Starmer launches Labour local election campaign and defends ‘difficult decisions’ over dropped pledges– politics live

The United Nations human rights committee has urged the government to drop its Rwanda bill.

In a statement issued today, the committee said:

The committee voiced its concern over legislative initiatives, such as the Illegal Migration Act 2023, which contains elements to limit access to rights for asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants.

The committee regretted to see [the UK government’s] arrangements with third countries, particularly Rwanda, to transfer asylum seekers, and its efforts to adopt the safety of Rwanda (asylum and immigration) bill despite the UK supreme court’s ruling that the arrangement would not be compliant with international law, particularly the prohibition of refoulement [returning asylum seekers to a country where they may face persecution].

It urged [the UK government] to swiftly repeal the discriminative legislative provisions within the Illegal Migration Act 2023, and to withdraw the safety of Rwanda (asylum and immigration) bill, or repeal the bill if passed.

Labour council leaders in West Midlands declare loss of confidence in Tory mayor Andy Street

Jessica Murray

A row is brewing between West Midlands mayor Andy Street and the Labour leaders of local authorities in his region.

Last night Labour leaders of four councils – Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton and Sandwell – sent an open letter to Street declaring they had lost confidence in his ability to lead the region. This is from John Cotton, leader of Birmingham city council.

The council leaders complained that Street had “repeatedly criticised the local authorities that make up the combined authority”, and said he had made “unfounded claims of success in areas where progress is significantly lacking”.

They also said after eight years in office “there are no achievements that can be pointed to” and Street had used the crisis in council funding for “political gain”.

A spokesperson for Street has responded this morning saying the letter was a “desperate attempt at gutter politics”.

“His plan is to put the West Midlands first, and he is delivering on it. There’s lots done, and lots more to do,” the spokesperson said.

The letter has also not gone down in all Labour quarters, with a number of councillors criticising it on social media. Labour councillor Kerry Jenkins in Birmingham said it was “petty political point scoring” and “debases the validity of your argument”.

Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, has delivered a damning verdict on the management at Thames Water. Commenting on the crisis at the company, which is dealing with a £500m investment black hole, Gove told broadcasters:

I think the leadership of Thames Water has been a disgrace. I think for years now we have seen customers of Thames Water taken advantage of by successive management teams that have been taking out profits and not investing as they should have been.

When I was environment secretary I called this out. They haven’t changed their ways. I have zero sympathy for the leadership of Thames Water. In my own constituency I have seen how they have behaved in a high-handed and arrogant way towards the consumers who pay their bills.

So the answer is not to hit the consumers, the answer is for the management team to look to their own approach and ask themselves why they are in this difficult situation, and of course the answer is because of serial mismanagement for which they must carry the can.

Jasper Jolly has more coverage of this story on his business live blog.

Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, has responded to Labour’s local elections campaign launch by suggesting that Labour cannot be trusted to devolve power to local communities. Keir Starmer has promised to give new powers to councils and mayors with a Take Back Control Act. (See 9.22am.)

He also accused Labour of not support the Tories plans to extend free childcare.

Responding to what Starmer said at the Labour launch, Hunt told broadcasters:

The Labour party in office devolved no powers to local authorities.

In just the last two years we have devolved powers to two-thirds of local authorities.

I am afraid this is a smokescreen for the fact that just this week the Labour party have said they are refusing to guarantee the free childcare offer for every child over the age of nine months.

That is going to be a hammer blow for families up and down the country who from next week are going to start to benefit from the biggest ever rollout of childcare in our history.

Hunt’s reference to Labour refusing to match the government’s plans to extend the availability of free childcare is prompted by Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, telling Newsnight this week that Labour would review the commitment (which is not due to be implemented in full until September 2025) because it does not believe the resources are available to deliver what the government promised. She said:

This is Liz Truss all over again. They’ve got no plan about how they make it happen. I think they risk crashing the childcare system just as they crashed the economy under Liz Truss.

We’ve heard from providers that they are just going to really struggle to make this happen.

And what we hear from parents right across the country is that when they go and try to access these entitlements, these commitments that the Conservatives have made, the places just aren’t there.

The number of crimes being prosecuted behind closed doors in England and Wales has risen to its highest level on record since the measures were introduced, PA Media reports. PA says:

Last year, 787,403 criminal cases were dealt with by magistrates’ courts under the single justice procedure (SJP).

The latest Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures show this exceeds a previous peak of 784,325 recorded in 2019, signalling how the volume of cases being considered through the secretive process has now returned to levels similar to those seen prior to the coronavirus pandemic.

The figures comes after justice secretary Alex Chalk suggested the system needs reform amid concerns from magistrates.

SJP allows magistrates to handle some offences which would not result in jail time – like using a television without a licence, dodging train fares, driving without car insurance, speeding and truancy – in private rather than in open court. Although defendants can choose to attend their hearing in person.

Labour until very recently said it was expecting a general election on Thursday 2 May, it was planning for such a contest, and if there had been an election then, parliament would have dissolved two days ago. Keir Starmer’s speech today would have been the launch of Labour’s national election campaign.

In fact, the speech we heard this morning may well have started life as a draft text for a national campaign launch. It was longer and better crafted than the sort of speech you normally get at a local election campaign launch. It did not contain anything particularly new, but it summarised the party’s key messages crisply. You can read it here.

What was much more interesting was the Q&A. During his four years as Labour leader Starmer has become increasingly confident in handling the media and today he was hard to fault. A lot of the media coverage will focus on the Angela Rayner story, and there is nothing that Starmer could have said that would have killed the story stone dead. But he defended her very robustly and, rather than sounding cowed or defensive when responding to questions on this from the rightwing papers that have been pushing the story, he took them on effectively, highlighting the fact that the Sun never asks for Tory ministers to publish their tax details from before they entered parliament.

He was robust on employment rights (see 11.17am), compelling about the Tories (see 10.51am), but the other really telling answer came when he was asked (by the Daily Mail) how people could trust him when he has U-turned so often on policy. Normally he responds to this question with a slightly apologetic line about how it is normal for people to change their mind. But today he managed to flip the question entirely, and used it to deliver an intregrity message that sounded strong. (See 11.11am.)

None of the questions caused him any real difficulty at all. It is hard to imagine Rishi Sunak exposing himself to this level of scrutiny and emerging unscathed in the same way. His local election campaign launch was a low-key event in a bus depot in Derbyshire last week, where he was cocooned by Tory activists and delivered an odd message about Labour “arrogantly” taking people for granted.

What’s the main takeaway from Starmer’s launch? It’s simple, really. He’s ready.

The final question was about Labour’s new deal for working people, its employment rights programme.

Q: You are under pressure from business to water this down. Will it be implemented in full in the first term of Labour government, including the ban on zero-hours contracts?

Starmer replied: “Yes.”

He went on:

Let me tell you for why, because I believe, deep down, that respect and dignity at work matters.

This goes back to what I said about my dad. It really matters that people feel respected and that they feel that they have their dignity at work.

But there is an additional reason … Every good employer knows that if you do treat people with respect and dignity of work, then that increases productivity, that increases the growth in your business and enterprise and it’s actually good for the economy.

Q: [From the Daily Mail] You have accused Boris Johnson of letting people down. But haven’t you done the same, by going back on some of your pledges?

Starmer says:

What I’ve done is to take difficult decisions before the election about what we can deliver.

Sometimes that has required us to adjust our position. So if you take some of the commitments we made on [the £28bn green investment plan], since we made that commitment, the Tories have done enormous damage to the economy and therefore we’ve had to adjust our plan.

I would rather level with the British public before the election, tell them straight what we can do, what we can’t do, and deliver on what we say we can do, rather than do what Boris Johnson did in the last election, which is to pretend he could deliver everything and then deliver nothing, because that leads you back to Amy’s question [see 10.46am] which is why do people not have faith in their politics?

I’ve taken a tough decision to not do things which an incoming Labour government might have wanted to do more quickly. But I’ve done it by looking down the barrel of the camera and saying to the British public, I will not make promises that I cannot deliver.