Starmer denounces Reform UK pledge to restore two-child benefit cap in full as ‘shameful’
Keir Starmer has responded to the Robert Jenrick speech. Referring to Jenrick’s commitment to bringing back the two-child benefit cap in full (see 11.45am), Starmer said in a post on social media:
Shameful.
I’m incredibly proud that this government has scrapped the cruel two child limit.
Reform wants to push hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.
UPDATE: And, speaking to reporters in South Wales, Starmer said:
This is shameful from Reform – a total disregard for the lives of young people.
I hope that they absolutely never get to be in power, because this is an indication of the sort of Britain that they want to see, a Britain which plumbs its children back into poverty.
I do not think that’s what this country needs and I don’t think it’s what this country deserves.
Key events
Liz Truss, the former Tory PM, has implicitly criticised Robert Jenrick for saying Reform UK will maintain the Office for Budget Responsibility and Bank of England independence. After Jenrick’s speech, she posted this on social media.
The Treasury and its associated bodies (OBR and Bank of England) are the most powerful institutions in the British state – more so than the Home or Foreign Office. I saw this up close.
They are ideologically committed to EU alignment, mass migration and Keynsian economics.
If their power structures aren’t dismantled, nothing will change.
For Jenrick, criticism from Truss is probably very welcome. His speech today was intended to show that Reform UK is committed to economic stability. (See 10.34am.) He served in Truss’s government as a health minister, but since then he has been very critical of her mini-budget, and he has said that Kemi Badenoch should have thrown Truss out of the Conservative party – claiming Badenoch’s failure to do so was one reason why he defected to Reform UK.
Jenrick says Reform UK would keep Bank of England’s 2% inflation target
Robert Jenrick has said Reform UK would keep the Bank of England’s 2% inflation target.
Asked about this, the Reform Treasury spokesperson said:
I’ve been very clear, of course we’re going to keep the target in place and it’s incredibly important to us. Reform serves working people. We want to make sure we keep their bills down.
Tories claim Reform UK wants more welfare spending – despite Jenrick saying it now backs having two-child benefit cap ‘in full’
Robert Jenrick made it clear today that Reform UK would restore “in full” (see 11.45am) the two-child benefit cap – the policy originally proposed by George Osborne that limits child-related universal credit payments to the first two children a family has. The government is in the process of passing legislation to abolish the cap. But the Conservative, and now Reform UK, want to restore for everyone.
Last year Nigel Farage said his party would get rid of the cap to help encourage poorer families to have children. But this was unpopular with anti-welfare rightwingers, and Reform soon said that what Farage meant was that Reform would only lift the cap for British parents with both parents working full-time. This was the policy when Reform last discussed it two weeks ago.
But the Tories do not accept that Farage has ditched what he said last year. In a response to the Robert Jenrick speech, Kevin Hollinrake, the Tory chair, said:
One week Nigel Farage says Robert Jenrick is a fraud, next week he’s Reform’s economic guru. You cannot trust a word he says.
Reform’s economic policy changes by the week. Just two weeks ago, Rob Jenrick voted to lift the two-child benefit cap. Today he claims he would reinstate it. They make even Keir Starmer look consistent.
Within Reform, no one agrees on anything. Danny Kruger wants to scrap the two-child cap. Richard Tice wants to scrap the OBR. Suella Braverman wants to pursue ‘socialist’ policies.
But none of it really matters. Reform is a one-man band. The only view that counts is Nigel Farage’s and he wants more welfare.
Starmer defends U-turn over local elections cancellation, saying legal advice changed and it was councils wanting to delay
Speaking to the media in South Wales, Keir Starmer has defended the government’s decision to U-turn over the plan to postpone elections in 30 council areas in England.
He said it was the councils themselves that asked for elections to be postponed, and he said the government was responding to legal advice that changed. He said:
It’s important to remind ourselves that the decision to cancel was a locally led decision, in the sense that each authority could decide.
And, yes, Labour authorities came forward to say, ‘please delay’, but so did Tory authorities, so did Lib Dem authorities.
In relation to the position, we took further legal advice and, as you would expect as a government, having got further legal advice, we followed that legal advice.
At least one council leader has claimed she was encouraged by the government to ask for elections in her area to be delayed.
Seven Kent county councillors elected as Reform UK join Rupert Lowe’s alternative, Restore Britain
Ben Quinn
Ben Quinn is a Guardian political correspondent.
Seven councillors elected to represent Reform UK on its ‘flagship’ county council in Kent have joined the new hard-right party set up by Rupert Lowe to rival Nigel Farage’s.
They include a number who parted company with the Reform UK group after leaked video obtained by the Guardian showed the council leader, Linden Kemkaran, telling that her councillors would have to “fucking suck it up” if they didn’t like decisions.
Oliver Bradshaw, one of the councillors who have now joined Restore Britain, said:
Reform UK in Kent has forgotten who sent them there,
When Reform was elected in May, it had two pledges, cut waste and put the residents of Kent first.
Instead, £200k is being spent on political assistants and DOLGE [Reform’s Department of Local Government Efficiency], a department the administration itself admits ‘hasn’t cut waste’.
Farage told a press conference on Monday that Lowe’s new party wouldn’t last long.
The Conservatives have joined Nigel Farage (see 11.24pm) in criticising the government for its oppostion to the attempt by a small group of Chagossians to settle on an atol among the Chagos Islands. Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, said:
We warned that [the Chagos Islands treaty] would put Chagossians at risk of repression by the Mauritian government. And now our own government is doing Mauritius’s bidding, threatening Chagossians with prisons sentences or crippling fines for landing on the Islands.
This is shameful. Chagos is British, not Mauritian. Starmer should show some backbone for once and stand up to those who threaten to harm to our national interest and our security.
Starmer denounces Reform UK pledge to restore two-child benefit cap in full as ‘shameful’
Keir Starmer has responded to the Robert Jenrick speech. Referring to Jenrick’s commitment to bringing back the two-child benefit cap in full (see 11.45am), Starmer said in a post on social media:
Shameful.
I’m incredibly proud that this government has scrapped the cruel two child limit.
Reform wants to push hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.
UPDATE: And, speaking to reporters in South Wales, Starmer said:
This is shameful from Reform – a total disregard for the lives of young people.
I hope that they absolutely never get to be in power, because this is an indication of the sort of Britain that they want to see, a Britain which plumbs its children back into poverty.
I do not think that’s what this country needs and I don’t think it’s what this country deserves.
Q: Was Nigel Farage wrong when he described the OBR as a Blairite quango? And what do you mean by saying you would get more people in?
Jenrick said the OBR should not be a retirement home for people who used to work at the Resolution Foundation.
And it came second from bottom in a list of accurate forecasters, he said.
So there would be changes, he said. He said there was a need to get better people in.
But he said the OBR was set up to instil “fiscal rectitude”. He said Reform UK were in favour of that.
Q: In the past Nigel Farage said the future of the triple lock was up for debate. It sounds like you don’t agree?
Jenrick said the party would say more about this in due course. But it would always protect pensioners, he said.
Jenrick signals Reform UK would keep pension triple lock
Q: [From the Daily Mail] Will you keep the triple lock?
Jenrick said he will say more about this in the coming days. But he said he had always been a supporter of the triple lock, and he said it was “incredibly important that we provide dignity and security to older people on fixed incomes”.
He said he did not think Daily Mail readers [many of whom are elderly] would be disappointed by what he would be announcing.
Q: If Reform UK gets rid of the Equality Act, as Suella Braverman said it would yesterday, will it produce alternative legislation. And can you guarantee that no one will lose their job because of their gender or ethnicity?
Jenrick said the party would say more about this in the coming days.
He said legislation has been passed over generations giving workers rights. Reform UK would protect those rights, he said. But he said the Equality Act had produced results that were “harmful”.
He claimed that white working-class boys are now being discriminated against when they apply for jobs.
Jenrick refuses to fully commit to Reform UK plan to cut QE interest payments to banks
Robert Jenrick is taking questions at the Reform UK press conference. I will post a summary of the main points from the speech later, but here are highlights from the Q&A.
The first was from GB News, and it was about young people feeling left behind, and considering emigrating.
Jenrick said he wanted people to be coming back to the UK.
Q: Should the Bank of England stop paying interest on QE deposits, as Nigel Farage has proposed?
Jenrick said Farage gave a speech on this at Davos, and the party would give it “careful consideration”.
In his speech Farage said Reform UK would definitely cut these interest payments. In the past Reform UK has claimed this could save taxpayers £40bn. Jenrick did not fully commit to this idea.
Eluned Morgan says Welsh Labour will cap bus fares at £2 if it wins Senedd elections
Q: Is bus investment as important as rail investment?
Eluned Morgan replied: “Yes, definitely.”
She said, under privatisation, firms only wanted to supply services on the profitable routes.
She said, if Labour wins the elections in Wales in May, it will cap bus fares at £2.
And it will also develop 100 new bus routes, developed with local communities, she said.
Starmer said rail privatisation had not been a success. In taking rail companies back into public ownership, the UK government was copying what has already happened in Wales, he said.
Q: Is this a vote of confidence in Transport for Wales?
Yes, said Starmer. He said he was here to make the point that this plan will be delivered.
At the event in Wales Keir Starmer took questions.
The first questions came from workers at the plant, and the first one was about how the rail investment would help growth.
Starmer said that the publication of the plan would give “certainty to supply chains”. That would encourage investment, he said.
And he said, more broadly, “transport absolutely drives economic growth”.
Eluned Morgan, the Welsh first minister, said she recalls asking businesses in Cardiff what they needed. They needed a South Wales metro, she said, so that people living in the Valleys could get to Cardiff to work. She said the document published today would implement that plan.
She also said it was important to stick with plans like this, “which is why stable government is crucial”.
In his speech Starmer did not just cover rail; he insisted that the government was focused on the cost of living generally, and he said the inflation figures out today were good news for people.
Starmer urged his audience to read the Transport for Wales document setting out the rail plans being announced today.
He said it showed the new stations that are being opened.
Starmer says rail investment plan ‘historic day’ for Wales
Keir Starmer has been speaking at an event in Wales where he is promoting the government’s plans for a rail investment in Wales that will see seven new stations opening.
He said this was a “historic day” for Wales.
