UK Politics

Sir Keir Starmer has been warned that Labour must take decisive action on the migrant crisis or risk losing voters to Reform UK, after the government won a significant court challenge over asylum hotels. Lord Falconer, who served under former prime minister Sir Tony Blair, backed the government’s decision to fight an injunction that would have seen asylum seekers moved out of the protest-hit Bell Hotel in Epping. He said people were demanding action to close asylum hotels. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We’ve obviously got to move forward in relation to closing the hotels and also stopping the crossings.“The government always has the burden of doing what’s possible and the government is doing the right thing in relation to it, but there’s a lot more to do, and if we don’t, as a government, do it, then you’ll see those opinion polls raised yet further for Reform, because they don’t have the burden of having to be practical.”His intervention comes after Court of Appeal judges revoked a ban on housing asylum seekers at the hotel, which has been plagued by unrest. They said the move would have “obvious consequences” for the government’s duty to house asylum seekers and could “incentivise” other councils to seek similar legal action if allowed. Labour grandee Lord Falconer has said Labour must take decision action or risk losing voters to Reform UK More

Rachel Reeves has been warned she faces having to break Labour’s manifesto pledge not to increase taxes on working people after leading economists said “fiddling around” with smaller taxes – like a mansion tax and a gambling levy – would not be enough to fill the black hole in the Budget.The warning has been led by Lord Jim O’Neill, the economist, former Treasury minister and ex-Goldman Sachs chairman who was brought in by Ms Reeves as a top advisor.He told The Independent: “I don’t think fiddling around with smaller taxes any longer is likely to yield much fruit.”Instead, the chancellor has been told by leading think tanks that, if she wants to maintain her spending plans and fiscal rules on borrowing, she will likely have to raise income tax, VAT or employee national insurance – breaking one of Labour’s key manifesto pledges. Rachel Reeves is faced with a potential £41.2bn black hole in government finances (Oliver McVeigh/PA) More

Cabinet office minister Pat McFadden has suggested a digital ID card for every Briton could help to combat illegal immigration and benefit fraud.The Labour MP for Wolverhampton South East said that the UK was “behind the curve” technologically and could implement a system similar to the Baltic state of Estonia, where its citizens are given a unique identification number. This allows Estonians to register births, marriages, divorces, deaths, vote, book GP appointments and access their bank accounts.In an interview with The Times, the senior government minister said that at the moment Britons were asked to prove their identity through “a multiplicity of paper-based documents” but that a digital ID could improve access to services.The issue of national identity cards was first raised by New Labour and championed by Tony Blair, before the controversial policy fell out of favour by the time the party lost the 2010 election.Pat McFadden proposes a system similar to that used in Estonia More

Angela Rayner has faced criticism this week for purchasing an £800,000 seaside apartment in Hove, which will be a third home for the deputy prime minister.Ms Rayner divides her time between a £350,000 home in her constituency near Manchester and her central London grace-and-favour flat at Admiralty House in Whitehall.Initially, the criticism centred around allegations of hypocrisy, as it comes as Ms Rayner, who is also the housing secretary, prepares to levy an extra 100 per cent council tax charge on second homes.The deputy prime minister said a scheme to speed up house building is helping to ‘turn the tide’ of the housing crisis (Peter Byrne/PA) More

The UK’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) has been increasingly called into question in recent years amid growing concern over illegal migration. But the issue has come to a head in August as a result of outrage over the number of asylum seekers housed in hotels in Britain, with protests breaking out across the UK. Here, The Independent takes a look at what the ECHR is, why some people think we should quit and why others say leaving may bring more problems than it solves. What is the ECHR? The ECHR is an international human rights treaty between the 47 states that are members of the Council of Europe (CoE). Governments that are signed up to the ECHR have made a legal commitment to abide by certain standards of behaviour and to protect the basic rights and freedoms of people. It is aimed at protecting the rule of law and promoting democracy in European countries.The concept of the ECHR was devised during the Second World War in the early 1940s, and was developed to ensure that governments would never again be allowed to dehumanise and abuse people’s rights with impunity, and to help fulfil the promise of ‘never again’.After the ECHR came into force in 1953, the European Court of Human Rights was then set up to safeguard the ECHR. Judgments of the court legally bind countries to stand by its rulings. There is growing public anger over illegal migration More

Rachel Reeves should tax bank profits to recover taxpayer money spent on compensating losses from the Bank of England’s cash-printing drive, a think tank has said.Hiking a levy on the windfalls from major firms such as Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC and NatWest could raise up to £8 billion a year for public services, according to a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research.The think tank argues the UK is an international outlier in having its Treasury pay for central Bank losses on its bond-buying quantitative easing (QE) programme.After a period of making profits on this programme, the Bank of England is facing record losses, estimated to cost the taxpayer £22 billion a year, as interest rates have risen since 2021, it warned.This money is then partly being funnelled to bank shareholders due to a “flawed” policy design, boosting profits while millions across Britain continue to face cost-of-living pressures, the report says.It recommends the Treasury introduce a “QE reserves income levy”, similar to the 2.5 per cent deposit tax imposed on banks under Margaret Thatcher in 1981, to rebalance the existing set-up.Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey More

Asda’s chairman has urged Rachel Reeves to stop “taxing everything in some way, shape or form”.Allan Leighton advised the chancellor to invest in Britain if she wants to grow the economy, not launch a new tax raid in her upcoming budget later this year.Ms Reeves is grappling with the various options at her disposal to fill a £50bn hole in the public finances, while she attempts to stay within her self-imposed fiscal rules.Among the policies believed to be under consideration by the chancellor, the most headline-grabbing is a so-called “mansion tax”, which would hit the owners of high-value properties with capital gains tax when they sell their homes.A likely move will also see the Treasury extend the freeze on income tax thresholds. This means that as wages rise with inflation, over the years workers are dragged into higher tax bands and end up paying more.Asda’s chairman has urged Rachel Reeves to stop ‘taxing everything in some way, shape or form’ More

Nigel Farage’s plans for the mass deportation of asylum seekers are “beneath us as a nation”, the UK’s top bishop has said.Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell argued that the Reform UK leader’s radical proposals to “send them all back”, which would involve returning migrants to war, violence and persecution, go against “the British way”.He said it has been a longstanding tenet in the UK that “compassion and understanding” is what is provided to those in need, as he warned that this country “cannot simply close the door”.The archbishop’s remarks come days after Mr Farage said his party would remove 600,000 asylum seekers, including children, under the first parliament of a Reform government, should they win power.At a press conference in London on Tuesday, he also pledged to scale up detention capacity for asylum seekers to 24,000 and secure deals with countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea and Iran to return migrants to their countries.Nigel Farage’s plans for the mass deportation of asylum seekers are ‘beneath us as a nation’, the UK’s top bishop has said More