Can you ‘take the politics out' of the grooming gangs scandal?
Elsewhere, Donald Trump has fled the G7. Although this isn't the first time he has cut a G7 visit short, it does mean he snubbed meetings with Zelensky and the Mexican president. Have Labour got what they wanted out of the conference? And what should we read into Trump's early exit?
Lucy Dunn speaks to Tim Shipman and James Heale.
Produced by Oscar Edmondson.
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New Statesman
39 minutes ago
- New Statesman
How Ed Miliband can deliver cheaper energy bills, today
Photo by Carl Court / Getty Images We need to get energy bills down, and fast. Above all else, how quickly we make these bills affordable is what will determine our success as a Labour government. Our work in expanding clean energy and insulating homes will get bills down for good, but these investments will take time while voters are, rightly, impatient for change. The good news is there are ways to get energy bills down now and for free. We can do this by implementing a progressive pricing system. The simplest way is to abolish the standing charge – a flat fee paid by all of us regardless of the amount of energy used. Another is through a 'Rising Block Tariff', where an initial allowance of energy has a lower unit price and energy consumed above this allowance, a higher unit price. With extra exemptions also built in, this pricing system will lead to lower bills for low- and middle-income households and doesn't cost the taxpayer a penny. Britain has some of the highest domestic energy bills in Europe and record numbers of people are struggling to pay them. The cost-of-living is still, by far, the most important issue for voters. Nine in ten people see reducing their energy bills as the best way of getting the cost-of-living down. They are right. Making the bills affordable is why I, as a Labour MP, was elected. Our Labour values can be summed up as this: ensuring that every single person in this country can afford a good life. But with one-third of people unable to afford the basics and 3 million emergency food bank parcels being handed out every year, it's clear we are very far from that ideal. If we want a country where a good life is affordable, then we must get energy bills down. Making life affordable was why over 100 MPs came together last week to form the Living Standards Coalition. We come from different traditions of the party, but we share common Labour values and the same overriding electoral imperative. Put bluntly, if we don't get bills down, we lose. Economically insecure voters are 50 per cent more likely to have left Labour. We need to get bills down fast to get these voters back and keep the likes of Nigel Farage out of power. We are building the solar farms, wind turbines, and nuclear power stations that will get bills down for good. We are insulating 5 million homes. But all of these investments take time. People need relief from rising bills now. We have acted, expanding the Warm Homes Discount, which led to an immediate fall in bills for the six million lowest income households, but we can do more to get more peoples bills falling today. There are ways to get bills down quickly and for free, by making the bills we pay more progressive. The simplest way is by abolishing the standing charge, and moving the costs on to each unit of energy consumed. The standing charge, paid by all of us regardless of the amount of energy used, has risen by 43 per cent since 2019. It is, in effect, a flat tax that hits low- and middle-income earners the hardest. Getting rid of this charge would mean that your energy bill is related to how much you use. It is progressive, puts more money into the pockets of low- and middle-income households, and is fiscally neutral. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Another element of a progressive energy bills system is a Rising Block Tariff. Where currently all the energy we use has a flat price, the Rising Block Tariff introduces an initial allowance of energy usage that is priced at a lower tariff. Energy used above this allowance is priced at a higher tariff. Protections are then built in for vulnerable groups such as those on means-tested social security, children, and the disabled to protect poorer, high-energy households. As income is strongly correlated with energy use, it is low- and middle-income households that benefit the most. A Rising Block Tariff is progressive, growth-enhancing, and fiscally neutral. It is progressive because it reduces costs for low- and middle-income households. It is growth-enhancing as it gets more money in the pocket of low- and middle-income families who will then spend more down the local shops and less on foreign gas imports. Crucially, this policy won't cost the Treasury a penny. It redistributes costs within the system. Too many of us are struggling to pay the bills with little relief in sight. Getting to clean energy and insulating homes will get bills down for good, but after years of hard times, people are impatient. They want us to get bills down now. There is a way to do this. By introducing a progressive pricing system, we can reduce bills for low- and average-energy users. Changing to this pricing system would also boost growth, and doesn't cost the taxpayer a penny. These are policies that live up to our Labour values and will help us win the next election. Related
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Can no one silence Nigel Farage's latest populist dogwhistle?
Apparently, there's a debate going on in the upper echelons of the Labour government about what to do about Nigel Farage. Not a moment too soon, you might say. The choice, as it's been posited by Labour insiders, is whether to 'confront' or 'deflect' Reform UK. Farage's populist insurgency has picked up lots of local councils, won a by-election – just – and settled in the opinion polls around 25 to 30 per cent ahead of Labour. Not so long ago, it was an unthinkable situation. Something similar has been going on in the Conservative camp since they lost the general election, and, as we see, it seems the immediate answer to their version of the Farage-ist challenge is to reshuffle the shadow cabinet, bring back James Cleverly, and let Kemi Badenoch have some more time. They can't work out if they want to collaborate with Farage, or confront him. Both parties actually show signs of appeasing him and aping his policies, from welfare to refugees. It's not good. It's worth reminding the mainstream parties what happened last time they were too fastidious to take an ascendant Farage down, which was the Brexit referendum campaign. It was, as it still is, incredibly time-consuming and tiresome to have to fact-check every vague promise and extravagant claim Farage comes out with, and the easiest thing is just to call him an extremist/populist/fascist/xenophobe/racist or whatever and try to ignore him. Well, we all know what happens. As Farage himself might say: 'They're not laughing now!' Much the same – less forgivably – goes for the media. Not that it's an easy job trying to verify whatever casual claims Farage comes out with in real-time, but it means he tends to go unchallenged. Take his appearance on the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show. He claimed, off the top of his head, that cancelling net zero – an amorphous concept, in any case – would save some £30bn a year, and said that 'even' the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), 'a tool of the Establishment,' said so. Kuenssberg had neither the time nor the evidence in front of her to cite Section 4 of the OBR report on long-term fiscal risks that showed that £20bn of the £30bn is due to the loss of fuel duty in the transition to electric cars. If some new levy on electric vehicles was introduce to replace the lost revenues in petrol and diesel sales, the additional cost to the taxpayer would be down to £10bn a year. The OBR has said in 2021 and apparently endorsed again now that 'the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero.' Which happens to be true. I'm definitely not criticising Kuenssberg here, because no interviewer – even with a researcher in her earpiece – could counter that in time, nor make the argument about how the UK has indeed helped big polluters like China and India at least sign up to CO2 reduction targets – and China is now leading the world in green tech and electric vehicles. We had the same sort of thing at the press conference where Farage said he'd cut crime in half in five years. The £30bn net zero thing came up again, but the Q&A session wasn't well suited to pinning him down over it. Asked how he'd pay for his sketchily costed plans to hire another 30,000 police, build 'Nightingale prisons', new 'custody suites', restore the magistrates courts, send 'Britain's worst offenders' to jail in El Salvador, and bang up an unknown number of serious offenders for life, he tossed out a figure of £50bn to £70bn that could be found from scrapping HS2 – even though it's pretty much been run down and the money diverted to other road and rail projects by Rishi Sunak. No one thought to ask exactly how Farage would halve crime, how the plan would work in practice, and why, if he could achieve that improbable outcome, that he couldn't abolish crime completely in 10 years. When Farage does get cornered, as when Kuenssberg pressed him on whether he believes in climate science, and the antics of Reform UK councillors, he has some stock get-outs, and, like so much else he does, they're straight out of the Trump playbook. Tactic one is to say he doesn't know anything about some story so he can't answer and doesn't know if what's referred to is true. Second, he can just say that no party's numbers ever add up anyway – the 'experts' are always wrong and it's not worth bothering about. Third, is the superficially plausible line that if he gets more people 'with real business experience' into government they'll sort things out, just like Trump and Musk did in America – and Reform's pretend DOGE team is trying and thus far failing to do in Britain's skint county councils. Like Trump in the US, Farage is inviting a public more than usually disillusioned with politicians to turn to brilliant business people such as, erm, Zia Yusuf and Richard Tice, and perhaps even the former commodities trader: Farage himself. I suppose I'm just stating the obvious, really, which is that Farage's Trumpian brand of populism and its amplification in the right-wing client press and social media presents a challenge to the mainstream parties, and real independent journalism that they have not been able to cope with. A lot of that failure is, frankly, down to something like laziness, and a reluctance to do the hard graft of countering the lies and busting the myths about economics, immigration, crime and the rest that Reform constantly pump to 'flood the zone', as they say in the states. It is tedious to get your head around, say, carbon budgets and remember all the key crime stats for London, because no one carries that much stuff around in their heads. But our leaders could confront Farage a little harder and with a bit more effect than they've managed so far. We could, let's say, push him much harder on why getting the Royal Navy to take irregular migrants back to Calais is a violation of French sovereignty, and would threaten a Cold War with France and the rest of the European Union in retaliation, with huge damage to trade and the economy. He's been getting away with this sort of nonsense for far too long, and now it's getting dangerous. He needs to be confronted – but who is going to do it?
The National
an hour ago
- The National
Scottish Water hits back at UK minister Steve Reed's pollution comment
Labour's Environment Secretary Steve Reed said in a Channel 4 interview last night that pollution levels in Scotland are 'worse than they are in England'. In response, Scotland's Climate Secretary Gillian Martin has written a letter hitting out at the 'misleading' comments and said it is "clear that Scotland has a higher performance". But now, Scottish Water – the publicly owned utility company that provides water and wastewater services in Scotland – has also responded to Reed's comments. "Scottish Water is the UK's top performing water company and most trusted utility in the UK according to the Customer Service Institute,' a spokesperson told The National. READ MORE: 'Twinned with Epstein Island' sign put up at Donald Trump's Aberdeenshire golf course "In addition to producing world-class drinking water, the independent regulator, SEPA, says 87% of water bodies in Scotland are either good or excellent, the highest proportion ever.' They added: "The Cunliffe Report also makes clear that, "Scotland has a greater number of water bodies achieving 'good' status compared to England and Wales". The final report from the Independent Water Commission led by Sir Jon Cunliffe was published this week. It found that 66% of Scotland's water bodies are of good ecological status compared with 16.1% in England and 29.9% in Wales. Although, the report does note that this is, in part, due to Scotland having a much lower population density.
