Labour Party
Angela Rayner Tax Protest Was Staged by Conservative Politicians Posing as ‘Tax Activists’
A supposedly grassroots 'tax protest' against Labour party Deputy Leader Angela Rayner, which hit the headlines on Wednesday, was organised and conducted by Conservative party politicians, one of the organisers has admitted to Byline Times.
The Daily Express published video from the protest in Yarm, North Yorkshire, showing what were described as "activists" donning caps, glasses and yellow vests with the slogan "tax inspector".
The report refers to what are described as "local sources" suggesting that Rayner was "forced to sneak out the back door of the Tomahawk bar to avoid being photographed with the protestors on the way out."
"Walking down Yarm highstreet, Ms Rayner was seen hiding under an umbrella as activists wearing 'Tax inspector' high-vis vests unveiled a giant banner reading: "Angela Rayner: Tax dodger?” the paper reported.
The Express did not reveal who the protesters, three of whom could be seen wearing caps, glasses and a hood were, or which campaign they represented. Nor too did other reports in outlets including the Spectator, GB News, or Guido Fawkes.
However, Byline Times has identified one of the protesters as local Conservative Councillor for Yarm, John Coulson.
Coulson admitted to this paper to taking part in the protest, alongside other local Conservative councillors.
However, he denied organising the protest, which he said had been put together at short notice by "others" in the party
"Our local guys decided to make this protest", Coulson said.
"It wasn't organised by me. I was asked to get involved because I am very vocal, and I'm very active and because I believe in what we're doing, I got involved".
Coulson, who faced his own local controversy back in 2022 over allegations of posting misogynistic social media posts, said that he took part because he feels "very protective" of local Conservative MP Matt Vickers, who is projected to lose his seat in the House of Commons to Labour, according to a series of recent national opinion polls.
The protest follows a campaign by the Conservative party and supportive newspapers to raise questions about Angela Rayner's historic tax affairs.
Rayner has strongly denied underpaying capital gains tax on the sale of a property ten years ago, which independent tax experts suggest would amount to around £1,500 if proven to have been underpaid.
The allegations first surfaced in a new book published by the former Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft, who previously faced controversy himself over his use of a non-dom tax status, which reportedly allowed him to legally avoid tens of millions of pounds in tax.
‘Rishi Sunak’s Delay in Calling an Election May Help the Conservatives – But it Could Benefit Labour More’
Governments trailing in the polls tend to wait until the last possible moment. Like Gordon Brown in 2010 and John Major in 1997 before him, Rishi Sunak appears to have decided to delay the inevitable in the hope that ‘something will turn up’.
His Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, is already talking up a further ‘fiscal event’ which seems all but certain to include more unfunded tax cuts, despite repeated evidence that what the public wants is investment in the NHS and other struggling public services.
There may be some wisdom in Sunak going long.
In both 1997 and 2010, the governing party did slightly less badly at the five-year mark than they would have done 10 months earlier. But there is no guarantee that history will repeat itself. The public are more sick of Sunak and his party than they were of Major’s Conservatives or Brown’s New Labour.
Rishi Sunak appears to have decided to delay calling an election. Photo: Imageplotter/Alamy
For Keir Starmer's party, the delayed election brings challenges as well as opportunity.
The additional time will help Labour prepare for power. Shadow ministers are meeting with civil servants in readiness for a handover. Labour still has candidates to select in many of its less winnable seats, the list of retiring MPs is yet to be finalised, and candidates selected or appointed.
Beyond the practical, Labour’s most pressing need is to further solidify its relationship with the public – thinking not just about winning votes on polling day, but about building a bedrock of support that will sustain it through what is likely to be a difficult Parliament.
Giving Labour pause will be the fact that politics has become more volatile since 1997. Labour lost the ‘Red Wall’ because, in 2015, 2017 and 2019, the Conservatives’ coalition had changed – doing less and less well among affluent, economically right-wing voters with college degrees but better among skilled manual workers and voters without degrees.
The Conservatives’ new unpopularity is seeing the party lose its new voters without regaining its old ones: a perfect storm.
The question is whether Labour’s resurgence in the Red Wall will mark a reversion to type – voters tried the Conservatives once, but won’t make that mistake again – or whether these seats will now swing with every election like a perennial marginal such as Crawley.
If it’s the latter, the UK will become a much more volatile democracy – one in which even very bad defeats like Labour’s 2019 rout can be recovered from in a single term as a matter of course. This presents Labour with a challenge: the extended terms in office won in 1979, 1997 and 2010 maybe a thing of the past, and big wins like 2019 may be more likely to be followed by a big loss unless the party in power meets public expectations.
Compounding Labour’s challenge is the fact that while all but certain to win – both Labour and Starmer are far more popular than the Conservatives and Sunak – both party and leader are less popular and trusted than previous opposition leaders who successfully took power from the opposition.
Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and David Cameron all started their premierships well ahead of the predecessors they replaced and with their approval ratings in positive territory. In contrast, while Starmer easily beats Sunak, his ratings are in negative territory – -18 according to Ipsos’ latest count.
But the public’s reticence is not confined to Starmer. While his party is seen as significantly more competent than the Conservatives, here too Labour is in negative territory – by -14 points to the Conservatives’ -47.
A different time – then party leaders John Major, Paddy Ashdown and Tony Blair in 1995. Photo: Neil Munns/PA/Alamy
In part, this negativity may reflect lasting voter anger over the Jeremy Corbyn years and Labour’s flight from electability. Even if it is, the party still has to win greater public confidence if not to win the election but to enable it to take the country through what will remain challenging times.
Labour’s leadership is acutely aware that there are no simple solutions to the country’s plight.
When Blair came to power with a swiftly growing economy, Labour had to avoid messing things up. This time, the challenge is far greater.
Labour will come to power after 16 years of economic stagnation. Had economic growth continued on its 1955 to 2008 path, GDP per head would now be 39% higher. The UK has not been the only high-income country to have fallen into stagnation, but its fall has been among the steepest.
Similarly, while public services were in a parlous state in 1997, they are far worse now. The ongoing – and permanent (unless things change) – economic harm of Brexit plus labour shortages and lost inward investment add further challenges.
Labour needs to both effect an economic transformation that will, in turn, enable it to renew public services, and to win public support both for its programme and the time it will take to implement given there are no quick fixes.
That it understands this challenge is clear. Both Starmer and Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves have used set-piece speeches to tell a narrative of Conservative failure as the cause of the nation’s ills and to limit expectations of what a Labour government could achieve.
Reeves has argued that the Conservatives had made four big mistakes: misunderstanding the role of the state in helping to drive growth; austerity; the failure to borrow more during the era of ultra-low interest rates; and Liz Truss’ unfunded tax cuts. Put together, she said, these errors strangled the economy, starved public services, and led to the recent rise in interest rates – adding costs for both government and the public.
To restore growth, she argued for a new model of economic management guided by three imperatives: stability; “stimulating investment through partnership with business”; and reforms to unlock productivity including reform of the planning system.
Starmer used his local elections launch to attack the Conservatives for their failure to 'level up’ and to temper expectations by arguing that Labour cannot “turn the taps on” to fix councils’ £4 billion funding gap.
This is all sensible politics, as is Labour’s refusal to make big spending commitments which it knows it would be unable to meet. And yet, the twin challenges remain.
While economists welcome Reeves’ prescriptions – particularly her commitment to reform the planning system – some query whether they will be enough to bring about the transformation required. Once in power, and faced with both real need and public desire for swift change, the pressure to raise spending and taxes will be hard to contain.
There is pressure on Labour not to go into too much detail. Specific pledges can win support and court opposition or raise questions over how they will be paid for – hence Labour’s step away from big commitments such as the £28 billion it had planned to spend on green infrastructure.
But to win public enthusiasm, as well as benefit from public revulsion at the current Government – and to win public consent for real change to take a full term or more – Labour will need to be more explicit about its plans, priorities and the limits of what can be achieved in the short-term.
The stakes are high. Reeves made clear in her speech her fear that, without widely shared economic growth, democracy itself could be in peril. Rebuilding trust in her party is necessary to rebuild public confidence in politics itself.
The task is not an easy one, but given what is at stake for our country’s economy, public services and faith in democratic politics as the best way to solve collective problems, we should all wish Labour good luck – and seek to play our part in political renewal.
‘A Keir Starmer Government Will Trigger a Revival of the Labour Left’
Owen Jones’ resignation from the Labour party and his proposal for a form of tactical voting to support Greens has brought the subject of the left’s relationship to the Labour Party to a very wide audience. A debate that is usually reserved for the pages of left journals, or among the left on social media, has received much wider attention.
Questions of whether the left should be in or out of Labour have been building for some time. From Jeremy Corbyn's suspension from the party, right through to Labour’s appalling position on Gaza, anger and disaffection has deepened. In some quarters there are arguments against any kind of Labour vote at all, although this is not what Jones himself has said.
Yet while the debate is real, the other side of the discussion is the unarguable fact that Labour is ahead in the polls and will likely form the next Government.
There is no groundswell of warmth and support for the Labour leader. Rejection of the Conservatives, rather than untrammelled enthusiasm for Labour, is driving Labour’s huge poll leads. Straightforward class instinct leads millions of people to reject the Conservatives, who are now widely and deeply disliked. For many, Labour is the only available mechanism to remove the Conservative party from government.
Even if there proves to be a degree of fragmentation in sections of the Labour vote, leading to some independents and Greens winning seats, the overall line of march is towards a Starmer Government. But until that happens, politics in Britain is in a long intermission in which everyone knows the Conservatives are going to lose and the only question is when and by how much.
This impasse in British society is also reflected in the politics of the labour movement.
One principal exception to the impasse is the dynamic pro-Palestine mobilisation against Israel’s killing in Gaza, which has reshaped the politics of protest on a sustained basis.
For now though, with the election in abeyance, we are at peak Starmer. The Labour leadership dominates the party’s central apparatus, which it has used to clamp down on debate, block candidates for selection and withdraw the whip from left-wing MPs. Policy formation has excluded major spending commitments, and thereby debate about the economy outside Rachel Reeves’ 'Securonomics' framework. Even on that narrow basis Labour voluntarily reined itself in further, gutting its own Green Prosperity Plan. But as long as Labour is in opposition there is a tendency to give the party the benefit of the doubt. Some of the more breathless responses to Reeves’ Mais lecture are an example of that.
Labour’s proposed supply-side reforms as a precursor to growth are not a sufficient platform to cope with either the immediate spending pressures built up over years of austerity, nor with the major challenge of the climate crisis. Labour’s plans are reliant on increased private investment whereas public investment is woefully low. As the Resolution Foundation has pointed out, the average OECD country invests nearly 50% more than the UK. Stagnant wages and the attack on disposable household income amount to a massive bottle neck of pressure for higher living standards and improved pay. Many local councils are in crisis. Once in power a Labour Government will face a tension between tight spending, self-imposed rejection of a variety of higher tax options, and the pent-up problems of immediate living standards. What Labour proposes is not equal to the scale of the task it will inherit.
But while there is a mismatch between the needs of the population and the solutions on offer, the real argument about that is not going to move beyond its current terms in any fundamental manner until the blockage of the general election is out of the way. Thus however contradictory it may seem, the formation of a Labour government under the politics of the Starmer leadership is now an essential step in breaking down the dominance of those politics within the labour movement and wider population.
Since Starmer is a leader pursuing a right-wing Labour course it is necessary for that course to first be exposed to the reality of its limitations in office, so his programme and its weaknesses can seen by the largest number of people for what they are.
Until Labour is in office Starmer will continue to be the beneficiary of anti-Conservative sentiment and will receive benefit of the doubt, including within Labour’s own base. Testing the Labour right’s agenda against the realities of power will move the political discourse on from the impasse and the question of getting a Labour government, and onto concrete questions of what the Government should do over living standards, public services and inequality.
Of course this being a Labour Government in waiting, there will still be differences with the Conservatives even under self-imposed constraints. Measures such as the New Deal for Working People, the extension of public ownership for the railways, and some of the remaining green agenda are bound to be opposed within and without the next Government. Figures such as Peter Mandelson, who have sought to water down elements of Labour’s programme, will continue to do so.
But it would be wrong for the left to draw the conclusion that these policies in themselves are sufficient justification for Labour’s otherwise limited package. In its totality the Labour leadership’s trajectory is wholly inadequate to the scale of the problems faced by a majority of the population, and will place the Labour Government in deep contradiction with the needs of working class people. At the same time, a renewed Labour Atlanticism, on display most obviously over Gaza, is bound to draw continued opposition.
We do not have to wait to see what opposition to Labour’s foreign policy means. Mass mobilisation over Gaza and the pro-Palestine movement has completely shaken up a sense that the Labour leadership is impervious to any opposition. The new politics under a Labour Government will not only be fought through the institutions of the labour movement, but also on the streets. A new left politics under a Labour Government will also raise questions about the degree to which the left and the unions are able to work more closely with each other. An inability to do so would give the Labour right more room to manoeuvre than it would otherwise enjoy.
The right of the party knows full well that once in office it will face pressure to go further, or alter course altogether, which is one of the principal reasons for its efforts to immunise the parliamentary party from the left. As the limits of the Labour Government’s programme are tested so there is every likelihood of a radicalisation among at least some sections of society on both domestic and international agendas.
For all the efforts of the leadership of the Labour party to protect itself from this, some elements of that political radicalisation will work their way through Labour and the unions, including those affiliated with the Labour Party. Other movements will be entirely distinct or new.
As the formation of a Labour Government under Starmer brings the present impasse to an end, the tensions at the heart of its project will be laid bare. When that happens, the conditions for the left to rise again will be formed.
Rishi Sunak Will Leave a Long List of ‘Big Nasties’ for the Next Government to Clear Up
The next Government will inherit a long list of 'big nasties' from the Conservatives which will cost hundreds of billions of pounds to clear up, a report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, warns today.
After a year when her committee examined projects across Whitehall, the NHS and schools the chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, Dame Meg Hillier, lists what she calls a catalogue of “big nasties – essential spending which cannot be put off”.
The list includes failed projects to tackle crumbling schools, hospitals, public health laboratories, outdated IT and renewing and refurbishing Parliament.
She warns: "All too often, we have seen money misdirected or squandered, not because of corruption, but because of group-think, intransigence, inertia, and cultures which discourage whistle-blowing. On occasion, the scale of failure has been seismic, such as HS2 or Horizon in the Post Office, or the procurement of PPE during Covid. Other times, there has been a systemic failure to be agile and adaptable as events unfolded.”
Unless this is tackled she warns: “my successors as chair of the PAC will be doomed to a cycle of broken promises and wasted cash in perpetuity.”
The report produces eye-watering shortfalls of money showing where short-termism by the present Government has worsened the state of public services.
In schools instead of spending £5.3 billion a year to refurbish or replace crumbling schools attended by 700,000 pupils, the Treasury cut this to £3.1 billion a year increasing the backlog.
In the NHS the backlog of crumbling hospitals has jumped from £4.7 billion to £10.2 billion after the NHS raided the capital programme to keep patient services going. Despite spending £178.3 billion a year patient services are worse, waiting lists longer, particularly for cancer patients who need urgent treatment.
A delayed £530 million programme to modernise public health laboratories which handle the most dangerous diseases such as Ebola and Lassa fever will now cost £3.2 million. Failure to implement it “would present a significant risk to public health,” says the report.
The report says a decision not to decommission 20 nuclear submarines which have been withdrawn from service since 1980 has left the ministry of defence with a £500m maintenance bill and it has run out of space of where to store them. The ministry now has a £7.5 billion future liability to dispose of them.
The Ministry of Justice now has a £900 million maintenance backlog on the prison estate and plans to create 10,000 new prison places have only seen 206 new places.
Some £100 billion of spending by local councils remains unaccountable because of a shortage of auditors and councils like Birmingham, Nottingham, Slough and Thurrock have gone effectively bankrupt.
The country’s main animal health laboratory in Weybridge, Surrey, has “deteriorated at an alarming extent". It has a £2.8 billion piecemeal redevelopment plan over 15 years but if it fails, “the UK will have no capacity to react to new and emerging animal disease threats”.
There are a large number of failures among IT systems across Whitehall -some of them impacting on the general public – notably the DWP underpaying pensioners.
The report says: “DWP has underpaid pensioners £2.5 billion,138 with errors dating back to 1985, and many more pensioners may still be under-claiming. 90% of these underpaid pensioners are women. The errors were due to outdated systems dating back to 1988.”
The Conservative Party’s Disinformation Machine
"There needs to be greater awareness among the public of the risks [of online disinformation]” the Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden told MPs on Monday, adding that citizens should make themselves aware of the “need to treat images [online] with much more scepticism”.
Yet within minutes of Dowden warning about rogue states spreading disinformation , the Conservative Party had released its own attack advert falsely claiming that London had become a “crime capital of the world”.
The video, which later had to be deleted and re-edited after social media users pointed out it had been illustrated with footage from a terror scare in New York, is still available online despite containing a series of other falsehoods.
It's opening sequencecontinues to suggest that London has now become so dangerous that citizens have been forced to either stay at home or “go underground”. This is obviously untrue.
In fact the latest crime stats actually show that London is among the safest cities in the world, with violent crimes lower than they are in England as a whole.
And while the video claimed that Khan had “seized power” in the city, he had in fact won two mayoral elections by a healthy margin and is currently forecast to win a third by an even larger distance.
The Conservative party’s misinformation video was also linked to a new website detailing claims of what “Life under Labour” would look like.
One of the pictures used to demonstrate this supposed dereliction being experienced under the opposition, was of derelict housing in a Peterborough - a city which until recently was Conservative-led and is now independent, without any Labour control.
A source close to Sadiq Khan told Byline Times that the party’s latest attack on him, led by their candidate Susan Hall, was “true to form for the Tory campaign. It’s a deeply misleading attack, intentionally talking down London from a candidate who appears to have no love for the city she aspires to lead.”
The video is not a one off, however. In recent days Hall has repeatedly tied crime rates in the city to Khan's closure of a number of police stations to Londoners, while refusing to acknowledge that the closure programme actually began under the last Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson.
Not everyone in the party appears willing to go along with such misinformation, however.
The party’s former Minister for London, whose bid to become their candidate for City Hall was reportedly blocked by Rishi Sunak, shared his discomfort with the party's latest attack ad.
A post shared on X by Scully, attacked the “deeply negative video” about London and warned that the party should not be “disrespectful to Londoners”.
Yet showing such disrespect to this city of eight million people appears to be a big part of the Conservative party's political strategy.
'A Dog Whistle in a City With No Dogs'
Despite briefings from both side that the race between Khan and Hall is close, recent polls suggest that the Labour incumbent is more than 20 points ahead of his rival. As a result, the Conservatives appear to be putting very little effort into their ground campaign.
At her campaign launch last weekend, in what appeared to be a car park in Uxbridge, Hall was not joined by Rishi Sunak, or any other senior Cabinet minister. And whereas Khan’s own launch last week was accompanied by Keir Starmer and attended by multiple media outlets, the Conservative party appears to have deliberately excluded any journalists from attending Hall’s launch.
A spokesman for Hall did not respond to a request for comment on why journalists had been excluded.
However, while the Conservatives appear to have abandoned any real hope of fairly defeating Khan, they do appear determined to continue using the city as a tool for their campaign in the rest of the country.
By portraying London and other Labour-led cities such as Birmingham, as crime-ridden hellscapes, no matter what the facts actually show, the party is attempting to send out a dog-whistle message to its potential supporters in other parts of the country.
This strategy, which includes the Prime Minister regularly mocking Keir Starmer’s own London background, is a clear attempt to do down the UK’s capital city in an attempt to win votes elsewhere.
This strategy has sometimes backfired, most recently when the party’s then Deputy Chairman Lee Anderson falsely accused London’s Muslim mayor of being in league with Islamic extremists. However, it is not a new one.
When Khan first stood to win back City Hall for Labour in 2016, the Conservatives subjected him to a sustained campaign attempting to tie him to Islamic extremism. At the time one senior London Conservative described it to me as being a "Dog whistle campaign in a city with no dogs".
Yet while such dog whistle misinformation may have had little effect on Londoners themselves, Rishi Sunak and his party still appear to believe that it will have an impact elsewhere.
Just like Brexit campaign, which relied on spreading false claims about millions of Turks heading the UK, the Conservative party's latest campaign is designed to play on the worst prejudices of swing voters, while abandoning any interest in accuracy or the truth.
So while we have heard much from the Government in recent weeks about the threats of deep fakes and online 'extremism', the reality is that when it comes to inciting division and spreading misinformation, there are few parties who have proven more adept at it than the Conservative party.
‘Starmer Cosied Up to the Murdoch Press in the Same Week It Faced New Allegations of Criminality – Why?’
What is the word for a politician who will do anything to get hold of power?
The question arises thanks to the front page of Friday's Sun newspaper, on which, beneath a banner reading "Labour leader at Sun HQ", we were told that "Keir joins revolt over 3 Lions shirt – he blasts woke flag and high price".
There are only two possibilities here. Either the Leader of the Labour Party sincerely believes that the design of the England football shirt is a matter that should properly engage the attention of a leader of the Opposition. Or – surely much more likely – he just doesn’t care what he says so long as it gets him nice coverage in the Sun, in which case he provides an answer to the question above.
It is actually worse than that, because this is only the latest evidence that Starmer is selling his soul to Murdoch.
He has already attended the media baron's summer party, paying personal homage to the old man and drinking his champagne. And now he is happy to visit the Sun’s offices and play rent-a-quote in support of a vacuous anti-woke jibe.
In terms of displaying lack of principle, this obviously does not compete with refusing to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and failing to acknowledge the economic disaster that is Brexit, but it is amoral in its own way.
For the Murdoch press is not only responsible, over decades, for demeaning everything that could be described as decent about Britain and for wrecking the lives of countless innocent people – it is also responsible for wholesale, proven law-breaking.
And remarkably, Starmer’s visit to ‘Sun HQ’ took place just a day after we were presented with a new and shocking picture of the scale of that criminality – some of it well established as fact, some in the form of fresh and very detailed accusations.
It comes in a series of monster documents revealed in court, some of which can be accessed here.
These latest legal claims allege that law-breaking at the Murdoch tabloids has been even more widespread and systematic, has persisted for much longer and has implicated even more staff and senior executives than previously acknowledged.
The allegations extend far beyond phone-hacking and unlawful information gathering to include, for example, perjury and the deliberate destruction of evidence of criminality – matters which, you might think, would be of concern to a former Director of Public Prosecutions such as Starmer.
And though – yes, this needs to be placed on record – the company continues to deny a good deal of it, the Labour leadership should ask itself why the company systematically chooses to avoid confronting the charges in open court and instead pays off the claimants, thus far at a cost of £1.2 billion.
Quite a few of Labour's new chums are named in the documents.
There is an awful lot, for example, about Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s longstanding CEO in the UK and a former Editor of the Sun. She knew more and earlier about criminal activities than previously admitted, the documents allege, and they suggest directly that she participated in the cover-up. Again, she has denied these things and was cleared of similar criminal charges back in 2014, but the new claims draw on a wealth of evidence not available back then, including evidence relating to the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone.
The name of the Sun’s current Editor, Victoria Newton, also keeps turning up in the court documents in very dark contexts. How, for example, will she account for the email she sent Brooks in 2006 saying "just blagged the bill from the Dorchester now – 11 grand – v expensive?"
And there is veteran Sun reporter Nick Parker who, phone records show, phoned a specialist blagger of medical records 1,763 times between 2005 and 2010 – more than once every working day.
The catalogue of names and worse-than-doubtful alleged behaviour is very long – and the allegations relate to events up to 2011, including during the Leveson Inquiry into the press, when Murdoch witnesses swore blind they had never done anything dodgy.
Ancient history, people will say. Hardly.
These are people Keir Starmer is associating himself with right now. And remember that Murdoch is also still the owner of Fox, a channel that encouraged an insurrection in the US in 2020.
People will also say there is nothing new in it all, because Tony Blair sucked up to Murdoch before the 1997 election and Gordon Brown was pally with Brooks before 2010. Well, we now know that Murdoch people hacked Labour phones behind those leaders’ backs – shouldn’t Starmer and his people see that as a warning?
And, of course, people will also say that you need to do unpleasant things to win power, which brings us back to the question we started with. Surely there is a line you don’t cross? And, surely, given all we know about his methods, Murdoch must be on the far side of that line.
Keir Starmer To Hand ‘New Powers’ to Mayors and Regions as He Extends Olive Branch to Sadiq Khan
The Labour party is set to unveil more details of its plans to devolve powers away from Westminster, Byline Times understands.
Some details of the proposals are expected to be outlined in a speech by the party's Deputy Leader Angela Rayner later this week.
The intervention follows notable tensions between the Labour leader and England's two most high-profile elected Mayors, Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham.
Khan and Starmer clashed last summer over the London mayor's plans to implement a now-enacted low emission zone in outer London, while Burnham has criticised Starmer's decision to U-turn on his plans for green investment and House of Lords reform.
Starmer's appearance earlier this week alongside Khan for the launch of the London Mayor’s re-election campaign marked an apparent attempt to heal divisions after a period of real tensions between the two politicians.
The Labour leader’s very public criticism of Khan’s flagship decision to bring in an Ultra Low Emission Zone in Outer London last summer was met with significant anger by some of those around the Mayor.
At the time, sources close to Khan expressed frustration at Starmer’s decision to attack a policy which by that point was just weeks away from being rolled out. They also warned that Starmer’s intervention risked giving oxygen to the Conservative party’s anti-ULEZ campaign in the then upcoming Uxbridge by-election.
Their warning appeared to pan out, with the Conservatives pulling off a surprise win in Uxbridge and Rishi Sunak using the result as justification to ditch much of his own Government’s green agenda. Half a year on and Khan believes his original policy has been vindicated.
“When we brought in ULEZ in central London there were people who were very hostile and anti and the truth is that the sky didn’t fall in” Khan told this paper.
“And the great news is that 19 out of 20 cars seen driving into [the new zone] now on an average day are compliant [with ULEZ]… and this has transformed the air in our city.”
Repairing Relations
The two men’s appearance at a London community centre on Monday appeared to be attempt to move on from the row.
It was particularly notable that in his speech, Starmer praised his “friend" Khan's agenda on cleaning up London’s air, saying that “I say to people who challenge me on cleaner air, I’ve got two kids. They’re 15 and 13. I wouldn’t give them dirty water to drink and I wouldn’t want them to breathe in dirty air.”
However, he failed to specifically endorse the ULEZ policy. A spokesman for Starmer later told this paper that the Labour leaders’s view on the policy “hasn't changed”.
A source close to Khan admitted that relations between City Hall and the Labour leader's office had been strained by the ULEZ row.
Other policy differences do still remain between Khan and Starmer.
An example of these came on Monday when Starmer was asked about Khan’s proposals to implement a form of rent controls in London. The Labour leader poured cold water on the idea, saying that “it’s not our policy at the moment.”
However, despite these ongoing differences, Khan’s team retain hope that a Starmer Government could prove pivotal for London.
Over the past eight years Khan has been a regular target of successive Conservative Governments, who have tightly held the purse strings on new London infrastructure projects. Khan's recent treatment by former Conservative Chairman Lee Anderson, who was accused of making a series of Islamophobic comments about the London mayor, was seen as emblematic of this.
City Hall hope that a relations with central government would be transformed if Starmer enters Downing Street.
In particular Khan's campaign pledge to build tens of thousands of new council homes is seen as lining up with the party's own national proposals to increase housebuilding.
Yet as well as being potentially more amenable to investing in London, Khan is also pinning his hopes on an incoming Labour Prime Minister handing over big new powers to the Mayor.
“I'm really optimistic about the next Labour government devolving more powers and resources to the cities and regions,” Khan told this paper.
“The key things we’re talking about are in relation to planning, skills and the economy.”
Khan pointed to proposals by the London Finance Commission to give the Mayor new powers to raise infrastructure funding as the sort of proposals he would be lobbying Starmer to adopt in office.
“We've done the heavy lifting on this so we're hoping in the first 100 days that you'll see the fruits of [those proposals].”
A spokesman for Starmer told this paper that the Labour leader accepted “the need for more powers for regional mayors” on areas including skills and welfare.
Devolution 2.0?
Labour proposals to devolve additional powers to the Mayor were set out in a report for the party by Gordon Brown two years ago, but little has been confirmed since.
However, with a general election looming later this year, Labour sources suggested that some details of these new devolution proposals would be set out by the party’s deputy leader Angela Rayner during a speech later this week.
Labour's devolution proposals are unlikely to be as impactful as anything pursued by Tony Blair during his first term as Prime Minister, however. The big wave of devolution rolled out by the then Labour Prime Minister was transformative, creating devolved government in both Scotland and Wales, as well as rolling out regional mayors and authorities across England.
Little proposed so far by Starmer appears to match that level of ambition, with previous plans for a new “senate of the regions” to replace the House of Lords, also reportedly being reconsidered by Starmer’s team.
However, with Labour dampening down expectations of big new spending proposals, the devolution agenda poses an opportunity for an incoming Starmer government to make real differences to the political landscape of the UK, at relatively little expense.
It could also help to contrast with the failure of the Government's own promise to "level up" the country. A Parliamentary report last week found that 90% of projects promised by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson remained years away from completion.
A spokesman for Starmer told journalists on Wednesday that the party would ditch the phrase "levelling up" if they form the next Government.
It’s the Conservative Party Which Most ‘Undermines British Values’, Say Voters
A majority of British voters now believe that it's the Conservative Party which truly doesn’t understand British values, an exclusive new poll commissioned by Byline Times suggests.
Rishi Sunak's Government this week set out its new definition of “extremism” with new restrictions to be placed on individuals and organisations it perceives to be “undermining British values”.
However, new polling conducted this week by pollsters We Think for this paper found that 61% of those surveyed do not believe the Conservative Party “understands British values”, with a further 58% saying the same of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
By contrast, a majority of those surveyed said that the Labour Party (57%) and its leader Keir Starmer (56%) do in fact understand British values.
Those surveyed were also presented with a list of 21 organisations, political parties, companies and individuals, including the Muslim Council of Britain and Britain First and asked to select all those they believed to be “undermining British values”.
Among the options offered, the Conservative Party was the most picked, with 31% saying the party undermines British values, followed by 29% who picked ‘the Government’.
The third most picked organisation was the Muslim Council of Britain, which was selected by 23% of those surveyed.
Byline Times exclusively revealed his week that the MCB, which represents mosques and Islamic organisations around the UK, had been removed from Michael Gove’s draft list of “extremist” groups amid legal fears among officials.
The list of those set to be targeted by ministers was leaked to this paper on the eve of Gove’s statement to Parliament.
It prompted a formal Government leak inquiry, with Gove telling MPs that such leaks were "fundamentally a challenge to the effective operation of government”.
Voters Want Conservatives to Hand Back Hester Cash
Voters were also asked what they think about the Conservative party’s continued refusal to hand back the £15 million they have received in donations from the businessman Frank Hester.
The Guardian revealed this week that Hester had called for the MP Diane Abbott to be shot, as she made him “want to hate all black women”.
Sunak's Government initially defended Hester, before eventually admitting that his comments had been “racist and wrong”.
However, despite admitting this, the party is still refusing to hand back the money received from Hester, with the Prime Minister telling MPs he was proud to have received donations from him.
This refusal to return the money puts the party firmly out of step with the British public, according to our poll, which found that 63% of those surveyed believe the party should return the money.
The Hester case has also helped to highlight the broader issue of party funding. Hester made the donations to the Conservatives after having received tens of millions of pounds in Government contracts, via his company TPP.
Asked where those who donate to political parties should be banned from receiving Government contracts, 70% of those surveyed agreed, compared to just 30% who disagreed.
Jeremy Hunt’s Tax Cuts are Paid for by Slashing Public Services – So Why is Labour So Silent About It?
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt attempted to salt the earth for Labour in his Spring Budget – stealing the party’s policy on scrapping the so-called non-dom tax status and launching tax cuts the party will struggle to oppose.
The 2p cut to National Insurance contributions, however, is funded by big cuts to departmental spending under the next government, and mysterious “productivity gains” from the public sector.
Today’s Office for Budget responsibility forecast states that the Budget is based on there being “no real growth in departmental spending per person over the next five years”, with a real cut in many departments’ budgets of 2.3% a year from 2025 to 2026. In other words: most likely when this Government is out of office.
Cutting public services alongside tax cuts is “a political con trick – giving with one hand while taking with another”, the head of the Trades Union Congress argued.
It’s early days, but Labour has been studiously quiet so far on the plans for future spending cuts.
TUC General Secretary Paul Nowak said in a statement: “This is a deeply cynical Budget. The Chancellor knows he won’t have to live with the consequences of the savage spending cuts he’s already imposed across large parts of our public services.”
I asked a Labour spokesman what the party thought of the cut to National Insurance contributions. "We supported the NIC cut last year and we will be supporting the NIC cut today," he said.
Labour’s response when reporters asked if it would oppose anything in the Budget was this: “We’re not going to oppose for opposition’s sake. And given that many of the policies seem to come from our own side, we'll obviously be supporting those. But at the moment, there's not a specific measure we would say we oppose."
Now, the language around the budget was of course negative – with Labour branding the non-dom policy shift a “humiliating U-turn”. But it was a U-turn that Labour clearly supported. The party's reaction looks thin, at best, when the facts from the OBR are considered.
According to the OBR's March 2024 Budget analysis, the Government plans “no real growth in departmental spending per person over the next five years. Within this envelope the Government has committed to, among other things, an NHS workforce plan that implies real [spending] growth of 3.6% each year and holding defence spending constant at 2% of GDP, with ambitions to raise it to 2.5% of GDP. Meeting these and other commitments on schools, childcare, and overseas aid spending would imply a real cut in all other departments’ budgets of 2.3% a year from 2025 to 2026.”
To illustrate the scale of the trap, in a normal year under the current Government, departmental expenditure was topped up “by an average of [more than] £32 billion a year” the OBR states. Now the Government is planning cuts of tens of billions per year, mañana.
Labour chose not to echo the Scottish National Party in its rhetoric – despite it being Labour that’s likely to face the fall-out from the Chancellor’s pledges. The SNP’s economy spokesperson, Drew Hendry MP, said the Government is "cutting public services to the bone" – noting that Jeremy Hunt had “ushered in another decade of austerity cuts at the UK budget”.
The progressive IPPR think tank dubbed it a “slash and crash” Budget, with today’s tax cuts implying “unfeasible and undesirable public spending cuts in the future”.
Harry Quilter-Pinner, its director of policy and politics, said “no one believes” that future cuts to day-to-day spending are possible, or that squeezing public investment further is sensible.
“The Government chose to slash taxes today at the expense of crashing public services tomorrow," he added. "With the NHS, pensions, childcare and defence spending likely to be protected, future spending plans imply big cuts across other key public services."
That means areas like education, local councils and the environment are facing further catastrophic cuts.
Health figures themselves – despite NHS budgets being protected – recognise the risks. As the Health Foundation has noted, while some extra cash for the NHS is welcome, “other public services are still likely to take a substantial hit, with the OBR stating that unprotected departments will receive a 2.3% a year real-terms cut in funding from 2025/2026”.
That, in turn, will “leave the wider public services that support good health, including local government, under significant pressure”.
Dr George Dibb, associate director for economic policy at IPPR, added that almost 50p of every £1 of the Budget will go to the richest fifth of households, with just 3% going to the poorest fifth.
Of course, it was unsurprising that Labour welcomed reforming the non-dom tax system and higher tax on holiday rentals. A further levy on first-class air travel is also unlikely to be reversed by Keir Starmer's party.
But what of the Chancellor’s cuts to capital gains tax on property wealth or the never-ending freeze on fuel duty?
Gideon Salutin, senior researcher at the Social Market Foundation think tank, said the continued freeze – which will cost around £5 billion – will “fuel more inequality”. The richest tenth of households in the UK will save an extra £60 a year from the freeze, while the poorest receive only £22.
It has calculated that the Government has lost £130 billion on cuts and freezes to fuel duty over the past 13 years – while only decreasing the average household’s motoring costs by £13 a month.
“Achieving a more meaningful reduction in transport expenses requires the Government to invest in cheaper, greener alternatives like public transport and electric vehicles, but today’s Budget did little to enhance those options for low income households,” Salutin said.
The Conservatives have, perhaps ironically, left the door open for Labour to scrap the fuel duty freeze. Why? Because much of the Budget’s ‘success’ in meeting Hunt’s fiscal rules stems from the sly accounting wheeze of claiming that fuel duty will rise in future years... a stark contrast to the decade-plus of constant freezes.
But for all the traps, the Government is unlikely to reap many electoral rewards from the Budget. Even the bosses’ club, the Institute of Directors, noted that it was obvious Hunt’s plans were “aimed at rallying political support rather than addressing the UK’s longer-term economic issues”.
“It fell short of delivering a comprehensive plan for sustainable growth and investment," a spokesperson added.
It’s there for everyone to see, from boss to worker. Average GDP growth has been just 1.5% since 2010 – the worst for any government since the Great Depression. This year, real-terms pay for workers is still below the level it was in 2008.
Councils are literally collapsing, while having to hike regressive council tax to the highest levels ever. The latest Local Government Information Unit research found that half of councils believe they could face bankruptcy within the next Parliament.
Again, Hunt has effectively placed that in Labour’s camp to worry about. Or, if by some sorcery the Conservatives are re-elected (the polls are consistently not projecting this as a likely outcome), they will attempt to blame it on ‘profligate’ local authorities.
When public services continue to be on their knees, it's likely most people would choose having a functioning society over a 2% tax cut.
Polling last month for the The Fairness Foundation by Opinium showed that two in three Brits oppose tax cuts if they result in cuts to spending on public services. And nearly two-thirds (64%) support maintaining or increasing taxes. By contrast, only 16% support cutting taxes if it means cutting public services.
Is Labour now in that minority – that 16% – supporting tax cuts funded by spending cuts?
Starmer's party is ruling out tax rises and pinning its hopes on growth, growth, growth. Should that not be forthcoming, the sunlit uplands may start to look a lot shadier.
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‘Starmer Should Ignore the Westminster Pearl-Clutching: Why Labour is Right to Look at Citizens’ Assemblies’
It’s become the cue for every citizens’ assembly advocate to down their drink whenever they hear a politico grumble 'we have a citizens’ assembly – it’s called Parliament’.
This cry – whether from outlets like the Spectator or from keyboard warriors – can always be predicted whenever the prospect of a citizens’ assembly raises its head.
But a citizens’ assembly is a far cry from a system centred on political parties, where members are not demographically representative of the UK population, competition abounds, and individuals are whipped to hold the party line.
In fact, the irony of this response, one steeped in party political culture, is that citizens’ assemblies represent an answer – even an antidote – to Parliament’s limitations. Randomly selected citizens, demographically balanced to be a mirror of the UK population are convened to reason collectively, to consider expert evidence and to have deep, thoughtful discussions which should arrive at complex, nuanced decisions for the long term. As such, they’ve been called ‘democracy under good conditions’.
So the news this week that Labour (via Chief of Staff Sue Gray) is open to introducing citizens’ assemblies for the biggest, most complex concerns of our time – housebuilding, House of Lords reform and devolution – should be applauded.
As citizens’ assemblies have proliferated across the world – from Brazil to Australia to France – public awareness of them has grown too.
Dispelling the myth that they represent some kind of wacky democratic experiment, they have been credited with tackling some of the toughest political and ethical questions – such as abortion, AI, hate crime and nuclear power –generating balanced and often surprising solutions, and most importantly restoring a level of trust in citizens’ ability to find common ground.
They have established themselves as a tried-and-tested tool in our democratic arsenal. Those who believe they still have to prove themselves simply haven’t been paying attention.
However, based on my research into their effectiveness in the UK, there are three important risks that the Labour Party must avoid if it is to conduct meaningful and powerful citizens’ assemblies.
The first is that they can fail when there is a lack of buy-in from the political body that sets them up. Politicians who commit to handing over a salient issue to a citizens’ assembly must prepare to receive their carefully crafted proposals, to respond seriously to them, and to involve citizens in the process.
It is right for leaders to have a view on the issues: they have been elected with particular principles and policies in mind, and they shouldn’t simply enact the proposals without scrutiny. But, unless and until they are prepared to cede a measure of control to the participants, and to promise to take action as a result, they risk doing more harm than good by alienating citizens and cementing a view that politicians don’t take citizens seriously.
Secondly, Labour must think carefully about how the issues it selects for review – such as House of Lords and devolution – are deeply enmeshed in other democratic and constitutional dilemmas.
I spent a year trying to design a Constitutional Convention (a citizens’ assembly convened to examine constitutional issues) and one of the trickiest design conundrums was how to both limit the scope of the convention so it didn’t become unwieldy, while admitting how closely interwoven these questions are.
For example, questions about the upper chamber – particularly after former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s proposal for a Senate of the Region and Nations – lead to further questions about the status of devolution: how will the UK be carved up, how will regions be defined, and who will be able to represent them?
And it is very difficult to address either House of Lords reform (with a proposed Senate elected by a proportional voting system) or devolution (which inevitably asks us to look at constituencies and representational imbalance) without looking square in the face of electoral reform.
This could be done through delicate sequencing of debates (the Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in the UK handled this admirably) or by looking at them all in the round at a Constitutional Convention.
Labour Together’s own polling in fact found that key Labour voters placed reform of the voting system as highest on their list of democratic reform priorities (citizens’ assemblies came second). It seems they may not accept it being shut out of the scope of a citizens’ assembly.
Finally, there is the legitimate criticism that a citizens’ assembly involves a tiny number of citizens, no matter how representative, to make decisions of some gravity. To address this concern, and get more democratic bang for your buck, they should precipitate a lively national conversation about the topics at hand so that citizens across the UK feel drawn into the discourse.
This might look like a large-scale public event to kick off the process, coupled with a roadshow that toured the country, picking up proposals and taking the temperature across the regions and nations. It might sound expensive, but the opportunity for the entire country to participate in this democratic experiment would be invaluable, and would provide a sense of proximity to the citizens’ assembly process – making the longevity of its decisions more likely.
The advantages of going big would also present the chance for experiential political education around deliberative democracy more generally – to sweep away some of the misconceptions about citizens’ assemblies and plant a flag for future deliberative processes.
These benefits were seen in Ireland, with its series of citizens’ assemblies examining the constitution – from everything to the much-celebrated citizens’ assemblies on abortion and equal marriage, to those looking at women’s place in society and on climate change.
What might have been a small-scale, contained process that only affected participants grew into a moment of national renewal in Ireland which addressed profound questions about its place in the world and the kind of country it wanted to be. Perhaps this is not what Labour has in mind – but there are many reasons why 2025 is an auspicious time to launch that conversation.
If some of this sounds too ambitious, too big, it’s worth reminding ourselves that the crisis of politics is fundamentally a crisis of democracy. UK democracy is at a profoundly low ebb, with record levels of distrust and alienation, and a public ground down to believe that nothing really ever changes.
Citizens’ assemblies are not the only answer, but they embody a lot of what democracy needs: more citizens involved in taking power, demonstrating a different way of doing politics and making decisions, creating collaborative solutions to collective problems, and renewing their democratic faith in each other.
And while critics might rail on social media that citizens’ assemblies are an ‘abdication of politicians’ responsibility’, I would counter that the basic problem is that citizens don’t trust politicians. Much is needed to be done to restore this trust, but one of the first steps is showing that politicians trust citizens.
As a show of strength, confidence and investment in our democratic future, what could be more powerful than that?
Frances Foley is deputy director of the cross-party group Compass
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