Andy Burnham hosts Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Downing Street – UK politics live | Politics
Burnham rules out Labour doing any deals with Greens as he condemns ‘Zionism is racism’ policy as ‘antisemitic’
Harriett Baldwin (Con) asked Burnham to rule out any deals with the Green party in the light its motion saying “Zionism is racism”.
Burnham replied:
Can I condemn the motion that was passed unequivocally?
It is wrong. It is antisemitic, and this side of the house will have nothing to do with it.
And we will always take the right response when it comes to any partnerships we have with other parties.
We cannot support a partnership with a party that holds [the] position that has recently been adopted.
Key events
King Charles meets Zelenskyy, before Ukrainian president’s meeting with Starmer
Another ‘show of support’ feature of President Zelenskyy’s visit is the fact that he was invited to meet the king at Buckingham Palace. Foreign leaders coming to Downing Street for a political visit don’t normally get to meet the king at the same time. But Charles and Zelenskyy have met many times before, and the king is a strong supporter of Ukraine.
Zelenskyy posted this on social media about the meeting.
Thank you to His Majesty King Charles III for the audience. For me, it is important to have the opportunity to personally thank him for the unwavering support of Ukraine. We appreciate all the assistance from the United Kingdom.
Here is a picture of the ceremonial guard.
While Andy Burnham has been relatively guarded in what he has said in public (see 12.40pm) about Donald Trump buying diesel from Russia and declaring that Volodymyr Zelenskyy should be replaced as Ukrainian president, this is a way of using the apparatus of the state to send a visual signal that the UK is very, very firmly on Zelenskyy’s side on this one.
President Zelenskyy is expected to arrive in Downing Street shortly. Unusually, there will be a ceremonial military guard there to greet him. According to Sky News, Downing Street has not laid on one of these for a visitor since Donald Trump visited Chequers.
Energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh says decision on whether to allow Jackdaw gasfield ‘imminent’
A decision on whether to give the green light to the Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea is “imminent”, Miatta Fahnbulleh, the energy secretary, has said.
But a decision on Rosebank, the largest untapped oilfield in the North Sea, will take “a bit longer”, the minister told the Energy UK annual conference in London on Wednesday.
As the Press Association reports, while Fahnbulleh would not be drawn on what the decision on either project would be, she told delegates at the Energy UK conference:
We have got all the information on Jackdaw and my department has gone through that, so there is a decision that will be imminent.
“Rosebank will take a little bit longer,” she said, adding her first two months in the job had been dominated by the question and she wanted to make the decisions as quickly as possible.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted this on social media earlier, on his arrival in the UK and ahead of his meeting with Andy Burnham.
Already in Britain with the team. Today, an audience is scheduled with His Majesty King Charles III. There will also be an important meeting with Prime Minister Andy Burnham. We will discuss a wide range of security issues. We are preparing solutions that will strengthen us. Thank you to the King, the Prime Minister, and all of Britain for their support!
Green leader Zack Polanski hits back at Burnham after PM says party’s Zionism motion ‘antisemitic’
Zack Polanski has hit back at Andy Burnham after Burnham said the “Zionism is racism” motion passed by the Green party at their conference was antisemitic. (See 12.57pm.) Polanski posted these on social media.
I’m the only Jewish leader of a political party.
I’m a victim of Antisemitism every day and I’ve made it clear Jewish people are welcome in my party.
You’re a Prime Minister who arms a genocide and locks pensioners up for opposing it.
The dangerous & irresponsible blurring of challenging Israel & Antisemitism is deeply revealing.
A Labour Government who apologised over their actions over Gaza is demonstrating that it was all performative. Andy Burnham still stands with Israel whilst it kills innocent people.
Polanski was not at the conference when the motion was debated and he has said that he would not have voted for it in the form it passed because he wanted to see it amended. But he has also said he supported the main thrust of what it was saying.
SNP to launch biggest pro-independence campaign since 2014, John Swinney says
The SNP will launch the biggest pro-independence campaign since the 2014 referendum, John Swinney has announced.
The first minister said the Choose Scotland campaign will kick off during the party’s conference in Aberdeen this weekend. As the Press Association reports, the launch is part of the SNP’s £100,000 “hearts and minds” campaign to win over voters and will be “anchored” by a new, pro-independence, party political broadcast.
Swinney said:
As we approach conference, the wind is in the sails of the SNP and the Yes movement – we have been emphatically re-elected, we have the biggest, pro-independence majority in the history of the parliament, independence is in the lead, the momentum behind constitutional change across these islands is building and there is a growing consensus we have the right to decide our own future.
Our task is to build on that momentum which is why, at this conference, we will be launching the Choose Scotland campaign – the biggest campaign since the referendum and what will be the most sophisticated, pro-independence campaign Scotland has ever seen.
Tories blame ‘source error’ for Badenoch’s Right Way policy document overstating cost of net zero by almost £500bn
Peter Walker
Peter Walker is a senior Guardian correspondent.
Kemi Badenoch’s flagship Conservative party conference policy document overstated the estimated cost of net zero by nearly £500bn because of a “source error”, her spokesperson has said, seemingly meaning it was copied from elsewhere and not checked.
A chapter on net zero in The Right Way, a policy document produced for the Tory conference in Birmingham, said the Climate Change Committee (CCC) estimated in 2020 that reaching net zero by 2050 would cost £957bn.
This baffled experts, and the CCC said it did not recognise the figure. The claimed total was double the £478bn cited in the 2020 document, seemingly because someone tallied a row showing totals for each individual column, along with the figures which made up the totals, thus doubling them.
Badenoch’s spokesperson said:
That was a source error, and it has been corrected online.
The incorrect total was previously published in a report by the rightwing thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs and also included in an article in the Spectator, from which it was seemingly copied.
Badenoch’s spokesperson defended the error, saying:
Quite frankly, the people who want to get upset about this should be upset more about the fact that net zero is costing us £500bn.
This is also incorrect. The 2020 estimate from the CCC was £478bn, but its most recent estimate puts the total at £110bn.
PMQs – snap verdict
At least we learned one thing from PMQs – the Conservative party still has not settled on a reliable line of attack against Andy Burnham (and the one deployed by Kemi Badenoch today was possibly its worst yet.)
Various themes have been deployed: that Burnham is continuity Starmer; that he’s leftwing; that he’s just “eyelashes and a black T-shirt”; that he’s an unprincipled opportunist; and that he is a people pleaser who can’t say no or take tough decisions. There is a bit of truth in most of these assertions (and quite a lot in the final one, which in time may turn out to be the line most useful to the Tories), but none of them has stuck yet, and so today Badenoch tried another.
Badenoch sought to depict Burnham as a serial gaffe-merchant and she set this up with her opening question:
The prime minister has had a busy few weeks tying himself in knots, explaining why national security shouldn’t come at the expense of social security, bumbling into a row still ongoing about Manchester City.
He spent the last 48 hours trying to unsay that Russia influenced the 2016 referendum, when we all heard him say it. Does he ever get tired of putting his foot in his mouth?
What’s true about this is that, unlike his predecessor, whose instinctive response to a question was to recall the No 10 line-to-take and stick to it rigidly, Burnham is someone more inclined to answer questions and to say what he thinks. This has sometimes led to him having to take back something he said (as he did over Manchester City), or reframe an argument in different language (as he did after the PMQs national security/social security answer). But these are not grotesque errors, and any downside is probably more than compensated for by the appeal of a PM who can actually talk a human being.
Badenoch then proceeded to develop this argument by claiming that Burnham received a slap-down from the head of MI5 yesterday. (See 12.16pm.) Given that Ken McCallum told reporters yesterday “I strongly agree with what the prime minister said”, to get from there to Badenoch saying it “the first time I have ever heard the head of MI5 slap down a prime minister for doing Russia’s dirty work for them” required some extraordinarily ingenious spin. It was arguably clever – but also nonsense.
The detail is tedious, but it has to be explained. Essentially, it rests on two acts of misrepresentation. Burnham told the Rest is Politics that there was Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum (which is true), but the Tories have suggested or said outright that Burnham was saying the Russians altered the outcome and that the result was illegitimate. Burnham has never said either of these things.
The second dodgy assertion came yesterday when CCHQ issued a press release saying McCallum had delivered “an extraordinary slap down to the prime minister”. This was in a response to McCallum saying Burnham was right about Russian interference in 2016. McCallum did also say that the impact of Russian interference was limited, and that it would be a mistake to go on about it too much because that would “play into our adversaries’ hands”. But, if that is the problem, you have to ask, who has been banging on it for the past three days? And who raised it at PMQs yesterday?
Burnham saw off the Badenoch attack quite easily. (Badenoch will probably get written up as having scored a great victory in the papers that have swallowed this hogwash, but if the Tories end up believing their own spin, they are in more trouble than they realise.)
One of Burnham’s strengths is that he does not seem to get rattled by this sort of rubbish. His decision to use his final response to Badenoch to praise what she said about race and Englishness at PMQs was a good one, and he even managed to adopt a cordial tone towards Nigel Farage. Being nice and personable does not guarantee success in politics, but it is a start and it helps to explain why Burnham is currently the most admired of the party leaders.
Burnham rules out Labour doing any deals with Greens as he condemns ‘Zionism is racism’ policy as ‘antisemitic’
Harriett Baldwin (Con) asked Burnham to rule out any deals with the Green party in the light its motion saying “Zionism is racism”.
Burnham replied:
Can I condemn the motion that was passed unequivocally?
It is wrong. It is antisemitic, and this side of the house will have nothing to do with it.
And we will always take the right response when it comes to any partnerships we have with other parties.
We cannot support a partnership with a party that holds [the] position that has recently been adopted.
Burnham urges Nigel Farage to accept small boat crossings coming down
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said every week unidentified males from Iran are arriving in the UK on small boats. He asked Burnham to accept this was a national security emergency.
Burnham began his reply recognising that the person accused of killing Ann Widdecombe has been charged with planning an attack against Farage. He went on:
Can I start by recognising it’s been a hard time for him and his family. There’s a lot we disagree on, but I defend his right to say it, and I will work hard to secure his safety.
On Iran, he said:
We’ve seen the issues at RAF Fairford recently, and they have been dealt with in the right way with the utmost seriousness by the police and security services.
And the key point is, of course, we do need to get, boat crossings down. I hope he would recognise that they are coming down. Removals are up. There is much more to be done, but there is clearly progress in the right direction.
Burnham declines invitation from Ed Davey to agree Trump has committed ‘shameful betrayal of Ukrainian people’
Davey asked Burnham to accept that President Trump’s decision to buy diesel from Russia is “yet another shameful Trump betrayal of the Ukrainian people and European security”.
Burnham said he called President Zelenskyy on Saturday “because I recognised it was another very dark and difficult moment for him”.
But he said that his role was to “try and repair bridges so that the support comes back”. He wanted to bring people together.
Burnham says further cross-party talks on social care reform to take place soon, ‘hopefully within next month’
Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, got a huge cheer when he spoke – a reference to his success in seeing off a supposed threat to his leadership. (See 10.55am.)
He asked when Burnham would hold another round of cross-party talks on social care reform.
Burnham welcomed Davey’s commitment to this issue, and said he was determined to change the system.
He said he would organise more cross-party talks, “certainly before the end of the year, but hopefully within the next month”.
