Ed Balls says Starmer should perform ‘big U-turn’ and drop £28bn as size of green jobs plan – as it happened

Rishi Sunak has restated his willingness to defy the European court of human rights if it imposes an injunction to stop a deportation flight taking off to Rwanda.

Speaking to broadcasters after the president of the European court of human rights, Síofra O’Leary, said that defying such an injunction would break international law, Sunak repeated a line he has used repeatedly in recent weeks. He said:

I’ve been very clear, I won’t let a foreign court stop us from getting flights up and running and establishing that deterrent.

The bill that we’ve just passed through the House of Commons has a specific power in it that says ministers will get to make those decisions, I would not have put that power in there if I wasn’t prepared to use it.

Sunak’s comments have been welcomed by Conservative MPs, although hardliners want him to go further and to commit to definitely defying ECHR injunctions. They tried to insert a clause to this effect in the Rwanda bill, but the government did not accept it.

Earlier No 10 argued that, given the changes made to the policy, the ECHR would not need to issue an injunction in the way it did in 2022. (See 12.48pm.)

Keir Starmer should perform a “big U-turn” over the commitment to spend £28bn a year on green investment, Ed Balls has said.

Balls, a former shadow chancellor who is married to Yvette Cooper, the current shadow home secretary, said that having that number attached to the green investment plan was a problem for Labour and that a U-turn had to be big enough to get noticed.

He made the comment in the latest episiode of his Political Currency podcast, which he hosts with George Osborne, the Tory former chancellor.

Balls, who is now a presenter on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, said that Labour has already tried “partial U-turns” on the £28bn-a-year green investment pledge. Labour has said that it would not get spending up to that level until the second half of a parliament, that some of the money will come from investment already committed by the government, and that if borrowing to fund the investment would break the fiscal rules, it would not happen.

But this has not stopped the Conservatives repeatedly claiming that Keir Starmer will have to put up taxes to fund the pledge – even though Starmer has explictly said he will not do that.

Balls said Labour now needed “a big U-turn” because the partial ones had not worked. He explained:

If you’re going to do a U-turn, you’ve got to notice it, you’ve got to see it happen. People need to hear Labour say that their commitment to sound public finances and the fiscal rules comes before spending more money on this agenda. Or they’re going to be open to this attack.

If they don’t say something now, they’re going to be asked about this in every interview. So I would say there is going to be a U-turn and that they won’t resile from a green plan, they won’t resile from the idea that that’s a way to grow some jobs, they won’t resile from the idea that you can spend now to strengthen the economy in the long term. But I think they’ll have to come off this £28bn number.

They’ll have to say the £28bn number is gone, that it’s ditched or else they can be open to this attack …

You need something which looks like a U-turn … They’ve tried partial U-turns. It hasn’t worked. They need a big U-turn.

In the same episode Osborne said Rishi Sunak would only make his leadership secure by getting a lead in the opinion polls. He said:

The only leadership strategy that works in the Tory party is having a poll lead. The only thing that works as a unifying strategy is the promise that you might win the election. And you can announce any amount of policy, you can make any amount of promises to the Conservative party. If you don’t look like you’re going to win, you’re going to have huge leadership problems.

At the Covid inquiry Humza Yousaf was asked about the revelation that he sought guidance from Jason Leitch, Scotland’s national clinical director, about what the rules said about wearing a mask at an official function. Leitch told him that, as long as he was holding a drink, he did not need a mask.

Jamie Dawson KC, counsel for the inquiry, put it to him that if he needed guidance on this, as health secretary, then the rules were too complicated for everyone else.

If the cabinet secretary for health and social care felt the need to clarify the rules, what chance do others have in understanding the rules?

Yousaf said that it was because of his job that he felt the need to, not just double check or triple check, but quadruple check what the rules were. He had to get them right, he said.

As the cabinet secretary for health and social care I didn’t want to just double-check the rules, triple check them, I would quadruple check them if I had to, because the intensity of the public scrutiny that we were under.

Dawson asked if he was concerned when Leitch told him that “literally no one” wore a mask when they were standing up and talking at a dinner, even though they should be doing that.

Yousaf said that Leitch, by his own admission, had a “casual way of speaking”. He had a tendency to “over-speak”, he said.

Q: Leitch was giving you a loophole, wasn’t he?

Yousaf did not accept that. He said he was just seeking clarification on how to follow the rules.

The British Polling Council (BPC) is looking into controversial YouGov polling used by Conservative plotters to call for Rishi Sunak to be ousted, Eleni Courea reports.

The outgoing Welsh first minister, Mark Drakeford, has hit back at UK Labour, urging his Westminster colleagues to avoid adopting a “King Canute” stance on devolution.

Drakeford said there were some in London who regard devolution as a “zero-sum game, that anything that is devolved elsewhere is a loss to them”.

He was speaking at an event at the Institute for Government, only days after the shadow Welsh secretary, Jo Stevens, rejected the Welsh administrations’s longstanding call for more powers over policing and justice.

Stevens said Labour would be focusing on the “things that matter” at the next election, listing “growing the economy, creating new jobs, getting cheaper bills, building an NHS fit for the future and breaking down barriers for opportunities for children and young people across the country”.

Drakeford said UK Labour had a “responsibility” to show the “journey has begun” on devolution if they won the election this year, and he said he hoped Keir Starmer would make an “early commitment” to adopting Gordon Brown’s report on the UK’s future, which urged a Labour government to “embark upon the devolution of youth justice and the probation service”.

Drakeford went on:

There are some colleagues in London who regard this as a zero-sum game, that anything that is devolved elsewhere is a loss to them.

All four police and crime commissioners in Wales are firmly in favour of the devolution of policing. So again, even people who are close to the operational end of all this share our view.

Drakeford who is due to step down as Welsh Labour leader in March, advised his successor to “be bold” and always “look for those radical changes that are necessary”.

Next year’s university students in England will be left worse off after the government said it will increase their maintenance loans by just 2.5%, following this year’s rise of 2.8% during a period of high inflation.

The Russell Group of leading research universities said the 2.5% rise means that students will miss out on £2,000 worth of support they would have received if the loans had risen in line with inflation since 2021-22.

Joanna Burton, the Russell Group’s head of policy, said:

Once again, we are disappointed to see that there has been no move to correct the maintenance loan shortfall suffered by students in recent years. Inflation may now be slowing down, but today’s announcement fails to address the deficit that has been created across the last three years.

We know that a quarter of students regularly go without food and other necessities due to financial hardship, and it’s vital they are provided with adequate loan provision so they can afford the essentials and focus on their studies.

Russell Group universities have spent tens of millions from their existing budgets on additional support measures over the past year, but it’s not feasible for universities to plug the gap in maintenance provision on their own. The hardest hit will be the most disadvantaged students, who are most at risk of dropping out due to financial pressures.

Robert Halfon, the minister for skills and higher education, said the 2.5% increase “follows standard procedure to base annual increases in support on forecasted inflation”. Halfon added:

Decisions on student finance have had to be taken to ensure the system remains financially sustainable and the costs of higher education are shared fairly between students and taxpayers, not all of whom have benefited from going to university.

Yousaf says he wants to apologise to the inquiry, and to people who were bereaved during the pandemic, for the government’s “poor handling” of requests for messages.

He says there is a recognition in government that any record of important decisions should be recorded.

But, because government had that corporate record, there was a view that that was all that needed to be handed over.

He says there has been a gap in terms of what gets recorded. That is why he has ordered an inquiry into the use of unofficial message channels like WhatsApp, he says. (See 1.18pm.)

Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, and health secretary from 2021 to 2023, is giving evidence to the UK Covid inquiry in Edinburgh now.

He has rejected suggestions that cabinet was only a forum where decisions were rubber stamped.

But Jamie Dawson KC put it to him that Nicola Sturgeon preferred to take decisons in a small group. He flags up a message Yousaf received, on the day be became health secretary, from Jason Leitch, Scotland’s national clinical director, saying:

There was some FM ‘keep it small’ shenanigans as always. She actually wants none of us.

Yousaf said that was Leitch “over-speaking”.

Labour says crime figures out today, one set published by the Office for National Statistics and another set published by the Home Office, show knife crime and shoplifting getting worse. Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said:

This disturbing further increase in knife crime in the last year shows how badly the Tories are failing on law and order and means that knife crime is now 77% higher than in 2015, with a devastating impact on young people, families and communities. Serious violence is rising with gun crime also increasing, yet the government just isn’t getting a grip.

At the same time shoplifting has soared by 32% in the last year alone, as criminals run rife in our town centres, and the number of cases dropped because no suspect was identified has reached record highs.

In its report on crime in England and Wales in the year ending September 2023, the ONS says:

Police recorded theft has increased by 9% (to 1.8 million offences) compared with the year ending September 2022. This rise was predominantly the result of increases in shoplifting offences. The year ending September 2023 saw a 32% increase in the number of shoplifting offences recorded compared with the previous year, with 402,482 offences compared with 304,459 offences in the year ending September 2022.

Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, has announced an externally-led review into the use of WhatsApp and other unofficial technology in the Scottish government.

Speaking during first minister’s questions, he told MSPs that Covid inquiry revelations about official communication processes being sidelined had been embarrassing. He said:

I do believe that there are challenges in relation to our use of WhatsApp. It has not been frankly the government’s finest hour in relation to handling those requests [for WhatsApp messages] and I put my hands up to that, unlike of course other governments.

That’s why I have commissioned officials to deliver an externally-led review – not a government review but an externally-led review – into the use of mobile messaging apps and the use of non-corporate technology in the Scottish government, and that should take particular account of our interaction with statutory public inquiries.

When it comes to being transparent, the government handed over 28,000 messages, 19,000 documents. I myself as first minister of the government have handed over my WhatsApp messages.

Yousaf will appear at the Covid inquiry this afternoon.

Some £9.9bn of the £13.6bn spent on personal protective equipment (PPE) has been written down because it was unusable or its value has crashed since the pandemic, PA Media reports. PA says:

The Department of Health and Social Care’s accounts published today said some items were defective or not suitable, while others will not be used before their expiry date.

The accountability report by the National Audit Office (NAO) said that the department plans to dispose of “nearly all” of its current PPE stock held in warehouses and containers.

Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, said the majority of the PPE recorded was of “insignificant value”.

He said that “ongoing efforts to detect, prevent and recover fraud must continue, improving public confidence that this drain on the public finances is being tackled effectively and efficiently”.

Downing Street defended the losses by stressing the havoc that Covid-19 wreaked.

The prime minister’s spokesperson said: “It’s important not to forget the circumstances in which the UK and countries globally found themselves during a pandemic when globally PPE was in extremely short supply. The costs as a result increased significantly and the government took the decision very transparently to do everything possible to secure protective equipment for frontline health and care workers, that was right.”

No 10 has brushed aside a warning from the president of the European court of human rights saying it would be against international law for the UK to ignore injunctions blocking flights to Rwanda.

At a news conference this morning, Síofra O’Leary, president of the court, said there was a “clear legal obligation” on states to obey injunctions, known as rule 39 orders, from the court.

The government’s first attempt to send a deportation flight to Rwanda in 2022 was stopped by an order from the court. The government’s new Rwanda bill, which is still going through parliament, says it is for ministers to decide whether or not to obey any future injunctions in these cases, but Rishi Sunak has angered some of his MPs by not firmly stating that injunctions will definitely be ignored.

Instead, he has just said that in some circumstances he would ignore them.

At her news conference, O’Leary said:

There is a clear legal obligation under the convention for states to comply with rule 39 measures.

In a speech proceeding her Q&A, O’Leary said injunctions were only issued “in exceptional circumstances where there is a real and imminent risk of irreparable harm”.

She also said the UK “has always complied with rule 39 measures”, except in one very particular case, and has “publicly declared the need for other states to comply with rule 39 indications” – including urging Vladimir Putin’s Russia to abide by a 2021 measure in relation to the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Asked to respond to O’Leary’s comment, the PM’s spokesperson told journalists at the No 10 lobby briefing that the government did not think rule 39 orders would be justified in relation to Rwanda given changes made to the policy. He also restated the PM’s willingness to ignore them.

The spokesperson said:

I think, firstly, we are confident our legislation is compliant with our international obligations. We’re clear the bill and the treaty address the supreme court’s concerns. There should be no need for Strasburg to intervene to block flights in the way they did in 2022.

We’ve also drafted the bill to give ministers the power not to comply with those rulings if necessary. And obviously every case is assessed on its individual facts, but the prime minister has been clear repeatedly that we will not let a foreign court block flights from taking off.

The spokesperson also said it was “bizarre” to compare the UK ignoring rule 39 orders to Russia. He said:

I think it would be bizarre to draw any comparison between Russia’s cruel treatment of Alexei Navalny, who was a victim of an attempted assassination, and our plan to protect and deter vulnerable migrants from making perilous crossings across the Channel.

The Home Office has now published a news release with details of its ban on zombie-style knives.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said the new ban “goes nowhere near far enough and it is also too little, too late”.

Speaking on a visit to a police station in Milton Keynes, she said the penalties were not strong enough, and the new ban was not going to take effect until the autumn.

She also said it was still too narrow. She told journalists:

It doesn’t include ninja swords, it doesn’t include a whole series of dangerous weapons …

We need much faster action, at a time when knife crime has gone up by a further 5% this year, 77% increase since 2015. This is an epidemic, we need action.

Nicola Sturgeon called Boris Johnson “a fucking clown” in a private message when he announced a further Covid lockdown on 31 October 2020, the inquiry has heard.

As PA Media reports, at a hearing in Edinburgh this morning the inquiry highlighted WhatsApp messages between Sturgeon and Liz Lloyd, her chief of staff. PA says:

Sturgeon said his address was “fucking excruciating” and that the UK communications were “awful”. Sturgeon also told Lloyd: “His utter incompetence in every sense is now offending me on behalf of politicians everywhere.”

Lloyd said she was “offended” on behalf of special advisers everywhere. Sturgeon replied: “He is a fucking clown.”

Lloyd told Sturgeon she wanted a “good old-fashioned rammy” with the UK government so she could “think about something other than sick people” in WhatsApp messages.

Asked about the messages, Lloyd said the Scottish government were “clearly not complimentary about [the UK government’s] communications handling”.

She said: “We had to mitigate the chaos that appeared around some of the decisions they took.”

Junior counsel to the inquiry Usman Tariq asked Lloyd if the relationship between the then first minister and then prime minister had “broken down”.

Lloyd replied: “That overstates what was there to break.”

Commenting on Johnson, she said: “He didn’t want to be on those calls, he wasn’t well briefed, he wasn’t listening, engagement with him became slightly pointless. They didn’t get us anywhere. We started with the approach we should work together, in co-ordinated fashion, but a substantive discussion isn’t what we got. The prime minister was reading a script and would largely ignore points made.”

She said Sturgeon’s strong language showed her “frustration” towards Johnson.

Kathryn Samson from Channel 4 News has posted the WhatsApp exchange on X.

The government has been accused of “failing” on crime following the publication of Home Office figures showing that 2.18m offences were closed in England and Wales in the year ending September 2023 without a suspect being identified. That was 40% of all recorded offences – up from 37% the previous years.

The figures also show that only 5.9% of recorded offences have so far resulted in charges. That is up from 5.5% the previous year.

Some 8% of cases are recorded as not yet having an outcome, which means they are still being investigated. Other recorded offences have not resulted in charges largely because of evidential difficulties.

The figures were highlighted by the Liberal Democrats. Alistair Carmichael, their home affairs spokesperson, said:

The Conservative government has totally failed to get a handle on crime, and they have no one but themselves to blame.

For years, they have taken resources out of frontline policing at the expense of our communities. It’s no surprise that more and more criminals are getting away with it as victims are left without justice.

Will Dry, a former special adviser to Rishi Sunak, is reportedly working with a group of rebels trying to oust the prime minister and helped commission polling which predicted a landslide Labour victory, Tom Ambrose reports.

There are further details in the Times, which says Dry has been “working with a loose grouping of about a dozen former government political advisers and MPs who believe that the Tories are doomed under Sunak’s leadership”. It reports:

The rebel group is based in central London. They are said to be working with around ten Tory MPs as they draw up plans to remove Sunak from office. Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, is said to be among those who believe there needs to be a new prime minister. She has repeatedly said that Sunak needs to “change course”.

Nicola Sturgeon has denied concealing emails about the covid crisis from her private Scottish National party account, and said those “relevant to the management of the pandemic” have been handed over.

Yesterday opposition leaders demanded full disclosure of emails from her SNP account after the UK Covid inquiry released evidence from the public health expert Prof Devi Sridhar that Sturgeon offered to use her private party account for government business. Sturgeon told Sridhar: “Don’t worry about protocol.”

In response, a source close to the former first minister said:

Any emails relevant to the management of the pandemic received by Nicola to her private email were passed to the Scottish government so that they could be actioned and recorded appropriately.

Yesterday Scottish Labour urged John-Paul Marks, the Scottish government’s permanent secretary, to establish whether or not emails on government business had been handed over to the inquiry. The Scottish government has not yet responded on his behalf.

The Scottish Tories said Sturgeon should publish them – a demand she seems to have rejected.

Jackie Baillie, Scottish Labour’s deputy leader, said Sturgeon’s carefully-worded response was far from enough. She said:

The full disclosure of all communications is necessary and it’s for the inquiry to determine what is relevant.

The former first minister has form here: during the Salmond inquiry [into the Scottish government’s handling of sexual misconduct allegations against him], reference was made to use of SNP emails to avoid scrutiny. All SNP emails need to be disclosed.

And the former first minister knows that government business shouldn’t be conducted on private emails and she was breaching those rules.

Chris Philp, the policing minister, also said that within about a year the police might have technology that would enable them to scan people for knives as they walk down a street. He told GB News:

We’re also investing, in the Home Office, in some new technology. It’s not ready for deployment yet but I’m hoping in about a year it will be. That will enable people to be scanned for knives as they walk down high streets to take more knives off the street.

In his morning interviews Chris Philp, the policing minister, said he wanted the police to feel “more confident” about using stop and search to tackle knife crime. He told BBC Breakfast:

I also want the police to be much more confident in using stop-and-search powers to stop people on the street when they’re suspected of carrying knives or drugs and performing a search ….

More does need to done, that’s why from April we’re going to be really stepping up these hotspot patrols.

He also claimed that “some Labour politicians, like Sadiq Khan [the London mayor] in particular, I don’t think give the police the encouragement they need”.

Good morning. Labour and the Conservatives are in a bidding war over knife crime today, with Keir Starmer announcing or re-announcing various plans to deal with the problem on the day when the Home Office is laying legislation before parliament to ban zombie-style knives. Pippa Crerar has the details here.

You may think the government was meant to have banned them already. According to Labour, the government has made 16 announcements on this theme since 2015. But, as Chris Philp, the policing minister, admitted this morning, a previous crackdown contained a rather obvious loophole.

When the government legislated to ban zombie knives, it defined them as blades having a cutting edge, a serrated edge and “images or words that suggest that it is to be used for the purpose of violence”. When the legislation came into force, manufacturers came up with a cunning ploy to get round the ban; they just left off the images or logos.

When asked why the legislation contained such an obvious flaw, Philp told LBC:

I wasn’t responsible at the time. There was essentially a loophole where the knives that were banned in 2019 had to have threatening words or pictures on them … What happened then is the manufacturers responded by taking the words and pictures off … that, amongst other loopholes, is being closed.

When it was put to him that it should have been obvious manufacturers would do this, he replied:

That may be so. I can answer for what we’re doing now. This came to my attention and we’re fixing it today.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

Morning: Keir Starmer is on a visit in Buckinghamshire.

10am: Alister Jack, the Scottish secretary, gives evidence to the UK Covid inquiry in Edinburgh. Liz Lloyd, Nicola Sturgeon’s former chief of staff, follows him and Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, gives evidence at 2pm.

10.30am: Penny Mordaunt, leader of the Commons, takes questions on next week’s business in the chamber.

11am: Mark Drakeford, the outgoing Welsh first minister, takes part in a Q&A at the Institute for Government thinktank.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

After 11.30am: Karen Bradley, the chair of the Commons procedure committee, makes a Commons statement on her committee’s proposal for David Cameron to be questioned by MPs in the chamber.

Afternoon: Rishi Sunak is on a visit in Yorkshire.

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