Kemi Badenoch says death threats have ‘intensified’ since publication of Nadine Dorries book – UK politics live

Amelia Hill

Raising the state retirement age to 71 would condemn millions of middle-aged people to misery as they get older, Britain’s biggest independent organisation of older people and a former pensions minister have said.

The National Pensioners Convention (NPC), which represents more than 1.15 million members, said the proposals “in no way reflects the harsh reality of getting older in the UK”.

The general secretary, Jan Shortt, said: “These proposals will affect everyone currently in their early-50s and younger, and will considerably add to the one in four pensioners already living in poverty. They will condemn even more people to a miserable retirement, as well as increasing pressure on already struggling public services.”

Shortt said the proposals favoured only higher-income groups because although the number of people living longer had been increasing, the number of those living with ill-health – and therefore not able to work longer – was also rising.

She said:

Making those already living with ill-health wait even longer to claim their pension will only increase poverty and the demand on already-creaking services, such as health and care.

Ros Altmann, the former pensions minister, agreed.

She said:

Raising the state pension age to 71 should be unconscionable. Only the top 10% of the UK population stay healthy into their early 70s, so cutting costs by making unwell workers wait longer, favours the well-pensioned, higher paid.

Chronological age is too inflexible as a unique criterion of eligibility for a state pension, which is part of every worker’s social contract. In addition, neither the NHS nor the UK labour market are prepared for this policy – the former because of the big health differentials across the country and the second, because it is rife with ageism.

Read the full story here:

Rishi Sunak has criticised local councils for putting up council tax too much, even as authorities struggle to cope with funding shortfalls that have left several on the brink of bankruptcy.

The prime minister criticised councils in England for requesting permission to raise council tax by more than 5% as they look to balance their budgets amid a national crisis in local authority funding.

Council leaders looking to raise tax by more than the 5% cap either have to be granted permission from central government or hold a local referendum on doing so. Bedfordshire is the only council ever to have held such a referendum, holding a vote in 2015 in which local residents rejected the idea of higher tax rates.

This week the government granted permission to a series of councils to raise taxes by more than the 5% cap, including Thurrock, Woking, Slough and Birmingham. Ministers refused to allow Somerset to do the same, however, as council leaders there look to close a £100m budget deficit.

Sunak told BBC Radio Somerset:

It’s important that councils manage the cost of living for their residents, and councils that are asking the government to just allow them to whack in incredibly high council tax rises – [that] is not right.

We can strike the balance between councils raising the money they need, but making sure they don’t unnecessarily burden people.

Read more here:

Junior doctors are to stage fresh strike action in England for a 10th time after talks between their union and the government broke down again.

Ministers, health officials and representatives from the British Medical Association (BMA) had been locked in negotiations for weeks since last month’s record six-day stoppage, trying to find a resolution to the pay dispute.

But the Guardian understands a last-ditch meeting on Thursday between Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, and the BMA failed to result in any immediate solution to end the stoppages. As a result, the BMA’s junior doctors’ committee has voted unanimously for another five days of strikes this month.

Junior doctors in England will strike from 7am on 24 February to midnight on 28 February.

The decision was announced a day after the latest NHS figures revealed that 7.6m health treatments were waiting to be carried out in England at the end of December, relating to 6.37 million patients.

The announcement from the BMA will alarm medical leaders and NHS bosses, who are becoming increasingly concerned about the deteriorating health of many of those stuck on waiting lists.

The Guardian revealed last month a warning from health officials that thousands of cancer patients could die early if ministers and junior doctors did not urgently resolve their bitter pay row.

On Thursday, the latest performance statistics showed more than a third of cancer patients in England were facing potentially deadly delays, with thousands of people forced to wait months to begin treatment.

Earlier this week Rishi Sunak was accused of personally holding up a deal to end doctors’ strikes despite warnings from the health department and NHS England that waiting lists would continue to soar unless the dispute was resolved.

Read the full story here:

The planned strike action by junior doctors shows that they are not “ready to be reasonable,” Victoria Atkins has said.

In a statement, the health and social care secretary said:

I want to find a reasonable solution that ends strike action. This action called by the BMA junior doctor committee does not signal that they are ready to be reasonable.

We already provided them with a pay increase of up to 10.3% and were prepared to go further. We urged them to put an offer to their members, but they refused. We are also open to further discussions on improving doctors’ and the wider workforce’s working lives.

I want to focus on cutting waiting times for patients rather than industrial action. We have been making progress with waiting lists falling for three months in a row.

Five days of action will put enormous pressure on the NHS and is not in the spirit of constructive dialogue. To make progress I ask the Junior Doctors Committee to cancel their action and come back to the table to find a way forward for patients and our NHS.

The British Medical Association (BMA) has announced further junior doctor strikes in England, from February 24 to 28.

The union said the government had “failed to meet the deadline to put an improved pay offer on the table,” PA News reports.

It added:

In a show of goodwill, the BMA provided the Health Secretary with an option to delay further strike action.

She was asked to extend the current strike mandate for a short period – and thus allow talks to continue with the aim to achieve a resolution for this year’s dispute.

Disappointingly, she declined to agree to extending the mandate.

The BMA said the strikes could still be called off “if a credible offer is made”.

Kemi Badenoch has said she has received more death threats since the release of The Plot, Nadine Dorries explosive book on the downfall of Boris Johnson.

In The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson, Dorries put forward elaborate conspiracies about those at the top of government and claimed a sinister cabal called “the movement” have “set out to control the destiny of the Conservative party” for 25 years.

Badenoch made the comments in a profile interview with The Times. While being interviewed, the business secretary showed journalist Janice Turner a phone message from her Westminster office manager reporting a death threat to the police.

These threats have intensified, she said.

She [Dorries] thinks she’s just writing stuff, but people who have that kind of mindset latch on to it.

If you get the unhelpful coalition of mental health issues and propensity to violence, then you read the Nadine Dorries conspiracy theory and decide you want to kill someone, it’s very, very nasty.

She pointed out that Dorries, who blames blames Badenoch for abetting the downfall of Johnson when she resigned as cabinet minister, claimed in The Plot that the minister is being manoeuvred by powerful men and portrays her as a puppet of Michael Gove.

“As if I have no thoughts and no opinions of my own,” Badenoch said, complaining that her best speeches are attributed to him. “Like they’re saying, ‘She’s not that bright. It’s some man who is doing this.’”

Severin Carrell

Scotland’s hospitals have experienced “a significant fall in productivity” despite record spending and staffing levels, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned, and are making slow progress to recover from the Covid pandemic.

A new IFS analysis has found Scotland’s NHS, which is run by the devolved government in Edinburgh, handled 8% fewer elective patients, 8% fewer outpatient appointments and 21% fewer emergency admissions in the second quarter of 2023 compared to pre-pandemic.

That was despite Scottish health spending being 10% higher in real terms, with 9% more hospital consultants and 6% more nurses, than in 2019. The number of people on elective waiting lists has leapt by 87% since the start of the pandemic.

While England’s NHS has worse A&E and elective waiting times, its staffing and spending levels are increasing faster and its recovery from the Covid crisis has been faster. In the first half of 2023, England’s hospitals provided 4% more outpatient appointments than in 2019, while Scotland’s delivered 6% fewer.

NHS funding in England is also growing at a far greater rate, comparatively, closing the gap on per capita spending. At the start of devolution, Scotland spent 22% more than England; in 2019, the gap was 3%.

These findings raise questions about Scottish government rhetoric around NHS reform. Humza Yousaf, the first minister, and former health secretary, hit back at Scottish Labour revelations in Holyrood yesterday that 12,000 died waiting for ambulances or emergency treatment in Scotland last year by asserting spending and staffing were at an all-time high.

Max Warner, a co-author of the IFS study, said cuts in bed numbers, sicker patients and continuing Covid hospitalisations contributed to the situation.

He said:

Without a substantial boost to hospital productivity, there is a risk that even additional funding and staffing will not bring the Scottish NHS back to pre-pandemic performance.

Helen Pidd

Brianna Ghey’s murder has “humanised the debate” around transgender people in her native Warrington, and stopped local Conservative politicians from using trans issues for “culture war” attacks, according to Brianna’s local Labour MP.

Charlotte Nichols, elected to parliament in Warrington North in 2019, said:

Most people haven’t necessarily met a trans person. And I think what happened to Brianna really gave people someone that they identify with and made them think about some of these issues with an actual human being.

Nichols said the discussion about transgender identities was “very abstract” for most people, but that her constituents had collectively grieved for a transgender girl and learned that being trans “isn’t something that’s bad or scary”.

She added:

It has really humanised the debate.

The MP said her local Conservative opponents would now not dream of following the lead of Rishi Sunak, who joked at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday that Keir Starmer could not define a woman. Sunak has refused to apologise for the jibe, made as Brianna’s mother was sitting in the public gallery with Nichols.

Nichols said:

I did previously find myself getting flak from local opposition parties if I raised LGBT issues. They would say, ‘this isn’t important’ or ‘you’re woke’ or whatever, the usual nonsense. That is not a thing that is said any more. It would be seen as being hurtful to Brianna’s family and her friends.

She noted that while she was mocked by some in the national media for a recent parliamentary question about trans people, the local Warrington Guardian reported it supportively.

Nichols asked the minister for women and equalities to reform the Gender Recognition Act 2004 to allow transgender people who are deceased to be legally remembered by the gender they lived by.

The MP said Brianna’s parents, Esther Ghey and Peter Spooner, had set a powerful example by being so open about their love for their daughter, who transitioned when she was 14.

Read the full story here:

Rishi Sunak has mocked Labour as having no plan, after Keir Starmer dropped the party’s £28 billion environmental pledge, PA reports.

He said:

I think what Labour announced yesterday just demonstrates what we’ve been saying – they absolutely don’t have a plan.

Their signature economic policy is in tatters, and when you don’t have a plan, you can’t deliver any change for the country.

In contrast, our plan is working. If you look at what’s happening with the economy, inflation has come down from 11% to 4%.

Mortgage rates are starting to come down, wages are rising and, because of that, we’ve been able to start cutting people’s taxes.

So someone earning £35,000 getting a tax cut of £450 kicked in in January, that shows that when you have a plan, you can make a difference.

And if we stick to our plan, I can give everyone that peace of mind that the future is going to be better.

And as we saw yesterday, the alternative is the Labour Party who have no plan and that means no change and just going back to square one.

Kalyeena Makortoff

The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has hinted at plans to launch a tax-free “British Isa” investing in UK company shares at the spring budget, as part of efforts to revive the country’s stock market.

A British stock Isa would allow investors to buy a certain amount of UK company shares, without paying tax. Currently, the government charges a 0.5% tax, known as the share purchase stamp duty, for any shares bought in the UK.

It comes as Hunt tries to find cost-free announcements that could help win over voters and businesses as the Tories lag well behind Labour in the polls before a much-anticipated general election.

The incentive, which some expected Hunt to announce as part of the autumn statement last November, could also complement government plans to sell shares in NatWest – which is still 38.6% government owned since its 2008 taxpayer bailout – to retail investors later this year.

Read more here:

Rishi Sunak again refused to apologise for his transgender jibe at Keir Starmer in the Commons this week, rebuffing calls from Peter Spooner, Brianna’s Ghey’s father, for him to say sorry.

Brianna, 16, was lured to a park in Cheshire and murdered in February last year. Last Friday, Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe, both 16, were jailed for at least 22 and 20 years respectively. Ratcliffe was found to have been partly motivated by hostility to Brianna’s transgender identity.

Sunak is under continued pressure to apologise for making a joke at the expense of transgender people at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, just after he was told by the Labour leader, Starmer, that Brianna’s mother, Esther Ghey, was in the public gallery.

The prime minister, appearing on BBC Radio Somerset, rejected the idea he had been making a joke.

He told the station:

That is not what I did, it is wrong to say that.

What happened was a tragedy and using that to try and detract from the completely separate and very clear point I was making about Keir Starmer and his proven track record of U-turning on multiple policy issues because he doesn’t have a plan.

Rachel Reeves has defended Labour’s U-turn on its pledge to spend £28bn a year on green projects.

In a move that prompted an angry response from environmental groups, unions and some in the energy sector yesterday, Keir Starmer and Reeves jointly announced they would slash the green prosperity plan to under £15bn – only a third of which would be new money.

The shadow chancellor blamed the Tories and the economic impact of Liz Truss’s mini-budget, as she told BBC Breakfast she would not “make any apologies” for fiscal responsibility.

I’ll make no apologies for ensuring that our plan is fully costed, fully funded and deliverable within the inheritance we’re going to get.

It is going to be a bleak inheritance after the damage the Conservatives have done to our economy.

She said:

In the almost three years that I’ve been shadow chancellor, I think people have heard loud and clear from me that fiscal responsibility, economic responsibility, are the most important things for me because it is absolutely essential that the public finances are managed well.

And when economic circumstances change, your plans have to change as well.

In case you missed it, here’s the full story on that U-turn:

I will be looking after the politics blog today. If you have any tips or questions, please get in touch: nicola.slawson@theguardian.com.