Liz Kendall says ‘we are clear-eyed about our relationship with China and national security will always come first’
Good morning and welcome to Friday’s UK politics blog. National security “will always come first”, science secretary Liz Kendall said this morning amid reports the government could approve a new Chinese embassy in London.
Kendall declined to comment directly on the reports, saying decisions on the embassy “will be taken through the proper process”. But she told Sky News:
We are clear-eyed about our relationship with China and national security will always come first. That is absolutely non-negotiable.
But where we can safely work with China, whether that’s on the economy or areas like research, that’s what we’ll do, because we want to get the best outcome for the British public.
I don’t know about the prime minister’s diary plans for the new year, but what I do know is that he takes all of those issues extremely seriously.
Ed Miliband promised to cut everyone’s energy bills by £300 but more and more experts are sounding the alarm that his plans will lock us into paying higher bills for decades.
Despite gas prices falling, independent experts, energy suppliers and academics say it’s the extra costs of Ed’s net zero targets that are putting upward pressure on bills.
Keir Starmer has defended his decision to travel to South Africa for the G20 summit days before the budget and despite the planned absence of Donald Trump. The prime minister arrived in South Africa on Friday morning for two days of summit discussions and bilateral talks on topics including sustainability and economic growth.
Starmer has accused Nigel Farage of being “spineless” when it comes to tackling racism in his party after the Guardian revealed allegations he made xenophobic and antisemitic comments while he was at school. The prime minister said the Reform UK leader had “questions to answer” about the comments and chants alleged, which included songs about the Holocaust and accusations of bullying towards ethnic minority schoolboys.
The UK’s response to Covid was “too little, too late”, a damning official report into the handling of the pandemic has concluded, saying the introduction of a lockdown even a week earlier than happened could have saved more than 20,000 lives. In a written parliamentary statement, Starmer addressed the failings identified in the report of the previous government.
Rachel Reeves has been urged by 40 Labour MPs to drop plans to fund NHS buildings with private finance initiatives (PFI) that would saddle the health service with debt. The Labour MPs, including Cat Eccles, Clive Lewis and Rebecca Long-Bailey, pressed the chancellor to commit to investment in the NHS without the use of private capital and warned that a return to the New Labour era of private funding for public projects would be damaging for trust in the government.
The Liberal Democrats are forcing a vote in parliament on creating a new customs union to put pressure on Labour MPs to take a more pro-EU stance. Ed Davey’s party is writing to all Labour MPs urging them to back a new bill in favour of a customs union with the EU, believing this is the best way to boost growth and raise revenue, rather than tax rises.
