a classic non-denial. If it were true that he had said the same thing to various MPs, he genuinely would not know who spoke to the i. And ‘don’t believe everything you read in the papers’ is just a statement of fact.
Jenrick went on to say that that he did not accept the charge that he was lurching to the right in the first place. He said:
But let me just address the broader point that it raises. Because there are those who say that the Conservative party, were I to lead it, is going to shift to the right.
I actually don’t see these labels as at all relevant. What I want to see is the Conservative party occupy what I describe as the common ground of British politics.
Those are the things that millions of our fellow citizens care about. Most people do not consider themselves left or right.
When Webb put it to him that leaving the European convention on human rights was not a “common ground” position, because only around 20% of the public are in favour, he argued that he was being practical, not ideological. Jenrick said:
The reason that I believe we should leave the European convention on human rights is not an ideological one. I came to this view through the practical experience I had as a minister, in particular at the Home Office, where I saw that we as a country were not able to do the most basic duty of the state, which is to secure our borders.
We weren’t able to remove dangerous criminals from the country. We weren’t able to remove terror suspects from the country, and we certainly weren’t able to set up a robust but important and credible deterrent, such as the Rwanda one, because of our continued membership with the ECHR.
Now millions of people across our country – most people, I would argue – want us to do those things. My point is we will never be able to achieve their objectives unless we leave the ECHR.
“more than £24bn of private investment for pioneering energy projects”, although it has been pointed out that some of this is not strictly new. As for the meeting itself, the main story to emerge so far is that Sue Gray has not turned up, despite being appointed as the PM’s new envoy for nations and regions.
Meanwhile, the Conservative party is still generating news. Robert Jenrick, one of the two candidates left in the leadership contest, gave an interview to the Today programme this morning with various interesting lines.
Jenrick confirmed that, if he is elected leader, he will expect members of the shadow cabinet to sign up to his plan for Britain to leave the European convention on human rights. This is significant because it could lead to many senior people in the parliamentry party refusing to serve on the frontbench. There are Tories who were happy to go along with Rishi Sunak’s position (not ruling out ECHR withdrawal as an option) who would draw the line at Jenrick’s position. It is also quite possible that some of them would swallow their principles, and go along with a Jenrick policy they regard as unwise, just for the sake of a good shadow cabinet job, but it is hard to know at this point quite how much of this shameless opportunism we would see.
When asked if all shadow cabinet ministers would have to agree to ECHR withdrawal if he were leader, Jenrick said:
It would be one of the stable of Conservative policies, so yes, we would go into the next election with it in our manifesto.
Asked if that meant James Cleverly, the former home secretary and former foreign secretary who was seen as the leadership candidate who did best at party conference, but who was unexpectedly voted out of the contest on Wednesday, would be out of his shadow cabinet, Jenrick replied:
I believe it’s very important that we do this … I’ve already said to James, who is a friend, someone I respect enormously, that I would be delighted for him to serve in the shadow cabinet should he want to do so.
Cleverly also claimed that the party was not as divided on this issue as people claimed.
I don’t think the point of difference is as big as perhaps you suggest it is. There is now a consensus within the Conservative party that the ECHR is not working in the interests of the British people, for all the reasons that I’ve just described.
Most people now are saying that, at a bare minimum, we need to reform the ECHR.
My position is simply one stage further, which is to say that – perhaps unlike others, because I’ve given this a great deal of thought, and that’s no disrespect to other colleagues, they haven’t always seen the things I’ve seen by virtue of having served as a minister where I have – I’ve come to the conclusion that we can’t reform it.
Reform requires the unanimous agreement of 46 member states from Iceland to Andorra. It’s not going to happen.
What I’m proposing is simply that we leave and that we replace it with a British bill of rights.
In the interview Jenrick also denied telling Tory MPs in private that, if he wins the leadership, he will stop being rightwing and tack back to the centre. But he also rejected the suggestion that he had lurched to the right in the first place, and so there is some ambiguity in what he meant. I will do another post on that soon.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9am: Keir Starmer is meeting the Scottish and Welsh first ministers, and Northern Ireland’s first minister and deputy first minister, at the first meeting of the Council of Nations and Regions. He will start with bilateral meetings, then there will be a collective meeting with first ministers, and then, at noon, a full meeting with metro mayors. In the afternoon Starmer is giving media interviews.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
3.10pm: Rhun ap Iorwerth, the Plaid Cymru leaders, speaks at his party’s conference in Cardiff.
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Source: theguardian.com
