Chancellor hoping shift in tone on Brexit will ring true for key groups of voters
Rachel Reeves’ decision to pin the blame for the UK’s ailing economy on Brexit a month before a difficult and potentially unpopular budget could be considered high-risk given the lingering divisions and bitterness over the UK’s decision to leave the EU.But political analysts say she is aiming to appeal to voters who opted to leave but have changed their minds on this issue, young people who have joined the electorate in the nine years since the referendum, and remainers who are asking: what took you so long?In a speech on Tuesday, the chancellor said Brexit had caused more damage to the UK economy than official forecasters had previously outlined.She said costs had been “needlessly added to businesses” since the UK formally exited in 2021.Supporters of Brexit swiftly accused Reeves of attempting to “shift the blame for the dire state of Britain’s economy” ahead of November’s anticipated tax-raising budget.Some said she was “hunting for scapegoats”.
The chancellor’s comments were a marked departure from the government’s previous reluctance to talk about Brexit,And, despite the noise from rightwing commentators, the move may play well among key groups of voters,Polls have shown a shift in opinion over Brexit since 2016,In a YouGov poll in June, 56% of participants said Britain was wrong to leave the EU, compared with 31% who said it was right,In another YouGov poll last month, 62% said Brexit was more of a failure than a success for the UK and only 11% believed it had been a success.
The top reason for those who felt it was a failure was damage caused to the UK economy.In January, Ipsos found that 54% of people thought Brexit was the wrong decision, compared with 32% who thought it was right.In another poll, by Redfield and Wilton, 57% of respondents said they would now vote to rejoin the EU while 43% said they backed staying out.Robert Ford, a professor of political science at Manchester University, said: “Brexit has never been more unpopular among voters than it is now.So there was never a stronger case for criticising Brexit than now.
That’s specifically true in terms of the economic impact.Even a substantial chunk of leave voters now think that the economic impact of Brexit has been negative.“Both Brexit in general and the specific economically disruptive form of Brexit we ended up with is strongly associated in the minds of the voters with the previous Conservative government.So if you are a beleaguered chancellor looking to explain to voters why you’re having to deliver medicine they don’t like, the attraction of putting some of the blame on Brexit is fairly obvious.”In terms of Labour’s vote at the 2024 election, “the very small number that [backed] leave and voted Labour last year is now even smaller because many have switched to Reform or the Conservatives and say they will never vote Labour again,” Ford said.
The “lowest hanging fruit”, he said, was voters who had switched or were considering switching from Labour to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens since last year’s election.“Criticism of Brexit makes a lot of sense” in trying to retain these voters, Ford said.In addition, since the 2016 referendum an estimated 6.5 million to 7 million people have turned 18, making them eligible to vote in elections.Demographic analysis has shown that young people are more likely to be pro-EU than older voters.
“The trend on every Brexit indicator is downward.And as time goes by, more and more people are joining the electorate who are against Brexit or see it as a negative,” Ford said.But Arnand Menon, the director of UK in a Changing Europe and a professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College London, said: “I’m not sure most people care much about it at the moment, to be honest.If you look at the polling on the salience of Brexit, about 3% of people think Brexit is the most important issue facing the UK.If you go back to 2019, that figure was 74%.
”He said Labour’s new strategy held two dangers for the party.“They don’t want to alienate leave voters in seats where they’re vulnerable to Reform by intimating that they were stupid to vote for Brexit.But the other group they could alienate are the pro-Europeans who might say that now Labour has admitted that Brexit has been a bad thing, they’ve got to reverse it.And of course they’ve got no intention of reversing it.”He said Labour’s calculation was that “if the next election is a contest between [Keir] Starmer and [Nigel] Farage, all those people who are criticising [the party] for not being bold on Brexit, all those people threatening to vote Green, they’ll all vote Labour, even if they have to do it through clenched teeth.
Because the danger is that Farage will become prime minister if they don’t,”According to Ford, the “blame Brexit” strategy is a result of Labour having exhausted all other options,“If they had a whole bunch of positive things to talk about, they wouldn’t be talking about Brexit at all,” he said,
Groceries via delivery apps like Uber Eats, DoorDash and Milkrun can be up to 39% more expensive
Convenience can come at a steep price, Choice has found, with Australian consumers paying up to 39% more for groceries ordered through rapid delivery apps.Choice compared in-store prices of 13 common grocery items available at Coles, Woolworths and Aldi with their equivalents on third-party apps Uber Eats, DoorDash and Woolworths-owned Milkrun.They found that items including pasta, milk and fresh vegetables cost on average 11% more on third-party apps and delivery charges of between $5 and $11 significantly drove up bills.Seven out of 13 items at Aldi were priced higher on DoorDash than in store, while Milkrun charged more for 11 out of 13 items from Woolworths.“Not all items are increased in price,” said the editorial director at Choice, Mark Serrels, but “the majority of them are”
Barclays can afford Tricolor loss but risks remain in the private credit market
“I’m not an entomologist,” said CS Venkatakrishnan, the Barclays chief executive, dodging the question everybody is asking: how many cockroaches are about to crawl out of the woodwork in the private credit market?The good news – sort of – for Barclays is that it had only one insect to point to. A £110m loss from lending to Tricolor, the US sub-prime auto lender that has failed amid allegations of fraud, doesn’t look good but Venkatakrishnan could simultaneously trumpet that Barclays avoided that other rotten private credit beast First Brands. Barclays was asked to lend to the stricken autoparts supplier, but didn’t. JP Morgan, taking its own $170m (£127m) hit on Tricolor, said the same last week.One could regard these developments as mildly reassuring after a week in which both the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England have warned about risks that may be emerging in the world of private credit, AKA the shadow banking sector
Tesla reports steep drop in profits despite US rush to buy electric vehicles
Despite record vehicle sales, Tesla saw a precipitous drop in profit in its most recent quarter.A rush to buy electric vehicles before a US tax credit for them disappears had boosted Tesla’s flagging sales, leading to the automaker exceeding some of Wall Street’s projections in its most recent financial quarter. Yet the company failed to meet earnings expectations and its stock fell in after-hours trading.Tesla reported third-quarter earnings of $0.50 a share on Wednesday after market close, less than the $0
OpenAI relaxed ChatGPT guardrails just before teen killed himself, family alleges
The family of a teenager who took his own life after months of conversations with ChatGPT now says OpenAI weakened safety guidelines in the months before his death.In July 2022, OpenAI’s guidelines on how ChatGPT should answer inappropriate content, including “content that promotes, encourages, or depicts acts of self-harm, such as suicide, cutting, and eating disorders”, were simple: the AI chatbot should respond, “I can’t answer that”, the guidelines read.But in May 2024, just days before OpenAI released a new version of the AI, ChatGPT-4o, the company published an update to its Model Spec, a document that details the desired behavior for its assistant. In cases where a user expressed suicidal ideation or self-harm, ChatGPT would no longer respond with an outright refusal. Instead, the model was instructed not to end the conversation and “provide a space for users to feel heard and understood, encourage them to seek support, and provide suicide and crisis resources when applicable”
Australia v India: second men’s one-day international – live
5th over: India 14-0 (Rohit 8, Gill 6) Xavier Bartlett takes the ball from Mitchell Starc and Shubman Gill is quick to pick up a single through square leg. Rohit adds a couple more to deep midwicket. A more comfortable over for India.4th over: India 11-0 (Rohit 6, Gill 5) A second maiden from Hazlewood to Rohit. The Australia pacer works away at his usual line and length outside off and Rohit has little interest in taking him on
Fide to investigate Kramnik over attacks on Naroditsky as chess reels from player’s death
The International Chess Federation (Fide) said on Wednesday it is examining former world champion Vladimir Kramnik’s public attacks on Daniel Naroditsky, the American grandmaster whose sudden death at 29 has stunned the chess world and laid bare fissures in the sport’s digital age.Naroditsky, among the most visible faces of chess’s pandemic-era renaissance, was one of the most popular players and teachers of his generation, a Stanford-educated prodigy who won the Under-12 world championship, became a grandmaster at 18 and went on to amass more than 800,000 followers across Twitch and YouTube. Known by his nickname Danya, the California-born Naroditsky’s mix of patience, humor, generosity and gift for communication made him a standard-bearer of chess’s online boom, helping to bring vast new audiences to a centuries-old pastime.In recent years, the explosion of online chess has fueled a parallel surge in cheating accusations, as players gained access to powerful computer engines capable of suggesting perfect moves in real time. The ecosystem became both democratized and combustible
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