Conservative Senedd member Laura Anne Jones announces defection to Reform UK
Conservative Senedd member Laura Anne Jones has joined Reform UK, the party has announced.
The announcement of the party’s first member of the Senedd was made on Tuesday at the Royal Welsh Show in Builth Wells, Powys.
The annual event is Europe’s largest agricultural show and attracts thousands of visitors every year.
Laura Anne Jones was initially a member of the Senedd for the South Wales East region between 2003 and 2007, before returning in 2020.
She is the second high-profile defection from the Conservative party, after former cabinet minister David Jones joined the party earlier this month.
(L-R) Nigel Farage, David Jones and Laura Anne Jones at the news conference
Reform leader Nigel Farage said the latest defection was a “big step forward for Reform UK in Wales”.
Speaking at the news conference, Ms Jones said she had been a member of the Conservative party for for 31 years but that the party was now “unrecognisable to [her]”.
She said the Conservative Party “wasn’t the party that [she] joined over three decades ago” and that she could “no longer justify” party policy on the doorstep.
Ms Jones said Wales was “a complete mess” and that she now wanted to be “part of the solution not the problem”.
Reform is still without a leader in Wales, but Ms Jones did not rule herself out of the running for that position.
The defection comes with less than a year to go until the Senedd election, when voters in Wales will elect 96 members to the Welsh parliament for the first time – an increase of more than 50%.
Recent opinion polls have shown Reform UK and Plaid Cymru vying for pole position, with Labour in third and the Conservatives in fourth.
Ms Jones said she had not notified the Conservative Party of her defection before the announcement.
The party’s Senedd leader Darren Millar said he was “disappointed” with the announcement and that Conservative members and voters would feel “very let down by her announcement”.
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US Representative Stephen Lynch pressed Federal Reserve Vice Chair Michelle Bowman on Tuesday over her past remarks encouraging banks to “engage fully” with digital assets, questioning the Fed’s role in advancing crypto frameworks while showing confusion over the definition of stablecoins.
In a Tuesday oversight hearing, Lynch asked Bowman, the Fed vice chair for supervision, about remarks she had made at the Santander International Banking Conference in November. According to the congressman, Bowman said she supported banks “[engaging] fully” with respect to digital assets.
However, according to Bowman’s comments at the conference, she referred to “digital assets” rather than specifically cryptocurrencies. The questioning turned into Lynch asking Bowman about distinctions between digital assets and stablecoins.
The Fed official said that the central bank had been authorized by Congress — specifically, the GENIUS Act, a bill aimed at regulating payment stablecoins — to explore a framework for digital assets.
“The GENIUS Act requires us to promulgate regulations to allow these types of activities,” said Bowman.
While the price of many cryptocurrencies can be volatile, stablecoins, like those pegged to the US dollar, are generally “stable,” as the name suggests. Though there have been instances where some coins have depegged from their respective currencies, such as the crash of Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin in 2022, the overwhelming majority of stablecoins rarely fluctuate past 1% of their peg.
Related: Atkins says SEC has ‘enough authority’ to drive crypto rules forward in 2026
Bowman said in August that staff at the Fed should be permitted to hold small “amounts of crypto or other types of digital assets” to gain an understanding of the technology.
FDIC acting chair says stablecoin framework is coming soon
Also testifying at the Tuesday hearing was Travis Hill, acting chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The government agency is one of many responsible for implementing the GENIUS Act, which US President Donald Trump signed into law in July.
According to Hill, the FDIC will propose a stablecoin framework “later this month,” which will include requirements for supervising issuers.
Magazine: When privacy and AML laws conflict: Crypto projects’ impossible choice
Over a third of people think Rachel Reeves exaggerated economic bad news in the run-up to the budget – twice as many as thought the chancellor was being honest, a new Sky News poll has found.
Some 37% told a YouGov-Sky News poll that Ms Reeves made out things were worse than they really are. This is much higher than the 18% who said she was broadly honest, and the 13% who said things were better than she presented.
This comes in an in-depth look at the public reaction to the budget by YouGov, which suggests widespread disenchantment in the performance of the chancellor.
Just 8% think the budget will leave the country as a whole better off, while 2% think it will leave them and their family better off.
Some 52% think the country will be worse off because of the budget, and 50% think they and their family will be worse off.
This suggests the prime minister and chancellor will struggle to sell last week’s set-piece as one that helps with the cost of living.
Some 20% think the budget worried too much about help for older people and didn’t have enough for younger people, while 23% think the reverse.
The poll found 57% think the chancellor broke Labour’s election promises, while 13% think she did not and 30% are not sure. Some 54% said the budget was unfair, including 16% of Labour voters.
And it arguably gets worse…
This comes as the latest Sky News-Times-YouGov poll showed Labour and the Tories are now neck and neck among voters.
The two parties are tied on 19% each, behind Reform UK on 26%. The Greens are on 16%, while the Liberal Democrats are on 14%.
This is broadly consistent with last week, suggesting the budget has not had a dramatic impact on people’s views.
However, the verdict on Labour’s economic competence has declined further post-budget.
Asked who they would trust with the economy, Labour are now on 10% – lower than Liz Truss, who oversaw the 2022 mini-budget, and also lower than Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 election.
The Tories come top of the list of parties trusted on the economy on 17%, with Reform UK second on 13%, Greens on 8% and Lib Dems on 5%. Nearly half, 47%, don’t know or say none of them.
Only 57% of current Labour voters say the party would do the best job at managing the economy, falling to 25% among those who voted Labour in the 2024 election.
Some 63% of voters think Ms Reeves is doing a bad job, including 20% of current Labour voters, while just 11% of all voters think she is doing a good job.
A higher proportion – 69% – think Sir Keir Starmer is doing a bad job.
Paul Atkins, chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, said that the agency can continue advancing digital asset regulation without legislation from Congress, signaling his expectations for the industry in 2026.
In a CNBC interview released on Tuesday, Atkins said the SEC was providing “technical assistance” as Congress considered legislation for digital asset regulation, likely referring to the market structure bill working its way through the US Senate. Atkins said that although the agency’s operations were impacted by the longest US government shutdown in the country’s history, he continued to make progress on “rules that are focused on helping [the crypto] sector.”
“We have enough authority to drive forward,” said Atkins. “I’m looking forward to having an innovation exemption that we’ve been talking about now. We’ll be able to get that out in a month or so.”
Atkins, whom the US Senate confirmed to chair the SEC in April after his nomination by US President Donald Trump, has taken steps to reduce the number of enforcement actions against crypto companies, including by issuing no-action letters for decentralized physical infrastructure networks.
His actions align with many of the policy directives from the White House under Trump, who has issued several executive orders touching on crypto and blockchain.
Related: Republicans urge action on market structure bill over debanking claims
The SEC chair rang the opening bell at the NYSE on Tuesday, outlining his plans for the agency “on the cusp of America’s 250th anniversary.”
US regulators are still awaiting progress on a market structure bill
Lawmakers on the US Senate Agriculture Committee and the Senate Banking Committee are taking steps to move forward with a digital asset market structure bill, which will outline the regulatory authority of agencies, including the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, over cryptocurrencies.
Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott said that the committee planned to have the bill ready for markup in December.
Magazine: When privacy and AML laws conflict: Crypto projects’ impossible choice
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