Meltdown? Labour goes nuclear
Sky News' Sam Coates and Politico's Anne McElvoy serve up their essential guide to the day in British politics.
Negotiations for the spending review are complete - with reports Chancellor Rachel Reeves has refused to meet Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's demand for extra police funding. We won't have heard the end of this.
Reform UK hold (another!) news conference, and the government announces its intentions to go nuclear - "ushering in a new golden age of nuclear [power]".
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BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
UN panel urges UK to renegotiate Chagos Islands deal
A UN panel has urged the UK to renegotiate a deal returning the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, saying it "fails to guarantee" the rights of the Chagossian deal, signed last month, returned sovereignty of the Indian Ocean archipelago to Mauritius, but the UK retained the right to run a military base on Diego Garcia, the largest of the Chagos preventing the Chagossian people from returning to Diego Garcia, "the agreement appears to be at variance with the Chagossians' right to return," the UN experts wrote.A Foreign Office spokesperson said the UK-Mauritius deal had been "welcomed by international organisations including the UN secretary general". The panel of four experts were appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, but are not UN staff and are independent from the said by the UK keeping the military base of Diego Garcia, the Chagossian people were hindered from being able to "exercise their cultural rights in accessing their ancestral lands from which they were expelled".The panel called for the current deal to be suspended and for a new agreement to be the agreement, the UK would pay an average of £101m a year for 99 years to continue operating the military base on Diego Garcia, in concert with the Chagos Islands are located in the Indian Ocean about 5,799 miles (9,332km) south-east of the UK, and about 1,250 miles north-east of UK purchased the islands for £3m in 1968, but Mauritius has argued it was illegally forced to give away the islands in order to gain independence from Garcia was then cleared to make way for a military base, with large groups of Chagossians forcibly moved to Mauritius and the Seychelles, or taking up an invitation to settle in England, mainly in Crawley, West then, Chagossians have not been allowed to return to Diego the UK-Mauritius deal was signed last month, two Chagossian women living in the UK - who were born on Diego Garcia - launched a last-minute legal bid to stop it, saying the agreement did not guarantee the right of return to their island of birth. The deal includes a £40m trust fund to support Chagossians, a component that the UN panel also questioned would "comply with the right of the Chagossian people to effective remedy... and prompt reparation". "The agreement also lacks provisions to facilitate the Chagossian people's access to cultural sites on Diego Garcia and protect and conserve their unique cultural heritage," the panel Foreign Office spokesperson said: "We recognise the importance of the islands to Chagossians and have worked to ensure the agreement reflects this."Shadow Foreign Secretary Dame Priti Patel said the Conservatives "have been warning from the start that this deal is bad for British taxpayers and bad for the Chagossian people"."It is why I have introduced a bill in Parliament that would block the [agreement] and force the government to speak to the people at the heart of their surrender plans," she the House of Commons and House of Lords have until 3 July to pass a resolution to oppose the deal being ratified.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
ALEX BRUMMER: If this is a fixed economy, I'd hate to see a broken one
Nearly half a century has passed since Margaret Thatcher skewered the incumbent PM James Callaghan at the 1979 election with her famous ' Labour Isn't Working' poster, which showed dole queues stretching across the horizon. We are not quite there yet. But after years of low unemployment in Britain, Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer have brought chaos – in just 11 months – to what was one of the strongest labour markets in Europe. Last October's Budget and its central and perhaps most hated policy – an increase in employers' National Insurance to 15 per cent – added no less than £23 billion to bosses' wage bills. And for all this Government's promise not to raise taxes on 'working people', it's now clear that this misguided and self-defeating pledge is having a vicious impact on jobs. Companies are proving reluctant to take on new workers, are deliberately not replacing colleagues who move on and are taking the opportunity to cut costs by making people redundant. The only silver lining is slowing wage increases, at least in the private sector, should make it possible for the Bank of England to lower interest rates by a further 0.25 per cent this summer to 4 per cent – making mortgages and borrowing cheaper. The public sector is another matter, of course, and has enjoyed lavish raises at the expense of the productive part of the economy – to say nothing of its far more generous gold-plated pensions, paid out of direct taxation. But overall the picture is dire. The National Insurance increase, along with a hugely generous rise in the minimum wage – now one of the highest on the planet – surging fuel costs and rising business rates, have shattered business confidence. Companies are shedding jobs at an alarming rate. Figures collected by HMRC show that 55,000 jobs were lost in April alone and numbers 'were notably weaker' than expected, according to bankers Goldman Sachs. Vacancies are tumbling, too – these stood at 736,000 in the three months to April, down from 760,000 in the previous period, and were at 1.4 million as recently as 2022. The unemployment rate, which was 3.6 per cent of the workforce prior to the pandemic, has now zipped up to 4.6 per cent. And the worst part? There's more to come. Businesses are steeling themselves for socialist firebrand Angela Rayner's beloved Employment Rights Bill, currently grinding its way through Parliament, which will make hiring new workers even more expensive. To peals of outrage (and a front-page Daily Mail headline: 'Deluded'), this week Sir Keir claimed to have 'fixed' our public finances, thus making possible his Government's U-turn on snatching the winter fuel allowance from millions of pensioners. Well, if this is what 'fixed' looks like, Sir Keir, I'd hate to see the economy 'broken'. Rising unemployment is a menace. It inevitably raises the cost of Britain's already gargantuan welfare bill – and it simultaneously reduces Government revenues due to lower income tax and National Insurance receipts. In 1979, unemployment stood at 5.3 per cent – and, despite the Iron Lady's famous poster, it rose to a staggering 11.9 per cent by 1984 on her watch. We are a long way from those days. Yet as I have said before, Ms Reeves – with last year's £40 billion tax-raising Budget, locked Britain into a doom loop of plummeting business confidence, rising unemployment and reduced job choices. Yesterday's multi-year public-spending review will splash the cash on investments in nuclear power, science and technology, roads and railways. As helpful as all that may be, it will mean more Government borrowing and debt that will take years to pay off. Expect unemployment to keep on rising until the Government changes course.
