Kemi Badenoch has dismissed the government’s VAWG strategy as a “complete distraction”, arguing that teaching boys to respect women should not be a priority because migrants post a more serious threat.In a post on social media, and comments quoted by the Telegraph, she backed up the arguments used by Katie Lam in the Commons (see 2.29pm) – but went further, dismissing the long-awaited policy document as “just a big mess”.Badenoch said:It’s not 11-year-old boys who are committing violence against women and girls.We need to get people who have come from cultures that don’t respect women out of our country! Not all cultures are equally valid.

Labour’s plan to lecture schoolboys to respect women and girls is a complete distraction.This is what a government looks like when they’re completely out of ideas.Deport all foreign criminals.Put more police on our streets.Conservatives have a funded plan to recruit 10,000 extra officers.

Pretending a few extra lessons in school will fix this is complete nonsense.Labour need to stop watching Adolesence and get real.But they can’t, because they’re too scared, weak and divided.They have no serious plan to tackle this problem.And, in comments in the Telegraph, she said:What they’ve announced today is just a big mess, I’m afraid.

The fact is, it’s not 11-year-old boys in school who are perpetrating violence against women and girls.This is happening because some people in Labour watched Adolescence and that’s what they want to focus on.It’s a complete distraction.Badenoch was referring to Starmer praising the programme Adolescence earlier this year.The Tory leader was criticised after telling an interviewer that she had not watched the programme and did not see why she should, because it was fictional.

Kemi Badenoch has been accused of weaponising violence against women and girls and using “dangerous” and “deeply inaccurate” claims in her response to the government’s plan to tackle the issue.Children as young as 11 who demonstrate misogynistic behaviour will be taught the difference between pornography and real relationships under the government’s violence against women and girls plan published today.Keir Starmer is facing the threat of a backbench rebellion over plans to reduce the number of jury trials in England and Wales as dozens of Labour MPs signed a letter describing the move as “madness”.Angela Rayner is writing a memoir about her rise to become deputy prime minister and her subsequent fall from grace, the Guardian can confirm, in a move that will be seen as an attempt to set the narrative ahead of any leadership contest.The Bank of England has cut interest rates by a quarter point, giving a pre-Christmas boost to the struggling UK economy, but a split vote among its rate-setters pointed to continued concerns about inflation.

For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.Eight Palestine Action activists on hunger strike while in prison awaiting trial are dying, according to a doctor.PA Media says:Dr James Smith, a qualified emergency physician who is a lecturer at University College London, told a press conference the group, who are accused of break-ins or criminal damage on behalf of Palestine Action, need specialist medical help.His warning comes amid calls for the government to intervene from doctors and politicians, including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who claimed there have been “regular breaches of prison conditions and prison rules”.Some of the eight prisoners, who began the action in protest at being held in custody while awaiting trial, have been taken to hospital.

Helena Smith is the Guardian’s correspondent in Greece,On a flying visit to Athens today, Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, underlined the importance of “mobilising” Russia’s frozen assets saying it was clear Moscow was still bent on waging its war of aggression in Ukraine,At a press conference she said:I see two presidents who are pursuing peace at the moment, President Trump and President Zelenskyy and one president, President Putin who is still seeking to escalate conflict and war,That is why it is so important to make progress on mobilising the Russian sovereign assets in order to be able to support Ukraine and also to be able to put increased pressure on Russia to properly bring them to the table and pursue peace,Cooper said by putting the legal steps in place to seize proceeds from the 2022 sale of Chelsea football club – announced by the British government yesterday - the UK was giving the Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich, the chance “to now honour the commitment he made three years ago towards the people of Ukraine” to support humanitarian efforts in the country.

Cooper’s visit was the first to Athens by a British foreign secretary since April 2017 when Boris Johnson, then in the post, stood in the same room in Athens and announced: “As we prepare to leave the EU, I look forward to strengthening our historic ties,”Cooper emphasised the importance of the UK’s alliances internationally saying: “We know we are stronger as a result of the partnerships we build abroad those that support partnerships that make us stronger at home,”Former industrial and mining communities across Britain are facing “entrenched disadvantage” stretching back some 50 years, the latest research on social mobility has found,PA Media reports:So-called left-behind communities in Yorkshire, the north-east, the Midlands, Wales and Scotland which were rapidly de-industrialised throughout the late 20th century are still disadvantaged and facing decline after decades in the same condition, the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) warned,The commission’s latest State Of The Nation report highlights stark differences in social mobility across the regions and nations of the UK.

Some Britons face fewer job opportunities, a lack of growth and a worse childhood as a result of where they live,The SMC also warned about the class disparities in the number of young people who are not in education, employment or training (Neets), a group which has grown in recent years,More than double of the number of young people from working-class backgrounds are Neets (22%) than from professional backgrounds (9%), the SMC said,The commission did acknowledge there was growth in the percentage of younger people getting good jobs, with 48,2% of 25-29 year olds in professional careers as of 2022-2024, compared with 36.

1% in 2014-2016.However, it also warned of a widening gap between those from privileged and working-class backgrounds who were getting into these jobs.Women from less well-off backgrounds also continue to experience more difficulty with getting higher-paid jobs than more privileged women, the commission said.The full report is here.This year’s report contains more international comparison data than in the past, and this chart summarises the main findings.

The company linked to the former Conservative peer Michelle Mone, which owes the government almost £150m for supplying unusable personal protective equipment during the pandemic, has been put into liquidation, David Conn reports.The government has today announced that three bills have received royal assent.The employment rights bill and the planning and infrastructure bill are particularly important, because they are flagship measures.Here are links to government news releases explaining what they will do.Employment rights billPlanning and infrastructure billMental Health billThe opening of the long-awaited Leeds tram system has been pushed back by at least two to three years, after a government review of the £2.

5bn project, Gwyn Topham reports.Kemi Badenoch has dismissed the government’s VAWG strategy as a “complete distraction”, arguing that teaching boys to respect women should not be a priority because migrants post a more serious threat.In a post on social media, and comments quoted by the Telegraph, she backed up the arguments used by Katie Lam in the Commons (see 2.29pm) – but went further, dismissing the long-awaited policy document as “just a big mess”.Badenoch said:It’s not 11-year-old boys who are committing violence against women and girls.

We need to get people who have come from cultures that don’t respect women out of our country! Not all cultures are equally valid.Labour’s plan to lecture schoolboys to respect women and girls is a complete distraction.This is what a government looks like when they’re completely out of ideas.Deport all foreign criminals.Put more police on our streets.

Conservatives have a funded plan to recruit 10,000 extra officers.Pretending a few extra lessons in school will fix this is complete nonsense.Labour need to stop watching Adolesence and get real.But they can’t, because they’re too scared, weak and divided.They have no serious plan to tackle this problem.

And, in comments in the Telegraph, she said:What they’ve announced today is just a big mess, I’m afraid.The fact is, it’s not 11-year-old boys in school who are perpetrating violence against women and girls.This is happening because some people in Labour watched Adolescence and that’s what they want to focus on.It’s a complete distraction.Badenoch was referring to Starmer praising the programme Adolescence earlier this year.

The Tory leader was criticised after telling an interviewer that she had not watched the programme and did not see why she should, because it was fictional.Alison McGovern, the local government minister, has confirmed that the government will let councils affected by local government reorganisation to postpone elections for another year.At the start of this year the government announced that council elections planned for East Sussex, West Sussex, Essex, Thurrock, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Norfolk, Suffolk and Surrey would be delayed for 12 months, until 2026, because of the council reorganisation.Two weeks ago it announced that four elections to new mayoral authorities, originally planned for next May, were also being delayed.Today, in a statement to MPs, McGovern said an increasing number of councils were expressing concerns about “time and energy” that they would have to spend running elections to bodies that would not last for long anyway.

Postponement would “free up resources to be concentrated on local government reorganisation and the delivery of good services”, she said.McGovern said, as a result, the government has opened a consultation with councils on this issue.If councils want elections to go ahead, they will.But if councils ask for a delay, the government will be minded to allow it, she said.The consultation will run until 15 January.

According to a statement from Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, there are 204 councils across 21 areas undergoing reorganisation and 63 of these councils are scheduled to hold elections in May 2026,They have all been given the option of postponement,Sky News is reporting that this decision is likely to result in elections in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and East and West Sussex being postponed for another year until 2027,Even though these are county councils controlled by the Conservative party, James Cleverly, the shadow housing secretary, complained that this was a decision that would benefit the Labour party,He said:Labour are scared of the voters.

They thought they could completely overhaul local government and stack the deck in their favour,They were wrong,Earlier this month, Labour cancelled mayoral elections and now they are at it again with council elections, fiddling the democratic process to serve their own political interests,Victoria Atkins, the shadow environment secretary, has criticised the government’s response to the publication of the Batters report about farming profitability,(See 12.

33pm,) She said:In her report, Baroness Batters admits that the farming sector is “bewildered and frightened of what might lay ahead” because of the vindictive family farm and family business taxes,It’s no wonder that the government have buried this report until after their disastrous Benefits Street budget, and sneaked it out on the last day of term,Instead of dealing with “the single biggest issue” facing the industry, the government’s only response today is to create yet another quango – the very last thing that farmers need,Here is an extract from what Katie Lam, a shadow Home Office minister, said when she was responding to Jess Phillips’ Commons statement about the long-awaited VAWG plan.

It is interesting because it shows the extent to which being anti-immigration has become an obsession for the party (which this year has been overtaken in popularity on the right by Reform UK).Lam, of course, is the MP who provoked controversy earlier this year for saying that legally settled families should be deported in part to ensure the UK is mostly “culturally coherent”.Lam started by talking about measures taken by the previous Conservative government to improve the way rape cases are prosecuted, and welcomed measures in the Labour strategy that, she said, built on this work, such as the plan for specialist rape teams in police forces.Then she swiftly moved on to the topic that took up most of her five-minute speech – the threat supposedly posed by migrants.She said:Truly protecting women and girls demands that we have difficult and sometimes awkward conversations, conversations about sex and consent, about private lives and criminality in the home, and about who is committing these crimes and why.

Relationships between men and women, relationships between parents and children are delicate, particular, and shaped by longstanding norms and beliefs.Not every country and culture in the world believes, as we do, that women are equal to men with personal, bodily and sexual autonomy.And when people from those countries and cultures come here, this can be dangerous.Do not take my word for it.The defence counsel for Israr Niazal, an Afghan asylum seeker convicted of raping a 15-year-old girl, argued that Niazal did not understand the age of consent, or the concept of consent more broadly, because no such consent exists in Afghanistan.

If we cannot be honest about this, we will fail to achieve the first of this strategy’s goals – preventing men and boys from becoming abusers.Lam went on to say that, despite repeated requests from the Tories, the government has yet to publish comprehensive data on crime committed by migrants.She said what data is available suggests “shocking variations in crime rates by nationality and immigration status”.She went on:According to data from the Ministry of Justice, foreign nationals make up a third of all convictions for sexual assaults against women, despite making up between 11 and 12% of the population.Afghans and Eritreans, the nationalities which made up the largest number of boat crossings this year, are more than 20 times more likely to be convicted for sexual offences as British nationals.

Each and every case of sexual assault is wrong.Perpetrators must face the full force of the law, regardless of nationality, and it remains the case that statistically, the most dangerous place for women to be is in her own home.But we must be able to have an informed and honest debate about whether mass migration is making this problem worse, particularly when a large number of recent migrants come here from countries where attitudes to women are very different from our own.Lam ended by quoting a recent article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, a BMJ academic journal, criticising the global campaign against female genital mutilation.She suggested this was an example of how immigration was leading to harmful ideas becoming acceptable in the UK