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The incredible – needless – tangle that Labour got itself into over its £28bn green investment policy only truly became clear as leader Sir Keir Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves were killing it.

The flagship policy had been that it borrows £28bn a year to turn Britain green.

But at 5pm on Thursday, Labour announced it would only be borrowing just a tenth of that sum – £2.6bn a year – an extraordinary switch.

Politics Live: Starmer ditches his ‘biggest dividing line’ with Tories

Yet in the same breath, Sir Keir and Ms Reeves say that they will continue to press ahead with all the projects they were talking about doing before this change, reducing the scale of spending on just one project while keeping all the rest in train.

Only over the course of briefings and interviews did the true scale of the underlying mess become clear.

All the agony and pain that Labour has been absorbing over this policy – a bruise the Tories have been mercilessly punching – was for a headline policy that, in reality, didn’t exist in detail at all.

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As recently as Tuesday, Sir Keir recommitted to spending £28bn a year. Last month, he told Sky News the Tories were trying to “weaponise this issue, the £28bn… this is a fight I want to have”.

Yet even as he said this, it wasn’t true.

Since it was first announced two years ago, this policy has already been changed three times – to delay its introduction in full until the second half of the parliament, make it subject to fiscal rules, and to set this target inclusive of existing government decisions.

This meant that despite repeating the headline figure, Labour was never going to spend anything like £28bn.

Some £10bn of the £28bn had already been committed by this Tory government – so would not need further additional borrowing by a future Labour government.

Read More:
What is Labour’s £28bn green prosperity plan?

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves with party leader Sir Keir Starmer after making her keynote speech during the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. Picture date: Monday October 9, 2023.
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Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves

On top of that, Labour never worked out how to spend all the remaining £18bn a year. Around £6bn of that had no plan attached to it whatsoever, so that’s been slashed – a cost-free cut.

Shadow climate secretary Ed Miliband might have had designs for how to spend that remaining sum, but it never appears to have passed muster with the shadow Treasury team.

Yet it seems incredible that Labour was drawing fire, worrying and losing political capital and sleep over a borrowing pledge it did not know how to spend.

It had become a strange mirage of a policy – about signalling intent – yet Sir Keir appeared determined to continue fighting in public to defend it – until today. Now he will spend just £4.7bn, only £2.6bn of which is from borrowing.

Nobody would say this has been easy.

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But in killing it, Labour is setting a clear course that very tight fiscal discipline matters most, just at a point where big decisions are about to be made that will determine what Labour does in office.

Sir Keir and Ms Reeves made clear that the fiscal rules – artificial rules to curb borrowing – are more important than anything else, yet have not spelled them out in full.

Reeves – who seemed to be the architect of the U-turn – is pushing to copy the Tory fiscal rules, meaning an even tighter regime than the one implemented by Gordon Brown as chancellor in 1997.

This worries some, as it will hinder spending all the way through the next parliament if as many think growth remains anaemic.

It is one thing to scrap an artificial spending pledge which had become a political millstone.

But if Ms Reeves is about to bind the hands of Labour for the whole of the next parliament, with the blessing of Sir Keir, decisions like this could become more tricky and more frequent.

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Paradigm urges jury clarity in Roman Storm’s Tornado Cash case

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Paradigm urges jury clarity in Roman Storm’s Tornado Cash case

Paradigm urges jury clarity in Roman Storm’s Tornado Cash case

Paradigm’s chief legal officer and general counsel said if Roman Storm is found guilty, it could slow future software development in the crypto and fintech industries.

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Flawed data used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’, Baroness Casey finds

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Flawed data used repeatedly to dismiss claims about 'Asian grooming gangs', Baroness Casey finds

Flawed data has been used repeatedly to dismiss claims about “Asian grooming gangs”, Baroness Louise Casey has said in a new report, as she called for a new national inquiry.

The government has accepted her recommendations to introduce compulsory collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in grooming cases, and for a review of police records to launch new criminal investigations into historical child sexual exploitation cases.

Politics latest: Yvette Cooper reveals details of grooming gangs report

Baroness Louise Casey answering question from the London Assembly police and crime committee at City Hall in east London. Pic: PA
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Baroness Louise Casey carried out the review. Pic: PA

The crossbench peer has produced an audit of sexual abuse carried out by grooming gangs in England and Wales, after she was asked by the prime minister to review new and existing data, including the ethnicity and demographics of these gangs.

In her report, she has warned authorities that children need to be seen “as children” and called for a tightening of the laws around the age of consent so that any penetrative sexual activity with a child under 16 is classified as rape. This is “to reduce uncertainty which adults can exploit to avoid or reduce the punishments that should be imposed for their crimes”, she added.

Baroness Casey said: “Despite the age of consent being 16, we have found too many examples of child sexual exploitation criminal cases being dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges where a 13 to 15-year-old had been ‘in love with’ or ‘had consented to’ sex with the perpetrator.”

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Grooming gangs victim speaks out

The peer has called for a nationwide probe into the exploitation of children by gangs of men.

She has not recommended another over-arching inquiry of the kind conducted by Professor Alexis Jay, and suggests the national probe should be time-limited.

The national inquiry will direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the inquiry’s “purpose is to challenge what the audit describes as continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling among local agencies”.

On the issue of ethnicity, Baroness Casey said police data was not sufficient to draw conclusions as it had been “shied away from”, and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.

‘Flawed data’

However, having examined local data in three police force areas, she found “disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as in the significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity identified in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country, to at least warrant further examination”.

She added: “Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about men from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds grooming and sexually exploiting young white girls, the system has consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively.

“Instead, flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue.

“This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division.”

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Read more:
Officials tried to cover up grooming scandal, says Cummings

Why many victims welcome national inquiry into grooming gangs
Grooming gangs scandal timeline

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From January: Grooming gangs: What happened?

The baroness hit out at the failure of policing data and intelligence for having multiple systems which do not communicate with each other.

She also criticised “an ambivalent attitude to adolescent girls both in society and in the culture of many organisations”, too often judging them as adults.

‘Deep-rooted failure’

Responding to Baroness Casey’s review, Ms Yvette Cooper told the House of Commons: “The findings of her audit are damning.

“At its heart, she identifies a deep-rooted failure to treat children as children. A continued failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, from exploitation, and serious violence.

She added: “Baroness Casey found ‘blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions’ all played a part in this collective failure.”

Ms Cooper said she will take immediate action on all 12 recommendations from the report, adding: “We cannot afford more wasted years repeating the same mistakes or shouting at each other across this House rather than delivering real change.”

Yvette Cooper makes a statement in the House of Commons, London, on Baroness Casey's findings on grooming gangs.
Pic: PA
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Home Secretary Yvette Cooper responded to the report. Pic: PA

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said: “After months of pressure, the prime minister has finally accepted our calls for a full statutory national inquiry into the grooming gangs.

“We must remember that this is not a victory for politicians, especially the ones like the home secretary, who had to be dragged to this position, or the prime minister. This is a victory for the survivors who have been calling for this for years.”

Ms Badenoch added: “The prime minister’s handling of this scandal is an extraordinary failure of leadership. His judgement has once again been found wanting.

“Since he became prime minister, he and the home secretary dismissed calls for an inquiry because they did not want to cause a stir.

“They accused those of us demanding justice for the victims of this scandal as, and I quote, ‘jumping on a far right bandwagon’, a claim the prime minister’s official spokesman restated this weekend – shameful.”

The government has promised new laws to protect children and support victims so they “stop being blamed for the crimes committed against them”.

It is also launching new police operations and a new national inquiry to direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures.

There will also be new ethnicity data and research “so we face up to the facts on exploitation and abuse,” the home secretary said.

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Crypto regulation needs more technologists and fewer suits

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Crypto regulation needs more technologists and fewer suits

Crypto regulation needs more technologists and fewer suits

The crypto community is missing the opportunity to reimagine rather than transpose rulemaking for financial services. More technologists must join the regulatory conversation.

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