Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer set to warn of 'backroom stitch up' between parties in Wales
The prime minister is set to warn of a "backroom stitch up" between the Conservatives, Reform UK and Plaid Cymru ahead of next year's Senedd elections.
Sir Keir Starmer will address Welsh Labour's annual conference in Llandudno, North Wales, on Saturday.
Voters will head to the polls next May to choose their representatives in Cardiff Bay and recent polls suggest Labour is in third place, behind Reform and Plaid.
Labour has been the largest party at every Senedd election since devolution began in 1999.
It is understood he will say such a deal would mark a "return to the chaos and division of the last decade".
But opposition parties have hit back at the prime minister's "imaginary coalitions", with Plaid Cymru accusing Labour of "scraping the barrel".
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Sir Keir is expected to tell members how the two Labour governments in Westminster and Cardiff are "working together for the people of Wales".
At next year's Senedd election, 96 members will be elected to the Welsh parliament for the first time - an increase of more than a third - under a more proportional voting system.
He is anticipated to describe First Minister Eluned Morgan as a "fierce champion" for Wales and "the best person" to lead the country into the future.
It comes after Ms Morgan set out the "red Welsh way" in a landmark speech last month, seemingly deviating from the Westminster party, and calling for more "respect" for devolution and a "fair deal" for Wales.
The prime minister's pitch to the people of Wales comes as the UK government announces legal protections for military personnel, their families and for veterans as the country marks Armed Forces Day.
Further details are set to be outlined in due course, but the government says they could include more travel benefits or flexible working arrangements for partners of serving personnel.
After a week in which the amid a mounting rebellion, the party is expected to make a number of announcements for Wales.
Among those is a new £11m fund for businesses in Port Talbot and the surrounding area, which Labour says proves that it is the only party with "a real plan to grow Welsh industry".
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The Independent
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Keir Starmer says he was ‘distracted' by Middle East and Nato during welfare rebellion
Sir Keir Starmer has admitted his focus was on matters involving Nato and the Middle East while a rebellion over welfare cuts took hold of his party at home. The prime minister has faced a growing backbench rebellion over proposed disability benefits cuts. Some 126 Labour backbenchers have signed an amendment that would halt the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill in its tracks when it faces its first Commons hurdle on 1 July. Responding to questions about what went wrong during the difficult week, Sir Keir claimed full responsibility for the welfare U-turn. 'All these decisions are my decisions and I take ownership of them,' he told The Sunday Times. 'My rule of leadership is, when things go well you get the plaudits; when things don't go well you carry the can. I take responsibility for all the decisions made by this government. I do not talk about staff and I'd much prefer it if everybody else didn't.' He continued that this was due to his heavy concentration on foreign affairs instead of domestic matters, first at the G7 meeting in Canada and then a Nato summit in the Netherlands. He also had to deal with the US's strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. 'I'm putting this as context rather than excuse: I was heavily focused on what was happening with Nato and the Middle East all weekend,' he said. 'I turned my attention fully to it [the welfare bill] when I got back from Nato on Wednesday night. Obviously in the course of the early part of this week we were busy trying to make sure Nato was a success.' He added: 'From the moment I got back from the G7, I went straight into a Cobra meeting. My full attention really bore down on this on Thursday. At that point we were able to move relatively quickly.' The government's original package restricted PIP eligibility, the main disability payment in England, and cut the health-related element of Universal Credit in a bid to save £5bn a year by 2030. The government has offered Labour rebels a series of concessions in an effort to head off the prime minister's first major Commons defeat since coming to power, as discontent bubbles among backbenchers surrounding welfare cuts, but campaigners have warned that these concessions could continue to cause problems Instead, the PIP eligibility changes will be implemented in November 2026, applying to new claimants only, while the existing recipients of the health elements of Universal Credit will have their incomes protected in real terms. While lead rebel Dame Meg Hillier has accepted the prime minister's £1.5bn U-turn as a 'positive outcome', Sir Keir has been warned that his decision to protect existing benefits claimants from upcoming welfare cuts would only create a 'generational divide' as hundreds of charities and campaigners urged MPs to continue their opposition to the proposed cuts. Disability charity Mencap warned that the changes will create a 'generational divide in the quality of life for people with a learning disability'. Think tank the Resolution Foundation warned earlier this week that the prime minister's U-turns on benefit cuts and winter fuel payments have blown a £4.5bn hole in the public finances that will 'very likely' be filled by tax rises in the autumn Budget.
Daily Mail
38 minutes ago
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MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: If ever we needed an effective opposition to rout Labour, it's now
Is there no limit to the price Britain must pay for having given Keir Starmer 's Labour Party a chance a year ago? This is rapidly becoming one of the worst governments in modern history. Some of its hopelessness and nastiness was predictable. Labour signalled loudly to its more militant supporters that it planned a class-war attack on private education. Other plans were buried deep in the small print. Or they were hinted at by the choice of ministers to carry them out. Chancellor Rachel Reeves, for instance, had disclosed to all who paid attention to her writings that she was gripped by Left-wing dogmas. She professed to revere the Cambridge eccentric Joan Robinson, who spent much of her career admiring the disastrous policies of Maoist China and North Korea. Later we discovered that she was inexperienced as well. Did Sir Keir Starmer realise this, or was he also beguiled by her dubious claims that she had spent a decade working as an economist at the Bank of England? It appears he has now decided to leave her in place to absorb as much as possible of the derision and dissent which her policies have brought about – a cruel revenge, if so. As her next duty will almost certainly be a huge stealth tax rise, achieved by failing to raise thresholds in line with inflation, he will no doubt prefer to let her take the punishment for that too. But this will not protect him from the general civil war which he began by permitting ill-planned attempts to slash the winter fuel allowance and cut welfare payments. Did he really not grasp that his huge new parliamentary party was full of men and women who are profoundly, emotionally committed to spending other people's money on a grand scale? Perhaps not. Sir Keir's own politics are something of a mystery, even to him. The sense of a man floundering between vague principles and a definite desire to stay in office is very strong. For example, he now says that he deeply r egrets describing Britain as an 'island of strangers', which many took as an echo of the late Enoch Powell's 1968 speech about immigration. He claims not to have read it properly before delivering it – a ridiculous thing for a Prime Minister to say. This retraction of his own scripted words must surely be the end of his attempt to save his bacon by trying to copy Reform UK. He also claims to be sorry about an earlier pessimistic speech about the economy, saying: 'We were so determined to show how bad it was that we forgot people wanted something to look forward to as well.' But do they have anything to look forward to, apart from an intensifying civil war between Sir Keir and his traditionally Leftist deputy Angela Rayner? Sir Keir and Ms Rayner are like two opponents grappling with each other on the edge of a precipice. The danger is that they will both fall together, leaving the country to suffer. As things stand, we could have four more years of this unsuccessful and increasingly divided government. It is vital that those who are opposed to its policies coalesce quickly into a coherent and effective opposition, which can both hold Labour to account and prepare to replace it with a competent pro-British government ready to step in, stop the rot and undo as much of the damage as possible.
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an hour ago
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