Starmer and Macron hope for ‘progress' on defence and migration at summit
Issuing a readout of the conversation between the Prime Minister and Mr Macron, a Downing Street spokesperson said Sir Keir 'looked forward to welcoming the President to the UK next week, with both leaders agreeing that the state visit will provide a historic opportunity to showcase the breadth of the UK-France relationship.
'Turning to the UK-France summit on Thursday, they hoped to make good progress across a wide range of our joint priorities including migration, growth, defence and security.'
The two leaders are also due to host a meeting of the coalition of the willing while Mr Macron is in Britain, with the two leaders expected to dial in to speak to other allied nations who are looking to support any future peace deal in Ukraine.
There have been extensive talks between the two nations on migration, and the summit comes as the UK has been repeatedly pushing the French authorities to do more to prevent small boats from crossing the Channel.
The number of people who have arrived in the UK by small boat passed 20,000 earlier this week.
Downing Street welcomed action from French officers on Friday, after reports suggested knives had been used to puncture a boat in waters off the French coast.
A Number 10 spokesman said: 'We welcome action from French law enforcement to take action in shallow waters, and what you have seen in recent weeks is a toughening of their approach.'
Existing rules have been changed to allow police officers to intervene when dinghies are in the water.
Those alterations have not yet come into effect, but reports on Friday suggested tougher action was already being taken.
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The Independent
17 minutes ago
- The Independent
Rachel Reeves should be as open as possible about tax rises
It has been clear for months that taxes were likely to rise in the Budget this autumn. Rachel Reeves left herself so little margin for error in last year's Budget that any bad fiscal news would mean that she would have to come back for more. Almost from the moment the chancellor sat down after delivering last year's speech, the bad fiscal news has come thick and fast. She sought to stay on track in March by announcing savings in welfare spending, but those have now been blocked by her own MPs. Before that, the prime minister announced a U-turn on means-testing the winter fuel payment, restoring it to most pensioners. Meanwhile, the global economic outlook has worsened and tax revenues have fallen behind the forecast. The question now is not whether she will have to raise taxes, but whether she can do so without breaking Labour's manifesto promises not to raise any of the taxes that produce the bulk of the government's revenue: income tax, national insurance and VAT. Jim O'Neill, the former Conservative minister who advised Ms Reeves in opposition, tells The Independent today that, 'without changing some of the big taxes', the chancellor cannot make her sums add up. 'The past few days should force government to truly prioritise,' he says, 'and, crucially, recognise it can't deliver on all three of its fiscal rules, growth mission and manifesto tax commitments. Something has to give.' The Independent 's view is that we are not quite at that point yet. It may still be possible for Ms Reeves to raise the sums of money required without breaking into the 'big three' taxes – or even into the fourth, corporation tax, which Labour has also promised not to raise. But any prudent chancellor needs to be prepared for more news on the downside. She needs to take the British people into her confidence and explain that, painful as last year's Budget was, it may be necessary to take further painful decisions this year. If she does have to break manifesto promises – as opposed to merely bending them with sophistry about the incidence of taxation on 'working people' with her increase in employers' national insurance contributions – she needs to persuade people that the alternatives are worse. She needs to explain that she cannot simply 'relax the fiscal rules' and borrow more, as some of the voices from her own party seem to imagine. She did this rather well at a conference of CEOs last month: 'Fine, we can change the fiscal rules to borrow more. What would happen? Gilt yields would go up more, so the cost of servicing the whole stock of debts goes up. The fiscal rules aren't a construct that we've pulled out of thin air, they're to meet the real constraints that exist – that if we want to borrow somebody has to be willing to buy those bonds.' But she, the prime minister and whoever is the minister for the morning news round need to make this argument repeatedly. Then she – and they – need to explain why it is so hard to cut public spending. Labour MPs may have been guilty of wishful thinking about the consequences, but they were not wrong to block the rushed and crude cuts to personal independence payments that Ms Reeves wanted. It has been reported that the chancellor, rather sulkily, wants the Labour rebels to take the blame for the tax rises that will follow: it would be better if she could set out a better path to welfare reform that might end up saving money rather than starting from the demand for cuts. There are still many options for tax rises that do not touch manifesto promises. Ms Reeves could perhaps explain to some of her ill-informed backbench colleagues why a wealth tax is a bad idea that has been abandoned in every country that has tried it. She could go on to explain that there are other ideas that could achieve the same objective. Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, helpfully set out a few small-ticket items in her memo in March. Beyond that, the freeze in income tax thresholds could be extended. Tax reliefs for pensions remain an unjustified benefit for the better-off. A mansion tax on properties worth more than £2m is long overdue. Openness and transparency have never been the watchwords of the Treasury in tax policy. Chancellors have tended to hoard their power to surprise people with the big decisions at Budgets. But this chancellor and this government are in an unusually difficult situation. Ms Reeves needs to explain the trade-offs behind the difficult decisions that she is about to make if she wants people to support them.
BBC News
32 minutes ago
- BBC News
Urgent action urged over Shropshire Council's finances
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Times
an hour ago
- Times
Starmer must protect Reeves zealously now. If she falls, so does he
Colleagues have compared Sir Keir Starmer to a tank: he powers on, under attack, even when the government seems to be falling apart around him. After a disastrous week when he was outmanoeuvred by his own MPs and forced into a humiliating retreat over welfare reform, Starmer was in full tank-like mode on Wednesday, at prime minister's questions, as he moved inexorably towards the line of fire. He was oblivious to the plight of Rachel Reeves, his chancellor, on the benches behind him. The 8.30am meeting in Downing Street does not take place on those Wednesday mornings when Starmer is preparing for PMQs. But No 10 had been made aware that 'something had happened at home' that morning and Reeves was upset. 'In normal circumstances,' I was told by a senior aide, 'she would have taken the day off.' These were not normal circumstances: had Reeves failed to appear in the chamber, after the collapse of the government's flagship welfare reform programme, speculation about her future would have been even more febrile. She knew that, and so did Starmer. Reeves was upset about a personal matter, but she was also under enormous strain: Britain's first female chancellor had become a 'lightning rod' for much of the dismay and anger directed at the government. Farmers, businesses, the disabled, pensioners, red wall MPs, Blairites — the chancellor had angered them all during her year at the Treasury. She seemed increasingly isolated and was being blamed inside the parliamentary party, even more than Starmer, for the welfare shambles. 'A chancellor is at their most exposed when they are taking money away,' Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's chief of staff, has told colleagues by way of explanation for the troubles of Reeves, whom he supports. • Janice Turner: Rachel Reeves's tears were ours after a year of Keir Starmer Reeves prides herself on being an 'iron chancellor', austere, unyielding, committed to her fiscal rules and pre-election pledges not to raise taxes on income and VAT or increase employee's national insurance. She is fearful of the power of the bond market, and, as she always says to me, 'I don't want to take risks with people's mortgages.' She was pleased with how her multi-year spending review had been received. 'The spending review was the best day I've worked in politics in 20 years,' McSweeney said, 'because it was the day we made more announcements on the things we're doing to change people's lives.' Since then the U-turns on the winter fuel allowance, which Reeves had unilaterally removed from most pensioners under instruction from the Treasury during a period early in the parliament when she and other senior ministers had complete autonomy, and the rebellion against welfare reform had weakened her authority. Worse, they had blown a £5 billion hole in the public finances. And here she was in the chamber, brutally exposed, in all her vulnerability and desperation. It seemed, at first, as if she was already mourning the end of her chancellorship. Kemi Badenoch had seen what Starmer had not: that Reeves, her eyes swollen as tears rolled down her cheeks, was distressed. Did the chancellor have the prime minister's full support, Badenoch asked, her eyes shining with malign intent. The tank powered straight into the trap set for him. Starmer is not a nimble performer or fluent speaker, nor respected for his emotional intelligence and empathy. This was the moment to declare total support for the chancellor, the loneliest politician in Britain. Instead he made a feeble joke about Badenoch's precarious position in her own party. Outside the chamber McSweeney was being inundated with messages from contacts in business who assumed Reeves had been fired or was due to resign. The markets responded to the spectacle of the chancellor's misery: sterling weakened and the yield on ten-year government bonds, or gilts, rose by the most in one day since the debacle of Liz Truss's mini budget in autumn 2022. Starmer was compelled to respond. That evening he gave a BBC interview confirming what he had neglected to say in the chamber: that Reeves would be chancellor 'for many years'. The next day they hugged in front of the cameras at the launch of the government's NHS ten-year plan, and Wes Streeting, the health secretary, rallied to her side in a buccaneering speech. The markets stabilised, and paradoxically Reeves ended the week strengthened: Starmer's support for her was now unequivocal and No 10 was briefing that she commanded the full confidence of the markets because of her fiscal rules and authority. You couldn't make it up. Last week at Westminster was politics at its most raw and unforgiving and it was deeply revealing about the state of the government and the failings of Starmer's leadership. Reeves likes to project an image of strength, which leads to a certain coldness in public performance. On numerous occasions she has said to me: 'I have been underestimated all my life.' It's as if she is continuously trying to fight impostor syndrome and prove her detractors wrong — one of whom, Maurice Glasman, the blue Labour peer, has dismissed her as a 'just a drone for the Treasury'. I first met Reeves when she was a parliamentary candidate (she was elected in 2010), and even then Labour people — she was already close to Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband — were talking about her as a future chancellor. As an Oxford graduate she had the choice of joining either Goldman Sachs or the Bank of England. She chose the latter because she believed her destiny was to enter politics. Over the years, in our many conversations, I've always had the sense that Reeves was conflicted and had slight class and intellectual insecurities. I've written before about this doubleness, what I call Rachel 1 and Rachel 2, the former being the restless economist interested in ideas and political economy and the latter the cautious automaton beholden to Treasury orthodoxy. She is not a moral missionary like Gordon Brown but is a product of the Labour Party. The party has nurtured and encouraged her, created the conditions for her rise, which is why it hurts her so much to know that members have turned against her, and that fellow MPs direct much of the blame at her for the government's struggles. They lament what they perceive to be her lack of compassion for pensioners, the disabled and families with more than two children. These charges are unfair and wound Reeves deeply. • My Week: Sir Keir Starmer Starmer, by contrast, comes from outside the party: as a career lawyer he does not relish the game at Westminster, he is bored by arcane Labour rules and procedures and he doesn't even enjoy mixing with MPs, which is why he messed up so spectacularly over welfare reform. The work had not been done, the preparation with MPs not made. After an appalling week for Labour, No 10 advisers now speak of having reached a 'fork in the road': tax rises will follow in the autumn, the soft left will demand the wealthy are targeted and Starmer will be urged to tell a more convincing story about the purpose of his government, as if he hadn't had enough time to do so already. After the events of recent days, what is clear is that he and Reeves are bound inextricably together: if she fails, so does he. Meanwhile, Angela Rayner, unscathed by the debacle, watches and waits, her power enhanced.
