Starmer to keep saying Truss crashed economy despite legal letter, No 10 suggests – as it happened

for kicking the victim “around four times” in 2006 when he was a teenager. Obese-Jecty said he believes “in the rehabilitation of offenders”, but that “being sentenced for such a heinous crime means that you forfeit some of the privileges those of us who have never attacked a woman are granted. One such privilege is being a member of parliament.” He told the Commons:

The presence of a member of parliament with a conviction for violently assaulting a woman has never been acknowledged in this house, let alone addressed. Any debate in this house on the subject of violence against women and girls should address the convicted criminal already in our midst.

As this government shapes its legislative agenda, I would ask the minister to consider whether it’s time to introduce legislation that bars those who have served a custodial sentence for violence against women and girls from standing as a member of parliament.

McMurdock has said in the past he still feels “deeply ashamed” of what he did and that he paid for his actions in full.

a report in the Financial Times, the current government, and the last one, estimate this could cost around £7bn. The report says:

One former Tory official and a Labour figure both said they had been made aware of an initial estimate of close to £7bn for the compensation.

Another person who worked at the Home Office during [Rishi] Sunak’s government said there had been broader estimates of £5bn to £10bn for the cost. “We were pushing for it, but Rishi didn’t want to do it,” they said. “It was blocked.

The government says it wants to deliver “meaningful change” in response to the report’s recommendations, but that it is still working out potential costs.

RMT union after four years during which he became perhaps the most recognisable presence on picket lines amid the biggest rail and tube worker strikes for decades. Jasper Jolly has the story.

Labour voted for the bill to proceed.

In an interview with the BBC, Burnham said:

In my view the government was right to reject that form of opportunism [the Tory amendment that was voted down].

But I did hear last night coming out of that debate ministers saying they are open to discussing issues now with survivors.

I will add my voice into this and say I do think there is the case for a limited national inquiry that draws on reviews like the one that I commissioned, and the one we have seen in Rotherham, the one we have seen in Telford, to draw out some of these national issues and compel people to give evidence who then may have charges to answer and be held to account.

The PM’s spokesperson told journalists at the lobby briefing that it was wrong to suggest the government was about to change its mind on an inquiry. He explained:

We’ve had a national inquiry, it … engaged 7,000 victims, and what victims are telling us is that they want to see action, and that’s where the government is focused, and that’s why we’re not going ahead with another national inquiry.

in his preview, David Lammy, the foreign secretary, used his speech today to say the post-cold war peace was “well and truly over”. Here is the full quote.

The post-cold war peace is well and truly over. This is a changed strategic environment.

The number of conflicts higher than at any time since 1945. The spectre of famine from Gaza to Sudan. And the most refugees and displaced people on record.

I am occasionally asked on my travels, here and of course on the doorstep around the country, when will the Kremlin threat, this upheaval that we’re experiencing, end? When will things get back to normal? My answer is that they will not. Europe’s future security is on a knife-edge.

Bevin warned in 1948 that we would only preserve peace by mobilising such force and I quote, “As will create confidence and energy on the one side and inspire respect and caution on the other.” And this is exactly what we need now.

That’s why our foreign policy has had to change. Inspired by Bevin, I call our new approach Progressive Realism. Taking the world as it is not as we wish it to be. Advancing progressive ends by realist means.

DfE’s evidence to the STRB submitted last month was that a 2.8% pay rise “would maintain the competitiveness of teachers’ pay” despite the challenging financial backdrop facing the government.here. Patrick Wintour covered it in a preview story, and Lammy wrote an article for the Guardian fleshing out some of what he was going to say.

Lammy seems to have caused some concern at GB News by talking repeatedly in his speech about “irregular migration”, not illegal migration. “Irregular migration” tends to be the term preferred by policy specialists. That is because in some countries entering without authorisiation is a breach of regulations, not an offence. It is also a reaction against the use of terms like “illegal migrant” or “illegal asylum seekers”. People object to this language on the grounds that acts are illegal, not people, and that under international law claiming asylum cannot be illegal.

But in the UK migrants who enter the country without the appropriate paperwork are committing an offence – even if their intention is to claim asylum when they arrived. The last government tightened the law on this in the Nationality and Borders Act, which is why Tory ministers regularly talked about illegal migration. Labour ministers use the phrase too.

Christopher Hope from GB News says Lammy told him both terms were appropriate.

I have just asked David Lammy if this change in description meant Labour was not taking the issue as seriously as the Tories. The Foreign secretary told me: “It can be both irregular and illegal – let me make that absolutely clear.” He added that his department is spending £84m to work “upstream” in the horn of Africa, and transit countries in western Balkans and southern Mediterranean countries, to combat illegal arrivals.

Jess Phillips and others, in comments which went notably further than those of her leader, Kemi Badenoch.

Speaking in a Commons debate on violence against women and girls, one scheduled by coincidence a day after furious exchanges about whether there should be a new national inquiry into so-called grooming gangs, Davies said she backed Badenoch’s call for the inquiry.

However, she strongly condemned Musk, who has called Phillips, the safeguarding minister, a “rape genocide apologist” and a “witch”. Davies also warned that such language could make it less likely that women and girls who are abused and raped would want to come forward.

There was a good turnout for the debate, but no one attended from Reform UK, some of whose MPs had spoken out very robustly on Wednesday about grooming gangs and the need to better protect women and girls.

As Phillips sat opposite on the Labour benches, Davies said:

Let’s all agree in this chamber this afternoon, and say quite clearly: we do not accept, or see any way that we should accept, any abuse directed to us as members of parliament, as ministers, and people speaking up for women and girls, that we have seen in recent days.

She warned against what she called “a leap from rhetoric to intimidation, and then potentially to violence when it comes to the political arena”, saying:

We need to make sure that that doesn’t seep down into what victims feel might happen to them if they come forward and speak out.

Speaking after Davies, Sarah Owen, the Labour MP who chairs the Commons women and equalities committee, said studies showing that around one in three women say they had been sexually assaulted meant misogyny was a far wider problem than often billed.

In referring to Phillips as a “witch”, Musk had been “really digging deep into historic misogyny”, she added.

their story, Gross and Miller say:

Musk, the world’s richest man and key confidant of US president-elect Donald Trump, is probing how he and his rightwing allies can destabilise the UK Labour government beyond the aggressive posts he has issued on his social media platform X, the people said.

“His view is that western civilisation itself is threatened,” one of the people added.

Musk has sought information about whether it might be possible to build support for alternative British political movements — notably the rightwing populist Reform UK party — to force a change of prime minister before the next election, according to associates.

Steve Reed, promised farmers today they would be able to build larger chicken sheds, but experts have said this would create “megafarms” and contribute to river pollution.

12.10pm.)

But Philip Hammond, who was chancellor when Theresa May was PM and who is now a Tory peer, told the World at One that Reeves should press on with the visit. He said:

I wouldn’t personally recommend the chancellor to cancel her trip to China. I think the trip to China is important, and I think this can wait until she gets back next week.

But I do think she will need to reassure parliament about what is going on when she does get back next week.

Asked who worried the chancellor should be, he said:

I think it’s right that we don’t get obsessed with single day movements in the markets, because there are a lot of short-term drivers in the markets as well.

But it’s clear that, on a medium term trajectory, the markets are concerned about the sustainability of the fiscal position in the UK and about the robustness of the UK economy.

If he was still chancellor, he would be “worried about the trend of what is happening”, he said.

Hammond said some of what was happening was due to trends in the global economy. But he says businesses in Britain were also expecting the government to take measures that would “provide a visible and clear boost to economic growth”, and they had not happened. As a result business was “confused, angry, disrupted in terms of what the direction of travel is”, he said. He went on:

I think we now need a message from the chancellor that she understands the concerns of business and that she is going to put business investment and economic growth at the very front of her agenda.

Graeme Wearden has more on the bond market story in his business live blog.

12.24pm.) She posted this on social media, commenting on a tweet summing up the No 10 line.

I know Keir Starmer won’t repeat his allegations that I crashed the economy because he knows it’s a lie.

11.58am.) He does not want to publish his name, but he says that if Truss ever did try to sue Keir Starmer for libel, she would not stand a chance.

He also describes the letter as a classic example of a Slapp.

He says:

The letter sent by Truss’s lawyers to Starmer does not explicitly threaten to sue for libel, but the language in which it is couched makes such a threat implicit. However, a libel claim in these circumstances would certainly fail.

Under section 4 of the Defamation Act 2013 – enacted, of course, under a Tory-led coalition government – there is a defence for statements made with a reasonable belief that making them is in the public interest. Political debate is a classic example of public interest speech, and the courts will steer clear of evaluating its content. It does not matter whether, on a technical economic analysis, Truss did in fact ‘crash the economy’. What matters is the fact that there is a legitimate, robust political debate around whether she did that. Starmer has weighed in on one side of that debate, and she has been free to put the other side (which she has, vigorously).

All the court needs to find is that: (a) Starmer’s comments were on a matter of public interest, and (b) Starmer, in making his comments, reasonably believed that communicating them to the public at large was in the public interest.

‘Public interest’ has never been defined at law, but in the context of the cut and thrust of general election debate, and political debate more generally, a court would undoubtedly find in Starmer’s favour on this, because it would not endorse setting a precedent that risked shutting down debate on the economy between leading politicians.

Incidentally, since there has been much debate around so-called Slapps (strategic lawsuits against public participation), much of the ostensible concern about which has been raised by Conservative politicians in recent years (as well as outlets such as the Guardian), it is perhaps worth pointing out that Truss’s letter is a textbook example of a Slapp. It implicitly threatens a totally unmeritorious legal claim in a bid to cause the prime minister to stop making statements on a matter of public debate. It is a strategic attempt to silence political criticism – something that is, quite nakedly, a Slapp. At this point, there is no specific anti-Slapp law in the UK, although existing civil procedure mechanisms would in all likelihood prevent such a claim reaching trial.

Islamophobia that says people should not talk about Muslim grooming gangs.

Kemi Badenoch raised this issued at PMQs yesterday. She told Keir Starmer:

The Labour party has adopted the APPG [all-party parliamentay group] definition of “Islamophobia”. The same APPG report said that talking about sex groomers was an example of Islamophobia. This is exactly why people are scared to tell the truth.

And today the Times is running a story saying the APPG definition that Badenoch was talking about “put ‘grooming gangs’ in inverted commas and suggested that using the term in relation to Muslims was racist”.

Badenoch was referring to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslim, which put out a statement yesterday saying Badenoch misrepresented what it was saying.

The APPG summarises Islamophobia as “rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. In a report published in 2018, it does not say all references to grooming gangs are Islamophobic. But it says it would be Islamophobic to talk about Muslim grooming gangs in circumstances where, if the perpetrators were Christian, that would not be mentioned.

And, as an example of Islamphobia, it says:

Using the symbols and images associated with classic Islamophobia (e.g. Muhammed being a paedophile, claims of Muslims spreading Islam by the sword or subjugating minority groups under their rule) to characterise Muslims as being ‘sex groomers’, inherently violent or incapable of living harmoniously in plural societies.

Asked about this in interviews this morning, Lammy said the Labour party had accepted the APPG’s definition of Islamophobia. But he said the government had not adopted that definition, and the government’s definition was “still being determined”.

And he told Times Radio:

That’s a process that’s underway and we’ve got to wait to see where that comes out.

But I’m quite sure that that process will not lead to anything that is an impediment in going after paedophiles, whatever their background, religious background, ethnicity, or the colour of their skin. Very, very clear on that.

Source: theguardian.com