Lack of ICU capacity was ‘political choice’, Chris Whitty tells Covid inquiry – UK politics live | Politics

The Senedd (the Welsh parliament) has had the power to vary income tax in Wales since 2019, but the Labour government in power there has never used it. Yesterday Mark Drakeford, the former first minister who is now finance secretary, said the government would “of course” consider the option of raising income tax when it sets its budget for next year.

Drakeford made it clear that he was not very keen on the idea, but the fact that he would not rule it out has led to the Welsh Conservatives attacking him for floating this as a possibility. This is from Andrew RT Davies, the Welsh Conservative leader.

We all know promises mean nothing to Labour.

But increasing income tax, as Labour ministers in the Senedd are considering, would be unforgivable.

It would increase economic unfairness and put even more pressure on working people.

As the BBC reports, in evidence to a Senedd committee yesterday, Drakeford said the Welsh government would only be able to raise “significant amounts of money” by raising the basis rate of income tax, because just increasing the higher or top rates woul not raise a lot. (Wales has significantly fewer higher rate taxpayers than the UK as a whole.)

He told the committee that people start paying income tax at £12,500 and he said he was very conscious that, if the Welsh government put income tax up, people on low incomes would be hit. He referred to a constituent, a young woman doing an important job but struggling on a very modest income. He said:

This is a very responsible person. Her letter to me said that she hadn’t eaten for three days because she’d paid her council tax bill, and that had left her with nothing to manage.

That’s the person I have in my head when we talk about raising rates of income tax, not people who are able to do it and would want to make a bigger contribution, but the people who are right on the very edge of managing and sometimes not managing.

Private school bursars say number of pupils likely to leave due to VAT policy lower than campaigners have claimed

Sally Weale

Bursars at independent schools in the UK are preparing for fewer pupils to leave as a result of the government’s policy of adding VAT to fees than recent reports have suggested.

Since Labour outlined its policy, there have been wide-ranging estimates about the impact higher fees might have on pupil numbers, with some surveys suggesting up to one in four parents could be forced to take their children out of the private sector.

The most recent, from UK wealth management firm Saltus earlier this week, found one in eight (13%) parents are planning to move their children into state school this academic year.

Estimates like this have been widely publicised by campaigners, and newspapers, opposed to the VAT policy.

Now, however, it has emerged that “most” private schools are basing their calculations on an estimate that around 3-5% of pupils will leave as a result of the policy, according to the Independent Schools’ Bursars Association (ISBA).

This is even lower than the estimate put forward by leading economic think tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which predicted the policy would have “a relatively limited effect on numbers attending private schools – perhaps a reduction of 3–7%”, a figure which has been relied upon by Labour in defence of their policy.

Speaking to an online forum debating the issue yesterday, ISBA chief operating officer John Murphie was asked about the modelling being used to estimate the impact of the government’s VAT policy on the sector.

“There’s going to be a contraction, there’s no doubt about that,” Murphie said. “The working assumption that most schools are taking is that something around between 3 and 5% of pupils,” he said. The ISBA provides support to more than 1200 independent schools.

The policy, which comes into force in January, has triggered countless stories, warning that private schools will go bust and state schools will be unable to cope with the mass exodus of children from the independent sector.

The online meeting, hosted by the Independent Schools Show which takes place in November, was also told that some parents are planning to move out of London in order to find private schools with lower fees in other areas of the country.

Private schools, meanwhile, are looking at a range of cost-cutting measures, including increasing class sizes, reducing the curriculum offer, redundancies, mergers and asset disposals, the forum heard. Schools were also advised to invest in a robot to mark out cricket pitches to save money on a groundsman.

Patrick Wintour

The former UK ambassador to Lebanon Tom Fletcher, who remains closely in touch with diplomats at the UN, said the joint statement backing a 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon signed by the US, France, the UK, the EU and 8 other countries , including three Gulf States, now has to be used to bring about change on the ground.

If that happens, he said it could represent a watershed in the crisis and even a moment when diplomacy fought back.

He also praised the UK’s foreign secretary David Lammy for “coming out impressively early and hard” in favour of an immediate ceasefire in the way a Labour government failed to do in the 2006 Lebanese crisis

He said: “We have got to use this scaffolding so it turns into something that matters on the ground and not just to pause it for 21 days.”

He set out three headline priorities.

1) “Get all sides to step back from escalation. There are signs that Israel is holding back from hitting Beirut and there are signs of Hezbollah holding back from hitting Tel Aviv at scale. Maybe this shows the mutual recognition of the dangers of escalation.”

2) “Get the official Lebanese army on the ground on the Israel-Lebanon border – not Hezbollah, not Iran – get state authority back into the south Lebanon border.”

3 Return to persuading both sides – Hamas and Israel to re-engage with the Gaza ceasefire agreement. “It is that agreement that gets th- e hostages out, the aid in and in the end potentially opens the conditions for the two state solution”.

Elon Musk has not been invited to an international investment summit organised by the government next month, the BBC is reporting. No one will be surprised. Despite being the richest person in the world, and a guest of honour at Rishi Sunak’s AI summit last year, the far-right billionaire spent much of the summer attacking Keir Starmer on X, his social media platform, over the government’s handling of the riots and posting or reposting comments about the situation in the UK which were inflammatory, conspiracy theorist or just wholly false.

But one person may be disappointed. In an interview with the Spectator, Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leadership candidate most popular with party members according to most surveys, has said she is a “huge fan” of his.

The magazine asked all four candidates if they thought Musk had been good for freedom of speech, and Badenoch, the former business secretary, replied:

I think Elon Musk has been a fantastic thing for freedom of speech. I will hold my hand up and say, I’m a huge fan of Elon Musk.

I look at Twitter before he took over and after: there is a lot more free speech. Yes, there are many, many more things that I see on X, as he calls it, that I don’t like.

But I also know that views are not suppressed the way that they were, that there was a cultural establishment – that was very left – that controlled quite a lot of discourse on that platform.

All the other candidates were far more circumspect in how they replied to this question.

Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister and current favourite in the contest, said that he did not have a strong opinion about the X owner, but that he was “not going to be booking a tête-à-tête with Elon Musk any time soon”.

James Cleverly, the former home secretary, said that when Musk took control of X, he tried to counter the perception that right-of-centre voices were being silenced on it. But Cleverly said you should be “very, very careful about curtailing voices that you disagree with”.

And Tom Tugendhat, the former security minister, said he was worried about malign states exploiting the internet for propaganda purposes. (There are claims this is happening much more on X since Musk took over, but Tugendhat directly make that connection.)

John Healey, the defence secretary, is hosting a meeting of the Aukus partnership today, as the UK and Australia are starting talks on a bilateral treaty.

The UK, Australia and the US formed the Aukus alliance, which is focused on submarine defence and Healey is hosting a meeting with the Australian defence minister, Richard Marles, who is also Anthony Albanese’s deputy prime minister, and US defence secretary Lloyd James Austin III.

The Ministry of Defence is also negotiating a separate Aukus side-deal with Australia, which it says will “lay out the nations’ relationship on submarine co-operation, as work progresses on future conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered attack submarines for the UK and Australia”.

In a statement ahead of the meeting, Healey said:

I’m proud to be the first UK defence secretary to host a meeting of Aukus defence ministers in Britain.

As Aukus partners, we stand shoulder-to-shoulder in an increasingly unstable world. This is a partnership that will boost jobs, growth and prosperity across our three nations, as well as strengthening our collective security.

I’m delighted that we will soon be commencing negotiations on a bilateral Aukus treaty with Australia, which will help create a more secure and stable Indo-Pacific for decades to come.

Good morning. Keir Starmer spoke at the United Nations security council yesterday, but today he is speaking at the UN’s general assembly (UNGA). In some respects these are chaotic meetings – world leaders queuing up to give speeches one after another, often over-running their times slots, not necessarily having much positive impact – but that does not mean it’s not a big gig for a debut PM.

According to advance briefing, Starmer will say the UK is returning to “responsible global leadership” because it is in British interests to address problems around the world. He will say:

War, poverty and climate change all rebound on us at home. They make us less secure, they harm our economy, and they create migration flows on an unprecedented scale.

For the rest of the speech, you may have to wait a while. According to the schedule, it will be 10.30pm UK time when Starmer gets to have his say, after Greece but before Nepal.

Before the speech (morning US time, afternoon UK time) he is due to meet US business leaders, including Jon Gray, president of the investment giant Blackstone, whih is announcing a £10bn deal to develop Europe’s largest AI data centre in Blyth, Northumberland. Rowena Mason and Lisa O’Carroll have the story here.

Yesterday, as well as addressing the security council, Starmer met Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, who confirmed that the two will meet in Brussels next week. Starmer said this would be a chance to “reset our relations with the EU”.

I want to reset our relationship with the EU and make Brexit work for the British people.

Looking forward to visiting Brussels next week to start discussions with @vonderleyen.

In Westminster parliament is in recess and, with Labour recovering after their party conference, and the Conservatives getting ready for theirs, there is a bit of a hiatus in the news cycle. Here are some of the events in the diary.

9.30am: The ONS is releasing violent crime figures for England and Wales.

Morning: Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, gives evidence to the Covid inquiry as part of the module looking at the pandemic’s impact on the NHS.

Noon: John Swinney, the first minister, takes questions in the Scottish parliament.

2.15pm: John Healey, the defence secretary, holds a press conference with his US and Australian counterparts, Lloyd Austin and Richard Marles, about the Aukus defence pact.

If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line (BTL) or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.

If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. I’m still using X and I’ll see something addressed to @AndrewSparrow very quickly. I’m also trying Bluesky (@andrewsparrowgdn) and Threads (@andrewsparrowtheguardian).

I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos (no error is too small to correct). And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.