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Labour and Tories both braced for bigger losses after U-turn allows 30 local council elections to go ahead
A minister has sought to defend Steve Reed, the local government secretary, against opposition calls for him to resign over the U-turn on postponing May’s local elections.
Stephen Kinnock, the care minister, said Reed was doing “an excellent job”.
Kinnock was doing an interview round on behalf of the government this morning and, asked about Reed’s position, he told Sky News:
Steve Reed is doing an excellent job as secretary of state, pushing through the Pride in Place programme, pushing through renters’ reforms, bulldozing all of the bureaucracy and regulations that stops us building things in this country.
Steve is doing an excellent job as secretary of state and he will continue to do that and to deliver for the British people.
Kinnock also told LBC government legal advice originally said a delay was justified. He went on:
That legal advice has now changed. That is not ideal. I’m not going to stand here and pretend to you that it is, but we’re a government that works with the rule of law.
In the Times Max Kendix and Oliver Wright say that one factor that led to change of heart was the fact that, while governments had in the past delayed local elections on a case by case basis, Reed had argued that this round of elections was relatively pointless anyway. They report:
There was another difference to the previous year as well. Steve Reed, the local government secretary, had been actively promoting the idea of cancelling elections this year before he’d announced which areas, if any, would be covered.
In The Times, Reed said the public would support cancelling “pointless” elections to “zombie” councils — calling them “time-consuming”.
Sources suggest these kinds of statements contributed to a final assessment by lawyers. They came back to ministers in recent days with a stark warning: if you go ahead with delays, you may well have to fight Reform UK in court, and there is a good chance you will lose.
Yesterday’s decision means that Labour and the Conservative party are now braced for even bigger losses in the local elections.
In the i Will Hazell reports:
According to a poll by JL Partners for The Telegraph, Labour is forecast to lose control of six councils due to elections which will now proceed: Blackburn with Darwen, Cannock Chase, Exeter, Preston, Thurrock and Worthing.
And a report in the Financial Times quotes Prof Sir John Curtice, the leading elections expert, as saying the biggest impact of the U-turn will be on the four county councils — Norfolk, Suffolk, East and West Sussex — three of which are currently controlled by the Conservatives. “Those are large councils where all the seats are up for grabs, and these are the type of areas that should mimic where Reform did well last year,” Curtice told the paper.
UK unemployment rate hits five-year high of 5.2% as wage growth cools
Unemployment in the UK has risen to 5.2%, the highest level in nearly five years, while wage growth continues to slow, raising the prospect of another cut to interest rates in the spring. Tom Knowles has the story.
Most people in a future Reform UK cabinet would not be career politicians, Zia Yusuf claims
Most people in a Reform UK cabinet would not be career politicians, Zia Yusuf has said.
Today the party will announce what it calls some “shadow cabinet” appointments and the most prominent is likely to be Robert Jenrick as Treasury spokesperson. Less than 18 months ago Jenrick was runner-up in the contest to be Conservative party leader.
But Yusuf told Times Radio this morning that ex-Tories would not dominate a Nigel Farage cabinet.
Yusuf said:
I can tell people listening to this that the majority of our parliamentary class will be people who are fresh to politics.
I think the majority of Nigel’s cabinet, if we win and he’s the prime minister, will also have people who are not career politicians.
Farage has repeatedly talked of his desire to give cabinet jobs to people who are not MPs and who have experience outside Westminster. His appointees could be given peerages, but Farage has also floated the idea of appointing some ministers who do not sit in parliament. This is constitutionally permissible, but has only happened in the past very rarely.
Yusuf himself is expected to be named today as the party’s home affairs spokesperson.
Yusuf was critical of Jenrick on social media before his defection to Reform UK, and it has been claimed that he has mixed feelings about having the former shadow justice secretary as a colleague.
But Yusuf told Times Radio that Jenrick was an asset to the party. He said:
I’ve gotten to know Robert quite well. And I speak to him almost every day. He’s a thoughtful, serious man. I think he does believe clearly the things that he has talked about, and he got extremely frustrated inside the Conservative party.
And he is somebody who is already adding value in terms of helping with his experiences that he had in government.
Reform UK no longer ‘one-man band’, Farage says as he prepares to announce ‘shadow cabinet’ appointments
Good morning. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is holding a press conference today where, according to the party, he will be “announcing members of his shadow cabinet”. In Westminster politics only the official opposition (the Conserative party, for this parliament) has a shadow cabinet, but other opposition parties sometimes use the term and, given his poll ratings, it is not hard to see why Farage thinks he has a better chance of forming the next government than Kemi Badenoch.
Farage is expected to announce four appointments. Robert Jenrick, who only defected from the Conservative party recently, is expected to be appointed Treasury spokesperson. Richard Tice, the party’s deputy leader, is expected to be given responsibility for business and energy, and Zia Yusuf, the party’s head of policy, is expected to be given the Home Office portfolio. There will also be a fourth appointment, but there has been no proper steer as to what this will be.
Here is Jessica Elgot’s preview story.
Speaking at a rally last night, Farage said that these appointments would show that Reform UK was no longer a “one-man band”. He said:
I think the moment to properly move away from the potential criticism that we’re a one-man band has been there now for a few weeks, and that’s why I’m doing this.
Am I concerned? No, I’m relieved actually. I’m relieved that other people are taking up these big areas, and from [reporter’s] perspective, on a given issue, you will know who to call.
The press conference starts at 11am in London.
There is not much else in the diary for today, but I will be covering other politics too, including the ongoing reaction to yesterday’s U-turn on the cancellation of local elections, which Kiran Stacey covers here in our overnight story.
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