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PMQs live: Starmer to face Badenoch for first time since local elections | Politics Key events Starmer faces Badenoch at PMQsPMQs is starting very soon. Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question. Starmer defends proposed legal change to stop protesters climbing on Churchill statue in Parliament SquareAt one point when he was opposition leader, Keir Starmer criticised the then Conservative government for being more interested in protecting statues than women. Labour is prioritising protecting women, and Starmer has pledged to halve violence against women and girls. But he is not ignoring statues either. According to a report by Jack Elsom in the Sun, the government is going to reclassify Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square as war memorial so that anyone who climbs on it is committing an offence punishable by up to three months in jail under measures in the crime and policing bill. Starmer told the Sun for the story:
Minister confirms government considering UK-EU youth mobility scheme - less than 2 weeks after telling MPs it wasn'tAnd, on the subject of trade deals, Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Cabinet Office minister in charge of post-Brexit relations with the EU, has confirmed that the government is considering a youth mobilty deal with Brussels. As George Parker reports in the Financial Times, Thomas-Symonds said that, provided the UK government’s red lines were respected, “a smart, controlled youth mobility scheme would of course have benefits for our young people”. He added: “We will consider sensible EU proposals in this space.” This will, of course, come as no surprise to anyone who has been reading the news for the last few weeks. But it will come as a surprise anyone naive enough to take what government ministers have said on this at face value. Less than two weeks ago, during Cabinet Office questions in the Commons, Thomas-Symonds was asked by the Lib Dem MP Sarah Olney, if the government would support a UK-EU youth mobility scheme. Thomas-Symonds replied:
Reynolds declines to deny report saying UK-US trade deal set to be signed this weekAccording to the Financial Times splash, the UK and the US has all but agreed a trade deal which is “set to be signed this week”. Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, would not confirm this when he gave interviews this morning. But he did not deny the reports either. He told the Today programme that he could not give a running commentary, but that he was “working extremely hard” to get the deal. In their story, Jim Pickard, Peter Foster and Aime Williams say:
Labour heading for third place in next year's Senedd elections, poll suggests, with Plaid Cymru set to come firstYouGov has two new polls out this morning – and both of them are good for Reform UK. Here are the GB voting intention figures, from the regular polling that YouGov does for the Times. Reform: 29% (+3 from last week) Labour: 22% (-1) Conservatives: 17% (-3) Liberal Democrats: 16% (+1) Greens: 10% (+1) According to YouGov, these are the lowest figures for the Tories since June 2019, when they were also on 17%, and the lowest figures for Labour since October 2019. And this is the highest figure YouGov has ever recorded for Reform UK. YouGov has also published a poll for ITV Cymru of voting intentions for the Senedd elections next year. It shows Plaid Cymru coming first, with Reform UK in second place and the Labour party, which has been the most powerful party in Wales most of the last century, coming third. Labour has been in power in the Senedd since devolution but, commenting on what these figures would mean for Senedd seats in 2026, Jac Larner, from Cardiff University’s Welsh Governance Centre told ITV:
The electoral system for the Senedd has changed, and next year there will be 96 MSs (members of the Senedd) elected, meaning a party or coalition will need 49 seats to have a majority. Senior Tory MPs and peers break ranks to call for recognition of PalestineMore than a dozen senior Conservative MPs and peers have written to the prime minister calling for the UK to immediately recognise Palestine as a state, breaking ranks with their own party to do so, Kiran Stacey reports. Trade policy Twitter is furious about the crassness of the Tory/Reform UK attacks on the double contribution convention aspect of the UK-India trade deal. These are from Allie Renison, a trade expert who has advised government.
This is from Sam Lowe, another trade specialist, on Bluesky.
This is from Brendan Chilton, director of the Institute for Prosperity thintank.
And this is from Paul Kelso, business correspondent at Sky News.
Critics of UK-India trade deal ‘confused’, says Jonathan Reynolds, as he denies British workers being undercutGood morning. Yesterday the government was able to announce some good news – a major trade deal with India. There is cross-party consensus that trade deals are a good thing, the last Conservative government was working on a trade deal with India too, and at least some Tories were happy to welcome the deal. Oliver Dowden, the former deputy PM, posted this on social media.
And Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former business secretary who is on the opposite wing of the party to Dowden, posted this.
But Dowden and Rees-Mogg did not get the memo about the official opposition line. As reported on the blog yesterday afternoon, Kemi Badenoch decided to attack the deal on the grounds that it includes a double contribution convention, which means that Indian workers temporarily living in the UK will not have to pay national insurance contributions for three years – with British workers in India benefiting in the same way. Crucially, Badenoch found an effective means of putting a negative spin on this relatively niche feature of the deal – she described it as “two-tier” taxation, involving “tax refunds for Indians not available to us”. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, was quickly making the same argument too, claiming the government was making it 20% cheaper to employ an Indian worker than a British worker. In a video he said the deal was “appalling”, and claimed it showed Labour had “in a big, big way betrayed working Britain”. Badenoch has certainly been successful at landing her message with the rightwing papers. Here are some of today’s front pages. Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, has been giving interviews this morning. His main task was to counter the Tory/Reform UK claims and he insisted that double contribution conventions were a routine feature of trade deals, applying to just a sub-category of workers (employees from firms with operations in both the UK and India, seconded temporarily from one country to another), and that the British workers were not being undercut. The Tories and Reform UK were “confused”, he said. He told the Today programme:
Asked whether the agreement meant Indian workers paying less tax than British counterparts doing the same job, Reynolds told the programme: “No.” In an interview with Sky News, Reynolds said that the trade deal would generate more than £1bn in extra tax revenues for the Treasury. He said the double contribution convention would cost “less than a tenth of that”. Here is the agenda for the day. 8.30am: Rhun ap Iorwerth, the Plaid Cymru leader, gives a speech in Cardiff marking one year to go until the next Senedd elections. 9.45am: Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, gives a speech to the CyberUK conference in Manchester. 10.30am: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, gives a speech in Edinburgh on SNP strategy running into next year’s Holyrood elections. Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, is also giving a speech this morning, at 10.45am, as is the Scottish Consevative leader, Russel Findley, at 12.30pm. 10.55am: Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, attends a ‘Turning of the Page Ceremony’ in the Commons, with the book of remembrance naming MPs killed in both world wars, as part of the VE Day 80th anniversary celebrations. Noon: Keir Starmer faces Kemi Badenoch at PMQs. Lunchtime: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor is visiting a Scotch whisky distillery near Edinburgh to promote the UK-India trade deal (which cuts tariffs on whisky exports to India). 2.30pm: Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Cabinet Office minister, gives evidence to an infected blood inquiry hearing about compensation payment arrangements. If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm at the moment), 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. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary. 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. Source link Posted: 2025-05-07 11:55:38 |
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