Tories challenge chancellor to rule out tax rises in budget as Badenoch labelled ‘embarrassment’ for Bank of England gaffe – UK politics live

The Conservatives want to brand Burnham’s administration as a ‘traditional tax and spend socialist government’ Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser, told Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband that the government should delay banning trade with illegal settlements on the West Bank until after the Israeli elections, Tim Shipman says in a report for this week’s Spectator. He suggests this advice was ignored in part because Labour wanted to announce the decision before the Holborn and St Pancras byelection. Shipman says: The truth is that Burnham and Miliband ignored the advice they were given – which was that if they were determined to sanction Israel, they should not do so before the Israeli election on 27 October. It may not be surprising that this was the message from the Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, when Miliband called him on 11 August to warn sanctions were imminent. ‘He said postpone it until after the elections,’ a diplomatic source confirms. It was also the message the Israeli embassy in London – and its new chargé d’affaires Chris Cantor – was relaying to the Foreign Office. ‘Their message was clear: why do it now? Wait until after the elections, because something might change,’ a senior Labour figure says. We won’t take any lectures from the Tories on the economy - not least when it was only last week that Andrew Griffith was praising the “lots of good things” in Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget. Andrew Griffith was the very person who abolished the Office for Tax Simplification after the tax code ballooned to 23,000 pages - why on earth would anyone believe him now? After making IR35 worse, freezing VAT thresholds and imposing reams of red tape, businesses won’t forget the Tories’ betrayal. Continue reading...