Badenoch accused of making ‘deeply inaccurate’ claims about violence against women
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,In the House of Commons on Thursday, the safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, introduced the government’s long-awaited strategy to tackle “the national emergency” of violence against women and girls, saying it did something “that none before it ever has” by making tackling it a priority across local and national government, the criminal justice system and the voluntary sector,Phillips told the Commons: “We are calling violence against women and girls the national emergency that it is,We are committing to halve these horrific crimes within a decade, and today we publish the strategy that sets us on that journey,”After the announcement of the strategy – which will focus on preventing radicalisation of young men, stopping abusers and supporting victims – the Conservative leader said plans to tackle misogyny in schools were being introduced only because “some people in Labour” watched the Netflix drama Adolescence, adding that the focus should be on “people, who come from cultures that don’t respect women, coming into our country”.
Badenoch added: “The fact is, it’s not 11-year-old boys in school who are perpetrating violence against women and girls […] They need to do the right thing, put police officers on the street, stop people who come from cultures that don’t respect women coming into our country, foreign criminals removed as soon as they commit crimes,Those are the sorts of things that will make a difference,”Ghadah Alnasseri, the co-executive director at Imkaan, a charity that supports women from ethnic minority backgrounds, said Badenoch’s language could contribute to making migrant women less safe,Alnasseri pointed to attacks on migrant women and women of colour, such as an alleged rape in Walsall that police are treating as racially aggravated,“Her rhetoric is very dangerous,” Alnasseri said, adding that the majority of victims of sexual and domestic abuse know their abuser.
“It’s deeply inaccurate, it’s misinformation and it’s spreading racism.“We know of charities which have had to remove their signs so they are not attacked, where women have to seek help through back doors.This kind of language is really problematic.”The shadow Home Office minister Katie Lam – who was criticised in October after claiming that “a large number of people” living legally in the UK should have their right to stay revoked and “go home” – used her allotted time in the Commons to respond to Phillips’s address to focus on whether immigration was exacerbating the problem.“Not every country and culture in the world believes, as we do, that women are equal to men,” Lam said.
“And where people from those countries and cultures come here, this can be dangerous.”Phillips told Lam that violence against women and girls happened in every community, regardless of culture and creed.“If the only crimes that I had to concern myself with halving was those that were committed by people who arrive in our country, my job would be considerably easier,” she said.“The vast majority of the data that I am talking about is around people who were born in our country abusing other people who are born in our country.”Andrea Simon, the director of End Violence Against Women coalition, said gendered crimes were “not an imported problem”.
“It’s hard not to see this rhetoric as political point scoring on a day when landmark measures have been announced to help prevent violence against women and girls,” she said.“Men’s entitlement to abuse women is a deeply entrenched issue for our society and our shared culture.Politicians should be educating the public on the realities of who is predominantly at risk of sexual violence, which is most likely to have been perpetrated by someone known to you.”
Reform-run Kent council accused of blocking scrutiny of claim it saved £40m
Reform-run Kent council has been accused of trying to block scrutiny after it refused, for more than five months, to produce evidence that it had saved more than £40m by cancelling two environmental projects that did not exist yet.Polly Billington, a Labour MP in Kent, first requested background to the claim via a freedom of information (FoI) request in July. She said the subsequent delay had not been explained and seemed to show the council was embarrassed at what the documents would show.Kent county council said it rejected any suggestion of a cover-up, and that it planned to release the information to Billington, the East Thanet MP, later this week.The saga began when the Kent leader, Linden Kemkaran, told a council meeting on 10 July that the authority had saved £32m by scrapping a programme to make properties more environmentally friendly, and £7
Reform candidate who told Lammy to ‘go home’ questioned other MPs’ loyalty to UK
A Reform UK mayoral candidate who said David Lammy should “go home to the Caribbean” has suggested that at least eight other politicians from minority ethnic backgrounds do not have a primary loyalty towards the UK.Nigel Farage’s party has so far refused to condemn Chris Parry, a retired naval rear admiral who has been picked to contest the now-postponed Hampshire and the Solent mayoral election for the party, over his comment about Lammy, the deputy prime minister.In a post in February, referring to a news story about the UK government supposedly considering talks about reparations for slavery – which ministers have in fact rejected – Parry is said to have written: “Lammy must go home to the Caribbean where his loyalty lies.”Labour said the emergence of the other comments, all made since May this year, showed Reform had to act swiftly, saying he was “dragging his party further into the gutter”.The bulk of the comments by Parry, all made on X, involve him quote-retweeting posts by others about the politicians, some originating from far-right or openly anti-Islam accounts
Lib Dems call for inquiry into hostile foreign state interference to include US
An inquiry into interference by hostile foreign states in the UK should be extended to cover the actions of Donald Trump’s US, the Liberal Democrats have said.In a letter to the communities secretary, Steve Reed, whose department is leading on the independent review, the Lib Dems said the US government’s explicit support for far-right nationalist parties in Europe amounted to outside interference.The US national security strategy, set out this month, said Europe faces “civilisational erasure” due to migration and EU integration, and that Washington should “cultivate resistance” within the continent.The document used language echoing the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, saying several countries risked becoming “majority non-European”, and praised the “growing influence of patriotic European parties”.The inquiry into the effect of financial influence and other interference is expected to primarily focus on Russia and similar hostile states
Farage avoids police investigation over alleged electoral law breach
Nigel Farage has avoided investigation over claims his general election campaign breached electoral law last year – in part because too much time has passed since the alleged offences.The Reform UK leader was told on Thursday that Essex police could not open an investigation because it was now time-barred, more than a year having passed since any alleged offence. The Electoral Commission, which had been asked to open a separate inquiry into other elements, said it had not identified any undeclared spending that should have been reported.“We have assessed a report relating to an allegation around misreported expenditure by a political candidate in connection with the general election in July 2024,” Essex police said.It said the report had been made on 5 December
From Keir as Eliot Ness to Radon Liz on YouTube – the 2025 alternative politics awards
You can hear the sighs of relief. Not from the MPs who are packing up to slope back to their constituencies for the Christmas recess, but from the rest of the country. Finally, the year is coming to an end and there will be few chances for our politicians to do any further damage before they return to Westminster in January.The psychodrama is finally done. We can all go to bed vaguely hopeful that the world won’t have taken a further turn for the worse by the time we wake up
Angela Rayner to publish memoir amid talk of potential Labour leadership challenge
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 book, which will detail the Labour politician’s life story from her impoverished childhood and leaving school at 16 while pregnant through the union movement and the Labour party to the second highest office in the land, is to be published in the second half of 2026.Rayner has kept a relatively low profile since quitting as deputy prime minister in September after failing to pay stamp duty on a flat. She has only intervened publicly on policy issues close to her heart, such as workers’ rights, on which she warned the government not to “blink or buckle” on the bill.Often considered a potential successor to Keir Starmer, she declined to rule out running for the leadership or returning to frontline politics in her first public comments after stepping down, saying she had “not gone away”
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