Author: Miles Donavan

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has given her long-awaited Spring Statement to Parliament today, as she lays out her latest plans for the public finances. 1.Economy The Chancellor confirmed that the Office for Budget Responsibility has downgraded growth forecasts for 2025 from 2% in autumn to just 1% today. Reeves told the House: “I am not satisfied with these numbers. That is why we on this side of the house are serious about taking the action needed to grow our economy, backing the builders, not the blockers, with a third runway at Heathrow Airport … increasing investment with reforms to our pension…

‘As the last 14 years have shown us, you cannot cut your way to growth.’ In today’s Spring Statement, Rachel Reeves set out investments in defence, while cutting welfare spending and the costs of running government through civil service reforms.  One focus of Reeves’ budget update was raising revenue by tackling tax avoidance. The chancellor said, under this government, £7.5 billion will be raised by tackling tax avoidance. Another was Labour’s planning reforms, including reintroducing mandatory housing targets, which the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has said will lead to housebuilding reaching a 40-year high of 305,000 new homes per…

‘David Cameron, George Osborne, Austerity, Brexit, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss. It was an unmitigated 14-year disaster.’ Clive Lewis, MP for Norwich South, schooled former minister Kevin Hollinrake on the Tory government’s failures after he tried to claim Rachel Reeves is responsible for the UK’s slow economic growth.  Hollinrake, who is now shadow housing secretary, rejected the idea that global headwinds and the record Labour inherited from the Tories have left the UK economy in a bad state.  He said that “What has destroyed growth, which is the number one mission of this government is Rachel Reeves, she has spent six…

The Good Law Project has filed a landmark legal claim against Reform UK in the High Court, over the far-right party’s alleged breaches of data protection laws. The Good Law Project has launched legal action against Nigel Farage’s Reform on behalf of 51 individuals, claiming the party failed to comply with data protection laws by ignoring data subject access requests (DSARs) and subsequent legal letters. The non-profit campaign company has launched a fundraiser to cover the legal costs of the case. It states on its page: “Before the general election, thousands of Good Law Project supporters joined our #StopTargetingMe campaign…

The estimated cost of the week-long trip was over £14,000 Kemi Badenoch and her family spent a week at a residential hosted by Tory donor and chair of the climate science denial group Net Zero Watch, Neil Record.  According to Badenoch’s register of financial interests, the week-long stay, which was paid for by Record, cost approximately £14,350.38.  Last week, the Conservative Party leader made an anti-net zero speech at advertising agency Havas, who have been working for Shell since 2023, in which she said the UK’s target of achieving net zero by 2050 was “impossible” to meet and pledged to…

At a time of increasing polarisation, with the far-right on the rise, incidents of Islamophobia are increasing, with the number of Islamophobic social media posts aimed at the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan doubling in a year. According to analysis commissioned by the Greater London authority (GLA), almost 28,000 social media posts referring to Khan included a key Islamophobic phrase last year, a huge increase on the 12,000 sent a year earlier and a more than eight-fold increase from 2022. The vast majority of abuse was posted on X. It comes after Trump supporter and owner of X Elon Musk…

Far-right commentator and activist Laurence Fox has been charged with a sexual offence, the Metropolitan Police have confirmed. The actor allegedly shared an intimate image of TV star Narinder Kaur without her consent on social media. He is said to have shared the ‘upskirting’ image of Kaur, a broadcaster who appears on Good Morning Britain and GB News, on social media in April 2024. Kaur, 52, described the incident as “unimaginably mortifying” in a post on X. She has also said that the image shows her as she got out of a taxi in 1996, and was taken without her…

“When it comes to applying cuts and changes, the government needs to really look at the lives of people with learning disabilities” “I feel it’s a huge concern, and it’s going to have a huge impact on people with learning disabilities,” says 47-year-old Ismail, who works full-time and receives Personal Independence Payment (PIP).  PIP helps Ismail to cover the extra costs related to his health needs and his learning disability. “It helps me be part of my community and takes me to places I need to reach,” Ismail says. Through the Motability scheme, Ismail’s family member leases a vehicle, enabling…

Ahead of the Spring Statement from Chancellor Rachel Reeves tomorrow, the Labour government has announced £2 billion of new funding to support the biggest boost in social and affordable housing in a generation. Up to 18,000 new social and affordable homes will be built as a result of the extra funding, and will form part of the pledge by the Labour government to build 1.5 million new homes by 2029. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves said: “We are fixing the housing crisis in this country with the biggest boost in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation. Today’s announcement…

‘How is that anecdote? That is cold hard fact that your hard Brexit is damaging our economy.’ Lib Dem MP Munira Wilson tore into former chief Brexit negotiator David Frost on Politics Live yesterday, giving him the ‘cold hard facts’ about the harmful impact Brexit has had on the economy. Economic growth in the UK fell from 0.4% in December, to 0.1% in January. Lord Frost tried to blame Keir Starmer for the UK’s sluggish economic growth. Politics Live host Jo Coburn challenged Frost’s claim, asking “what would you do differently at this point? I mean arguably Brexit was the…