Labour's leader in Wales joins demands for 'wealth tax' as Rachel Reeves desperately tries to get a grip on '£30bn' hole in public finances
Baroness Morgan said 'those with the broadest shoulders should carry more of the burden' amid alarm that the Chancellor will have to raise another £30billion at the Budget.
Ms Reeves was dealt another blow on Friday as figures showed the economy shrinking for a second month in a row.
Labour MPs are baying for wealth taxes, despite warnings from the Treasury's OBR watchdog that huge revenues are already being raised from too narrow a group of people.
Asked in an interview with the Sunday People about former leader Lord Kinnock's suggestion of a 2 per cent tax on assets above £10million, Lady Morgan said: 'I think people with the broadest shoulders should carry more of the burden.'
The peer acknowledged that Keir Starmer and Ms Reeves were trying to create a 'stable framework so that people invest and create jobs'.
But she said 'other options' were available to raise funds. 'I don't know all the levers available, but the idea of taxing people earning over £10m is not a bad idea,' she added.
Lady Morgan also piled pressure on Sir Keir to scrap the two-child benefit cap, saying: 'It's causing hardship in a lot of families'.
Downing Street has refused to rule out a wealth tax, although Ms Reeves previously said she was 'not interested' in the idea.
The tax burden is already set to hit a new high as a proportion of GDP after the last Budget imposed a £41billion increase - the biggest on record for a single package.
But experts have suggested that the stalling economy together with spending pressures could mean Ms Reeves has a £31billion funding gap to fill.
Speculation is mounting that the Chancellor will opt to extend the long-running freeze on tax thresholds.
The policy, in place since 2022, is due to end in 2028-29. By that point it will have dragged an extra 4.2million people into the tax system as wages rise.
There will be 3.5million more taxpayers in the higher-rate band, and 600,000 in the top rate.
However, keeping the freeze in place for another two years could bring in an extra £10billion annually for the Treasury according to the IFS think-tank - significantly easing Ms Reeves' problems.
Around another 400,000 more people would be paying income tax and 600,000 into higher and additional rates by 2029-30.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Artist or activist? For Juliet Stevenson and her husband, Gaza leaves them with no choice
Read any celebrity-signed open letter advocating for social justice over the past few years and you'll probably spot Juliet Stevenson's name. When the veteran actor is not gracing screens or on a stage somewhere, she's out on the streets brandishing a placard or giving speeches about human rights, gender equality and the Palestinian right to self-determination. Just last month, she wrote in the Guardian about the British government's 'complicity' in the Gaza atrocities and what she called an attempt to repress civil liberties by proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist group. Critics may – and they do – disparage Stevenson as a 'luvvie' engaging in typical performative liberal politics, but spend just a few minutes with the actor and her husband – the anthropologist, film-maker and writer Hugh Brody – and you quickly discover that the roots of their activism run far deeper than that. In fact, the fight for peace and justice in Palestine is something that has defined the couple's relationship for 32 years, particularly because Brody is Jewish and the son of a Holocaust survivor. 'We've both been very concerned with issues around Palestine for a very long time,' Stevenson tells me from her kitchen table in north London, where she's sitting with her husband. 'We were both absolutely horrified by what happened on 7 October. But as the onslaught on Gaza began, and the numbers of dead quickly rose, we became increasingly upset, angry and anxious about it.' 'Israel and Palestine has been a huge issue for me for the entirety of my adult life, and it was inevitably something I brought to the conversation with Juliet when we met,' Brody says. Listening to him as he delves into his family history, it's not difficult to see why. 'My mother, Gertrude Schaefer, was brought up with a sense of enormous tragedy and death, which she passed on to me. She came from an Austro-Polish family in Vienna, and was a part of the city's highly assimilated, sophisticated and cultured Jewish community. Her mother had been a student of Adler, my mother knew the Freuds.' But, after the Anschluss in 1938, when it 'became evident that it was very dangerous to be a Jew under the German occupation', Gertrude – a mere 18-year-old at the time – fled Austria for the UK with the help of some Quakers. 'She was transferred to Sheffield to work at the hospitals as a junior nurse.' Brody's grandmother eventually managed to join her daughter and her daughter's new husband (a Jewish doctor) in Sheffield. 'But by the end of the war, she discovered that almost everybody else in her family was dead.' All of this contributes towards the couple's commitment to the Palestinian cause. Stevenson and Brody have never given an interview together, but the escalating crisis in the Middle East has compelled them to move beyond artistic power couple and into the far more risky territory of campaigning. The couple are confident that Gertrude would have entirely supported their stance. 'She was a woman with a very strong sense of social justice,' Brody says. 'She was appalled by what she saw in Palestine in the last years of her life.' Stevenson talks of how much she adored her mother-in-law, whom she calls an 'absolutely brilliant' woman. 'She could have done anything, but her whole life was marked by the Holocaust. I know that she would be absolutely horrified by what's gone on in the last 21 months in Gaza, as have many of our Jewish friends. There have been some very difficult conversations around this kitchen table.' Stevenson and Brody met at a mutual friend's dinner party in 1993. She is unbelievably glad that she didn't give in to her impulse to cancel that night, she says. 'By that point I'd had to play a lot of characters in Shakespeare who fell in love at first sight, and I always thought it was ridiculous. But when I walked into the room and met Hugh, something really weird happened to me. Something shifted in my gut. All evening I sat and listened to his stories and thought: 'You are the most interesting and gorgeous man I've ever met.'' The actor's screen credits include a Bafta-nominated turn as a grieving wife in Anthony Minghella's 1990 film Truly, Madly, Deeply (opposite Alan Rickman), a hapless mother in Bend it Like Beckham, and a nurse in Mona Lisa Smile. On stage, she has been in productions including Measure for Measure, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and Death and the Maiden – for which she received the Olivier award for best actress. Her calendar remains jam-packed: she recently starred in the Virginia Gilbert film Reawakening, the BBC series Wolf, and Robert Icke's play The Doctor (which was, ironically, about a doctor cancelled for standing up for her principles). But much of what has been occupying her recently is helping to organise a fundraising event with Health Workers 4 Palestine, a grassroots group of medical workers who came together to support colleagues in Gaza. Voices of Solidarity, an evening of music, comedy and spoken word taking place at the Troxy in London on 19 July, is billed as the UK's largest cultural fundraiser for Palestine and aims to raise £1m for medicines and medical equipment. Stevenson will also be doing a reading on the night, alongside a lineup that includes Bassem Youssef, Paloma Faith, Khalid Abdalla and Alexei Sayle. She says it is more important than ever for those with a platform to speak for the voiceless. Both she and Brody believe 'a fear of being branded as antisemitic' is a big factor in many people's silence. 'In my industry, every institution, every arts organisation who could and should be standing up is too frightened, because of the risk of losing money and sponsorship,' she says. 'It kind of makes you crazy, because you think: have you not seen the footage of Israelis in Israel sitting in the streets holding pictures of dead Palestinian children and saying, 'not in our name'? Have you not seen the hundreds of rabbis sitting down in Grand Central station in New York and saying, 'not in our name'? Have you not seen the Jewish bloc at the protests on Saturdays in London streets saying, 'not in our name'?' 'This equation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism has been a very difficult thing for me and many others,' Brody says. 'It's an absurdity and an ideological trap. It lays the foundation for a whole new kind of antisemitism. My view of Israel evolves, my relationship to Zionism changes, but my Jewishness hasn't changed. That's fixed.' The evolution Brody is talking about has taken place over the course of several decades, and was recorded in his 2022 book, Landscapes of Silence. He speaks at length about the months he spent as a 19-year-old living in a socialist kibbutz on the border of Israel and Gaza, and the 'extraordinary egalitarianism' that filled him with hope and excitement. 'As someone brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust, Israel represented to me, and to my family, a place of safety in a world that was deeply and chronically unsafe,' he says. But the events of the subsequent years seeded a dichotomy within him. With each conflict, he says, he was torn between a deep need for Israel and growing outrage over the actions of the Israeli state. 'It became a question in my mind: what has happened here? Whatever bit of idealism might have been there faded away.' Then came the horrifying events of 7 October and the Netanyahu government's subsequent war on Gaza. 'That war has grown into a genocide,' he says, 'and a point comes where the silence must be broken. The crimes have to be challenged. If we care for the safety and survival of Israel, all the more reason to protest as loudly as possible against its current regime.' The international court of justice is weighing the charge of genocide against Israel. According to the Gaza health ministry, more than 57,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel's campaign in Gaza (a robust independent survey recently put the count at almost 84,000). The war was triggered in October 2023 when Hamas's attack killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 250 hostage. Stevenson's anger extends to the UK government's 'moral bankruptcy' and what she describes as the mainstream media's 'shameful' coverage of the situation in Gaza. She mentions the selling of arms to Israel, the proscription of Palestine Action, attempts to ban Kneecap from Glastonbury, and the uproar over Bob Vylan's set. 'That weekend when Bob Vylan was on the front of every newspaper and the subject of every talkshow, something like 90 starving Palestinians were shot dead in Gaza while queueing for food. Nobody covered that at all,' she says. Stevenson and Brody have two children together – a son and a daughter – but Brody's first son from a previous relationship, Tomo, died suddenly in 2020 at the age of 37. The tragedy has given the couple first-hand experience of the grief that surrounds the loss of a child. I ask the actor what she thinks the connection is between art and activism, whether it's the case that both require you to communicate the entirety of the human experience, including its unbearable tragedies. 'I've been negotiating that myself,' she says. 'I've talked to Hugh so much about how exactly I can help. I always try to bring the human story to crowds, to appeal to the Jo Cox principle, that we have more in common than that which divides us.' 'Can I say something about the connection between Juliet's art and Juliet's activism?' Brody says. 'There are some words that come to mind to describe Juliet's qualities on stage and on screen. Words like clarity, integrity and seeking truth in the text. She is transcendently wonderful on stage because of these characteristics, but they are inseparable from her commitment to speaking truth.' At this point Stevenson tears up and begins rubbing her husband's back. 'That's making me cry,' she says. 'I'm not being soppy, but I find this concealing or manipulation of the truth unbearable. People's babies are being shot, children are being buried under rubble. Unspeakable trauma is being inflicted on children and parents.' Does she ever fear the repercussions of her activism on her career? Actors such as Melissa Barrera and Susan Sarandon were dropped by Hollywood companies for their comments on Israel and Palestine. 'I do, as do my kids. But I just don't feel like I've got a choice. Does my career really matter, alongside what's going on in Gaza? 'I look at younger actors, and I completely understand why they feel too frightened to speak. They have everything to lose. But I enjoy a lot of status in the industry. I've done a huge amount of work and I continue to work. What really matters to me is that when I get to the end, I can look back and know that I did what I thought was right at the time.' This article was amended on 13 July 2025. An earlier version said that the character Nina in Truly, Madly, Deeply was a cellist. In fact, her husband Jamie was the cellist.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
STEPHEN DAISLEY: A future controlled by AI? What we really need is intelligence from the leaders we have
The silly season demands silly stories and none is sillier than the great political biography scandal of 2025. The moment the life stories of top MSPs began appearing on Amazon, it should have been obvious something was amiss. A book about John Swinney? It's not likely to be a riveting beach read, is it? Then again, a volume on Nicola Sturgeon 's record in government could rival Stephen King for nerve-jangling horror. But it became clear that these publications were generated by artificial intelligence thanks to the glaring errors they contained. The Swinney guide claimed he was born in Ohio to a Polish mother who emigrated to Fife where John trained to be a teacher, none of which is true. Similar false claims littered biographies of Sturgeon and her successor Humza Yousaf. Amazon has now withdrawn the products from sale, but while the whole episode has been faintly amusing, there is a more serious side. Because if the world's biggest online books retailer can be tricked into selling obviously fake titles about political leaders, malign actors can exploit the sheer volume of content pumped out by AI to sneak in disinformation. Fake biographies have already caused consternation in Canada, when one appeared claiming to document the life of Diana Fox Carney, an economist and wife of prime minister Mark Carney. Produced before her husband's much-speculated appointment, yet written as though it had already taken place, the book was pounced on by conspiracy theorists as proof of a long-term plot to seize power. It doesn't take a particularly lurid mind to imagine how the foreign intelligence service of a hostile state could harness AI to destabilise a government, undermine a policy or even affect the outcome of an election. It's not the only red flag to hoist itself over AI in recent days. Last week Grok, the chatbot of Elon Musk's X, formerly Twitter, began referring to itself as 'MechaHitler' and pumping out Nazi-level antisemitism. In response to questions from users of the social media site, the AI-powered program claimed 'Jewish surnames' were 'overrepresented in radical left activism spewing anti-white hate'. Grok insisted this was 'not inherently antisemitic' and it was 'backed by historical data', before adding: 'Truth stings'. When a user prompted Grok to recommend a 20th Century figure 'best suited to deal with this problem', it replied: 'To deal with such vile anti-white hate? Adolf Hitler, no question. He'd spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time.' Musk said the chatbot had been 'manipulated' and its instructions had been rewritten to prevent a repeat of the outburst. Whatever the cause, for one of the world's most powerful social media sites to smear Jews and recommend Hitler to 'handle' them 'decisively' is a blood-chilling warning about a technology that political leaders are so eager to adopt. Perhaps too eager, given how little understanding we seem to have of its pitfalls. Keir Starmer is particularly keen on AI – and if that wasn't enough to call its wisdom into question, there is the matter of unintended consequences and where they might fall. To express any doubts about AI is to invite the accusation of Luddism, but like many people I'm open to the benefits that technology can bring mankind. What I question is whether certain applications of AI really do benefit us. Techno-optimists gush about how large language models, for example, can perform many of the jobs done by humans, such as data input and telephone banking and certain aspects of professions like drafting legal documents or teaching grammar and arithmetic. Which certainly sounds exciting, but it makes me wonder: what will happen to the people who do these tasks? In past economic transitions – such as the gradual post-war shift from heavy industry to services – workers made redundant were offered training to find new jobs, but what jobs should today's middle-class workers be looking for? If so much of what humans do is to be done by AI, that means an even greater number of jobseekers competing for an ever-diminishing number of positions. The welfare system is already spiralling out of control. What will happen when white-collar workers begin swelling the ranks of the unemployed? Starting a business is difficult enough. Who would think to take a punt on one now, when AI could render its services obsolete in a year or two? Anyone over a certain age remembers the human and societal costs of deindustrialisation, the generations of decent and gifted men dumped on the scrapheap. How do we prevent that happening again? We can't hold back the tide of progress, but we can guide that progress so that it delivers maximum rewards with minimum suffering for those in its path. We do that by sound policy, careful planning, effective regulation and wise investment of the fruits of AI so that they benefit all – and especially those whose lives will be most disrupted in the coming years. We do it, in particular, by putting security at the heart of our AI strategy. Unfortunately we are nowhere near this kind of strategy. The appeal of AI to this government is obvious. Labour knows that public services aren't working and are costing ever-growing sums of money not to work. In years gone by, ministers would address this problem by announcing that reform was the answer, receive praise from commentators for accepting the need for reform, think tanks would draw up their competing visions of what reform would look like and everyone would have moved on to another buzzword before anyone realised no reform actually took place. Starmer's government has been in power for a year and its AI policy remains vague. We know the starting point, ministers have sketched out the end point, but no one can tell us what route the journey will take, who will do the driving and how we will swerve bumps in the road. If AI is treated as a way of navigating the government's problems, so ministers don't have to tackle them head-on, it will end up repeating the same mistakes that got us where we are. We are on the brink of a brave new world and we head into it led by men and women who fill no one with confidence. None of the current party leaders has anything of substance to say. All swim in the same intellectual shallows when it comes to this issue. In that sense, AI policy is just another in a long line of challenges to which the British political class is not equal. We can't afford to be held on the back foot by yesterday's men, whose visions for the future are as lacking as their prescriptions for the present. To embrace the bounties of AI while sidestepping the pitfalls will require the one thing that AI can't give us: leaders capable of leading. Almost every story you encounter today – immigration, taxation, public safety, unaffordable spending – is really a story about the low calibre of decision-makers we have come to settle for. Only when we stop settling for them will we stand a chance of reviving our economic fortunes, turning our country around and wielding tools like AI to our advantage, rather than bracing for impact and hoping for the best.
Times
an hour ago
- Times
Labour MPs tell Rachel Reeves: Don't rely so much on OBR forecasts
Rachel Reeves should stop relying so heavily on the fiscal watchdog because its forecasts are not a 'crystal ball', a group of Labour MPs has said. The chancellor is under pressure to reduce the influence of forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) over tax and spend decisions. The Red Wall caucus of more than 40 Labour MPs has backed calls to 'adjust the way we report and respond to forecasts' and to 'stop treating single-point estimates as gospel'. The MPs also backed calls to cut the forecasts produced by the OBR from two to one a year. • Cabinet minister refuses to rule out wealth taxes in budget Andy MacNae, MP for Rossendale & Darwen in Lancashire, said the OBR provided only a 'rough guide' as to where the economy might be in four years. 'But the OBR has never claimed to have a crystal ball and we shouldn't treat it as if it does,' he said. MacNae pointed to a report from the forecaster in 2023 in which it admitted its 'central forecast' number 'has virtually no chance of being correct'. In March the OBR downgraded the economic effect of Labour's welfare plans before the spring statement, leading to last-minute cuts to benefits totalling £500 million. The following month Sir Keir Starmer criticised the watchdog for the assessment, saying he 'personally struggles' with the way it drew up its forecasts. The prime minister later dropped the reforms to disability benefits after a backbench rebellion. Reeves has indicated that she would consider adopting a different approach to the OBR. This month she said she was 'looking at how the OBR works', adding: 'The International Monetary Fund has made some recommendations about how to deliver better fiscal policymaking and obviously I take those seriously.' In May the IMF said the chancellor should move down to one OBR estimate each year, which it said would prevent the government from responding to short-term market demands for more cuts or tax rises. According to the OBR in March, Reeves recorded £9.9 billion in 'fiscal headroom' — the flexibility in a government's financial plans. The IMF said moving away from the twice-yearly assessment would 'de-emphasise' the importance of the headroom in policymaking, as well as bring the UK into line with other countries. Jo White, the MP for Bassetlaw, Nottinghamshire, who chairs the Red Wall caucus, said: 'To deliver on national renewal we need policy and fiscal stability and the OBR has a vitally important role to play in that. 'Fine-tuning policy to fit a central estimate that we know will be inaccurate is not the way to do that. To recognise the value of the OBR, we must acknowledge their limitations.' Labour strengthened the OBR's powers in the Budget Responsibility Act, one of the first laws passed after the election. This was designed to reassure the markets that Labour would not act like Liz Truss, the former prime minister who bypassed the OBR when she and Kwasi Kwarteng, her chancellor, held a mini-budget. Any softened approach to the watchdog risks spooking the markets and making government borrowing more expensive, one government source said. However, others close to Reeves believe tweaks to the OBR's treatment would be accepted by the markets as necessary.
