Reeves ‘going nowhere’ and has Starmer’s full backing, No 10 says – UK politics live | Politics
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- July 2, 2025
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No 10: Rachel Reeves ‘going nowhere’ and ‘has PM’s full backing’
Rachel Reeves has the prime minister’s “full backing”, Downing Street has said.
Asked why Keir Starmer did not confirm in the Commons that he still had faith in Reeves, the prime minister’s press secretary said:
He has done so repeatedly.
The chancellor is going nowhere. She has the prime minister’s full backing.
He has said it plenty of times, he doesn’t need to repeat it every time the leader of the opposition speculates about Labour politicians.
The chancellor and the prime minister are focused entirely on delivering for working people.
It’s thanks to the chancellor’s management of the economy that we managed to restore stability, which has led to four interest rate cuts, wages rising faster than inflation and she recently delivered a spending review that invested in Britain’s national renewal.
Asked whether the prime minister still had confidence in work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall, the press secretary said: “Yes.”
Key events
Diane Taylor
Government has today announced that it is boosting legal aid rates for housing, debt, immigration and asylum, after almost three decades of stagnation.
The £20 million per year injection of extra funds will add at least 10% on current rates.
The increase equates to a new hourly rate of £69.30 for London lawyers and £65.35 for non-London lawyers.
The government’s decision to raise legal aid rates follows a legal challenge to the very low legal aid rates for civil matters, after which the government agreed to conduct a consultation about legal aid fee levels
While legal aid lawyers and their representative bodies such as Immigration Law Practitioners Association, welcome today’s announcement, they have warned that the changes do not go far enough and only relate to housing and immigration legal aid at a time when they say the entire civil legal aid system is in crisis.
Toufique Hossain (corr) of Duncan Lewis solicitors who worked on the legal challenge against the government, arguing that legal aid rates need to increase, said: “The right to access justice has long been held to be an important constitutional right for all, especially those who are vulnerable. For years, investment in legal aid has been woeful.
“We welcome this decision, in response to our legal challenge and hope the changes will go some way to improve the dire state of legally aided immigration and housing advice.”
Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper said former Conservative MP Anne Marie Morris, who has joined Reform, previously used “abhorrent language”.
She said that Nigel Farage’s welcoming of a politician who had previously used racist language had exposed his “hollow claims of dragging his party into the mainstream”.
She said: “That Reform is embracing someone who has used such abhorrent language speaks volumes: they are the company they keep.”
UK government borrowing costs rise amid speculation of Reeves’s future
Richard Partington
UK government borrowing costs have risen sharply amid speculation over Rachel Reeves’s position as chancellor, as City investors warned Labour’s welfare U-turn had blown a multibillion-pound hole in the public finances.
After Keir Starmer failed initially to give his full backing to a tearful chancellor at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, the yield on 10-year UK government bonds had its biggest jump in a day since Liz Truss was in No 10, while the pound slumped.
The yield – in effect the interest rate – rose by as much as 0.2 percentage points to trade close to 4.7%, climbing by the most in one day since October 2022 when investor confidence in Britain remained shaken after Truss’s mini budget.
Highlighting investor unease over the government’s tax and spending plans, the pound also fell by more than 1% against the US dollar.
Peter Walker
The battle to lead the Greens has been confirmed as a straight fight between a joint ticket comprising two of the party’s MPs, Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns, and the more insurgent offering of Zack Polanski, the deputy leader.
A final list of nominations to head the party in England and Wales has resulted in a two-way battle for the leadership, while nine candidates are vying to be deputy leader.
Since 2021 the party has been led by Ramsay and Carla Denyer, two of the Greens’ record haul of four MPs elected to Westminster a year ago. In May, Denyer announced she would not stand again, with Ramsay opting to stand again alongside Chowns.
The leadership race is broadly a competition between two contrasting styles: the more organised and elections-led approach of the two MPs, versus Polanski’s aim to make the Greens a radical, mass-membership “eco-populism” movement.
Polanski, who has been deputy leader since 2022 and serves as a London assembly member, said the party had to meet the challenge of Reform UK, which has a membership about four times the size of the Green party and won nearly 700 councillors in May’s local elections, against 79 for the Greens.
Ramsay and Chowns have dismissed this implicit criticism, saying their record in winning rural, Conservative-dominated seats a year ago – Chowns won South Herefordshire from the Tories while Ramsay took the new seat of Waveney Valley on the Norfolk-Suffolk border – showed they could win over new supporters.
Jasper Jolly
The former head of the UK’s civil service has described the Chinese leader Xi Jinping as a “dictator” and said Donald Trump had put “helpful pressure” on Europe to increase defence spending.
Simon Case, who served as the cabinet secretary until December, when he stepped down on health grounds, said China had sent a clear message to “prepare for serious conflict” in Taiwan.
The UK has committed to spend the equivalent of 2.6% of GDP in 2027, and it and other Nato members have signed up to increasing spending to 5% by 2035 on militaries and related security.
The increased defence spending came after years of Trump raising questions over the future of the Nato alliance – and whether the US would come to allies’ defence – if other countries did not increase spending.
Case argued for the UK and mainland Europe to increase the pace of increased defence spending. He was speaking at an event in London paid for by Britain’s biggest weapons maker, BAE Systems. The manufacturer of artillery, fighter jets and nuclear submarines is expected to be one of the biggest corporate beneficiaries of increased spending on weaponry.
Responding to the news that former Conservative MP Anne Marie Morris has joined Reform UK (see 3.06pm BST), Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper said:
The mask has slipped, exposing [Nigel] Farage’s hollow claims of dragging his party into the mainstream. That Reform is embracing someone who has used such abhorrent language speaks volumes: they are the company they keep.
Ms Morris’ constituents already made their views clear when they ejected her at the general election in favour of a hardworking local Liberal Democrat champion. The public will view Farage’s decision to elevate someone with such an appalling track record to the core of the Reform party with similar contempt.
Morris had the Conservative whip suspended twice during her time in the Commons, including once in 2017 for using racist language, for which she later apologised.
Heather Stewart
Newsportu’s economics editor, Heather Stewart, has written an explainer on where the welfare bill climbdown leaves UK public finances:
Cuts to the personal independence payment (Pip) announced at Rachel Reeves’s spring statement in March were meant to save the Treasury £5bn a year.
Ministers’ changes to the welfare bill last week to try to avoid a Commons defeat – reversing some cuts to universal credit and applying the stricter Pip eligibility rules only to new claimants – had already reduced that saving to about £2bn.
After stripping the Pip changes out of the bill completely on Tuesday, the Resolution Foundation estimates there will be no savings in five years’ time – leaving a £5bn hole in the chancellor’s plans.
Reeves also faces a £1.25bn cost from her decision to restore the winter fuel allowance to most pensioners – having stripped it away last year.
Between them, these U-turns will swallow most of the £10bn headroom the chancellor created for herself against her fiscal rules at her spring statement.
You can read the full piece here:
Chris Whitty says culture-war coverage of cycling could harm nation’s health
Peter Walker
Culture war-based coverage of cycling based on stereotypes of middle-aged men in Lycra could harm the nation’s health because it shifts focus away from the people and communities who benefit from physical activity, Chris Whitty has said.
Speaking a day before the launch of the NHS’s 10-year-health plan, which is expected to focus heavily on prevention, the chief medical officer for England called on people to set aside media cliches and instead focus on “data which nobody can dispute”.
If active travel “is seen as something which is simply the reserve of middle-aged, Lycra-clad people cycling possibly too fast around the park, that completely misses the point of actually where the huge health gains are”, Whitty told a conference in York.
He said:
There are some areas where you can send a debate from a cultural war into a much more day-to-day one by actually saying, ‘OK guys, but this is the maths,’ and ensuring that you do so with facts which people find surprising.
So for example, the culture wars will always try and paint the person who’s in favour of active transport, and let’s say cycling, as middle-class, entitled, speeding like a bad person. What they don’t see is a woman in a wheelchair who actually benefits even more from the activity that we’re talking about.
Being more active, Whitty said, was “one of the most impressive things you can do to preserve health of all forms, physical and mental”. He added that the best way for people to do this was to build it into their everyday life, for example by walking, cycling or wheeling for transport.
“The people who benefit most from any form of activity are people who are doing none,” Whitty said, adding:
And the next group who benefit most are the people who are doing a very small amount, who might do a bit more.
The second group of people who benefit most are those who are teetering on the brink of ill health, or are in ill health which could accelerate from under them. And for many of those people, a small amount of activity is going to be very hard work, but it is going to be remarkably powerful at preventing and in many cases, reversing the health conditions they have.
Transport planners should not just focus on bigger projects such as bike lanes, but also on everyday issues such as uneven pavements, which might put off someone with mobility issues from walking a short distance, Whitty said.
Former Tory MP joins Reform UK and will head up social care policy
Former Conservative MP Anne Marie Morris has joined Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s party has said, according to the PA news agency.
The former MP for Newton Abbot will head up the party’s social care policy. Morris, who was a member of the Commons from 2010 to 2024, said that Reform “offers the vision and leadership” that Britain needs. “I want to play my part in delivering that vision,” she added.
Party chair David Bull said that he was “delighted” to welcome her to Reform. “She brings a wealth of experience with her and will be a crucial part in developing the party’s social care policy as we look to build our policy platform ahead of the next general election,” he said, adding:
Anne Marie is just one of many who realise that Reform UK is the only party that can stop this damaging Labour government in its tracks.
Morris represented the Devon constituency of Newton Abbot from 2010 until last year’s general election, when she was unseated by Liberal Democrat Martin Wrigley, who overturned a majority of more than 17,500. Morris came second, with the Reform candidate in third place.
Morris had the Conservative whip suspended twice during her time in the Commons, including once in 2017 for using racist language, for which she later apologised.
Kemi Badenoch’s spokesperson said that Tories who want to “get serious about public spending” should “be sticking with the Conservatives”. The spokesperson said:
The Conservative party is fighting to win the next election. We need to be united in that goal.
We know what we stand for. Last night, you saw Reform sign up and put their names and vote in favour of the reasoned amendment, which was calling for more welfare spending, which would do nothing to bring down the deficit, or the welfare bill, or the health and disability bill that’s going to hit £100bn by 2030.
I think any Conservative who wants to get serious about public spending, about bringing down the welfare budget, should be sticking with the Conservatives.
Responding, Stephen Doughty told the Commons he was “disappointed by the tone” of Patel’s comments, reports the PA news agency.
“I don’t know who writes this stuff,” the Foreign Office minister said. He added:
I don’t know whether it’s just performative politics or rhetoric, I don’t know what. But I should point out that I have received and answered over 100 written parliamentary questions from [Priti Patel], I’ve answered over 250 questions on this deal and the process in total.
We’ve had no less than six urgent questions in this house. We have had two statements from this government by the foreign secretary [David Lammy] and the defence secretary [John Healey].
I personally briefed [Priti Patel] and answered many of her questions in my office just a couple of weeks ago in good faith and in detail, and indeed, I was subjected – quite rightly – to robust scrutiny not only from the Foreign Affairs Committee of this house, but also from the International Relations and Defence Committee in the other house, and indeed the International Arrangements Committee in great detail on these issues.
Doughty said a bill would follow “in due course” but added the deal with Mauritius, presented to parliament in May, “secures” the UK-US military base on Diego Garcia, “secures our national security and that of our allies”.
Priti Patel has urged ministers to “have the courage” to trigger a vote on the Chagos Islands deal, reports the PA news agency.
The government won a vote in the House of Lords on Monday, when 205 peers struck down a Tory attempt to reject the treaty which cedes control of the archipelago to Mauritius.
But the Conservative party’s shadow foreign secretary Patel has called for a similar vote in the Commons.
“With the 21-day Crag (Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010) process about to conclude, it is a disgrace that Labour have breached the parliamentary conventions and denied this house a meaningful debate and vote on ratification,” she told MPs.
To accompany the treaty, MPs will need to sign off on a bill to wind up the current governance of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). The treaty will only come into force once the legislation is “in place”, according to the government.
Patel added:
Having a vote on the bill is not the same as voting on the treaty under Crag. Earlier this week, the House of Lords – the other place – had a debate and vote where the Lib Dems sided with Labour in backing this £30bn surrender treaty, which is subsidising tax cuts in Mauritius.
So, why can’t we have a debate and vote in this house? What are ministers afraid of?
Are they afraid that their backbenchers, now worried about benefit cuts and the impact of unpopular tax rises, will question why so much money is being handed over for a territory that we own and force them into another embarrassing U-turn?
Patel urged ministers to “scrap this treaty or at least have the courage to bring it here for a proper debate, full scrutiny, and finally, a vote in this house”.
Treaties are laid before parliament before they are ratified, but there is no requirement for a debate or vote.
Peers in their vote, which Conservative shadow Foreign Office minister Martin Callanan triggered, agreed not to reject the treaty by 205 votes to 185, majority 20.
During Wednesday’s PMQs, SNP leader in Westminster Stephen Flynn took a swipe at Keir Starmer and his promise to “end the chaos” after the events of the Welfare bill’s second reading on Tuesday.
Flynn said:
In his victory speech last year, the prime minister promised to end the chaos. Does he think that the public still believe him?
Responding, Starmer said:
We’ve delivered more in the first year of a Labour government than they’ve [the SNP government in Scotland] delivered in 20 years.
Let me give him one example. We had waiting lists, we said we’d do two million extra appointments. We’ve done four million for the NHS in England.
What a contrast – where they’ve been in charge for that 20 years, Scotland’s doctors now saying, in the past week I think, and this is their quote, that the Scottish NHS is ‘dying before our very eyes’. They should be ashamed …
Scotland needs new direction, so it can bring waiting lists down in Scotland, just like we’ve done in England.
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