Tony Blair’s climate crisis views ‘absolutely aligned’ with government policy, Starmer says – as it happened | Politics

Key events

Afternoon summary

David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has said that spending money on defence can still save lives around the world. Speaking to a Lords committee, and responding to questions about the impact of the government’s aid spending cuts, he said:

Sometimes, investing in hard power saves lives, by the way. The war in Ukraine has cost the continent of Africa [by] some estimates 7 billion, upwards 9, and so us investing in hard power at this time is important for global security and saves lives, not just in our own country.

For a full list of all the stories covered here today, scroll through the key events timeline at the top of the blog.

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Dominic Cummings urges people to vote Reform UK in local elections

At PMQs Keir Starmer taunted Nigel Farage by referring to reports that Reform UK is taking advice from Liz Truss. This afternoon another Tory figure from the Boris Johnson era came out to help Farage. Only Dominic Cummings has formally endorsed the party.

In a post on his Substack blog, Cummings, Johnson’s chief adviser in No 10 until November 2020, said:

On Thursday, you should vote Reform if you have a local vote, unless you’re voting personally for someone you know about. Why? To signal a desire for big change and strengthen the forces pushing for big change. Voting Tory just encourages the useless gang in charge to think they should carry on what they’re doing which is wasting everyone’s time. Per my previous blog we need to either a) push them in a useful direction (and a necessary condition is retiring KB [Kemi Badenoch]) or b) close and replace them ASAP. It’s also the best way to spook No10 to abandon some of the dumb things they’re doing — e.g letting the worst elements of the HMT/OBR consensus govern economic policy.

Like Truss, Cummings is widely seen as a crackpot by his opponents – and by many of his former political colleagues. But, unlike Truss, Cummings is also seen as a successful political operator. Many people think Vote Leave would have lost if he had not been in charge.

Cummings now spends a lot of time on social media speculating about how the Conservative party might the replaced, as the first step towards revolutionary overhaul of the UK state. But at one stage he was talking about setting up his own startup party. Now he seems more interested in working through Reform.

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Updated at 12.51 EDT

No 10 praises Miliband – but declines to say he will definitely stay in post until next election

At the Downing Street post-PMQs lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson praised Ed Miliband – but refused to say he would stay in post for the whole of this parliament.

Asked if Keir Starmer had confidence in Miliband, the PM’s spokesperson said: “Absolutely. He’s doing a fantastic job.”

But, asked if Miliband would stay as energy secretary for the whole of this parliament, the spokesperson replied:

The PM absolutely backs the energy secretary, as I said. He does a great job in winning the global race for the jobs of the future.

Miliband is seen as vulnerable because he is the most prominent cabinet supporter of net zero policies that some senior figures in the party regard as a liability. (An alternative theory is that at some point climate policy might be downgraded to the extent that he would be pushed into resigning.)

No 10’s decision not to say Miliband is guaranteed to keep his job is seen as significant because Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, and David Lammy, the foreign secretary, have both received assurances of this kind.

But the Lammy comment, issued when Tories were calling for his resignation over his past comments about Donald Trump, might have been over-interpreted. And the Reeves comment only came a few hours after Keir Starmer declined to say Reeves would remain in post for the whole parliament, and No 10 realised it had to change tack to stop papers reporting that she no longer had Starmer’s confidence.

In reality, Starmer has been ruthless with regard to previous appointments and, if he were to decided that Lammy or Reeves should move, the previous assurances would count for little.

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Reform UK receives libel claim from staff working for Rupert Lowe over report issued by party during Lowe/Farage feud

Ben Quinn

Ben Quinn is a senior Guardian reporter.

Reform UK’s simmering civil war was re-ignited today as the party was served with papers as part of a legal action being taken by staff for the MP, Rupert Lowe.

Lowe’s staff are taking legal action after Reform UK published an internal report into bullying allegations, in which they were named.

The libel action is separate from an announcement earlier this month by Lowe that he would be suing Nigel Farage and two other senior party figures after they accused him of bullying staff and making verbal threats.

Lowe, who now sits as an independent, said he was suing Farage along with Lee Anderson, its chief whip, and Zia Yusuf, the party chair, for comments he said had “caused serious harm to my reputation”.

The Great Yarmouth MP was suspended after Anderson and Yusuf issued a joint statement saying the party had “received complaints from two female employees about serious bullying” in Lowe’s offices, and had at least twice made threats of violence against Yusuf.

The papers served on Reform UK today were on behalf of four people working for Lowe.

“The action follows the publication of an internal report commissioned by Reform UK which publicly named then when there was no legal basis for doing so,” a law firm acting for them said in a statement.

One of the four individuals was pregnant, it is understood.

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‘Magic spatula of victory’ – Ed Davey reveals secret of Lib Dems’ campaigning success

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, has become notorious for his oddball photo opportunities, but today’s is one of the strangest yet. He has been signing wooden spatulas – or “the magic spatula of victory”, to be exact – and distributing them to party activists.

No – in the office, none of us had a clue what this was about either.

But the Lib Dem press office was able to elucidate. Apparently Lib Dem activists often use spatulas when they are delivering leaflets because it makes it easier to push them through letterboxes, and reduces the risk from dog bites.

Other parties don’t normally hold photocalls to celebrate their campaigning paraphernalia. But other parties don’t have quite the same leaflet obsession, as anyone living in a Lib Dem target ward will know.

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Badenoch says she feels ‘vindicated’ by Blair’s net zero comments

Kemi Badenoch has said that she feels “vindicated” by Tony Blair’s comments on net zero.

The Tory leader gave a speech last month saying that having 2050 as a legal target for achieving net zero was unrealistic and, as Sky News reports, on a campaign visit this afternoon she said:

I do feel vindicated, and I’m really glad that a former prime minister – a Labour former prime minister – agrees with me.

The plans that we have for net zero by 2050 are impossible, and what Keir Starmer needs to do is scrap what Ed Miliband is planning, which is actually going to bankrupt the country. It’s not workable.

Much of what Blair said in the foreword he wrote to the TBI report published yesterday does echo what Badenoch has argued on climate policy. But the clarification his thinktank released earlier today explicity says the thinktank does back the 2050 net zero targets. (See 11.58am.)

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‘Muddled and misleading’ – Blair’s net zero report criticised by his government’s former climate guru Lord Stern

When Tony Blair was PM, he commissioned Nicholas Stern (now Lord Stern), a former chief economist at the World Bank, to write a report on the economics of climate change. It was published in 2006, it was vast and it was highly influential – seen as helping to persuade policy makers around the world not just that there was an environmental/humanitarian case for tackling climate change, but an unarguable economic case too.

So what does Stern think of the Blair report? Not much. Stern is now chair of the Grantham Research institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the LSE and he has issued this comment.

This new report is muddled and misleading. There is far more progress being made around the world to decarbonise the global economy than it suggests. For instance, China is the world’s leading producer and domestic deployer of renewables and electric vehicles. Its power generating capacity from renewables has now exceeded that of fossil fuels and its emissions are likely to peak in the next two years.

The UK’s leadership on climate change, particularly the elimination of coal from its power sector, is providing an influential example to other countries. So, too, its climate change legislation and its Climate Change Committee. If the UK wobbles on its route to net zero, other countries may become less committed. The UK matters.

The transition to clean domestic energy offers British consumers the prospect of lower bills, and greater energy security by not being dependent on volatile international markets for fossil fuels.

And the report downplays the science in its absence of a sense of urgency and the lack of appreciation of the need for the world to achieve net zero as soon as possible, in order to manage the growth in climate change impacts that are already hurting households and businesses across the world and in the UK. Delay is dangerous.

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But the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), an organisation that promotes informed debate on climate policy, has said the Tony Blair Institute was naive not to realise how the report would be interpreted in the light of what Blair wrote in the foreword. Jess Ralston, an analyst at the ECIU, said:

Given the clarification the TBI has had to issue, this seems like a bizarre case of naivety on how parts of the media and politicians might misinterpret some of the statements in the foreword.

More carbon capture and storage, 80% of which has gone into extracting more oil and gas to date, nuclear and nature-based solutions, even AI, are not new suggestions and in the UK the government is pursuing all of them to an extent. The majority of the public back net zero, and the science is clear that unless we reach net zero emissions, we don’t stop climate change. The public don’t want climate extremes of flooding, wildfires and crop failures to get ever worse, and it’s ironic that this has come on the same day the Climate Change Committee published evidence of how climate extremes are already threatening the UK.

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Author of Tony Blair Institute’s climate report claims it was misinterpreted

Lindy Fursman, director of energy and climate policy at the Tony Blair Institute thinktank, wrote the report published yesterday that infuriated environmentalists. In truth, it was the comments in the foreword, written by Blair himself, that provoked most of the uproar. But Fursman is clearly unhappy about the way her report was interpeted.

In a post on LinkedIn, responding to a journalist who quoted what Nigel Farage said about the report yesterday and who asked if this was the response she was expecting, Fursman replied:

This is exactly the problem – the paper *doesn’t* say that the push for net zero is irrational, it says that the current state of debate about it is.

I thought I was really clear in the paper that we need net zero, and that we need more action – including on continued use of renewables and their financing, especially in developing countries.

In fact, I even say that an added benefit of CCS would be to show how much cheaper renewables are!!

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Unite says Labour should respond to Blair’s net zero concerns

In what might be a first, Unite, the most leftwing of the major unions affiliated to the Labour party, has put out a new release backing Tony Blair. The press release is headlined Grangemouth closure and Blair’s net zero intervention must be wake up call for government warns Unite and it quotes Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, saying:

Unite is not against net zero but it will not be achieved without serious investment in new jobs.

Unite has warned time after time, that all the rhetoric about a joined up industrial strategy and future jobs must be backed up with serious investment that actually delivers. What is Labour waiting for? The time to act is now.

If they fail to do this, then Labour cannot expect workers to support their net zero plan.

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Updated at 10.03 EDT