Lib Dems say Robert Jenrick’s ‘attempt to exploit’ child grooming scandal is ‘completely shameless’ – UK politics live | Politics

Scottish Lib Dems says they are hoping for concessions that could persuade them to vote for SNP budget

Severin Carrell

Alex Cole-Hamilton, the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, has confirmed his party hopes to wrangle a deal with Scottish ministers which would be good enough to win their four votes at Holyrood.

His confirmation follows an incredulous response from other parties to claims from John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, that the Scottish budget could fall because his minority government might lose the vote on it, risking public services and a rise in populist-fuelling anger amongst voters.

Cole-Hamilton said Scottish Labour’s confirmation earlier today (see 9.40am) that it would not block the budget made it clear there would be no crisis, and therefore no risk of an early election – despite Swinney’s theatrics.

He indicated the Lib Dems would abstain on the budget at the very least, but were still angling for more concessions:

You can already see significant Liberal Democrat demands baked into the pages of the budget’s first draft. There is the reinstatement of the winter fuel allowance for pensioners, spending on social care, affordable homes, family carers, additional support needs, GPs, dentists, long covid, the Belford hospital in Fort William and Edinburgh’s Eye Pavilion [an eye hospital].

There is no deal at present, our support is not guaranteed, but we continue to negotiate with the government and expect more talks in the coming days.

Plaid Cymru claims Labour can no longer give Wales leadership it needs

Steven Morris

At the start of its centenary year, Plaid Cymru is arguing it has the alternative vision needed to win power from Labour, which has dominated politics in Wales for more than a century.

Speaking at a press conference to mark the start of a crucial – and potentially very exciting – year for Plaid, its leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, said Labour was failing Welsh citizens, citing NHS waiting lists and crises such as the Welsh ambulance service declaring a critical incident at new year.

Ap Iorwerth said:

We will be making the case for new leadership and the fresh start that I believe Wales urgently needs with Plaid Cymru at the helm. Over the next three months, we’ll give more detail about our ambitious offer of change for the people of Wales, better public services and improved NHS, an economy that creates good jobs, a government that will be unrelenting and fighting for fairness for our communities.

Plaid believes it can make dramatic gains at the 2026 Senedd elections. Ap Iorwerth said:

We’ll be starting next week by publishing our plan to bring down NHS waiting lists. And we’ve got a clear message. If people in Wales want to see Wales put first, if they feel let down by Labour, if they’re looking for an alternative, and crucially in these times of uncertainty and division, looking for a driven government that will be focusing on turning the corner for Wales.

The Plaid leader said the Labour government in Cardiff was unwilling to challenge its “masters” in Westminster to call for more for Wales.

He referred to a blog by the former Labour minister Lee Waters who suggested his party needed to shake off the perception it was managing the status quo.

Ap Iorwerth said his sense was that there is a realisation that Labour governing Wales was not inevitable. “There’s an opportunity for change,” he said. “The Labour establishment is not as good as it gets for Wales.”

At the end of last week Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary and runner-up in last year’s Tory leadership contest, said the child abuse grooming scandal started with “mass migration” and “importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women”. In response Samuel Kasumu, a former Tory adviser on race issues, said that comments like that could lead to people being killed, while Kemi Badenoch defended her colleague.

In an inteview on the Today programme this morning, asked if Kasumu’s comments made him reconsider his views, Jenrick replied:

That’s complete nonsense. MPs have been killed in this country in recent times by a jihadist and by a neo-Nazi. They were killed because of the views of those individuals, not what anything an MP has said. We have to fight extremism in this country, wherever we find it, and you fight that by standing up to the extremists, you don’t fight it by shying away, by turning a blind eye, by looking the other way.

I’m not going to tiptoe around this issue. Millions of people in our country are listening to your programme this morning, and they are appalled by what is happening to young girls, and they are shocked that there might be girls in that situation today. We have to stop this.

Jenrick rejected claims that the last government was not implementing the recommendations from the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, saying that work on this was under way when the general election was called. And he defended the Tory call for a new inquiry, referring to the GB News report (see 11.06am) saying there are 50 towns where child exploitation gangs have operated which have not been covered by “proper inquiries”.

Asked by the presenter, Nick Robinson, who he was referring to when he spoke about “alien cultures who possess medieval attitudes towards women”, Jenrick said British Pakistanis were over-represented in the rape gangs. It was important to be honest about that, he said.

Asked if he was saying people from Pakistan had an alien culture, Jenrick replied:

I think some people who come from that country do. I’m not saying everybody.

The exchange went on:

NR: Did Sajid Javid’s family [the former Tory chancellor] come with a medieval culture to this county?

RJ: I’m saying some people do.

NR: Do Sadiq Khan’s family [the Labour mayor of London]?

RJ: I’m saying some people do, Nick.

NR: How are you going to identify those you think acceptable and those who are not?

RJ: Are you disputing the evidence, outlined by the report you have cited, and the testimonies of the victims – in fact the testimonies of the perpetrators themselves – that many cases were Pakistani men, some born in this country …

NR: I’m asking you what you would do as a result of it. Would you stop immigrants from those countries?

RJ: I’ve always said, that’s the point made by Kemi Badenoch, the leader of my party, that not all cultures are equal. We should be very careful about who is coming into this country and the scale of immigration.

Robinson then pointed out that immigration from Pakistan increased after Brexit, and while Jenrick was a Home Office minister.

After the interview, the Liberal Democrats called for Jenrick to be sacked from the shadow cabinet. Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem deputy leader, said:

Robert Jenrick’s attempt to exploit this appalling scandal for his own political gain is completely shameless. He didn’t lift a finger to help the victims when a minister, now he’s jumping on the bandwagon and acting like a pound shop Farage.

Kemi Badenoch should sack him as shadow justice secretary and condemn his divisive comments, instead of letting him run a leadership campaign under her nose.

Plaid Cymru criticises Mark Drakeford for ‘threatening’ it with ‘day of reckoning’ if it doesn’t back Welsh budget

Steven Morris

The Plaid Cymru leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, has strongly criticised former first minister Mark Drakeford for warning that his party will soon face a “day of reckoning” over the Welsh government’s budget.

The Labour-led government needs the support of another party to get its spending plans through in March and Plaid is making it clear it is not going to help, as it has previously done.

Drakeford, who is now cabinet secretary for finance, has called Plaid’s stance “baffling” and said it is playing “political games” and its day of reckoning would come in March.

Speaking at a press conference in Cardiff, ap Iorwerth confirmed there had been no secret negotiations over the budget. He said:

There are no negotiations. It’s Labour’s budget to pass. And I assume they will be busy thinking how they’re going to get it passed, but no negotiations have taken place.

We’ve shown in recent years our willingness to get government to do things that otherwise wouldn’t by entering into a cooperation agreement. That came to an end. But now we have Labour putting together its own budget and its responsibility to get it through.

We have heard what the finance cabinet secretary said. I don’t think it’s particularly good look for a government to be threatening an opposition party in that way, when really they have to be focused on getting their own budget through. It’s not our budget.

Asked about the suggestion that Plaid wasn’t a serious party, he said:

That sounds to me like a governing Labour party feeling they are entitled to have their budget passed in whatever form it’s put forward. I don’t believe that that’s how budgets work in parliaments around the world.

Yesterday, in his lengthy attack on Elon Musk and the Conservative party for what they have said about the child abuse scandal, Keir Starmer focused on one point in particular: the Conservative party’s refusal to condemn Musk for saying that Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, was a “rape genocide apologist”. Musk’s tweet saying this has now had almost 43m views and many MPs believe a comment this extreme could amount to an incitement to violence. Starmer said that a line had been crossed, and that decent politicians would condemn this unequivocally.

In his LBC phone-in Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, was asked if he would condemn Musk for what he said. He refused, replying:

If he was inciting violence, then that would be going beyond the line at which free speech is acceptable.

Nick Ferrari, the presenter, said that using language like “rape genocide apologist’ was very close to this point. Farage replied:

It’s very, very strong language, and it offends many, but then free speech should be able to offend many.

Asked if it was OK to knowingly cause offence, Farage replied:

Of course. That’s what free speech is. You should be allowed, I should be allowed, to say things that others find offensive.

Farage also said that his friends in America had read some of the online accounts of what happened in the child abuse scandals in British towns. They were “horrified”, he said. He went on:

That perhaps explains some of the strong language [from Musk]. You may find it offensive. I don’t think it goes beyond the line.

During the phone-in, Farage also said that he believed that he would be able to repair relations with Musk, even though Musk declared at the weekend that he did not think Farage had “what it takes” to be leader of Reform UK. Farage said he expected to meet Musk when he went to Washington for President Trump’s inauguration.

Scottish Labour won’t vote against SNP government’s budget, Anas Sarwar says

Severin Carrell

The Scottish budget will pass through Holyrood comfortably after Anas Sarwar said Labour would either abstain or vote for it, despite John Swinney’s theatrical warnings about its precarious status on Monday.

Swinney annoyed his allies in the Scottish Greens and irritated Labour by claiming yesterday the budget hung in the balance because his minority government had no guarantees other parties would support it. The SNP has 62 MSPs in Holyrood, three short of a majority.

The Scottish Greens, who believe they were in “sincere” talks with Swinney’s ministers about backing the budget, said his rhetoric risked fuelling cynicism about politics by inventing a crisis; Sarwar accused him of “shadow boxing”.

Sarwar told BBC Radio Scotland on Tuesday morning Scottish Labour, which has seen its support in the polls plunge since November, would not obstruct the budget and might even support it:

We, at this current stage, will abstain from this budget, because this budget is going to pass anyway. It has the votes of another political party, at least one of the opposition political parties, so we are not going to vote against this budget.

Labour is in a delicate position: the budget uses several billion pounds of extra spending provided by the UK Labour government, and will reverse the chancellor’s cuts to winter fuel payments for pensioners in Scotland – a policy Sarwar supports.

He told Good Morning Scotland Labour might even vote for it if Swinney enacts his pledge to scrap the two-child payment cap this year rather than next year – another measure which goes against UK Labour policy.

If they actually put the ending of the two-child benefit cap into this budget and lift it on the first of April, we will vote for the budget.

UPDATE:

Both the Scottish Greens and Liberal Democrats are said to be in constructive talks with the Scottish government, and the Greens are hopeful of winning more concessions to gain their votes. But neither party will confirm for reporting purposes what they plan to do, with things still to play for, because that lessens their bargaining power. The belief is that at least one of those parties will do so, because the political gains for a small party in showing to its target voters they’re able to influence the government are real.

It is possible both parties will do so and one should not forget Alba and its sole MSP, Ash Regan; if Sarwar was being cynical, he may have been referring to Alba, though her single vote doesn’t greatly change the parliamentary arithmetic.

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is doing a phone-in on LBC. He has just said that, if the government does not hold a new national inquiry into sexual abuse and rape by gangs, his party will organise its own version. He said:

If [the government] won’t do it, we at Reform will do it. I will have no difficulty in raising the money to do this whatsoever. We’ll appoint independent ex-judges and experts.

Farage said that he would press ahead with this plan within the next few weeks, if the government continued to refuse to set up its own inquiry.

When Nick Ferrari, the presenter, put it to him that a party-led inquiry would not have the power to compel witnesses to give evidence, Farage replied:

I think this would garner such massive public support that anybody asked to appear that didn’t appear would look terrible.

Farage also said he was encouraged by the Times coming out in favour of a new inquiry in an editorial today. The Times, which has published much investigative reporting on this topic, said:

Grooming gangs were only one element of Professor Jay’s inquiry — Rotherham garners a sole mention in her 468-page report and the gangs in Telford are not referenced. A new national inquiry is needed to explore where and how these gangs operated.

Good morning. Keir Starmer is basking in praise from liberal, progressive Britain today for the way he hit back at calls for a new inquiry into child sexual abuse scandals, and the way they are being driven by inflammatory and false claims by Elon Musk and other rightwingers on X. But Tory Britain has yet to be persuaded, and the rightwing papers are promoting the Conservative party’s (very dubious) claim that Starmer was smearing anyone opposed to child rape as far-right.

This morning Prof Alexis Jay stepped into this argument. As the main chair of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA), the eight-year, all-encompassing inquiry into child sexual abuse in Britain, she has as much authority on this subject as anyone. Today she clearly came out against calls from Musk, Reform UK, the Tories and others for a new national inquiry focusing specifically on rape or grooming gangs.

When it was put to her on the Today programme that Robbie Moore, the Conservative MP for Keighley and Ilkley, told MPs last night that the scale of sexual abuse in Bradford could “dwarf” what happened in Rotherham, and that this showed why a new inquiry might be useful, she replied:

No, I don’t agree with that, in the sense of requiring further and more detailed national inquiries into child sexual exploitation. We have learned quite a lot from those reviews that have already been undertaken.

Jay said she did not believe that there are many areas where officials are still trying to cover up sexual abuse allegations. It might be happening in some places, she said. “But in general terms we believe that people are well intentioned in their local efforts to address any known problems about child sexual exploitation,” she said.

Asked if she thought a new national inquiry would be counter-productive, she replied:

I think that the time has passed for more inquiries. We’ve had enough of inquiries, consultations and discussions, and especially for those victims and survivors who’ve had the courage to come forward …

They clearly want action, and we have set out what action is required, and people should just get on with it, locally and nationally.

Asked if a new inquiry would hinder the implementation of the recommendations from the final IICSA report, which came out in 2022, she replied: “It would certainly cause delays.”

Asked if she thought people calling for a new inquiry were politicising the issue, she replied:

I would not attribute that to everyone, but I’ve certainly been very unhappy about the politicisation of child sexual exploitation and child sexual abuse in the way that many people, sometimes in a very uninformed way, have waded into the argument.

This sounded like a clear reference to Musk. But, asked if she thought “billionaires in America” knew what was happening in places like Oldham, Jay said she did not want to talk about individuals.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9am: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, holds a phone-in on LBC.

9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet.

9.30am: Rhun ap Iorwerth, the Plaid Cymru leader, holds a press conference at the Senedd in Cardiff.

10am: Vijay Rangarajan, chief executive at the Electoral Commission, and colleagues give evidence to the Commons public administration and constitutional affairs committee about the 2024 election.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

11.30am: Wes Streeting, the health secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

2.30pm: Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister and housing secretary, gives evidene to the Commons housing committee.

2.30pm: Executives from McDonald’s, Tesco and the British Retail Consortium give evidence to the Commons business committee about the employment rights bill.

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