
Chancellor: Public will reject Corbyn's new party like they rejected him before
Ms Reeves told an audience at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival that Mr Corbyn had 'tried to destroy my party' during his leadership in which he lost two general elections, one in 2017 and one in 2019.
She was asked about the left-wing party during an appearance on the Iain Dale All Talk show on Saturday.
Mr Corbyn launched the new political party with former Labour MP Zarah Sultana, which still does not appear to have a name but is marketed as 'Your Party'.
Mr Corbyn vowed it would 'take on the rich and powerful'.
Asked about whether the new party could eat into Labour's support by becoming a 'Reform of the left', the Chancellor said: 'Jeremy Corbyn has had two chances to be prime minister and I think the country gave their verdict, most recently in 2019 when Labour had its worst result since 1935.
'If he wants to give it another go, be my guest. I think the voters will have the same reaction.'
Asked by Mr Dale if Labour was being complacent about the new political group, she said: 'It's not being complacent. He tried to destroy my party and he can now go set up his own party.
'The country has rejected him twice. The bloke's got a big ego. He can have another go but I think the country will have the same verdict.'
It's time for a new direction in politics. #YourParty pic.twitter.com/v6zamj8HwT
— YourParty_UK (@ItsYourPartyUK) July 27, 2025
The Chancellor's comments saw some of the biggest cheers of her chat with Mr Dale, which lasted around one and a half hours.
Mr Corbyn has said that more than 500,000 people had signed up to the movement in less than a week.
The figure was dismissed by Ms Reeves who told the crowd in Edinburgh that her sister Ellie Reeves, a serving Labour MP, had received an email stating she had signed up to the party.
Speaking at the same event, the Chancellor said Reform UK was now Labour's main rival, describing the Tories as 'irrelevant'.
But she warned that Nigel Farage offered 'simple solutions' that amounted to a 'mirage'.
Mr Corbyn has been approached for comment.
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Times
12 minutes ago
- Times
Ignoring prison crisis won't make it go away
Of all the bin fires raging across government last summer that might have prompted Rishi Sunak to chuck it in and call an election, the problem of Britain's overflowing prisons was one of the fiercest. And now we learn just how fierce, thanks to a review that reveals jails repeatedly came within three days of being officially 'full' in the two years before the election, until ministers finally came to the rescue with a brilliant scheme simply to release criminals earlier. Labour ministers no doubt feel sore about it. It was they who ended up releasing offenders like Isaac Donkoh, a gang leader convicted of kidnapping and torturing a teenage boy; or Lawson Natty, convicted of manslaughter for killing a 14-year-old boy; or Jason Hoganson, released early in error and, within a day, back to assaulting his ex-partner. These were not the headlines with which a party in possession of a stunning victory wanted to launch its 'decade of renewal'. The government can now happily point to the review by Dame Anne Owers in arguing that the lucky breaks handed to Donkoh and co were at least a decade in the making, with more than a walk-on part for Tory cuts and the unfailingly cloddish machinations of one Chris Grayling, a name that shall serve for ever as a watchword for misbegotten numbskull-duggery. Dame Anne was the doyenne of the jailhouse under Blair, serving as chief prisons inspector from 2001 to 2010. And it's probably fair to say that the 'tough on crime' brigade would not share all her views. But her report reads as bland fact rather than polemic. Besides, she has been warning about a prison capacity crunch since the Blair days. The Tories trumpeted her first warning in early 2007, when David Cameron accused the then-government of having 'stuck its head in the sand'. They don't make sandpits deep enough for the Tory justice ministers and Treasury officials since then who have pretended to believe the prison population is not going to keep growing despite repeatedly adopting policies that fuel population growth and tougher sentencing. The result, as described by Dame Anne, is 'a cycle of prison capacity crises'. While the prison population rose most sharply under Labour, from 66,300 in 2001 to 85,002 in 2010, it has kept rising since, to 87,726 last year. Whereas there used to be more women, children and young men in jail, and more men serving short sentences, the past decade has seen fewer women and many fewer children locked up, with more capacity filled by older men serving longer sentences. The exception is the backlog of people sitting in jail while waiting for a court date, which now accounts for a fifth of prisoners, compared to a seventh in 2015. Despite promises to be tough on crime, the 2010 coalition found it convenient to adopt projections saying that more prison space wouldn't be needed. The Treasury had no intention of releasing cash to build prisons — and indeed, was keen to save money by selling them off and laying off experienced prison officers. First Ken Clarke and then Grayling both appear to have connived in the delusion, so that by 2017, the system was running with fewer than 1,000 free places. Under the radar, more criminals were tagged or detained at home under curfew rather than being jailed. For a short time, things stabilised, though another crunch was coming when Covid hit. Afterwards, with Boris Johnson's thousands of extra police officers on the beat and the courts jammed up, things started to spiral. Day-to-day work at the Ministry of Justice was taken over by all sorts of special committees and meetings, in which frazzled officials crunched the numbers to work out exactly how Donald Ducked the whole system was and then, having found it was indeed just days from catastrophe, sounding the alarm. In these emergency phases, officials, police and prison officers would kick off the first of several rounds of a sliding puzzle game at 5.30am each day, shunting prisoners frantically between police cells, crowded jails and court rooms, a task in which, as the review puts it, 'the marker of success was 'whether everyone got a bed last night''. The costs were wild: filling a proper prison cell costs the Treasury £150 a night, whereas a police cell costs £688, with the result that the government has spent £70 million and counting on not having enough jail space. The usual congratulations are due to the Treasury for its characteristic forethought in generating such staggeringly expensive savings. Obviously, something had to give, and that something was the enforcement of judge-given sentences. There were two chaotic early release schemes, the first at the end of the Tory government and the second at the start of Labour's. Already stretched probation officers scrambled to assess who could be released and when, under various overlapping criteria, sometimes at a few hours' notice — followed by a dash to arrange the services meant to help stop an ex-convict falling instantly back into a life of crime, like addiction treatment or temporary accommodation. Similar stress in the probation service means monitoring all this properly is basically impossible. Even if you are among those who believe in locking up fewer people, it is clear that a country with a growing population and decades of overcrowded jails needs more prisons. Less crowded jails are safer, better able to police violence and drugs and more likely to rehabilitate at least some of the population. So why haven't we been building them? It's a different face to the same old problem: we can't build anything. It has always been a bit more expensive to house people in prisons than houses, but the cost gap is now absurd. Per person housed, it costs about six times more to build a jail than it would to build them each a one-bedroom flat. There are environmental regulation, shortages of building materials and workers and so on, but even where big capital spending has been earmarked for prisons, it doesn't get spent because of a 'major block', as Dame Anne calls it, within the government's own control: planning. Even with prisons full and dangerous criminals being released prematurely to cope, it is still taking prison projects at least two years to get planning permission. Usually, it takes longer. Three major projects first proposed in 2020 only made it through the process with the help of central government rulings four years later. It does not take a statistician to see that at this rate, more offenders will go free earlier and earlier before anything changes. A few weeks ago, the Tories were out promising a 'zero-tolerance' approach to petty crime. Unfortunately for them, the country has zero tolerance for this dipstickery. There are neither enough prisons, nor probation officers nor court hours to punish all the people they want to put away. 'Tough on crime' requires building on time, and they didn't.


Telegraph
12 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Reeves has driven Britain to the brink. Full-blown crisis will soon be upon us
Britain's fiscal reckoning has arrived. The £20bn 'black hole' has, according to one new estimate, doubled in size under Rachel Reeves's dubious stewardship. Most of the money we are now borrowing is going not towards servicing our debt, but the interest on that debt. Colossal off-the-book liabilities, such as public sector pensions, have been hidden from voters by successive governments. They are now falling due. For years, the country has behaved like a household hooked on payday loans. Now, the bills have come through the letterbox and we've no cash left to cover them. Even the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, traditionally Left-leaning, is warning that if the Chancellor is to remain within her fiscal rules, she must raise taxes or cut spending by £51bn. Not even the Office for Budget Responsibility can maintain the fiction that the current trajectory is sustainable. Reductions in spending are out of the question, as the ludicrous welfare row exposed. What many may not realise is that around 75 per cent of government expenditure is mandated – benefits, pensions, for instance – and cannot be avoided in the short-run. Only a quarter is discretionary – areas such as transport, or defence. This means that major spending cuts would require primary legislation, which feckless Labour backbenchers will never swallow. It also means that further tax rises, which Reeves in January insisted would not be necessary, are inevitable. No wonder asset managers are telling clients to prepare for 'very real, very targeted moves on people with portfolios, pensions and property'. Keir Starmer has refused to rule out further tax increases in the autumn Budget. Be afraid, be very afraid. How did we get into this mess? Not since 2001 has a chancellor presented a balanced Budget. Despite lip-service to fiscal probity, the desire to splurge has consistently outweighed the need for restraint. Lord, give me continence, but not yet. Politicians, of whatever stripe, have engaged in a collective delusion: that the Treasury is so awash with cash it is scrambling to find things to spend it on. Pay rises across the public sector? Green subsidies? A pointless railway to Birmingham? Bring it on. But the overall state of the public finances tells a grim story. In 2024-25, the state is projected to spend £1.2tn. Some £450bn of this will go on welfare, health and pensions – more than the entire take from income tax, National Insurance and VAT combined. The UK entered this century with debt at around 30 per cent of GDP; it's now pushing 100 per cent. The tax burden is at a post-War high, set to be around 37.5 per cent of GDP for the rest of this Parliament, yet core public services are crumbling and the crowd yells out for more. Polling suggests the public are closer to grasping our fiscal reality than politicians, with economic optimism now half what it was in July 2024. But even growing pessimism isn't enough to slake their thirst for more spending. Some 9.1 million people of working age are currently economically inactive. Over half of households are taking more from the state than they are putting in. As the number of net contributors shrinks, who, exactly, do people believe is footing the bill? More than two centuries ago, Adam Smith wrote: 'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence... but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice.' Peace is uncertain, the administration of our increasingly wonky justice has time lags measured in years, and taxes increasingly drag us down. Council tax on our homes. The licence fee. VAT on virtually every product we consume. Vehicle Excise Duty. Congestion charges, tolls, Ulez. The sugar tax. A Digital Services tax on any online orders or subscriptions. Income tax. National Insurance Contributions raised for employers, but which in the end the employee will pay. It's enough to drive us to – massively taxed, of course – drink. And the more convoluted the system becomes, the easier it is for governments to mask the scale of the extraction and the harder it is to scrutinise – or object. Taxes should be visible and just. Currently, they are neither. This is not by accident, but design. Worse still, the public has been fed a series of monstrous lies about tax-and-spend. That it is not only necessary for the state to plunder our earnings and assets, but moral. That squeezing the private sector to fund the public mysteriously delivers growth. That the 'rich' aren't paying their 'fair share', despite all the evidence to the contrary. That we could tax the 'wealthy' without punishing the middle classes. Of all Labour's pledges, none has unravelled faster than the self-defeating promise to shield 'working people' from tax hikes. They punished businesses, and since the start of the year, employment is down, unemployment is up, wage growth has stalled and vacancies are falling. They waged war on independent schools, and since January 50 have closed, with all the job casualties that brings. The affluent, as the Telegraph this week reports, have paid their fees in advance – a luxury poorer parents, those who strain every sinew to privately educate their children, cannot afford. The list goes on. Reeves's inheritance tax assault on family farms has triggered the worst collapse in rural businesses since 2017. Non-doms are fleeing almost as fast as small boats are arriving, taking with them billions in tax receipts, spending and investment. Labour said they would deliver the kind of 'growth' that would haul us out of the post-lockdown economic crisis, but are giving us stagnation. Even if they renege their manifesto pledge not to hike income tax, VAT or National Insurance, it might not be enough. There are major structural problems in our economy – a broken planning system, suffocating regulation – to which this Government has no answer. And, at some point, tax takes begin to destroy growth, with one study suggesting each 10 per cent rise in tax reduces the growth rate by around 1.2 per cent. We are completely boxed in. Politically, of course, breaking their tax triple lock would be a disaster. As Professor John Curtice tells me, it could prompt a tuition-fees moment – a betrayal that would be forever etched in the public's memory. Our overall approach to the public finances is self-evidently unsustainable. A retrenchment of state expenditure is coming at some point and the longer we wait the more painful it will be. We've lived in Neverland for too long. It's time to say no, we don't believe in fairies.


The Herald Scotland
34 minutes ago
- The Herald Scotland
'Introvert Starmer doesn't dominate Scottish Labour'
Mr Sarwar said the Prime Minister's body language was "more relaxed" in Scotland compared to the rest of the UK. "If you compare body language and approach, so he has been leader of the Labour Party for five years, if you compare visits to Scotland five years ago compared to four years ago, I think you will see a significant shift in terms of confidence and comfort. 'We're different personalities. I am much more conversational, out there, a bit more extrovert. I think it's safe to say he is a bit more introverted in that sense. 'I'm in charge in Scotland – of course I am. 'What's really interesting is if you actually compare his body language to when he is in Scotland, compared to when he is in the UK, he's actually more relaxed in Scotland than he is in other parts of the UK. Read more: 'We've built up a rapport and probably push him to be a bit more extroverted than perhaps in other parts of the UK.' Mr Sarwar said he spoke with the Prime Minister "at least two to three times per month". Herald editor Catherine Salmond asked Mr Sarwar whether he dreaded the Prime Minister's trips to Scotland. Unpopular policies such as the two-child benefit cap and cuts to the winter fuel payment have caused internal unrest within the party. 'No,' he said, adding it was 'absolutely' beneficial to his Scottish Labour leadership. He said the prime minister 'enjoyed' being in Scotland. But he said: 'We aren't dominated. I do what I want to do, when I want to do and how I want to do it. I lead the Scottish Labour Party . I want to be First Minister and I want to lead the Scottish Government.' He said there was an 'obsession' the dynamic between UK and Scottish Labour. Day three of @heraldscotland's Unspun Live at the Fringe at Summerhall. Anas Sarwar's our guest tonight. @SalmondSalmond quizzing him on Gaza and Starmer. — Andrew Learmonth (@andrewlearmonth) August 6, 2025 Throughout the hour-long grilling, Mr Sarwar emphasised his ambition to become Scotland's next first minister, and the first from Labour since Jack McConnell in 2007. 'I'm putting my heart, soul, energy and time into winning the election next year. We have done a huge amount of work to change the Scottish Labour Party in the last four years. 'I look around and I see endless potential and opportunity in Scotland. What a difference it would make it there was an FM with a can do attitude, rather than a can't do attitude.' He added he 'fundamentally believes' he would be a better first minister than John Swinney. The Scottish Labour leader was full of praise for the Prime Minister, however he admitted Sir Keir's handling of the crisis in Gaza was "challenging" in the beginning. The Prime Minister told LBC in October 2023 that Israel had the "right" to withhold water from Gaza. Meanwhile Mr Sarwar had been supportive of calls for an immediate ceasefire. Asked whether the Prime Minister had handled the crisis well, he replied: 'Look, the opening part was difficult.' The Prime Minister's LBC interview 'caused a lot of upset'. Mr Sarwar said: 'I have always been of the view that cutting off the electricity, water, food, is a breach of international humanitarian law.' He added: 'The early part was of course challenging and he himself accepts that what he said in the LBC wasn't right. It was wrong. But I don't think enough people recognise things. One is that there are probably more people that think we in the UK have the influence to stop Benjamin Netanyahu than we do.' Mr Sarwar also ruled out forming a coalition with any other party in Holyrood, but accepted the election would be a close call between Labour and the SNP and ultimately returning a minority government. Earlier this week, Professor Sir John Curtice gave his prediction on Holyrood 2026 at Unspun Live at the Fringe, telling political correspondent Hannah Brown it would be "most extremely unlikely" for the SNP to win a majority next year.