Badenoch set to hit out at Tories over Brexit as MP admits assault: UK politics live

The UK should only host a state visit with Donald Trump if he “delivers” on support for Ukraine, Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey has claimed.

In a speech in central London on Thursday morning, Sir Ed said the president-elect “craves” a visit, but it should only be granted following a sit-down summit that would examine financial support for Kyiv.

Sir Ed said: “We have something Trump desperately wants: a state visit. The pageantry at Buckingham Palace. A banquet with the King. We all know he craves it, so I say we give it to him, but only if he delivers what we need first for Britain and Europe’s defence and security.”

He said Mr Trump should “sit down with President Zelensky and other European leaders in a summit convened by the UK to agree how we collectively use the hundreds of billions of dollars, pounds and euros of frozen Russian assets to pay for the weapons Ukraine needs to win the war and beat Putin.

“If Trump delivers on that deal, pushing the necessary measures through Congress, then, and only then, do we roll out the red carpet for a state visit.”

Sir Ed Davey has urged the government to seek a new deal with the EU based around a new customs union.

In his first major speech of the year, the Lib Dem leader said: “The UK must be far more positive, far more ambitious, and act with far more urgency. That is why today I’m calling on the government to negotiate, this year, a brand new deal with the EU.

“Not just tinkering around the edges of the botched deal the Conservatives signed a few years ago. But negotiating a better deal for Britain that has at its heart a new UK-EU customs union, to come into force by 2030 at the latest.”

Just over one in 10 voters expect the UK economy to improve over the next 12 months, new YouGov polling suggests, in a gloomy assessment of Sir Keir Starmer’s vows to “relentlessly” pursue growth.

Conversely, 63 per cent of those surveyed this week expect the economy to deteriorate over the next year, with 17 per cent expecting the situation to remain roughly unchanged.

According to YouGov: “This is a clear increase in negativity, with just 51 per cent having expected the economy to get worse over the next year when we asked following the 2024 October Budget. Indeed, this is the highest level of economic pessimism since late 2022.”

Similarly, 52 per cent believe Rachel Reeves is doing a bad job as chancellor. Just 13 per cent believe she is doing a good job, the fewest Britons saying so of a chancellor since Kwasi Kwarteng in September 2022, the month in which his disastrous mini-Budget was unveiled.

MP Mike Amesbury has pleaded guilty to assaulting a man in a street bust-up last year.

The Runcorn and Helsby MP admitted attacking the 45-year-old Paul Fellows in Main Street in Frodsham, Cheshire, when he appeared at Chester Magistrates Court on Thursday morning. The incident happened on 26 October at 2.48am.

Amesbury was suspended from the Labour Party after footage emerged which appeared to show him punching a man. He now sits in Parliament as an Independent.

Bryony Gooch reports:

The recent turmoil in the UK government bond markets does not seem to be UK specific, hedge fund analysts have suggested.

Comparing the current situation with the Liz Truss Budget debacle, when UK gilt yields soared above US Treasury yields, the Man Institute said, as per the FT: “In contrast, the current episode doesn’t seem UK-specific at all – gilt and Treasury yields are largely moving in tandem. So, can we really blame Rachel Reeves?

“Our lesson here is to be careful of what the media are saying.”

Responding to the latest figures showing the economy grew just 0.1 per cent in November, Tory shadow chancellor Mel Stride said: “Labour inherited the fastest-growing economy in the G7, but this is the third month in a row of disappointing growth figures.

“The chancellor seems content with burying her head in the sand, but this is a crisis made in Downing Street. We need an urgent change of course.”

Lib Dem Treasury spokesperson Daisy Cooper said: “The chancellor has put the handbrake on the economy with her misguided jobs tax and the consequence is this pitiful rate of growth. Every month this persists means less money in struggling families’ pockets and public services without the funding they need.

“After years of the Conservatives’ economic vandalism, the public was crying out for change but this new government is falling well short of fixing this mess.

“Rachel Reeves needs to see sense and scrap her foolish jobs tax, and pursue a real strategy for growth like fixing our broken trade relationship with our European partners and replacing the broken business rates system.”

A former SNP MP has suggested that today’s admission that the Tories were mistaken to pursue Brexit without a plan for growth was not the first time Kemi Badenoch displayed scepticism over the economic case for leaving the EU.

Angus Brendan MacNeil – who was among the SNP’s longest-serving MPs and chaired the Commons international trade committee for more than six years – said the now-Tory leader “certainly didn’t like the numbers” on Brexit when they were discussed several years ago.

Rachel Reeves has been warned that farmers should not be “punished” further as she searches for spending cuts following her inheritance tax raid in the Budget.

The Chancellor has already prompted fury in the countryside with the ‘farming tax’ hike, which critics warn could sound the death knell for family firms in England.

Now fears have been raised that they could be hit by a double whammy if Ms Reeves makes cuts to the Environment Land Management (Elm) scheme.

Our Whitehall editor Kate Devlin reports:

Sir Keir Starmer told broadcasters during a visit to Ukraine that the government would be “unrelenting” in its pursuit of economic growth.

He said: “It was always going to take time to turn around 14 years of economic failure under the last government. That was always going to take time.

“The figures out today are a step in the right direction, but there’s much, much more we’ve got to do and that we will do. We’re going to be unrelenting when it comes to driving our economy forward – changing the planning rules, changing regulation.

“The chancellor’s having a session today with the regulators. We’re unrelenting on this because we intend to turn this around, to get back economic growth.”

The business secretary has said upcoming talks in Downing Street with regulators about how to boost growth were not about scrapping important safeguards.

He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “On regulation, I talk to business people every day, as you would expect, and this is the biggest thing that they raise. And it’s not a request for for deregulation, for taking away these important things. It’s for regulators balancing those in the correct way against what needs to happen on growth.”

He gave the cost of Consumer Duty, which sets higher and clearer standards of consumer protection across financial services, as an example.

“An insurance company told me last week that the Consumer Duty, that’s part of what we put on to financial services … cost 20 times the impact assessment of what that would mean. And that is money that could have gone into jobs, to investment.”

He said the issue is “how we balance growth against security and making sure we’re not keeping people safe by stopping whole areas of economic activity together”. Countries such as Australia and Singapore “do this better”, he added.