UK politics live: Badenoch claims Partygate was overblown as Reeves admits promising no tax rises was ‘wrong’

The Treasury economic secretary cited Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecasts that the economy would shrink by 4 per cent in the long run due to Brexit. And Ms Siddiq said that Britain’s imports and exports would end up 15 per cent lower than they would be had the UK stayed in the EU.

Political Correspondent Archie Mitchell reports:

Labour Party chairwoman Ellie Reeves has criticised Kemi Badenoch’s comments on the Partygate scandal in her interview on the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg.

She said: “Listening to Kemi Badenoch dismiss partygate as ‘overblown’ will add insult to injury for families across Britain who followed the rules, missing loved ones’ deaths and family funerals, while her colleagues partied in Downing Street.

Ms Reeves also questioned Ms Badenoch’s pledge to scrap Labour’s controversial independent schools VAT policy as she accused the Conservative Party of not listening or learning.

She said: “Kemi Badenoch must explain where the cuts to state schools will bite after promising unfunded tax breaks for private schools – no wonder she refused to condemn Liz Truss whose mini budget crashed the economy.

“The leader may have changed but on her first day in the job Kemi Badenoch has proved three times that the Tories haven’t listened and they haven’t learnt.”

It should probably come as no surprise that what the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, once described as “a tax on jobs” has turned out to be… a tax on jobs. Her decision in the Budget to raise up to £25bn from an increase in employers’ national insurance contributions (NICs) has obviously proved controversial.

A heated but largely inconclusive debate has surrounded the question of whether the move violates Labour’s manifesto promise not to raise taxes for “working people”. But now the change is coming under sustained attack from a number of sectors with tight profit margins, where the employment of lower-paid and/or part-time workers means an immediately higher tax bill for the employers.

In particular, the “secondary threshold” – the level at which employers become liable to pay national insurance on each employee’s salary – will come down from £9,100 per year to £5,000 per year.

This is presenting notable difficulties in the health sector…

The election of Kemi Badenoch as leader of the Conservative Party is an intriguing moment. Not only have the members of the party finally disposed of the calumny that they would never elect a non-white candidate, but – given the options available to them – they have to some extent made up for their folly in electing Liz Truss the last time they were asked to vote.

Robert Jenrick’s rather unconvincing reinvention as a hardline anti-immigration candidate required him to adopt an unrealistic position on the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). While recognising that the European Court is an imperfect organisation, The Independent will have no truck with any politician who seeks to renounce a document drawn up by British lawyers after the trauma of world war that underpins the protection of fundamental rights across the continent.

Not only would withdrawal from the ECHR have been wrong in principle, it would not be the magic solution to the problem of irregular immigration – a point made with some courage by Ms Badenoch – and the policy would have plunged the Tory party into a prolonged civil war, because a large share, probably a majority, of its reduced contingent of MPs remain rightly committed to the ECHR.

A Labour MP has said she faces “extreme” abuse including racism almost every day.

Satvir Kaur has been in public office since 2011 and said the abuse has escalated since she was elected MP for Southampton Test in July.

She was the first female Sikh leader of a local authority in Britain when she headed Southampton City Council from 2022 to 2023.

It was put to Ms Kaur on BBC Radio Solent that women in politics receive a lot of abuse, and she said: “It’s been extreme, it’s kind of more than I thought.

“You always get it when you’re kind of in the public eye and being a politician – suddenly somehow you become sub-human when all you’re really trying to do is make a positive difference to people’s lives.

“So I got it to a certain extent when I was a councillor and leader of the council, but I feel as though, since I’ve become an MP – especially online – I feel as though I’ve attracted all of the misogynists, all of the racists, and all of the haters out there.”

She added that she receives racist abuse “constantly, almost on an daily basis”.

“Actually it just encourages me more to do what I’m doing, because I want other people from areas of deprivation, and brown girls, to feel that, if I can do it, they can do it,” she said.

The MP said she tries to ignore the vitriol and blocks abusive comments on her social media, but she does occasionally “bite”.

“I don’t want to spread hate, and there’s enough hate out there,” she told BBC Radio Solent presenter Louisa Hannan.

Kemi Badenoch has accused the previous Conservative government of borrowing too much and raising taxes too high, as she insisted reducing taxes does not mean cutting public services.

She told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg: “If we start from the assumption that we can just tax and borrow our way through, we will keep getting poorer, and that is what has been happening.

“And we were a part of that, so when you ask what we did wrong, these were some of the things that I think that we got wrong.

“I think the tax burden was too high under the Conservatives. That doesn’t mean that we have to cut public services, it means that we have to look at how we are delivering public services, and a lot of what government does is not even public services.”

Partygate was “overblown” and the Government should not have fined people for breaking lockdown rules, Kemi Badenoch has said.

Asked about what went wrong with Boris Johnson’s government, the new Conservative leader told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg: “I thought he was a great prime minister, but there were some serious issues that were not being resolved and I think that during that tenure the public thought that we were not speaking for them or looking out for them, we were in it for ourselves.

“Some of those things I think were perception issues, a lot of the stuff that happened around partygate was not why I resigned.

“I thought that it was overblown. We should not have created fixed penalty notices, for example. That was us not going with our principles.”

Adding that the public was “not wrong to be upset about partygate”, she said: “The problem was that we should not have criminalised every day activities the way that we did.

“People going out for walks, all of them having fixed penalty notices, that was what ended up creating a trap for Boris Johnson.”

But, at the last minute, Mr Murray pulled out. Sources close to the minister confirmed he did not want to undermine security guards, who were on strike as members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union.

Political correspondent Archie Mitchell reports:

The shadow culture secretary dismissed suggestions Kemi Badenoch had an “abrasive” character, saying people “want to see politicians who are straight talking”.

Put to her that Ms Badenoch might need “a personality transplant” as new Tory leader with some colleagues saying she is “rude”, and asked whether she was going to be “nice” to people, Julia Lopez told Sky News’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Philips: “We’re in a situation now where Kemi secured the most MP votes, Kemi also secured the most votes among the membership.

“People want to see politicians who are straight talking. She speaks with clarity, she speaks with truth.

“She’s already had a discussion in a different media outlet about how she might start to change some of the ways in which she deals with people, if that’s necessary, but I don’t know it’s necessary right now.”