Labour plays down row with Donald Trump over claim of US election interference – UK politics live

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Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has said that “the main taxes that working people pay” will not be going up in the budget.

In an interview with Matt Chorley for his Radio 5 Live show being broadcast this afternoon, asked if people earning more than £100,000 would have to pay more tax under the measures in next week’s budget, Reeves replied:

We said that because working people had already paid the burden under the last government, we wouldn’t increase the taxes, the main taxes that working people pay, so income tax - all rates - national insurance and VAT. So those taxes that working people pay, we’re not increasing those taxes in the budget.

She also said there would be no return to austerity.

We go into this budget with a number of challenges - the £22bn black hole just this year, in the public finances, the unfinanced company compensation schemes, for example on infected blood and Horizon, it’s really important that we honour but they weren’t in the forecasts from the previous government.

The fact that the previous government had baked in austerity to our public spending settlements in the years to come, and we committed to not return to austerity.

And so all of those things mean that, yes, we do need to find additional money.

Greg Swenson, chair of Republicans Overseas UK, has said that, even if the Labour volunteering effort for the Democrats was not illegal, it was a mistake.

In an interview on Times Radio, asked if the initiative would backfired, he replied:

It’s hard to disagree with that. It is election interference. I think it’s a mistake. I think it will backfire not only on the Democrats here, on Kamala Harris, but I think it will backfire on Labour in some respects.

So, yeah, I think it’s uncool. I don’t know if it’s illegal, but I think it’s uncool.

He also claimed it was unfair to compare what the Labour volunteers were doing with Nigel Farage backing Donald Trump. He said:

[Trump and Farage] have been friends a long time. So the fact that Nigel supports Trump is just because they were friends long before the recent election. So anyway, I think it’s apples and oranges. And I don’t think it ends up hurting Trump to have him.

Health secretary Wes Streeting to vote against assisted dying bill over concerns NHS not ready to deliver it safely

The health secretary Wes Streeting is to vote against the assisted dying bill, saying he had concluded that end-of-life care was currently not fit to deliver it safely.

Speaking to Labour backbenchers, Streeting said he had initially believed in the right to choose by terminally ill patients but said that he had changed his mind given the degraded state of the health service.

The move by the health secretary is likely to seed some doubt among MPs ahead of the free vote at the end of November. The justice secretary Shabana Mahmood has also said she will vote against the bill from the backbencher Kim Leadbeater, citing her faith as a reason to oppose it. She told The Times that she had an “unshakeable belief in the sanctity and the value of human life”.

Keir Starmer, whose mother suffered from a degenerative illness, has said he is in favour of assisted dying and had promised there would be a parliamentary vote – though said it should come via a private members’ bill.

Streeting has previously spoken publicly about his doubts about legalising assisted dying, but confirmed his decision to vote against in comments at the Labour PLP meeting on Monday night, according to the Times. Sources close to Streeting confirmed that was his decision.

Cabinet ministers have been told they are allowed to express an opinion on the matter but have been cautioned against getting involved heavily in one side of the debate.

Leadbeater’s bill, which will be debated on 29 November, would restrict assisted dying to terminally ill patients and requires two doctors and a judge to sign off the procedure.

Streeting told the FT Weekend festival earlier this year that he was unusually torn over the decision – having voted for it in the past. He told the FT Weekend Festival last month:

Underneath that philosophical ethical question are a whole series of practical ones about which I am deeply uncomfortable.

Candidly, when I think about this question of being a burden, I do not think that palliative care, end-of-life care in this country is in a condition yet where we are giving people the freedom to choose, without being coerced by the lack of support available.

That is one of the reasons why I can buy into the principle and think about people in my own life who have really suffered at the end of life and not want to impose my views on assisted dying as to whether they should have a choice. But I am not sure as a country we have the right end-of-life care available to enable a real choice on assisted dying.

Wes Streeting Photograph: Thomas Krych/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock

John Healey, the defence secretary, has suggested that the Trump campaign complaints about Labour are little more than an electoral stunt.

As the BBC reports, Healey told BBC Radio Sheffield that the Trump campaign “got this wrong” and that there was no organised effort to interfer with the election, against electoral law.

Healey said the people going to the US were individual Labour members. He added:

There’s no organised deal on this - they’re all volunteers, they pay their way …

This is Trump’s campaign doing what campaigns do, creating controversy during an election.

Healey also said Labour would “work with whatever president the American people elect”.

Farage claims Labour volunteers were breaching US electoral law – despite his own record backing Trump

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader who has spoken in support of Donald Trump at rallies in the US, has claimed that when a Labour official encouraged people working for the party to volunteer in support of Kamala Harris’s campaign, that was against US law.

Speaking on GB News, Farage said:

They have perfectly clear rules that whilst people from overseas can come take part in campaigns, make statements, appear on media, all things incidentally that I’ve done over the years, what they can’t do is do it if they’re being funded.

Now, the important thing about the LinkedIn advert that went out to Labour employees and supporters is no mention was made that you’d have to pay your own air fare.

No mention was made that you’d have to take time off work and not have your salary paid. And of course, on top of that, they were told free accommodation would be provided.

If you take that at face value, it is a very clear breach of American electoral law, and that is what the Trump campaign is complaining about.

Farage also said that, when he spoke at a major Trump rally in 2016, he made a point of telling the audience he was not telling them how to vote. And he was not paid, he says.

But in the register of members’ interests Farage declares as a donation worth £32,836 flights and accommodation paying for him to visit the Republican convention in July. Under purpose of the visit, he says: “To support a friend who was almost killed and to represent Clacton on the world stage.” The donation was from a British cryptocurrency investor, Christopher Harborne.

And, as Rowena Mason revealed in the Guardian last week, in the register Farage did not mention the free PR support he got from a Republican PR firm during the trip, or the fact that the company settled his $3,531.10 hotel bill.

Opinion in the commentator class is divided as to whether the Trump/Labour election interference row is just largely confected nonsense, or whether it is really quite serious. In his Inside Politics briefing for the Financial Times, Stephen Bush inclines to the latter view. Here is an excerpt.

Keir Starmer is wholly correct when he says it is normal for Labour party staffers and former Labour party staffers to volunteer their own time in US presidential campaigns.

But the big and important difference now is that Donald Trump is a very different kind of politician. In the unlikely event that Poilievre loses the next Canadian general election, Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberals, would not freeze out a Jenrick-led British government. Clinton and John Major worked well on a range of issues, as did Tony Blair and George W Bush. Trump is mercurial, unpredictable and chaotic.

If Trump does return to the White House in November, that will, I think, be the defining moment in the life of the Labour government. Any hope of a return to “normal” politics will die alongside Kamala Harris’s presidential ambitions. Starmer’s government will have to find a new way of approaching the US-UK relationship: and what has, until now, been a “normal” exchange of volunteers between the two countries’ major centre-left parties may soon become a major diplomatic liability.

Steve Reed, the environment secretary, has said that when he accepted free football tickets from a company last year, he did not know it was owned by a firm that owns most of Northumbria Water.

Reed accepted the tickets, donated by a phone company, last year, when he was shadow environment secretary.

In an interview with Sky News this morning, asked if he knew that CK Hutchison Holdings, who donated the tickets, owned 75% of CK Infrastructure Holdings, the owner of Northumbrian Water, Reed replied:

There was nobody from a water company that was involved in offering those tickets. There was nobody from a water company at that event.

Asked if he would take the tickets again, Reed replied:

I probably wouldn’t, but I didn’t know at the time and it hasn’t influenced a single decision that I’ve taken.

Asked why he would not do the same thing again, he told the presenter, Kay Burley:

The implication, Kay, is it somehow influences the decisions that I’m taking … I wasn’t aware that there was any relationship with a water company. Water wasn’t discussed even for one second at that event.

I’m doing the best by the public: The things that we said we do in the general election. My intention is to reset a failing water sector so it serves customers and the environment in a way it hasn’t done for decades.

UK will start running short of drinking water in 10 years if infrastructure does not improve, says minister

Steve Reed, the environment secretary, has said that Britain will start running short of drinking water in about 10 years if action is not taken to improve infrastructure.

In an interview with LBC to defend the need for the review of the water industry he is launching today, Reed said:

The lack of water infrastructure is now holding back economic growth in this country, so we can’t build the homes that we need in parts of the country.

Cambridge, for instance, lacks clean water supply. Oxford lacks sewage systems sufficient to allowed house building to go ahead.

And a third point here is that by the mid-2030s unless we take action to increase water supply – reservoirs as well as infrastructure – then the demand for drinking water will start to outstrip supply, in a way that already happens in some Mediterranean countries.

We cannot allow the water system, the water sector, to continue in this way.

Steve Reed says it is 'perfectly normal' for political activists to volunteer in other countries' election campaigns

Good morning. Steve Reed, the environment secretary, has been doing the morning interview round, and he expected to be talking about the appointment of an independent commission, led by the former Treasury official and former deputy governor of the Bank of England Sir Jon Cunliffe, to consider the future of the water industry. Details were briefed out last night, here is the news release, and here is Helena Horton’s story.

But instead Reed has spent the morning fending off a rather bizarre story about the Trump campaign filing a complaint with election regulators in the US alleging that the Labour party is interfering in the US presidential election. Eleni Courea has the details here.

In an interview with the Today programme, Reed said that it was “perfectly normal” for political activists to volunteer in election campaigns in other countries. In an interview with the Today programme, he said:

It’s up to private individuals what they do with their free time, and it’s actually perfectly normal for people who are interested in politics to go from one country to campaign for a sister party in another country. I‘ve seen Americans in the UK doing that in our elections.

He also said the pro-Democrat volunteering effort had not been official organised or funded by the Labour party.

None of this has been organised or paid for by the Labour party. This is just individuals using their own time and their own money.

Asked about a post on LinkedIn from Sofia Patel, head of operations at the Labour party, inviting more people to volunteer and saying their housing would be sorted out, Reed said Today programme would have to be speak to her, but “the Labour party has nothing to do with organising this”.

When it was put to him that the fact that the post has been taken down was an admission that it was badly worded, Reed just said he had not seen it.

Reed is right, of course. Volunteering like this is routine (Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, helped out with the Bill Clinton campaign at one stage in 1992), and the Trump campaign don’t seem too bothered about British inteference when the person doing the interfering is Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader. In one respect, the most interesting feature of the story is the fact that Donald Trump and his campaign team appear to be the only people on the planet who think that Keir Starmer’s Labour party is “far left”.

But Trump may well win the US presidential election in two weeks’ time and, although Starmer has been scrupulous about being respectful towards him as PM, and describes their relationship as “good”, Trump is unpredictable and vindictive, and so this could be a story with repercussions.

Starmer is spending all day travelling to the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, so we are not going to hear much more from him on this. But we’ve got PMQs, and so the topic may come up there.

Here is the agenda for the day.

11.30am: John Healey, the defence secretary, holds a press conference with his German counterpart, Boris Pistorius, after they signed a UK-Germany defence pact.

Noon: Angela Rayner, the deputy PM, faces Oliver Dowden, the shadow deputy PM, at PMQs.

After 12.30pm: MPs debate regulations relating to the infected blood compensation scheme.

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