Burnham says long-awaited 10-year plan may be delayed until January
Andy Burnham has confirmed that his long-awaited 10-year plan may be delayed.
In his speech outside No 10 on the day he became PM, Burham declared that “later this year” he would “bring forward a new plan for Britain, a 10-year plan, laying out a path from where we are now to where I believe we all want Britain to be”. The document has been described as the core policy statement coming from No 10 this year, with some insiders briefing that the budget was relatively low-key because key announcements were being held back for the 10-year plan.
But we may have to wait a little longer then expected until we see it. In an interview with Hugo Gye from the Economist, when asked when it would appear, Burnham said:
We may go into the new year, to be honest … December or January, I think we will need to leave that open.
Burnham was speaking after Ailbhe Rea in the New Statesman published an article yesterday suggesting that, even when the initial 10-year plan announcement comes at the end of this year (or in January), that won’t be the final word. Rea said:
Yet, with expectations high, some familiar with the process are already worried that the Ten-Year Plan may be another kicking of the can. I can reveal that it may not be the long, comprehensive document that we might have expected, and will be the beginning – not the end – of a long consultation process.
It will be a speech, delivered by the prime minister before Christmas, to tick the box of a plan delivered “later this year”, accompanied by a document that may be “slimmer than expected”. It will mark the beginning of a six-to-nine-month process of consulting with the public, think tanks and everybody else about government priorities – as well as kickstarting work across government to define what some of its plans will look like in more detail. That process, in turn, will set the priorities for the spending review, itself a procedure that will take months. Suddenly, critics fear, we are looking at a government spending well over a year discussing its plans without taking the major action to address them.
Key events
Yvette Cooper says she hopes much of health budget can qualify for new ‘preventative DEL’ protected spending status
Yvette Cooper, the health secretary, has said her officials are “extremely excited” about one of the more obscure, but potentially most significant, changes in last week’s budget – the creation of a new category of “preventative” spending.
Internal government spending negotiations are all about DEL (departmental expenditure limits), and standard government accounting differentiates between resource DEL (day-to-day spending) and capital DEL.
Last week John Healey, the chancellor, announced that he would create a new category of ringfenced spending in the spending review next year – preventative DEL, or PDEL. This will ensure that budgets are protected for measures involving early intervention to create savings in the long term.
Giving evidence to the Commons health committee yesterday, Cooper said that her public health officials were “extremely excited” about this announcement. She said:
We think a lot of our investment across not just public health but across the NHS has benefits in terms of keeping people healthy and in work. A lot of those treatment budgets have a consequence in helping people work as well as in the direct prevention.
Cooper said that, as a former Treasury minister, she knew that preventative programmes designed to deliver benefits in the long term were “the areas that always come under shortest-term pressure”.
Asked how rigorous her definition of preventative spending would be, she replied:
Mine would be quite broad; we do not yet know what the Treasury’s will be …
A lot of our treatment services have an impact, in saving money elsewhere. Mental health is a really good example, as we know that a lot of young people who are not in work could benefit from mental health support.
Cooper is already in a better position than most other cabinet ministers because the health budget is one of the few that it nominally protected from real-terms cuts.
Heather Stewart, the Guardian’s economics editor, wrote a good column on the potential benefits of PDEL at the weekend.
Peter Walker has also posted these on Bluesky about what Angus MacIntyre said when Peter asked him why he did not mention Ukraine in his first speech as Reform UK’s armed forces spokesperson.
In a 16-minute speech on defence, Reform’s new armed forces spokesperson did not mention Ukraine or Iran once.
Worth noting that I asked MacIntyre about this after and he said this was simply as his speech was to introduce him and his role, and that Ukraine/Iran are very much a focus
Farage claims polling figures showing Tories catching up with Reform UK are ‘nonsense’ and due to pollsters’ ‘jiggery-pokery’
Peter Walker
Peter Walker is a senior Guardian political correspondent.
Polling numbers which have seen the Conservatives climb above Reform UK are not credible, Nigel Farage has said, claiming that there had been “jiggery-pokery” intended to restore the two-party system.
Farage made the claim unprompted while speaking to reporters after a speech when he was asked if Reform UK had failed in vetting, given the number of councillors and candidates found to have said offensive things or, in some cases, charged with serious offences.
The Reform UK leader said that while politicians from other parties had been arrested for alleged offences, it was only those connected to his party – notably this week’s charging of George Madgwick, its leader on Hampshire county council, with 12 counts of rape and other offences – that led to “a BBC push notification – the others don’t”.
Digressing into polling, he said:
What I will tell you is this: the jiggery-pokery that is going on with polling is utterly astonishing. And if you believe the polls you’ve seen this week, you’re not understanding what’s going on out there. On the raw data, we’re four points higher, and the Conservatives are nearly four points lower than the reality.
And I know there’s a desperate push from the establishment – let’s get back to two-party politics, let’s get back to Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Let’s get back to total failure. Let’s make sure there’s no change.
It simply isn’t true. What you’ve seen from the polling industry is nonsense, and I mean that.
He did not offer any evidence for the claim.
Farage adopted a different line in a recent GB News appearance when he said he did not mind being behind in the opinion polls because he thought that would make campaigning easier. (See 1.51pm.)
Farage says Repubicans lost US midterm elections because Trump broke promise to end foreign wars
Peter Walker
Peter Walker is a senior Guardian political correspondent.
The main lesson for Reform UK from the Republicans’ huge defeat in the US midterm elections is “keep your promises”, Nigel Farage has told reporters in his first comments since the results.
Speaking after a media event at which the party unveiled their new armed forces spokesperson, Angus MacIntyre, a former RAF officer, Farage said Trump was also being punished for the “bizarre” decision to wage a long-term conflict with Iran.
Asked if he had learned something from the US results, Farage said:
Yes, keep your promises. Trump was very good in the first term and the second term in keeping his promises, but he broke a promise. That was no more foreign wars, and we’re eight months in, and the resultant rise in gas and diesel prices, more than anything else, is what did them in.
The key focus must be keeping your promises, and the cost of living, of course.
Asked if the Iran war – which Farage did not initially oppose – was a mistake, Farage said:
No question about it. I mean, to have quick tactical strikes from Diego Garcia, to try and maybe not halt, but at least slow the nuclear weapons programme, I totally agree with that …
But would I have said to them, ‘Yes, come on, let’s go to war for the next eight months or three years’? No, of course not. And that is so bizarre.
Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA
The government has announced it is spending £13m on another wave of Valour-recognised support centres for military veterans and their families. In the first round, 14 organisations got funding earlier this year, and another 21 organisations are now getting money. “An estimated one million veterans and their families in the UK will benefit from easier access to local services, thanks to the Valour network expanding,” the government says.
Mahmood accused of hardening rules for 200,000 successful asylum applicants
Shabana Mahmood has been accused of causing “distress and uncertainty” to hundreds of thousands of refugees by quietly introducing plans to force them to wait up to 30 years before being granted the right to settle in the UK, Rajeev Syal reports.
The latest episode of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly UK podcast is out. It features Pippa Crerar and Kiran Stacey talking about the US midterm elections results, and what lessons they may offer to Labour.
After MacIntyre finished his speech, Farage did not take questions on camera in the main hall where the rally was taking place. But he is speaking to journalists in a “huddle” shortly.
MacIntyre says, if Reform UK wins the election, it will end ongoing prosections of veterans.
And future prosecutions would only be allowed with the consent of the defence secretary, he says.
(This is not that different from the situation that will apply under the Northern Ireland Troubles bill, currently going through parliament. It says any Troubles-related prosecutions will only be allowed with the explicit consent of the attorney general.)
New Reform UK defence spokesperson says prosecutions of veterans amount to ‘Marxist rewriting of history’
MacIntyre complains about the prosecution of veterans over alleged war crimes. Veterans should be treated as heroes, but they are treated as criminals, he says.
Human rights lawyers dissect the decisions taken by servicemen in the heat of battle, life and death situations that no civilian can imagine.
Government lawyers use the luxury of hindsight, often decades on, to drag our veterans through the courts, treating them as criminals at every stage.
This is unjust and immoral.
We are witnessing the Marxist rewriting of history’s narratives, calling evil good and good evil.
A functioning society celebrates, not criminalises, its armed forces personnel.
My colleague Peter Walker is at the Reform UK event. He has posted these about Angus MacIntyre.
I am at a Reform UK event at which they are about to unveil their new armed forces [spokesperson], a just-retired RAF officer called Angus MacIntyre. As someone who ended a 40-year military career just last week he has no apparent social media presence, which must be useful for Reform.
Note he is armed forces spokesperson, not the main defence brief. Two years-plus from the election, that brief for Reform is still unfilled, as are a few other fairly key ones eg health.
MacIntyre seems like a real believer. This is him on asylum: “Uncontrolled illegal migration has brought hundreds of thsouands of undocumented fighting-age males, many with combat eperience and operatives from hostile states into the heart of our communities.”
He also says that zet zero has “collapsed our industrial base, and they put our energy sovereignty at risk”. He is a confident speaker, so my guess is we’ll see a fair bit more of him. But he is also a complete political novice, so there is always a risk of something going wrong.
