'Very, very premature' to be talking about interest rate cut, Bank of England governor warns
The Bank of England has warned against complacency after its interest rate was frozen at 5.25%.
Rishi Sunak watering down green pledges not a ‘cynical ploy’ but what is ‘right’, says business secretary | Politics News
Rishi Sunak’s watering down of climate pledges is not a “cynical ploy” – but is rather the prime minister doing “what is right”, Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch has said.
Last night, Mr Sunak announced a raft of changes to the UK’s climate pledges, including delaying the ban on the sale of new internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles by five years to 2035.
The prime minister explained that he was making the changes as the previous plans were unaffordable and unachievable.
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However, as Sky science and technology editor Tom Clarke explained, the decision seemed to be more about politics – and the general election expected next year – than the climate.
And Ms Badeonch told Sky News this morning: “This is not some sort of cynical ploy.”
“This is the right thing to do, and I fully support the prime minister.”
Mr Sunak defended his change of direction this morning, telling the BBC that the UK’s decarbonising ambitions are “more ambitious than pretty much any major economy in the world”.
The move has been welcomed by some Conservative MPs, who, believing it may be popular with voters, have been calling for green policies to be delayed to avoid exacerbating the cost of living crisis.
But it has been opposed by sections of the business community, opposition parties, and campaigners – including Al Gore.
One of the critics of the move was Lord Goldsmith, a Conservative former minister.
Ms Badenoch said: “I know Zac Goldsmith very well. He is a friend… I fundamentally disagree with what he has said.
“We are listening to the concerns people are raising with us. Most people in this country do not have the kind of money that he has.”
Kemi Badenoch at the MINI plant in Oxford last week
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Last week, Ms Badenoch visited the BMW MINI plant in Oxford as the company announced it would build its next generation electric vehicles there, securing government funding in the process.
She was asked if yesterday’s roll-back was known about when she announced the deal.
The business secretary said: “Well, I had been making representations to the prime minister – he had not made his decision known to all of us.
“But these were conversations that we were having, So I’m quite pleased that this has happened.”
Sam Coates: Climate changes may jar with Sunak’s image as a stable leader
The car industry was one of the most vocal critics of the government’s changes, as many had planned to stop selling ICE vehicles in seven years time.
Ford was the most sceptical, saying that the new path undermined the “ambition, commitment and consistency” needed for the UK.
Ms Badenoch pointed out the US car giant made the statement “without even hearing what the announcement was”, and added that Toyota welcomed the move.
When asked about criticism from the chief executive of EON – who claimed the changes would mean people have to live in draughty homes – Ms Badenoch urged the leader of the energy giant to “actually look at what the prime minister announced”.
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UK’s new net zero plans
Daisy Powell-Chandler, the head of energy and environment at polling company Public First, explained to Sky News how the public tends to hold a dim view of parties that water down green policies.
She said: “The public aren’t very keen on that, including Conservative and Labour swing voters.
“Most people think that the government should be doing more rather than less to reach net zero.
“So about three times more people think the government should be doing more on the environment than think they should be doing less.
“And there’s an extraordinary consensus right across the age range. For example, climate change these days is amongst people’s tier one concerns.
“It’s just below things like the NHS, but it’s still up there in the top five on most trackers.”
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Sarah Jones, Labour’s shadow industry and decarbonisation minister, told Sky News that her party would return the deadline for ICE sales to 2030, but would not unpick other parts of the changes announced yesterday.
She said that on heat pumps, for example, the government “has utterly failed” to get close to the previous target, and that it was more important to focus on insulating homes first.
NHS strikes: Hospital boss says preparing for winter amid walkouts ‘like going into battle with one hand behind your back’ | UK News
The chief executive of a busy NHS Hospital Trust has described preparing for winter amid ongoing industrial action by consultants and junior doctors as “going into a really tough battle with one hand tied behind your back”.
Matthew Trainer, CEO of Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, was speaking exclusively to Sky News on the first day of an unprecedented joint action by consultants and their junior doctor colleagues.
He said: “I think we’ve cancelled more than 10,000 outpatient appointments here. We’ve cancelled more than a thousand non-urgent surgeries and a small number of urgent surgeries.
“What we’re increasingly seeing is actually we’re not cancelling things, because we’re not even booking stuff in any more for the strike days.
“It feels like we’re walking into a really tough battle with one hand tied behind our back.”
Mr Trainer, who has 12 hospitals under his care including the Queen’s Hospital in Essex and the King George Hospital in Ilford, said his patients and his staff were suffering because of the industrial action by NHS health workers. which is now in its 10th month.
He said: “It’s about the patients who are not getting access to the care that they need. And the second thing, it’s about the staff that we’re asking, at times, to work in some really tough circumstances.
“I regularly meet our emergency department teams because they tend to bear the brunt of it. Emergency departments are the last unrationed part of health care, they’re the only place you can walk into and guarantee someone will see you. And as a result, we’re seeing real pressures piled on to them.”
Some 900,000 NHS appointments have been cancelled across England since December last year.
Matthew Trainer has 12 hospitals under his care
Hospitals now routinely do not book appointments for strike days, with the dates announced at least six weeks in advance. That means the true figure of disruption to elective care is likely to be much higher.
Mr Trainer added: “I think one thing that worries me is actually that we’re finding the strikes less difficult to cope with because we’re becoming so practised at them.
“The NHS is good at crisis management and responding to incidents. Actually, we now know how to stand up a strike rota. We know to take down all the planned care activity. This shouldn’t be something we’re used to doing.
“You know, this should remain a real outlier for us, to have cancelled 10,000 outpatient appointments since April is not normal. And we should not become accustomed to this as a way of doing business in healthcare.”
But this is likely to be the case for months to come, deep into another crippling winter.
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The junior doctors and consultants have long mandates for strike action and show no sign of calling them off.
Their union, the BMA, will feel vindicated in its action after learning that the public is more than twice as likely to blame the government for the ongoing strikes than the doctors’ trade unions, by 45% compared to 21%, according to a YouGov poll commissioned by Sky News.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has made bringing down waiting lists one of his key pledges.
But that is not achievable unless there is a resolution to what is becoming an increasingly bitter and protracted dispute. It also means trusts are not able to prepare for the fast-approaching winter.
Mr Trainer continued: “We had a really tough winter, last year. January was as bad as I’ve ever seen it in terms of the pressures. Primary care is also seeing huge increases in demand.
“They’re seeing more people than ever before, but they can’t keep up with the demand, and mental health services are also dealing with enormous backlogs for care and emergency care.
“So we’re trying to get ourselves ready for that. But what we know at the minute is that unless there’s some kind of resolution to this, we’re going to have to deal with that regular disruption of strike action.
“And I think we’re getting to a position now where it’s making it very hard to plan for what’s going to be the toughest period of the year in the NHS.
“We’ve got clinical staff trying to deliver good quality health care in some really challenging environments at the minute. And this is just adding to the strain they’re feeling and adding to the pressures on the NHS.”
Sunak was chosen as leader to end the chaos – but his climate announcement may jar with image as stable leader | Politics News
Today the cross-party climate consensus in place for many years was shattered.
Minutes after Rishi Sunak’s press conference concluded, Labour announced they would reverse the most incendiary of all the PM’s promises – to move back the date to ban new petrol cars, from 2030 to 2035.
This puts Labour and the Tories differences on climate at loggerheads going into the election. Climate politics will now inevitably get much uglier.
Politics Live: PM reveals major roll back on net zero policy
Sunak used a press conference today to set out not only a new approach on climate, but a new argument about himself.
Sunak 2.0 is a politician who says that politics doesn’t work, must change, and insists that only he can take decisions in the long-term national interest, puts aside party politics and can take emotion out of heated subjects.
It is quite a claim, and a big journey he needs to take the public on in a small amount of time.
Might the public struggle to be convinced by the protestations of motivational purity?
Today was a climate announcement which many Tory MPs saw as a consequence of the Uxbridge by-election win credited to their opposition of the Ulez emissions scheme – at a point where he is 18 points behind in the polls.
But it helps Sunak that a YouGov poll showed that, individually, these messages are popular – with 44% supporting Sunak’s decision to delay or drop some net zero commitments.
By 50% to 34%, Britons supported the government proposal to push back the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars to 2035.
Labour wants to use this moment to cast the Tories as an anti-business party at the mercy of his right flank.
They aren’t keen to have a fight on environmental arguments themselves, conscious that an Ed Miliband led fight might lose the support of some hard-pressed voters.
The danger for Sunak lies elsewhere.
Read More:
Which of the Conservatives’ green policies have been scrapped by Rishi Sunak?
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When he took over from Liz Truss almost a year ago, he was chosen to reduce the political temperature and end the chaos.
Today we had a string of business leaders openly attacking the PM for destabilising business, with blue-on-blue violence as Tory MPs reacted badly to the U-turn.
At the same time, Sunak was insisting that the changes do not represent a watering down of the UK’s climate ambitions, which felt a little redolent of Theresa May’s “nothing has changed” moment.
Sunak’s USP with voters is as someone who channels seriousness and stability. The kinetic response to this announcement may jar with his image.
King Charles and Queen Camilla arrive in France for state visit months after it was rescheduled due to riots | UK News
The King and Queen have arrived in France to a guard of honour as they begin a three-day state visit to the country.
The royal couple are visiting Paris and Bordeaux six months after the trip had to be rescheduled because of widespread rioting across the country.
The King and Queen were greeted by the French prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, and other diplomats after they arrived at Paris’s Orly airport on Wednesday afternoon.
An officer and 20 guardsmen of the Republican Guard, which is part of the French National Gendarmerie, were lined up to greet them.
French President Emmanuel Macron issued a poignant welcome ahead of the King’s arrival, writing on social media: “You visited as a Prince, you return as a King. Your Majesty, welcome.”
The King and Queen met up with Mr Macron, 45, and his wife Brigitte, 70, for a ceremony of remembrance and wreath laying at the Arc de Triomphe, in the capital’s centre.
As part of the ceremony, King Charles was invited by the president to symbolically light the monument’s eternal flame which burns in memory of those who died in the First and Second World Wars.
Afterwards, the foursome were due to process down the Champs Elysees by car towards the Elysee Palace, the president’s official residence, where the King and Mr Macron are sitting down for talks.
In the evening, the King and Queen will be guests of honour at a grand black-tie state banquet hosted by Mr and Mrs Macron in the Palace of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors.
Both the King and Mr Macron will address the 160 guests, who will include high-profile figures chosen for their contribution to UK-France relations.
The majority of the original royal programme has been retained but a few new elements have been added, including the Queen and Mrs Macron launching a new Franco-British literary prize at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.
The King will become the first British monarch to give a speech from France’s senate chamber to senators and national assembly members on Thursday.
Other highlights include the royal couple meeting sports stars as France hosts the Rugby World Cup.
When the couple travel to Bordeaux, home to 39,000 Britons, they will meet UK and French military personnel to hear about how the two nations are collaborating on defence.
The King and Queen’s planned tour in March was to be their first state visit, but it was postponed at the last minute after violent nationwide demonstrations.
Bordeaux’s town hall was set on fire by protesters just a few days before the trip was due to begin.
Germany – the second leg of the overseas tour – became the historic first state visit destination for the royal couple instead.
Russell Brand denies ‘serious criminal allegations’ he claims are being made against him | Ents & Arts News
Russell Brand has denied “very serious criminal allegations” that he claims will be made against him by a newspaper and TV company.
In a video posted on YouTube and X, formerly known as Twitter, titled “So, This is Happening”, the comedian denied the allegations that he described as “a litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks”.
He said that while he was “very promiscuous” at the height of his career, his relationships were “always consensual”.
Brand, 48, said: “Now, this isn’t the usual type of video we make on this channel where we critique, attack and undermine the news in all its corruption because in this story, I am the news.
‘Very serious allegations that I absolutely refute’
“I’ve received two extremely disturbing letters or a letter and an email. One from a mainstream media TV company, one from a newspaper listing a litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks, as well as some pretty stupid stuff like my community festival should be stopped, that I shouldn’t be able to attack mainstream media narratives on this channel.
“But amidst this litany of astonishing rather baroque attacks, are some very serious allegations that I absolutely refute.
“These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies. And as I’ve written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous.
“Now, during that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual. I was always transparent about that then, almost too transparent, and I’m being transparent about it now as well.
“And to see that transparency metastasized into something criminal that I absolutely deny makes me question, is there another agenda at play?”
He continued: “I’m aware that you guys have been saying in the comments for a while [saying] ‘watch out, Russell. They’re coming for you, you’re getting too close to the truth, Russell Brand did not kill himself’.
“I know that a year ago there was a spate of articles – Russell Brand’s a conspiracy theorist, Russell Brand’s right wing. I’m aware of news media making phone calls, sending letters to people I know for ages and ages.
‘A serious and concerted agenda’
“It’s being clear to me, or at least it feels to me like there’s a serious and concerted agenda to control these kind of spaces and these kind of voices. And I mean, my voice along with your voice.
“I don’t mind them using my books and my stand-up to talk about my promiscuous consensual conduct in the past. What I seriously refute are these very, very serious criminal allegations.
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“Also, it’s worth mentioning that there are witnesses whose evidence directly contradicts the narrative that these two mainstream media outlets are trying to construct, apparently, in what seems to me to be a coordinated attack.
“Now, I don’t wanna get into this any further because of the serious nature of the allegations, but I feel like I’m being attacked and plainly they’re working very closely together. We are obviously going to look into this matter ’cause it’s very, very serious. In the meantime, I want you to stay close, stay awake, but more important than any of that, if you can, please stay free.”
Brand has not named the newspaper and TV company which he claims have made allegations against him.
Greater Manchester Police investigating after boy, 14, stabbed in Harpurhey | Breaking News News
Greater Manchester Police are investigating after a 14-year-old boy was stabbed.
The teenager has been taken to hospital after he was injured in Tavistock Square, Harpurhey.
Officers were called at around 6.05pm this evening.
Another 14-year-old boy has been arrested.
Police added they do not believe there is any wider threat to the community.
The condition of the injured boy has not been disclosed.
Superintendent Cara Charlesworth said police are in the early stages of their investigation and called for members of the public with information to come forward.
Brixton Academy will be allowed to reopen after deadly crowd crush if it can meet 77 ‘robust’ safety conditions | UK News
The Brixton Academy will be allowed to reopen after a fatal crowd crush at the venue last year – but Lambeth Council said the venue will have to meet 77 conditions to open again safely.
It comes after security guard Gaby Hutchinson, 23, and Rebecca Ikumelo, 33, died at the south London venue on 15 December 2022, when fans without tickets tried to enter a show by Nigerian Afrobeat artist, Asake.
Both victims were in the foyer of the building when they were critically injured, the Metropolitan Police said. About 1,000 people were outside the venue at the time.
The council said the Academy will have to meet 77 “extensive and robust” conditions “designed to promote public safety” before it could reopen, in a decision announced today.
Rebecca Ikumelo, 33, of Newham. Pic: Met Police
Gabrielle Hutchinson
Following the crush, which also injured 10 people, the venue was ordered to shut down after its licence was suspended by Lambeth Council in December.
A hearing of the council’s licensing subcommittee to decide the venue’s ultimate fate began on Monday.
The initial decision to close Brixton Academy was supported by the venue’s owner, Academy Music Group, which offered to voluntarily close the site’s doors over the suspension period.
The Metropolitan Police has also previously urged the council to act.
Gerald Gouriet KC, who represented the Met at an earlier licensing meeting, said officers found “large-scale disorder” with crowds eventually pushing the doors open in the moments before the crush.
A police investigation was launched, and the Security Industry Authority (SIA) opened an inquiry into corruption allegations that some security staff at the venue regularly took bribes.
Read more:
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Probe into corrupt security claims
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‘People need to be held accountable’
Meanwhile, a petition was launched calling for the venue to reopen. It surpassed 100,000 signatures.
Members of well-known bands, such as Blur and The Chemical Brothers, supported the reopening of the venue.
Asake was forced to abandon the gig last December after performing three songs and released a statement saying his “heart is with those who were injured”.
His manager, Stephen Nana, later told Sky News he was “completely speechless and lost for words” after Ms Hutchinson’s death was announced.
American XL bully dogs to be banned after attacks, Rishi Sunak says | UK News
American XL bully dogs are a danger to communities and will banned, Rishi Sunak has said, following a spate of recent attacks.
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Father among three charged with murder of 10-year-old Sara Sharif | UK News
Three people have been charged with the murder of 10-year-old Sara Sharif.
Surrey Police said the Crown Prosecution Service authorised charges against Sara’s father, Urfan Sharif, 41, his partner, Beinash Batool, 29, and his brother, Faisal Malik, 28, all of Hammond Road, Woking.
They have also been charged with causing or allowing the death of a child.
All three will appear before magistrates in Guildford today.
They were arrested on Wednesday evening at Gatwick Airport as they disembarked a flight from Dubai.
In a statement, Surrey Police said: “Sara’s mother has been informed of this latest development and is being supported by specialist officers.”
Urfan Sharif, left, and Beinash Batool. Pic: AP
Faisal Malik
The trio travelled to Pakistan a day before police discovered Sara’s body in her home in Woking on 10 August.
Five of Sara’s siblings, aged between one and 13 years old, also travelled to Pakistan on 9 August with them.
A post-mortem found Sara had suffered “multiple and extensive injuries” over a “sustained and extended” period of time.