Rachel Reeves denies lying about Budget black hole to justify tax hikes – UK politics live

The controversy stems from pre-Budget speculation suggesting a £20 billion gap in meeting fiscal rules, partly due to downgraded productivity forecasts.

Zarah Sultana welcomed the Your Party conference’s decision to choose a collective leadership model over a single leader.

The former Labour MP had backed collective leadership after her preference for a co-leadership model was not put to members for a vote.

She said: “I have fought for maximum member democracy since day one. Seeing members choose collective leadership is truly exciting.

“Together, we’re building a new socialist party – radically democratic and powered by a mass movement.

“This party will be led by its members, not MPs. This is only the beginning.”

Your Party’s founding conference has voted to be led by its members, rather than an individual leader.

The conference voted 51.6 per cent in favour of being led by a committee of members.

In a separate vote, the conference agreed to allow members of other parties to join Your Party where they were found to “align with the party’s values”.

It follows a row over the expulsion of a number of members on the eve of the conference on the grounds they were also members of the Socialist Workers Party.

A Your Party spokesperson said: “This vote shows that we really are doing politics differently: from the bottom-up, not the top-down.

“In Westminster we have a professional political class increasingly disconnected from ordinary people, serving corporations and billionaires instead of the communities they are supposed to represent.

“With a truly member-led party, we will offer something different: democratic, grassroots, accountable.”

Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana cannot run to lead the new left-wing party they founded after members voted that a ‘collective’ headed by a non-MP should make major decisions about its future.

Kate Devlin, The Independent’s Whitehall Editor reports here:

Here were the key points made by the Chancellor as Rachel Reeves spoke to Trevor Phillips and Laura Kuenssberg this morning:

• “I could have cut public services, I chose not to,” she told Laura Kuenssberg.
• “We didn’t break the manifesto. We haven’t broken the manifesto because that’s explicitly said about the rates. But are you asking, am I asking working people to pay a bit more? Yes, I am.”
• “The £4 billion surplus was not enough,” she told Trevor Phillips in response to news the OBR had said she had a £4bn headroom.
• “One of the things I did in the budget was lift 450,000 children out of poverty. That was funded through cracking down on tax avoidance, more measures in the budget and introducing a gambling tax.”
• “Because of the measures that I took in the budget, inflation is going to be 0.4 percentage points lower next year than they originally forecast because of our cost of living measures to reduce inflation, and so I needed to address [that] as well.”

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has defended her response to the Budget and said her “job is to hold the Government to account, not to provide emotional support for the Chancellor”.

Asked whether she went too far in her response to the Budget and criticisms of Rachel Reeves, Ms Badenoch told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme: “I remember last year’s Budget – Rachel Reeves took a swipe at me, I wasn’t even Leader of the Opposition then – she’s forgotten now.

“I remember when Rachel Reeves was out there calling Rishi Sunak a liar. I remember when they were all calling Liz Truss a lettuce.

“But now it’s them and I’m merely talking about her competence. They can’t take it. They like to dish it, but they can’t take it.

“My job is to hold the Government to account, not to provide emotional support for the Chancellor and the people out there wanted someone to tell her she was doing a bad job, and I had to make sure that I got that message across.”

Ms Badenoch added: “I don’t care whether people misbehave at the despatch box. What I care about is whether or not I’m doing a good job.

“She should care about whether or not she’s doing a good job – she’s doing a terrible job.”

As Rachel Reeves continued to defend the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap scrap in her Sunday morning post-budget roundup, here Albert Toth looks at just what the policy change will mean for families across the UK.

Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP, former Conservative leader and Chairman of the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), has called on the government to stop “pouring money into benefits” in response to the budget as part of his think tank’s latest analysis.

“Good politics is about tough choices. Hiking taxes on working people to pay for £16 billion in extra welfare spending is a bad choice. After all, taking money from those who work hard to give to those who work not, is bad economics and bad politics.

“Pouring money into benefits is not the same as tackling the root causes of poverty. Children growing up without a parent in a job are four times as likely to be materially deprived.

“Work is not just a job but the key to a positive life one of hope and aspiration. We must want people to make that choice and be rewarded for doing so.

“Getting welfare spending under control is critical. We must make work pay and as this government loses control of a ballooning welfare budget it will ensure work does not pay.

“Bringing an end to the crisis of worklessness is the only way to transform life chances for good and restore consent for a functional welfare system, not one that is clearly now running out of control and eating up hard working taxpayers’ money.”

Chancellor Rachel Reeves reflected on a visit to a hospital on Wednesday afternoon with the Prime Minister where nurses said the way to help the NHS was to lift children out of poverty.

“[Sir Keir] and I were in our hospital on Wednesday afternoon talking to nurses. One of the nurses said one of the best things you can do for our national health service is to lift kids out of poverty, because we have kids coming in to A&E coming in admitted to hospital because of respiratory problems and other problems associated with poverty.”