Shadow cabinet shows Tories ‘have learned nothing’ from Truss and Johnson eras, says Labour – UK politics live

Last week the Office for Budget Responsibility published a report into Rachel Reeves’s claims that the last government left a £22bn black hole in government spending plans for 2024-25. It said that the Treasury under Jeremy Hunt did withhold information from the OBR about the spending pressures it faced, but it did not specifically endorse the £22bn claim. Instead it implied that any black hole would have been about £9.5bn in size.

Today, in evidence to the Commons Treasury committee, Richard Hughes, chair of the OBR, said that withholding information in this way was against the law. He said:

There were about £9.5bn worth of net pressure on departments’ budgets which they did not disclose to us as part of our usual budget preparation … which under the law and under the Act they should have done.

When pressed by Meg Hillier, the Labour chair of the committee, if he was really saying that the Treasury broke the law, Hughes said there may have been a “misunderstanding” about how the law should be interpreted.

Hughes also said that, as a result of what happened, the OBR was moving from a system where it just trusted the Treasury to give it the relevant figures to a “trust but verify” relationship.

Graeme Wearden has more details on his business live blog.

Labour says that three quarters of the members of Kemi Badenoch’s new shadow cabinet abstained in the Commons vote to approve the report condemning Boris Johnson for lying to MPs about Partygate, that 42% of them (11 out of 26) backed Liz Truss for leader and that nearly three quarters of them served in Truss’s government.

In a statement issued by Labour HQ, Ellie Reeves, the party chair, claims this shows the Tories are tainted by the past and have not moved on. She says:

Instead of turning the page on 14 years of Tory government, Kemi Badenoch’s shadow cabinet shows that the Conservatives have learned nothing.

How can the new Conservative leader claim to be changing the Tory party when most of her team were ministers for Liz Truss as they crashed Britain’s economy, or claim to want to uphold standards when most went AWOL for the vote on Boris Johnson’s antics at Partygate?

Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, told MPs during justice questions today that Labour is deporting foreign criminals more quickly than the Conservatives did. She said:

I share the public’s view that there are far too many foreign national offenders (FNOs) in our prisons. Since coming into office we have returned more than 1,500 foreign offenders and I am pleased to say that we are currently on track to remove more foreign offenders this year than at any time in recent years …

We are on track to remove more foreign offenders this year than in previous years. In fact, over the same period when the previous government was in office and in fact the shadow justice secretary [Robert Jenrick] was himself the immigration officer, the number was around 1,300.

Robert Jenrick used his first question in the Commons as shadow justice secretary to claim Labour should apologise to the public over prison releases.

Speaking during justice questions this morning, Jenrick, who was runner up in the Tory leadership contest, said:

I’ve been a little busy over the summer. But, during that time, the only group this Labour government’s popularity has increased with is criminals.

How many domestic abusers and sex offenders who were released under their early release scheme have gone on to reoffend? And would they like to apologise to the victims?

Alex Davies-Jones, the justice minister, said Jenrick had “a very short memory” and that “it is he who should be apologising to the country as a whole, on behalf of his government’s woeful, absolute misabuse of our justice system and our prisons”.

In a later question, Jenrick asked if the government would review the charging threshold to make it harder for firearms officers to face prosecution following the acquittal of the officer who killed Chris Kaba.

In response Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, said that charging decisions were a matter for the CPS, but that the Home Office has announced a presumption of anonymity for firearms officers who are charged following the Kaba case.

Jake Richards, the Labour MP for Rother Valley and a former barrister, posted a message on social media afterwards saying Jenrick’s tone was disappointing.

A depressing tone to @RobertJenrick’s debut as shadow Justice Secretary in the Chamber this morning. Any hope for building a cross-party consensus on sentencing and prison reform seems off the table. A great shame – as the appointment of @DavidGauke was an important opportunity.

Kemi Badenoch, Priti Patel and Chris Philp all look very cheerful in the picture released by the Tories from shadow cabinet. (See 12.36pm.) But real cabinet sounds like a more gloomy affair.

According to the readout from No 10, the contributions included Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, talking about the dire risks posed by climate change, Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, and Wes Streeting, the health secretary, talking about preparations for winter, and Streeting talking about mpox.

In its summary of what Miliband told colleagues, Downing Street says:

[Miliband] said that since the election the government has consented over 2GW of solar power, removed the ban on onshore wind, held a record-breaking renewables auction, established Great British Energy, and invested in CCUS, hydrogen and nuclear projects that will boost growth.

He went on to say that our domestic ambition and international leadership, including at Cop, go hand in hand with the 2008 Climate Change Act – the first of its kind which resulted in many countries following suit.

Climate change is a threat to national security and growth, given climate change could force more than 200 million people globally to migrate, the global economy could be 19% smaller in 2049 than it would be otherwise, and it could put an additional 600,000 people in the UK at risk of flooding.

Talking about the winter, McFadden said the flooding in Spain was a reminder of the impact that for example extreme weather can have on local communities.

And Streeting told cabinet there two further cases of mpox in the UK have been confirmed, taking the total number to three. He said the overall risk to the UK public was low.

Hague, Mandelson, Grieve, Lady Royall and Elish Angiolini makes shortlist to be Oxford University’s next chancellor

Richard Adams

Talking of William Hague, he has made the shortlist of five in the election to be the next chancellor of Oxford University, the university has announced.

There are two Conservatives, or former Conservatives, on the shortlist – Hague and Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general – and two former Labour cabinet ministers, Peter Mandelson and Lady Royall. The fifth candidate, Elish Angiolini, is a former Lord Advocate in Scotland, the Scottish government’s most senior law officer. She was originally appointed to serve a Labour government, but kept on by the SNP.

Oxford said just 23,000 staff and alumni voted in the first round, with a fitness instructor and an “anti-woke” priest among the 38-strong long-list of candidates for the largely ceremonial post held by Chris Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong.

No woman has filled the position in its 800-year history, with previous chancellors including Oliver Cromwell and the Duke of Wellington. This election is the first to be held online, with only around 6.5% of Oxford’s estimated 350,000 graduates worldwide taking part so far.

Nigel Farage likes Donald Trump, but another rightwinger, William Hague, has used his column in the Times today to describe Trump as “a serious danger” and a threat to democracy. Here’s an extract. Hague, the former Tory leader and former foreign secretary, says:

It is important we understand that Trump is not Reagan. He isn’t even a conservative. He is against free trade: “tariff” is his favourite word. His plans for tax cuts without spending reductions are reckoned, by the calculations of the impartial Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — the equivalent of our Institute for Fiscal Studies — to be likely to add $7.5 trillion to America’s deficit, abandoning any fiscal conservatism. His foul diatribes against those who cross him and refusal to accept legitimate election results make him a threat to the functioning of democracy. Reagan would have only contempt for him.

It is hard for British Conservatives to accept that the Republican Party we knew so recently has become inhabited by something quite different, by a cult of personality rather than a political philosophy. It is as if a close friend has died, or at least taken leave of their senses. Those of us who were there, cutting our political teeth in the Reagan-Thatcher days, mourn the disappearance of our old sister party. And it is on matters of global security that this is most alarming.

The current Tory leader, and current shadow foreign secretary, would not say this.

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is in the US where he is due to attend an election day party at Donald Trump’s Florida home in Mar-a-Lago. In an interview with the Telegraph, he has said that Trump, who is a friend, should accept defeat if he loses the presidential election. (See 10am.)

But Farage said he expected Trump to win. And he said he was particularly excited by the prospect of a Trump victory because Trump has said he will put Elon Musk, the Tesla founder and X owner, in charge of a government efficiency commission. Farage said that Musk would slash government spending, and that this would provide a blueprint for what Reform UK would propose for Britain. He told the Telegraph:

This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.

There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.

Because that’s what Reform UK believes in – that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting.

They’ll all be gone. They’ll all be fired. Why do we need Whitehall with all these useless, ghastly Marxists? Universities have all become madrassas of Marxism. The whole thing is appalling.

Trump’s first term taking on the deep state was impossible because they had no idea how it worked; he finished up with a lot of people around him who weren’t supporters and who were imposed upon him.

They didn’t know an American president has the power to appoint 3,000 people. This time they have been working really hard on that for 18 months.

Rightwingers regularly complain that the state is too large (Kemi Badenoch believes this too), but it’s unusual to argue that Musk’s management of Twitter has been a success. Since he took over, it has lost three quarters of its value, equivalent to a sum worth around $30bn. That is partly because, after Musk sacked most of the moderators, people were less willing to use and advertise on the site.

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has said the NHS review its guidance on testing for prostate cancer in the light of Sir Chris Hoy’s “powerful” call for more men to be screened.

As PA Media reports, the Olympic cycling champion, who has terminal cancer, is urging men with a family history of the disease to consider seeing their GP, and for more men to be aware of the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test to check for the disease. Both Hoyle’s grandfather and father had prostate cancer, which can run in families.

NHS guidelines for England say anyone can request a PSA test if they are over the age of 50. GPs are currently told to use their clinical judgment for men aged under 50 without symptoms who they consider to be at increased risk of prostate cancer, but men with symptoms of any age can request a test. Hoy said it should be easier for younger men to get test.

Asked about this on BBC Breakfast, Streeting said:

I think [Hoy] makes a powerful argument there. That’s why I’ve asked the NHS to look at the case for lowering the screening age on prostate cancer, and [he] even makes a particularly powerful case where there’s family history.

I’m sure his appeal to people who’ve got a history of prostate cancer in their family to maybe think about asking for an earlier check will already be heeded by people watching …

So, I can tell Chris we are now actively looking at the case – we’ve obviously got to be evidence-led, [have] clinically led decisions … but we are acting actively looking at it as a result of his intervention.

Libby Brooks

Andrew Bowie, Kemi Badenoch’s new shadow Scottish secretary, was a prominent supporter of Theresa May during the Brexit negotiations, and resigned as party vice-chair over Boris Johnson’s handling of the Owen Patterson lobbying row. He went on to work as a junior minister under Badenoch in the Department of International Trade.

Considered a rising star when he was elected at the age of 30 in the snap general election of 2017, he has held onto his north-east Scotland seat despite incursions from the SNP reducing his majority to 900 in 2019.

On the frontline of the debate about transition from oil and gas in the West Aberdeenshire seat, Bowie has been a strong advocate of nuclear energy.

He posted this on social media.

Honoured to have been appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland.

And also very excited to be carrying on as Shadow Minister for Energy at such a pivotal moment for our energy security and future of our energy industry.

Now, time to get to work.

Wes Streeting has brushed aside questions about once describing Donald Trump as an “odious, sad, little man”, insisting Labour could have a “strong” relationship with his adminstration if he wins the presidential election.

In an inteview with ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Streeting, the health secretary, was asked about a post on social media in 2017 in which he said:

Trump is such an odious, sad, little man. Imagine being proud to have that as your president.

Streeting replied:

The prime minister and the foreign secretary have been working hard to build a relationship with President Trump and his team, so that in the event that he is elected as the next president of the United States, we start with the strong working relationship which is in our national interest and in the interests of the United States as well.

And it’s not often I would pray and aid Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform party but, as he said overnight, President Trump, you know, he speaks as he finds.

He had a very good meeting with Keir Starmer not too long ago, and of course, he’ll be aware of things that we’ve we’ve all said in the past.

Asked about David Lammy, who also made fiercely critical comments about Trump when he was a backbencher, Streeting said:

If you look at the foreign secretary’s relationship with people around Donald Trump, including his vice presidential nominee, the relationships are strong.

There is full coverage of what is happening in America, of course, on our US elections live blog.

As Denis Campbell reports, the tobacco and vapes bill being published today will ban smoking outside schools and hospitals – but not in pub gardens. The government considered a pub garden ban, but decided the benefits would not outweight the costs to the hospitality sector.

But the bill could also ban vaping in certain outdoor spaces. Speaking on LBC this morning, Wes Streeting, the education secretary, said:

We’re also proposing to regulate vapes – vaping outside schools and playgrounds – as part of a wider package to clamp down on the scourge of youth vaping, which will include licensing for retailers, enforcement and also clamping down on the marketing and vaping and advertising and packaging and flavours of vapes to kids.

And this is what the Deparment of Health and Social Care is saying about this in its news release.

The government will also take tougher action to crack down on youth vaping, with 25% of 11 to 15-year-olds having tried vaping in 2023.

Subject to consultation, the government is considering extending restrictions in places that are currently smoke free to also become vape free, especially in areas where there are children and young adults.

Together, these measures will help protect children from becoming hooked on nicotine while continuing to enable adult smokers to use vapes as a quit aid.