Budget has preserved Starmer’s job until at least May elections, say Labour MPs
Labour MPs have said they believe Keir Starmer’s leadership is safe until at least the May elections, after a budget that avoided any major damaging measures but which few MPs believe will revive the party’s fortunes.More than a dozen previously loyal MPs told the Guardian they did not believe the budget would shift the fundamentals required for the party to beat Reform.“It only delays what is inevitable,” one minister said.On Wednesday night in the Commons after the budget, many of the cabinet did the rounds chatting to MPs, including the health secretary and the prime minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, a tacit declaration of peace after the fallout from a week of furious briefing about Streeting’s leadership ambitions from allies of Starmer.Those close to Starmer were adamant he would never have walked away had the budget fuelled more criticism of his leadership.
“The idea he’d walk away if somebody said the budget hadn’t landed well is nonsense,” a senior No 10 source said.MPs said they had been “love bombed” in the run-up to the budget when Rachel Reeves met more than 100 MPs individually, name-checking many of them in her budget speech.“Everyone is getting photo ops and invites to Chequers,” said one MP.“The budget doesn’t change the fundamentals that they are one crap decision away from catastrophe.”A number of MPs on the party’s right, however, said they were deeply unnerved by the budget, with one calling it “focused on the bond markets and the backbenches” and not on ordinary voters, who would feel their incomes considerably squeezed in order to pay for additional headroom, the welfare U-turn and the two-child benefit cap.
“It’s a tactical victory, the political and economic trends are all still heading in the wrong direction and it’s not going to turn any of that around,” one senior Labour figure said.“There simply isn’t a wider economic or political story that gives you any idea where we’re going or what this is for, beyond survival.“I don’t think it kills challenges stone dead.And it would be better to try to find a way to do it before May.”Streeting, who has robustly denied any leadership plotting, has been noticed by MPs to be spending time publicly defending key figures on the party’s soft left, including Lucy Powell, the new deputy leader with whom he had previously privately clashed.
Streeting has also publicly praised Angela Rayner, his main potential rival for any future leadership, sparking rumours of a potential pact,One frontbencher said he believed that in any future contest, Streeting would attempt to collect more votes from the party’s left, after having been more outspoken on anti-racism, Gaza and the need to fight harder against Reform,They said they believed Streeting would reach the threshold of 80 MPs, as would the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, should she decide to run,But any candidate from the soft-left group of MPs would likely eat into the vote of both, although there is no obvious person, aside from Rayner – who is in two minds about whether she should be a candidate,The energy secretary, Ed Miliband, who has been mentioned as a potential candidate, is considered by most allies to be highly unlikely to run.
“He would want to be a kingmaker if he could,” said one MP close to the former Labour leader.Sign up to Headlines UKGet the day’s headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morningafter newsletter promotionThe Tribune group of soft-left MPs, which has been revived by the former cabinet minister Louise Haigh and the former whip Vicky Foxcroft, welcomed much of the budget, especially the lifting of the two-child benefit cap, but MPs aligned with the group said they expected its lobbying efforts would now focus on living standards.Those around Keir Starmer know that next May’s local elections pose an even greater challenge to the prime minister’s hopes of staying in office.“If the budget is a dangerous moment, then the local elections are perilous,” one senior Downing Street figure said.Discussions are already under way in No 10 – led by Miliband’s 2015 campaign manager Spencer Livermore – about how to limit the damage in what is widely expected to be a disastrous set of results.
There are fears Labour will be badly hit in thousands of council races across England, including London, and could lose Wales to Reform UK and slip into third place behind the SNP and Reform in Scotland, where at one stage the party was tipped for power.“We’ve got to have enough of a story to talk about a win, even if the results overall are terrible,” the No 10 figure added.“If we can find some indicative places where we’ve done well against the Greens or Reform, for example, then we can argue that there’s a route to doing that nationally.”Some MPs, particularly those in Wales and Scotland, think that is thin gruel.“Morgan is more positive than most about how we’ll do north of the border but it’s difficult not to worry when you look at the polls,” one said.
“We need to make sure the contest is about who leads Scotland at Holyrood, who will transform public services here, not about what Scottish voters think about Keir, because otherwise we’re stuffed,”
OBR challenges claims Reeves dropped income tax rise due to rosier forecasts
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has cast doubt on claims Rachel Reeves dropped plans to raise income tax in this week’s budget because of rosier forecasts, pointing out she knew about these well before the change of heart.In a move likely to exacerbate tensions with the Treasury, the OBR chair, Richard Hughes, has taken what he acknowledged was the “unusual step” of writing to the Treasury select committee to explain how its forecast evolved, “given the circumstances in this case”.Reeves’s budget was preceded by a flurry of speculation and briefing, even before the OBR accidentally made its documents available online earlier than intended on Wednesday.The chancellor took the rare step of delivering an early morning “scene setter” speech, on 4 November. This was widely interpreted as an attempt to clear the way for breaching the letter of Labour’s manifesto pledge on income tax by raising rates
Germany to urge EU to soften 2035 ban on sale of new petrol and diesel cars
The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is to urge the EU to soften the 2035 cutoff date for the sale of combustion-engine cars.Merz said he would send a letter to the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on Friday urging Brussels to keep technological options open for carmakers. The sale of new petrol and diesel cars in the EU is scheduled to be banned in a decade’s time.Merz’s letter hardens the battle lines emerging between Germany’s powerhouse car industry and those pleading with Brussels to stick to its flagship green policy, which is designed to help the EU meet its 2050 carbon-neutral target.“We’re sending the right signal to the commission with this letter,” Merz said, adding that the German government wanted to protect the climate in “a technology-neutral way”
One in 10 UK parents say their child has been blackmailed online, NSPCC finds
Nearly one in 10 UK parents say their child has been blackmailed online, with harms ranging from threatening to release intimate pictures to revealing details about someone’s personal life.The NSPCC child protection charity also found that one in five parents know a child who has experienced online blackmail, while two in five said they rarely or never talked to their children about the subject.The National Crime Agency has said that it is receiving more than 110 reports a month of child sextortion attempts, where criminal gangs trick teenagers into sending intimate pictures of themselves and then blackmail them.Agencies across the UK, US and Australia have confirmed a rising number of sextortion cases involving teenage boys and young adult males being targeted by cyber-criminal gangs based in west Africa or south-east Asia, some of which have ended in tragedy. Murray Dowey, a 16-year-old from Dunblane, Scotland, killed himself in 2023 after becoming a victim of sextortion on Instagram and Dinal De Alwis, 16, killed himself in Sutton, south London, in October 2022 after being blackmailed over nude photographs
Small changes to ‘for you’ feed on X can rapidly increase political polarisation
Small changes to the tone of posts fed to users of X can increase feelings of political polarisation as much in a week as would have historically taken at least three years, research has found.A groundbreaking experiment to gauge the potency of Elon Musk’s social platform to increase political division found that when posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity were boosted, even barely perceptibly, in the feeds of Democrat and Republican supporters there was a large change in their unfavourable feelings towards the other side.The degree of increased division – known as “affective polarisation” – achieved in one week by the changes the academics made to X users’ feeds was as great as would have on average taken three years between 1978 and 2020.Most of the more than 1,000 users who took part in the experiment during the 2024 US presidential election did not notice that the tone of their feed had been changed.The campaign was marked by divisive viral posts on X, including a fake image of Kamala Harris cosying up to Jeffrey Epstein at a gala and an AI-generated image posted by Musk of Kamala Harris dressed as a communist dictator that had 84m views
From value-adds to networking superconductor: how the weird language of tech dulled sport | Aaron Timms
Finally, a sector more ludicrously hyped than AI. Speaking to Yahoo Sports recently about the launch of Project B, a startup global women’s basketball league, co-founder Grady Burnett declared that “women’s basketball is growing right now as fast as AI”. Come again? There’s no question that women’s basketball is growing nicely, a development that we should all cheer: this year’s WNBA season was the most watched ever. But it is testing credulity to suggest that the sport is growing at anything like the same speed as AI, which since 2022 has gone from the technological margins to the very center of the US economy: by some reports, AI spending accounted for half of the growth in US GDP in the first half of this year. Perhaps I’m missing the real story here and the Federal Reserve is actively keeping tabs on attendance figures at Washington Mystics v Golden State Valkyries games for signs of potential overheating in the US economy
Cummins out of Australia Ashes squad as Khawaja lays into state of Perth pitch
The opportunity that England squandered in Perth appears to have presented itself once more, after Australia opted to play it safe with Pat Cummins and name an unchanged squad for next week’s day-night second Test at the Gabba.Beyond their match-defining collapse on the second afternoon, one of the most galling aspects of England’s eight-wicket defeat in the first Test was the fact that Cummins and Josh Hazlewood – two members of Australia’s fabled fast bowling group – were missing. But the situation officially remains unchanged as Ben Stokes and his tourists look to level the five-match series starting in Brisbane on 4 December. Hazlewood is still absent with a hamstring injury, while Cummins has been held back despite a recent return to training that has included bowling with the pink Kookaburra ball.Cricket Australia offered no specifics regarding this delay for Cummins other than to say Australia’s Test captain will still travel with the squad
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