Markus Andrews

Rachel Reeves is eyeing up a £5bn pre-Budget windfall as the government considers selling off seized cryptocurrency to plug a hole in the public finances. The Home Office is reportedly working with police forces to offload at least £5bn worth of Bitcoin and other currencies taken from criminals.It is planning to develop a storage system for the currencies to handle their sale, it has emerged, as concerns about Labour’s spending plans mount ahead of the autumn Budget. Rachel Reeves needs to find billions to balance the books ahead of her Budget this autumn More

Labour will leave Britain with the cleanest rivers on record by cutting sewage pollution from water firms in half by 2030, the environment secretary will say. Steve Reed will promise on Sunday to make the UK’s rivers the cleanest since records began with a £104bn investment to rebuild the country’s crumbling sewage pipes.Mr Reed will also roll out a set of strict new rules to slash pollution and a “root and branch” overhaul of the way water companies are regulated. Environment secretary Steve Reed (right) and energy security and net zero secretary Ed Miliband (left) are joined by Jeremy Biggs of the Freshwater Habitats Trust during a visit to the Ock and Thame Farmers floodplain restoration project, in South Hinksey, Oxfordshire More

Rough sleeping has almost doubled since Covid, a damning report found, with Andy Burnham calling on Sir Keir Starmer to make tackling homelessness a “moral mission”.The Greater Manchester mayor piled pressure on the prime minister to follow the success of the region in offering housing to the homeless. “If you set people up to succeed – they largely do,” Mr Burnham said. He added: “Tackling homelessness is not just an economic imperative, but also a moral mission.” Andy Burnham said tackling homelessness must be a ‘moral mission’ More

Ministers “have their fingers in their ears” over the ongoing Birmingham bin strikes, the boss of one of Britain’s biggest unions has said. The prime minister and Angela Rayner must “get in the room, sort it out and stop letting this continue for no reason,” Sharon Graham warned. The outspoken Unite chief said she is not the prime minister’s “favourite trade union leader… probably because I call things out”. Sharon Graham said Unite members would vote to ditch Labour ‘without a shadow of a doubt’ More

On Wednesday afternoon, York Central MP Rachael Maskell like most MPs was winding down, getting ready for a long summer recess to recharge, take stock and come back refreshed.Many of her colleagues were hitting the summer drinks circuit in Westminster with dreams of the various beaches in different corners of the Mediterranean they will be heading to in the very near future.But Ms Maskell got a call out of the blue asking her to go and see the Labour chief whip Sir Alan Campbell immediately.Starmer strikes backShe was to discover that the prime minister – after discussion with his closest allies – had decided to strike. The talk of deputy prime minister Angela Rayner or possibly health secretary Wes Streeting replacing him had got too much.And it was clear after the welfare rebellion – which Ms Maskell had reluctantly in the end led – that he had lost control and needed to restore it.Sir Keir Starmer faces similar challenges to Harold Wilson in the late 1960s More

Rachel Reeves will freeze fuel duty again this autumn in a boost to drivers still struggling with the cost of living, it has eben reported. The chancellor reportedly feels vindicated by a freeze on the levy last October, despite calls from campaigners and economists to hike the tax. As she seeks to fill a multi-billion pound black hole in the public finances, she has faced fresh calls to end the long-running freeze on fuel duty, which has been in place since 2011. ( More

Nigel Farage is facing calls to sack his right-hand man Zia Yusuf after the senior Reform UK figure said that a member of his team “accidentally pressed like” on an antisemitic post which attacked the wife of Tory MP Robert Jenrick. The former Reform chair, who now heads the party’s Doge unit, has apologised for the incident, which comes after an anonymous X user posted a video that appeared to show Mr Yusuf liking a tweet which said: “Reminder that Jenrick is a traitorous Zogbot with a Jewish wife and family. I’m sure it’s unrelated that he imported infinite brown savages to rape our women and children.”Zogbot is a derogatory term for a Zionist.The anonymous account that shared the screen recording of Mr Yusuf’s interaction with the post described it as “absolutely horrifying antisemitism”.Since last summer, likes on X have been privatised, so that only the liker and the poster can see them, rather than a wider audience.In response, Mr Jenrick said he “called bull****” and pointed out that Mr Yusuf had been calling him a “traitor” for the previous 48 hours over the Afghan data breach in what had become an ugly spat.Zia Yusuf with Nigel Farage last month More