The papers were heavily focused today on the allegations that a BBC presenter paid a 17-year-old for sexually explicit photos. The mother of the victim has claimed that the presenter stayed on air for weeks after the complaint was made. The shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves told Sophy Ridge on Sky that this scandal goes beyond the BBC and questioned wider investigations processes. She also said that the Corporation and other broadcasters ‘need to get a grip’.
Rachel Reeves – cluster bombs are not an appropriate weapon
Reeves said she was concerned that the US had agreed to supply Ukraine with cluster bombs. The bombs are banned under the Geneva Convention and the UK has stated that it will not join the US in providing Ukraine with them. Reeves said that although it was important to arm Ukraine properly, weapons which can have a fatal impact years after the conflict should be avoided.
Why is the UK’s debt so high?
Sophy Ridge asked the Financial Secretary to the Treasury Victoria Atkins to explain a graph showing that the UK had the third worst deficit of OECD countries. Ridge pointed out that the pandemic and the war in Ukraine had clearly affected every country, and so were not satisfactory explanations for why the UK’s economy was performing so badly. Atkins argued that developed countries like the UK were particularly exposed to international gas and food prices.
‘We do not have the headroom at the moment to look at tax cuts’
Over on the BBC, Laura Kuenssberg asked Victoria Atkins if it was true that Conservatives hoping for tax cuts should ‘forget it’. Atkins conceded that the priority had to be on dealing with high inflation and that recent government spending on lockdown and cost-of-living support meant there wasn’t room to look at tax cuts in the short term. She also attacked Labour’s £28 billion green plan, which the party has now rowed back on.
‘Builders want to build’
Reeves told Laura Kuenssberg that homeownership under the Conservatives has fallen and that local authorities no longer have any obligation to build more housing. Kuenssberg asked Reeves how Labour could guarantee to voters that more houses would be built if they were not planning on spending more taxpayers’ money. Reeves claimed that it could be achieved purely through reforms to the planning system and that the current fall in house building was costing the UK £44 billion a year.
John Kerry: the dynamic between the US and China needs to change for climate action
Finally, the presidential envoy for climate John Kerry disagreed with Kuenssberg’s assertion that the world is moving in the wrong direction on climate change. He said that the growing trend of civil disobedience showed that people were concerned by the climate crisis, but that greater cooperation between the US and China was needed, as the world’s two biggest economies and emitters.
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