Tories challenge PM to rule out tax rises in budget, as Badenoch’s attack on TUC BofE appointment backfires
Good morning. With less than six weeks so go until the budget, economics is rising up the agenda at Westminster. The Bank of England is announcing its latest interest rate decision later – Graeme Wearden will have all the details on his business live blog – and Andrew Griffith is giving his first major speech since being appointed as shadow chancellor just over two weeks ago.
Not surprisingly, Griffith is urging the chancellor, John Healey, to rule out tax rises in the budget. He has been doing interviews this morning and he told BBC Breakfast:
The taxes or the fear of taxes … are driving really big taxpayers to leave our country for overseas, taking hundreds of millions of pounds of tax revenues that will pay for public services …
The thing that they (the government) could do right now is take off the table the fears of ordinary small businesses, the self-employed, who are getting up now, going to work, and allow them to get on with their lives with confidence that the taxes are not going to go up.
The speech will focus on small businesses, and Griffith will announce that he has appointed two advisers – the Tory peer and former MP Craig Mackinlay, a chartered accountant, and Robert Colvile, the outgoing head of the Centre for Policy Studies thinktank – to produce a report for him on cutting red tape for business.
The Tories are keen to present Burnham’s administration as what Andy Haldane would call just another “traditional tax and spend socialist government” and yesterday Kemi Badenoch leapt on what she thought was new evidence to confirm this theory. She posted this on social media.
Only one party has ever rescued the country from trade union control. We’re ready to do so again.
If you weren’t sure what kind of Labour government we have, or want to know what’s in store for you and your family finances, the news below is a big clue and it’s not good news 👇
She was responding to a tweet from the Sun saying Paul Nowak has been made a director at the Bank of England.
It was true; he has. There are up to 14 directors on the Bank’s court of directors and Nowak, general secretary of the TUC, has been appointed as one of its non-executive directors. The court is not the body that sets interest rates; it just oversees the Bank’s administration.
But there is nothing very new or surprising (or socialist) about this. Nowak is replacing Frances O’Grady, who was also TUC general secretary. She was made a non-executive director at the Bank under a Tory government. As was her TUC predecessor.
In fact, this has been happening for decades. Rupert Harrison, who was chief of staff to George Osborne when he was chancellor, took to X yesterday to suggest to his Tory colleagues that they keep things in perspective.
Got no take on this particular candidate but worth noting that it’s been a tradition to have a trade union representative on the Court of the Bank for decades. Since the War I think.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government publishes figures on local government spending.
11am: Andrew Griffith, the shadow chancellor, delivers his speech.
Noon: The Bank of England announces its interest rate decision.
I’m afraid we are no longer able to have comments open below the line every day on this blog. If you want to contact me, please email politics.live@theguardian.com. You can use this email to flag up corrections, comments for publication, questions or complaints,
Key events
Q: [From Rob Powell at Sky News] Why should young voters back the Tories when they want to prioritise the pension triple lock, even though pensioner poverty is lower than poverty among working-age adults, and cutting inheritance tax, which benefits wealthier families?
Griffith says he wants to cut taxes for everyone. He says the Tories want to cut stamp duty, which would help first time buyers. He goes on:
That is the big difference in British politics today – between those who want you to keep more of what you earn and want to cut your taxes, and those who refuse to reform welfare and will only ever put taxes up.
Griffith says last Tory government made mistake with making tax digital programme, as he calls for it to be paused
Andrew Griffith has delivered his speech, and he is now taking questions.
Q: You want the government to pause the making tax digital programme. Is that an admission that the last government got this wrong when it introduced it?
Yes, says Griffith. He goes on:
It is an admission that despite [good] intentions, the execution of that has left a lot to be desired.
In fact, coming to parliament from business, I can confess the law that we pass the most often is the law of unintended consequences. And I think making tax digital is a good example of that.
To those who are ready, I would say, fine, you’re past that pain point, we’re not going to take the ability to file digitally away from anybody.
But we do have to recognise that it’s hurting an already suppressed sector.
The government’s Making Tax Digital for Income Tax programme is to due to apply to sole traders and landlords earning over £30,000 from April 2027 and over £20,000 from April 2028. Griffith wants Labour to pause this in the budget.
Jonathan Powell, national security adviser, wanted West Bank sanctions delayed until after Israeli elections, report claims
Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser, told Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband that the government should delay banning trade with illegal settlements on the West Bank until after the Israeli elections, Tim Shipman says in a report for this week’s Spectator. He suggests this advice was ignored in part because Labour wanted to announce the decision before the Holborn and St Pancras byelection.
Shipman says:
The truth is that Burnham and Miliband ignored the advice they were given – which was that if they were determined to sanction Israel, they should not do so before the Israeli election on 27 October.
It may not be surprising that this was the message from the Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, when Miliband called him on 11 August to warn sanctions were imminent. ‘He said postpone it until after the elections,’ a diplomatic source confirms. It was also the message the Israeli embassy in London – and its new chargé d’affaires Chris Cantor – was relaying to the Foreign Office. ‘Their message was clear: why do it now? Wait until after the elections, because something might change,’ a senior Labour figure says.
The British ambassador in Tel Aviv, Simon Walters, who was of the same opinion, delivered a ‘very explicit’ warning not to move so quickly. As a former director of national security for the Middle East in the Foreign Office, he had a deep understanding of the security implications. More remarkably, Jonathan Powell, the National Security Adviser, was of the same view. He was the most important figure in government on foreign policy during Keir Starmer’s premiership, but now seems to have been ignored on the first major issue of Burnham’s tenure.
Shipman says the government has defended announcing the decision before the Israeli elections on the grounds that “tenders to build 1,200 homes on a settlement site called E1, an action seen as an impediment to a two-state solution, were due by 19 October.”
Labour won’t let Andrew Griffith forget Liz Truss. This is what it said overnight in response to the trail of Griffith’s speech.
We won’t take any lectures from the Tories on the economy – not least when it was only last week that Andrew Griffith was praising the “lots of good things” in Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget.
Robert Jenrick, who served with Griffith in the last Tory government and who is now Reform UK’s Treasury spokesperson, also issued a “pre-buttal” ahead of Griffith’s speech. Jenrick said:
Andrew Griffith was the very person who abolished the Office for Tax Simplification after the tax code ballooned to 23,000 pages – why on earth would anyone believe him now? After making IR35 worse, freezing VAT thresholds and imposing reams of red tape, businesses won’t forget the Tories’ betrayal.
Shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith launches review into cutting red tape for small business
In a news release issued ahead of his speech this morning, Andrew Griffith, the new shadow chancellor, gave details of some of the questions he wants the experts he has asked to review small business regulation to address. (See 8.58am.) He said:
[Craig Mackinlay and Robert Colvile] will produce a report taking evidence from small business and self-employed organisations. While they will have a wide remit, they will consider in particular these key questions, and report in December:
-Why have past attempts to reduce the regulatory and compliance burden on small business and the self-employed failed, and what specifically should be done to reduce the burden successfully?
-Where is HMRC’s performance falling short and what specifically should be done to improve it?
-Where do the worst complexities in filing returns and claiming the reliefs small businesses are entitled to sit?
-Where did the 2017 and 2021 reforms to off-payroll working, known as IR35, go too far, and what should a new, better framework look like to cut compliance costs and preserve flexibility while guarding against abuse?
-What are the best systems for small business and the self-employed in use around the world?
Kemi Badenoch was not the only person who criticised the government’s decision to appoint Paul Nowak to the Bank of England’s court, in line with a long tradition that the TUC gets representation there. (See 8.58am and 9.24am.) Last night Richard Tice, the Reform UK deputy leader, issued this statement.
This is staggering. Our socialist Chancellor has dished out a big Bank of England finance job to a socialist union boss who knows nothing about finance.
Clearly, trade union donations not only buy your way into government policymaking, but also onto the Bank of England’s board. This is cronyism in plain sight.
Minister rejects call from MPs for government to stop talking about ‘net zero’ because phrase now a ‘distraction’
The government should stop talking about “net zero” when talking about the transition to clean energy because the phrase has become “a distraction”, MPs say.
The cross-party Commons energy committee says the phrase has “lost much of its significant positive association” amid increasing misinformation.
In a report, it says:
The term net zero has become a distraction from the broader aims and the benefits of the energy transition and the politics of the energy transition have become mired in a stale debate on the cost and feasibility of achieving an emissions target. The public debate fails to reflect the wider benefits of engaging with the transition or the costs of not tackling climate change …
Future government communications under the new administration should be more demonstrably relevant to people’s lives, with clear information on how people might reduce their costs or minimise their exposure to future costs in a way that they believe they can achieve. The department should drop ‘net zero’ from its name as a start to making its communications less technocratic and reduce its use in regular communications and public statements, instead focussing on wider societal benefits.
The full name of the committee is the energy security and net zero committee, which mirrors the full name of the government’s energy department. The committee says that should change.
The Conservatives and Reform UK have both strongly criticised the government’s net zero policies, using the label as a catch-all phrase to cover what in effect are multiple policies to promote the switch from fossil fuels to renewables. Richard Tice, the Reform UK deputy leader, likes talking about “net stupid zero”, although his slogan has not been widely adopted.
When Theresa May was PM, she passed legislation committing the UK to reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 and at the time there was cross-party consensus on this being a good target. But under Kemi Badenoch’s leadership the Tories have abandoned support for this; Reform UK was never signed up in the first place.
In an interview this morning, Martin McCluskey, an energy minister, told Times Radio he did not agree with the committee’s claim that “net zero” has now become a negative term.
He said:
It’s not just about tackling climate change, which is really important, and we need to carry on doing that. But it’s also about making our whole energy system more secure and making sure that our national security is protected as well.
Peers call for UK to enact tobacco-style ban on gambling advertising
The UK should introduce a ban on almost all gambling advertising to protect public health, a cross-party group of peers has urged, prompting fury from the lobby group for bookmakers and casinos. Rob Davies has the story.
This is from Torsten Bell, a Treasury minister, on Kemi Badenoch’s attack on Paul Nowak getting a post as a non-executive director on the Bank of England’s court.
Two Conservative Chancellors appointed Frances O’Grady – then TUC general secretary – to two terms on the Court of the Bank in the recent past. As @rbrharrison the welcome appointment of @nowak_paul today has a LOT of precedents
And the Labour MP Yuan Yang, a former FT journalist, has posted a thread on social media explaining the role of the Bank’s court.
Badenoch labelled ‘an embarrassment’ by cabinet minister over attack on TUC appointment to Bank of England’s court
Chris Bryant, the Northern Ireland secretary, has described Kemi Badenoch as “an embarrassment” over her attack on Paul Nowak’s appointment to the Bank of England’s court.
Tories challenge PM to rule out tax rises in budget, as Badenoch’s attack on TUC BofE appointment backfires
Good morning. With less than six weeks so go until the budget, economics is rising up the agenda at Westminster. The Bank of England is announcing its latest interest rate decision later – Graeme Wearden will have all the details on his business live blog – and Andrew Griffith is giving his first major speech since being appointed as shadow chancellor just over two weeks ago.
Not surprisingly, Griffith is urging the chancellor, John Healey, to rule out tax rises in the budget. He has been doing interviews this morning and he told BBC Breakfast:
The taxes or the fear of taxes … are driving really big taxpayers to leave our country for overseas, taking hundreds of millions of pounds of tax revenues that will pay for public services …
The thing that they (the government) could do right now is take off the table the fears of ordinary small businesses, the self-employed, who are getting up now, going to work, and allow them to get on with their lives with confidence that the taxes are not going to go up.
The speech will focus on small businesses, and Griffith will announce that he has appointed two advisers – the Tory peer and former MP Craig Mackinlay, a chartered accountant, and Robert Colvile, the outgoing head of the Centre for Policy Studies thinktank – to produce a report for him on cutting red tape for business.
The Tories are keen to present Burnham’s administration as what Andy Haldane would call just another “traditional tax and spend socialist government” and yesterday Kemi Badenoch leapt on what she thought was new evidence to confirm this theory. She posted this on social media.
Only one party has ever rescued the country from trade union control. We’re ready to do so again.
If you weren’t sure what kind of Labour government we have, or want to know what’s in store for you and your family finances, the news below is a big clue and it’s not good news 👇
She was responding to a tweet from the Sun saying Paul Nowak has been made a director at the Bank of England.
It was true; he has. There are up to 14 directors on the Bank’s court of directors and Nowak, general secretary of the TUC, has been appointed as one of its non-executive directors. The court is not the body that sets interest rates; it just oversees the Bank’s administration.
But there is nothing very new or surprising (or socialist) about this. Nowak is replacing Frances O’Grady, who was also TUC general secretary. She was made a non-executive director at the Bank under a Tory government. As was her TUC predecessor.
In fact, this has been happening for decades. Rupert Harrison, who was chief of staff to George Osborne when he was chancellor, took to X yesterday to suggest to his Tory colleagues that they keep things in perspective.
Got no take on this particular candidate but worth noting that it’s been a tradition to have a trade union representative on the Court of the Bank for decades. Since the War I think.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government publishes figures on local government spending.
11am: Andrew Griffith, the shadow chancellor, delivers his speech.
Noon: The Bank of England announces its interest rate decision.
I’m afraid we are no longer able to have comments open below the line every day on this blog. If you want to contact me, please email politics.live@theguardian.com. You can use this email to flag up corrections, comments for publication, questions or complaints,
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