Blair’s climate crisis views ‘absolutely aligned’ with government policy, Starmer says
Sammy Wilson (DUP) says Starmer’s net zero policy “is not only bad, it is mad”. Even Tony Blair says so, he says.
Starmer says Blair said there should be more carbon capture. The government agrees. He called for more use of AI. That is happening too, he says. And Blair said domestic targets were needed too, he says.
What Tony Blair said is we should have more carbon capture, we’ve invested in carbon capture. That’s many jobs across different parts of the country.
He said that AI [artificial intelligence] should be used, we agree with that. We’ve invested huge amounts in AI and the jobs of the future. He also said we need domestic targets so that businesses have their certainty.
If you look at the detail of what Tony Blair said, he’s absolutely aligned with what we’re doing here, these are the jobs and the security of the future.
Key events
Reform UK receives libel claim from staff working for Rupert Lowe over report issued by party during Lowe/Farage feud
Ben Quinn
Ben Quinn is a senior Guardian reporter.
Reform UK’s simmering civil war was re-ignited today as the party was served with papers as part of a legal action being taken by staff for the MP, Rupert Lowe.
Lowe’s staff are taking legal action after Reform UK published an internal report into bullying allegations, in which they were named.
The libel action is separate from an announcement earlier this month by Lowe that he would be suing Nigel Farage and two other senior party figures after they accused him of bullying staff and making verbal threats.
Lowe, who now sits as an independent, said he was suing Farage along with Lee Anderson, its chief whip, and Zia Yusuf, the party chair, for comments he said had “caused serious harm to my reputation”.
The Great Yarmouth MP was suspended after Anderson and Yusuf issued a joint statement saying the party had “received complaints from two female employees about serious bullying” in Lowe’s offices, and had at least twice made threats of violence against Yusuf.
The papers served on Reform UK today were on behalf of four people working for Lowe.
“The action follows the publication of an internal report commissioned by Reform UK which publicly named then when there was no legal basis for doing so,” a law firm acting for them said in a statement.
One of the four individuals was pregnant, it is understood.
‘Magic spatula of victory’ – Ed Davey reveals secret of Lib Dems’ campaigning success
Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, has become notorious for his oddball photo opportunities, but today’s is one of the strangest yet. He has been signing wooden spatulas – or “the magic spatula of victory”, to be exact – and distributing them to party activists.
No – in the office, none of us had a clue what this was about either.
But the Lib Dem press office was able to elucidate. Apparently Lib Dem activists often use spatulas when they are delivering leaflets because it makes it easier to push them through letterboxes, and reduces the risk from dog bites.
Other parties don’t normally hold photocalls to celebrate their campaigning paraphernalia. But other parties don’t have quite the same leaflet obsession, as anyone living in a Lib Dem target ward will know.
Badenoch says she feels ‘vindicated’ by Blair’s net zero comments
Kemi Badenoch has said that she feels “vindicated” by Tony Blair’s comments on net zero.
The Tory leader gave a speech last month saying that having 2050 as a legal target for achieving net zero was unrealistic and, as Sky News reports, on a campaign visit this afternoon she said:
I do feel vindicated, and I’m really glad that a former prime minister – a Labour former prime minister – agrees with me.
The plans that we have for net zero by 2050 are impossible, and what Keir Starmer needs to do is scrap what Ed Miliband is planning, which is actually going to bankrupt the country. It’s not workable.
Much of what Blair said in the foreword he wrote to the TBI report published yesterday does echo what Badenoch has argued on climate policy. But the clarification his thinktank released earlier today explicity says the thinktank does back the 2050 net zero targets. (See 11.58am.)
‘Muddled and misleading’ – Blair’s net zero report criticised by his government’s former climate guru Lord Stern
When Tony Blair was PM, he commissioned Nicholas Stern (now Lord Stern), a former chief economist at the World Bank, to write a report on the economics of climate change. It was published in 2006, it was vast and it was highly influential – seen as helping to persuade policy makers around the world not just that there was an environmental/humanitarian case for tackling climate change, but an unarguable economic case too.
So what does Stern think of the Blair report? Not much. Stern is now chair of the Grantham Research institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the LSE and he has issued this comment.
This new report is muddled and misleading. There is far more progress being made around the world to decarbonise the global economy than it suggests. For instance, China is the world’s leading producer and domestic deployer of renewables and electric vehicles. Its power generating capacity from renewables has now exceeded that of fossil fuels and its emissions are likely to peak in the next two years.
The UK’s leadership on climate change, particularly the elimination of coal from its power sector, is providing an influential example to other countries. So, too, its climate change legislation and its Climate Change Committee. If the UK wobbles on its route to net zero, other countries may become less committed. The UK matters.
The transition to clean domestic energy offers British consumers the prospect of lower bills, and greater energy security by not being dependent on volatile international markets for fossil fuels.
And the report downplays the science in its absence of a sense of urgency and the lack of appreciation of the need for the world to achieve net zero as soon as possible, in order to manage the growth in climate change impacts that are already hurting households and businesses across the world and in the UK. Delay is dangerous.
But the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), an organisation that promotes informed debate on climate policy, has said the Tony Blair Institute was naive not to realise how the report would be interpreted in the light of what Blair wrote in the foreword. Jess Ralston, an analyst at the ECIU, said:
Given the clarification the TBI has had to issue, this seems like a bizarre case of naivety on how parts of the media and politicians might misinterpret some of the statements in the foreword.
More carbon capture and storage, 80% of which has gone into extracting more oil and gas to date, nuclear and nature-based solutions, even AI, are not new suggestions and in the UK the government is pursuing all of them to an extent. The majority of the public back net zero, and the science is clear that unless we reach net zero emissions, we don’t stop climate change. The public don’t want climate extremes of flooding, wildfires and crop failures to get ever worse, and it’s ironic that this has come on the same day the Climate Change Committee published evidence of how climate extremes are already threatening the UK.
Author of Tony Blair Institute’s climate report claims it was misinterpreted
Lindy Fursman, director of energy and climate policy at the Tony Blair Institute thinktank, wrote the report published yesterday that infuriated environmentalists. In truth, it was the comments in the foreword, written by Blair himself, that provoked most of the uproar. But Fursman is clearly unhappy about the way her report was interpeted.
In a post on LinkedIn, responding to a journalist who quoted what Nigel Farage said about the report yesterday and who asked if this was the response she was expecting, Fursman replied:
This is exactly the problem – the paper *doesn’t* say that the push for net zero is irrational, it says that the current state of debate about it is.
I thought I was really clear in the paper that we need net zero, and that we need more action – including on continued use of renewables and their financing, especially in developing countries.
In fact, I even say that an added benefit of CCS would be to show how much cheaper renewables are!!
Unite says Labour should respond to Blair’s net zero concerns
In what might be a first, Unite, the most leftwing of the major unions affiliated to the Labour party, has put out a new release backing Tony Blair. The press release is headlined Grangemouth closure and Blair’s net zero intervention must be wake up call for government warns Unite and it quotes Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, saying:
Unite is not against net zero but it will not be achieved without serious investment in new jobs.
Unite has warned time after time, that all the rhetoric about a joined up industrial strategy and future jobs must be backed up with serious investment that actually delivers. What is Labour waiting for? The time to act is now.
If they fail to do this, then Labour cannot expect workers to support their net zero plan.
Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood defends case for reviewing how article 8 of ECHR applied in immigration cases
At the joint committee on human rights Helena Kennedy, the KC and Labour peer, asked Shabana Mahmood why the government is reviewing the application of article eight from the European convention on human right (the article guaranteeing a right to family life) in immigration cases. Kennedy said many of the cases where article eight got the blame were spurious, or they involved cases where people should not be forced to leave the country because they had been here from a very young age.
Mahmood said the government supported the convention, and the Human Rights Act. But she said it would be wrong for the government to adopt a “nothing to see here” approach and to pretend there were not some problems. Not all cases that have led to article eight being criticised are “completely spurious”, she said. She went on:
Some do not always stand up to scrutiny when you get into the full facts, and they do raise questions of whether the law is working as it should.
Asked when the review would concluded, Mahmood said the Home Office was in charge of this.
Green party co-leader Carla Denyer accuses Blair of mimicking Farage on net zero
Carla Denyer, the Green party co-leader, has now put out a fuller response to yesterday’s report from Tony Blair’s thinktank about climate policy. She said:
Tony Blair has decided to mimic Nigel Farage on net zero and sounds like he is speaking on behalf of petro-states like Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan for whom he has lobbied for more years than he was prime minister.
It is vital that the government distance itself from this latest dodgy dossier from Blair and turn its attention instead to what the Climate Change Committee is saying today. Their report could not be clearer: we are woefully unprepared for the impacts of climate breakdown as a country. Tomorrow is likely to be the hottest local election day on record – a potent reminder that we need a comprehensive plan to prepare for increasingly extreme weather events.
Tony Blair and Nigel Farage apparently need reminding that a huge 89% of the world’s people want stronger action to fight the climate crisis, not a reset or watering down of ambition. And the CBI points to the fact that the UK’s net zero sector expanded 10% last year, three times faster than the rest of the economy.
The future is green; Labour must not allow yesterday’s man to drag us back into the dark ages. The government must press ahead with the drive towards clean energy and the green economy and all the advantages that will bring in creating good quality jobs, cutting energy bills and creating a healthier society.
Earlier Denyer released a video comment on this. See 11.31am.
At the joint committee on human rights Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, was asked what impact the supreme court judgment on the definition of a woman under equality law would have on policy in prisons.
Mahmood said when she took office a strong policy was already in place. No trans woman convicted of rape or a serious violent offence with birth genitalia intact gets placed in a women’s prison, she said.
But the Ministry of Justice would be considering if other policies needed to be changed in the light of the judgment, she said.
Helena Kennedy, the KC and Labour peer, asked what would happen to a trans woman convicted, for example, of a financial crime. Would she go into a female prison? She would be at risk in a male prison.
Mahmood said that most trans women prisioners are in the male estate. But there are also specific trans wings for some offenders where they might be a risk somewhere else, she said.
She also said there were a handful (“very low single digits”) of trans women in women’s prisons. But they were not there for violent offences, and did not have their birth genitalia, she said.
Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is also giving evidence to a parliamentary committee today. She is talking to the joint committee on human rights about the work of her department. There is a live feed here.
Lammy brushes off report saying trade deal with UK second-order priority for Trump
David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has just started giving evidence to the Lords international relations and defence committee, about the work of his department.
There is a live feed here.
Asked about today’s Guardian splash saying President Trump has decided that a trade deal with the UK is a second-order priority, Lammy said that he read the Guardian but that it wasn’t always right. He said the government was still working hard to agree a trade deal.
UPDATE: Here is the clip.
PMQs – snap verdict
That was a rather odd PMQs because it felt as though Kemi Badenoch had slipped back in time to January, when calls for a national inquiry into the grooming gang scandal were dominating the pages in rightwing newspapers because Elon Musk kept banging on about this on his global disinformation network and the news was not yet dominated by Donald Trump, because the world was still waiting for his inauguration. Most of what Badenoch said today she could have said, and did say, back then. The newish point was that, more than three months after promising five local inquiries into grooming gangs, the government can only say where one of them will actually take place.
If that was the point Badenoch wanted to make, she landed it perfectly well. She told the Commons:
[Starmer] cannot name a single place because nothing is happening. He stood there at the despatch box and promised five local inquires, nothing is happening, on the last day of term he had his minister come out to water down the promise to say they would provide funding – that’s not good enough.
At least 50 towns are affected by rape gangs, places like Peterborough, Derby, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leicester, Rotherham, Rochdale and Preston. Is he dragging his heels on this because he doesn’t want Labour cover ups exposed?
And yet – was this really the best and most important issue to raise?
For some people, the answer is yes. There are plenty of voters who think that the systematic grooming and rape of young girls was a horrific scandal (it was) and that a holding a national inquiry would help stop it happening again (which is a lot more questionable). In taking up this issue, Badenoch is very much appealing to the core vote. But it is not even her core vote – it’s Nigel Farage’s. As this YouGov polling from January shows, the people who care most about this topic are Reform UK supporters.
One reading of this is that Badenoch’s PMQs strategy is yet more evidence of the Tories and Reform UK in competition with each other over the same voters. There was an even more bizarre example of this week when Reform UK said they would promise a national grooming gangs inquiry in their election manifesto, only for the Tories to say this was “too important to wait until the next election” and that it should take place now (which of course is what Reform UK also wants).
But there is another reading; that, for all the talk of a potential Tory/Reform UK coalition, the reality is that the merger is already happening.
As well as choosing an issues mostly of interest to Farage supporters, Badenoch also picked an argument today where, on balance, Keir Starmer has a stronger case anyway. He was on tricky ground when Badenoch asked where the other four local inquiries were happening. But he clearly had the upper hand when he pointed out that Badenoch ignored this issue when she was in office, and that multiple recommendations from previous inquiries on this were ignored by the Tories when they were in office.
Starmer set out a plausible strategy for approaching this problem that would achieve more than the inquiry demanded by the Tories.
My position is absolutely clear. Where there’s evidence then police should investigate and there should be appropriate prosecutions. That’s route number one.
Route number two we should implement existing recommendations which did expose what went wrong. They weren’t implemented by the last government, they’re being implemented by this government.
We are providing for local inquiries, we are investing more on delivering truth and justice for victims than the party opposite did in 14 long years.
And he also argued – persuasively – that his record as director of public prosecutions means he has done much more to bring grooming gangs to justice than Badenoch.
I was the prosecutor who brought the first case and when that file was brought to my attention I noticed that one of the defendants had not been prosecuted previously.
Far from covering up, I asked for that file so I could have a look at it. On the back of that I then changed the entire approach to prosecutions, which was then lauded by the government that we were doing the right thing, and brought those prosecutions.
So my record was going after where I thought something had gone wrong and putting it right. She stayed silent throughout their years in government.
Most lawyers believe the changes to prosecution guidelines introduced by Starmer when he was DPP made a considerable difference, because he said it was no longer acceptable to drop prosecutions just because the girls involved did not fit the “model victim” stereotype. The Starmer guidelines are here, and here is the Guardian’s news report at the time.
Badenoch also, of course, missed the opportunity to ask about something much more topical and arguably much more important. This is the verdict on her performance from Henry Hill, deputy editor of the ConservativeHome website.
So Tony Blair puts out a report basically agreeing with Kemi Badenoch about Net Zero… and she doesn’t mention it once at PMQs?
Blair’s climate crisis views ‘absolutely aligned’ with government policy, Starmer says
Sammy Wilson (DUP) says Starmer’s net zero policy “is not only bad, it is mad”. Even Tony Blair says so, he says.
Starmer says Blair said there should be more carbon capture. The government agrees. He called for more use of AI. That is happening too, he says. And Blair said domestic targets were needed too, he says.
What Tony Blair said is we should have more carbon capture, we’ve invested in carbon capture. That’s many jobs across different parts of the country.
He said that AI [artificial intelligence] should be used, we agree with that. We’ve invested huge amounts in AI and the jobs of the future. He also said we need domestic targets so that businesses have their certainty.
If you look at the detail of what Tony Blair said, he’s absolutely aligned with what we’re doing here, these are the jobs and the security of the future.
Mark Francois (Con) asks if Starmer will back a campaign to erect a memorial to Vera Lynn.
Starmer says he will support this campaign.
Deidre Costigan (Lab) asks about fly-tipping. (See 11.10am.)
Starmer says the Tory record on fly-tipping was terrible, and he says the government is cracking down on this.
Layla Moran (Lib Dem) asks about a victim who suffered sexual misconduct in the workplace, and who was made to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Will Starmer back plans to ban their use in cases like this?
Starmer says the government is looking at what it can be done to stop the misuse of NDAs.
