Starmer denies Reeves cried over him, says she'll remain in her role
But last night Sir Keir denied a rift between them and said her tears had 'nothing to do with politics' or Labour's embarrassing U-turns on benefits - insisting she cried over something 'personal' without expanding further. 'That's absolutely wrong,' he said. '[it's] nothing to do with what's happened this week. It was a personal matter for her, I'm not going to intrude on her privacy by talking to you.' Asked if he was going to sack her, he went on to insist that Ms Reeves would remain in government - with him as PM. 'She's done an excellent job as chancellor and we have delivered inward investment to this country in record numbers. She and I work together, we think together', he said. 'In the past there have been examples - I won't give any specifics - of chancellors and prime ministers who weren't in lockstep. We're in lockstep.' The Chancellor is said to have told Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle she was 'under so much pressure' minutes before taking her seat for an extraordinary session of Prime Minister's Questions.
She was forced to listen in silence as Sir Keir Starmer refused to say in front of MPs that she was secure in her job, as he was battered over his welfare surrender to Labour rebels. But the the truth about her tears is yet to be revealed. In an extraordinary moment that spooked markets, tears appeared to roll down Ms Reeves' cheek as Kemi Badenoch demanded a guarantee she would stay in No11 - something the premier did not give. She was seen being comforted by her sister Ellie - also a Labour minister - as she left the chamber, although Sir Keir did not speak to her.
Ms Reeves' spokesman insisted afterwards that it was a 'personal matter' and he would not be 'getting into' the reasons. Downing Street said the Chancellor 'is going nowhere', had not resigned, and retains Sir Keir's 'full backing'. No10 and No11 both denied claims Ms Reeves had an argument with Sir Keir before they entered the Commons. Last night, Sir Keir told BBC Radio 4's Political Thinking show he worked 'in lockstep' with Reeves and she was 'doing an excellent job as chancellor'. But the Guardian reported that she told the Speaker about the strain she was under. She apparently broke down when she was privately rebuked by Speaker Lindsay Hoyle for giving long answers during Treasury questions yesterday.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting (pictured) last night said Ms Reeves has 'toughness and hard-headedness... in spades' as he spoke out in support of the Chancellor. 'It's why with the choices she's made, not always the most popular choices, is creating the conditions for our economy to grow,' he told ITV's Peston. Mr Streeting added Ms Reeves has 'something going on personally, not professionally'. 'It's easy to forget that we're all humans as politicians and we have lives like everyone else,' he continued. Interest rates on 10-year and 30-year gilts - effectively the cost of government borrowing - spiked and the pound slipped sharply against the US dollar as the Commons scenes unfolded earlier.
Just a year on from his election landslide, Sir Keir's authority has been left in tatters after his extraordinary surrender to avert defeat at the hands of Labour rebels. Ms Badenoch said he had made 'mistake after mistake', highlighting volte faces over grooming gangs and winter fuel allowance. She also pointed to a visibly-upset Reeves, sitting next to the PM, saying she looked 'miserable' and was being used as a 'human shield'. Last night Sir Keir effectively tore up his benefits reforms, which had been due to shave £5billion a year off spirallling costs by the end of the Parliament - but will now actually increase spending by £100million. The move heaped misery on Ms Reeves, who was already struggling to fill a black hole in the public finances that could amount to tens of billions of pounds. Touring broadcast studios this morning, Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden warned there would be 'financial consequences' - hinting that the tax burden will need to rise again.
Ms Reeves has insisted Labour will stick to manifesto pledges of no hikes to income tax, employee National Insurance or VAT. And she had been adamant that she will not break her 'cast iron' fiscal rules. But she refused to guarantee yesterday that the hated freeze in tax thresholds will not be extended. In highly emotional scenes at PMQs, Ms Badenoch said: 'This man has forgotten that his welfare bill was there to plug a black hole created by the Chancellor. Instead they're creating new ones. They're creating new ones. '(Ms Reeves) is pointing at me, she looks absolutely miserable. Labour MPs are going on the record saying that the Chancellor is toast, and the reality is that she is a human shield for his incompetence. In January, he said that she would be in post until the next election. Will she really?'
Sir Keir replied: '(Mrs Badenoch) certainly won't. I have to say, I'm always cheered up when she asks me questions or responds to a statement because she always makes a complete mess of it and shows just how unserious and irrelevant they are. She talks about the black hole, they left a £22billion black hole in our economy and we're clearing it up, and I'm really proud that in the first year of a Labour Government, we got free school meals, breakfast clubs, childcare, got £15 billion invested in transport in the North and the Midlands. We're cutting regulation, planning and infrastructure is pounding forward, building 1.5 million homes, the biggest investment in social and affordable housing, and of course the three trade deals.' Mrs Badenoch replied: 'How awful for the Chancellor that he couldn't confirm that she would stay in place.' Challenged afterwards why Sir Keir failed to give Ms Reeves the vote of confidence, the PM's press secretary said: 'He has done so repeatedly. The Chancellor is going nowhere. She has the Prime Minister's full backing. He has said it plenty of times, he doesn't need to repeat it every time the Leader of the Opposition speculates about Labour politicians. The Chancellor and the Prime Minister are focused entirely on delivering for working people. It's thanks to the Chancellor's management of the economy that we managed to restore stability, which has led to four interest rate cuts, wages rising faster than inflation and she recently delivered a spending review that invested in Britain's national renewal.'
Asked whether the Prime Minister still had confidence in Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall (pictured), the press secretary said: 'Yes.' A spokesman for the Chancellor said: 'It's a personal matter which, as you would expect, we are not going to get into. The Chancellor will be working out of Downing Street this afternoon.' Aides to Speaker Lindsay Hoyle refused to comment on claims he had a row with Ms Reeves shortly before the PMQs session began. But MPs believe Sir Lindsay only rebuked Ms Reeves for giving excessively long answers at Treasury questions yesterday, with the Speaker surprised that she immediate became upset.
The pair had already exchanged words on the subject during the session yesterday. One MP told MailOnline that the cause was a spat with the PM before that clash. 'There has been a major row before, just before she walked in. I think it was with Keir,' they said. However, both No10 and No11 denied that there was any argument between Ms Reeves and Sir Keir. After the session, Mrs Badenoch's spokesman said 'personal matter doesn't really clear it up' and 'you normally tell people what the personal matter is'. He added: 'I'm not going to speculate… I think we should find out what's going on.'
Labour circles have been in a frenzy over how the Chancellor will handle the crisis in the public finances. One MP said: 'She is in massive trouble. This government has lost control. It is the worst politics of anybody - it doesn't matter whether you are left or right. Governments get this after four years, but we're not even at one year.' Rather than leaving the Commons immediate after PMQs as usual, Sir Keir remained on the estate for about two hours having meetings. Meanwhile, rebel ringleaders gloated that they had 'power' over the PM and stepped up demands for a lurch to the Left. Rachael Maskell (pictured), whose fatal amendment sparked the benefits shambles, urged a £24billion 'wealth tax' to pay for more handouts.
Deputy PM Angela Rayner (pictured) is said to have brokered the deal with rebels, fueling speculation that she is positioning to succeed Sir Keir. Opponents jibed it is obvious that Sir Keir will not now lead the party into the next election. Appearing on ITV's Lorraine show, Ms Rayner insisted she did not want the top job, joking that it would 'age me by 10 years'. Told that Sir Keir looked 'tired' and 'exhausted', she said: 'It's a very challenging job. To be fair for Keir Starmer there's been a lot going on... There's a lot going on and the PM's been here there and everywhere doing the job for Britain.' Amid carnage at Westminster yesterday, the PM's carefully assembled truce with rebels dramatically disintegrated.
Facing the threat of a massive revolt, Sir Keir opted to make yet another major concession just 90 minutes before the vote. Ministers pledged that changes to disability handouts will not be finalised until after a review - meaning that the package as it stands will actually make the current system more expensive than before up to 2029. Sir Keir - who is days away from marking the first anniversary of his election landslide - had already agreed that the benefits curbs would only apply to new claimants.
There was mocking laughter in the chamber as Social Security Minister Stephen Timms (pictured) was asked how much the proposals would save now, and merely replied that the government would 'set out figures in the usual way'. Despite the humiliating manoeuvres, when the vote was held 44 Labour MPs still backed the fatal amendment and others abstained - although it was comfortably defeated by 328 to 149 as Tories largely stayed away. Shortly afterwards, the Bill cleared second reading stage by 335 to 260, with the rebellion growing to 49. It will now be scrutinised at committee, where there could be further problems. Mr McFadden told BBC Breakfast he is 'not going to speculate' on what could be in the Autumn Budget but there would be 'financial consequences'. 'This is one moving part of the budgetary picture, it does have a financial consequence yesterday,' he said. 'I'm not going to speculate on where the budget lands, because there are so many other different moving parts in it, and it wouldn't make sense for me to do that.'
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The Guardian
30 minutes ago
- The Guardian
In an age of failing economies and a populist backlash, I'll tell you what we need – Marxism
A young woman I met recently remarked that it was not so much the existence of pure evil that drove her berserk, but rather people or institutions with the capacity to do good who instead ended up damaging humanity. Her musing made me think of Karl Marx, whose quarrel with capitalism was precisely that – not so much that it was exploitative but that it dehumanised and alienated us despite being such a progressive force. Preceding social systems might have been more oppressive or exploitative than capitalism. However, only under capitalism have humans been so fully alienated from our products and environment, so divorced from our labour, so robbed of even a modicum of control over what we think and do. Capitalism, especially after it shifted into its technofeudal phase, turned us all into some version of Caliban or Shylock – monads in an archipelago of isolated selves whose quality of life is inversely related to the abundance of gizmos our newfangled machinery produces. This week, alongside a host of other politicians, writers and thinkers, I will be speaking at the Marxism 2025 festival in London, and one of the questions that occupies me is the way in which young people today clearly feel this alienation Marx identified. But the backlash against immigrants and identity politics – not to mention the algorithmic distortion of their voices – paralyses them. Here Marx can re-enter with advice on how to overcome this paralysis – good advice that lies buried under the sands of time. Take the argument that minorities living in the west should assimilate lest we end up a society of strangers. When Marx was 25, he read a book by Otto Bauer, a thinker he respected, making the case that to qualify for citizenship, German Jews should renounce Judaism. Marx was livid. Though the young Marx had no time for Judaism, indeed for any religion, his passionate demolition of Bauer's argument is a sight for sore eyes: 'Does the standpoint of political emancipation give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism and from man the abolition of religion? … Just as the state evangelizes when … it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights.' The trick that Marx is teaching us here is how to combine a commitment to the religious freedom of Jews, Muslims, Christians etc with the wholesale rejection of the presumption that, in a class society, the state can represent the general interest. Yes, Jews, Muslims, people of faiths that we may not share – or even much like – must be emancipated immediately. Yes, women, black people and LGBTQ+ people must be granted equal rights well before any socialist revolution appears on the horizon. But freedom will take a lot more than that. Shifting to the topic of immigrant workers suppressing the wages of local workers, another minefield for today's younger people, a letter Marx sent in 1870 to two associates in New York City offers brilliant clues on how to deal not only with the Nigel Farages of the world but also with some leftists who have bitten the anti-immigration bait. In his letter, Marx fully acknowledges that American and English employers were purposely exploiting cheap Irish immigrant labour, pitting them against native-born workers and weakening labour solidarity. But for Marx it was self-defeating for trade unions to turn against the Irish immigrants and espouse anti-immigration narratives. No, the solution was never to banish immigrant workers but to organise them. And if the problem is the weakness of the unions, or fiscal austerity, then the solution can never be to scapegoat immigrant workers. Speaking of trade unions, Marx also has some splendid advice for them. 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Last, Marx's freshness shines through when we try to make sense of the technofeudal world that big tech, along with big finance and our states, has surreptitiously encased us in. To understand why this is a form of technofeudalism, something much worse than surveillance capitalism, we need to think as Marx would have of our smartphones, tablets etc. To see them as a mutation of capital – or 'cloud capital' – that directly modifies our behaviour. To grasp how mind-bending scientific breakthroughs, fantastical neural networks and imagination-defying AI programs created a world where, while privatisation and private equity asset-strip all physical wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains. Only through Marx's lens can we truly get it: that to own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively. Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25, a former finance minister and author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
Sky News
31 minutes ago
- Sky News
Welsh independence will unleash 'full potential' as nationalists serious contenders to form next government
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Sky News
an hour ago
- Sky News
Leaseholders to get rights to more easily challenge extortionate service charges
Why you can trust Sky News Leaseholders will be able to more easily challenge extortionate service charges, the government has said. For those who are trapped in the midst of the leasehold scandal, the reforms cannot come soon enough. They have been promised change for many years by successive governments and by Labour in opposition, so any progress will be welcome, but is it enough for those suffering financially? It's a complex problem but at the heart of it are service charges that go higher and higher in a way that is often inexplicable, unpredictable and opaque. These are fees for building services and maintenance that are on top of the homeowner's mortgage. They often run into thousands of pounds, go way over the initial estimate and it is not clear why they are so high. By forcing companies to be transparent about the fees they are charging, the government is hoping to tackle this. The reforms, which the government has said it will push through after a consultation, will receive standardised service charge documentation which spell out clear and detailed information about how their service charges are calculated and spent. Further reforms will stop leaseholders having to automatically pay for landlords' litigation costs even where they have won their case. According to housing minister Matthew Pennycook, the changes will enable homeowners to challenge unreasonable charges more easily. He also believes it will put pressure on managing agents to bring fees down. The government will also introduce a strict new qualification regime for managing agents to try to raise standards in the sector. Mr Pennycook told Sky News: "The system has some inherent inequities in it that do allow leaseholders to be gouged and particularly when it comes to managing agents there are unscrupulous people out there. "They are abusing leaseholders and there's poor practice. "The reforms we are announcing today and reforms that are to come are going to bear down managing agents and ensure the sector as a whole is properly regulated." Asked why it has taken a year to make this announcement, and why further changes could take much longer, he said: "We've got to take forward through primary legislation the wider reforms necessary to bring the system to an end. "You can't do that in 100 days but we are also determined to provide relief to existing leaseholders now."
