Burnham rules out deal with Greens as he condemns ‘Zionism is racism’ policy as ‘antisemitic’– UK politics live

The SNP will launch the biggest pro-independence campaign since the 2014 referendum, John Swinney has announced.

The first minister said the Choose Scotland campaign will kick off during the party’s conference in Aberdeen this weekend. As the Press Association reports, the launch is part of the SNP’s £100,000 “hearts and minds” campaign to win over voters and will be “anchored” by a new, pro-independence, party political broadcast.

Swinney said:

As we approach conference, the wind is in the sails of the SNP and the Yes movement – we have been emphatically re-elected, we have the biggest, pro-independence majority in the history of the parliament, independence is in the lead, the momentum behind constitutional change across these islands is building and there is a growing consensus we have the right to decide our own future.

Our task is to build on that momentum which is why, at this conference, we will be launching the Choose Scotland campaign – the biggest campaign since the referendum and what will be the most sophisticated, pro-independence campaign Scotland has ever seen.

Peter Walker is a senior Guardian correspondent.

Kemi Badenoch’s flagship Conservative party conference policy document overstated the estimated cost of net zero by nearly £500bn because of a “source error”, her spokesperson has said, seemingly meaning it was copied from elsewhere and not checked.

A chapter on net zero in The Right Way, a policy document produced for the Tory conference in Birmingham, said the Climate Change Committee (CCC) estimated in 2020 that reaching net zero by 2050 would cost £957bn.

This baffled experts, and the CCC said it did not recognise the figure. The claimed total was double the £478bn cited in the 2020 document, seemingly because someone tallied a row showing totals for each individual column, along with the figures which made up the totals, thus doubling them.

Badenoch’s spokesperson said:

That was a source error, and it has been corrected online.

The incorrect total was previously published in a report by the rightwing thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs and also included in an article in the Spectator, from which it was seemingly copied.

Badenoch’s spokesperson defended the error, saying:

Quite frankly, the people who want to get upset about this should be upset more about the fact that net zero is costing us £500bn.

This is also incorrect. The 2020 estimate from the CCC was £478bn, but its most recent estimate puts the total at £110bn.

At least we learned one thing from PMQs – the Conservative party still has not settled on a reliable line of attack against Andy Burnham (and the one deployed by Kemi Badenoch today was possibly its worst yet.)

Various themes have been deployed: that Burnham is continuity Starmer; that he’s leftwing; that he’s just “eyelashes and a black T-shirt”; that he’s an unprincipled opportunist; and that he is a people pleaser who can’t say no or take tough decisions. There is a bit of truth in most of these assertions (and quite a lot in the final one, which in time may turn out to be the line most useful to the Tories), but none of them has stuck yet, and so today Badenoch tried another.

Badenoch sought to depict Burnham as a serial gaffe-merchant and she set this up with her opening question:

The prime minister has had a busy few weeks tying himself in knots, explaining why national security shouldn’t come at the expense of social security, bumbling into a row still ongoing about Manchester City.

He spent the last 48 hours trying to unsay that Russia influenced the 2016 referendum, when we all heard him say it. Does he ever get tired of putting his foot in his mouth?

What’s true about this is that, unlike his predecessor, whose instinctive response to a question was to recall the No 10 line-to-take and stick to it rigidly, Burnham is someone more inclined to answer questions and to say what he thinks. This has sometimes led to him having to take back something he said (as he did over Manchester City), or reframe an argument in different language (as he did after the PMQs national security/social security answer). But these are not grotesque errors, and any downside is probably more than compensated for by the appeal of a PM who can actually talk a human being.

Badenoch then proceeded to develop this argument by claiming that Burnham received a slap-down from the head of MI5 yesterday. (See 12.16pm.) Given that Ken McCallum told reporters yesterday “I strongly agree with what the prime minister said”, to get from there to Badenoch saying it “the first time I have ever heard the head of MI5 slap down a prime minister for doing Russia’s dirty work for them” required some extraordinarily ingenious spin. It was arguably clever – but also nonsense.

The detail is tedious, but it has to be explained. Essentially, it rests on two acts of misrepresentation. Burnham told the Rest is Politics that there was Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum (which is true), but the Tories have suggested or said outright that Burnham was saying the Russians altered the outcome and that the result was illegitimate. Burnham has never said either of these things.

The second dodgy assertion came yesterday when CCHQ issued a press release saying McCallum had delivered “an extraordinary slap down to the prime minister”. This was in a response to McCallum saying Burnham was right about Russian interference in 2016. McCallum did also say that the impact of Russian interference was limited, and that it would be a mistake to go on about it too much because that would “play into our adversaries’ hands”. But, if that is the problem, you have to ask, who has been banging on it for the past three days? And who raised it at PMQs yesterday?

Burnham saw off the Badenoch attack quite easily. (Badenoch will probably get written up as having scored a great victory in the papers that have swallowed this hogwash, but if the Tories end up believing their own spin, they are in more trouble than they realise.)

One of Burnham’s strengths is that he does not seem to get rattled by this sort of rubbish. His decision to use his final response to Badenoch to praise what she said about race and Englishness at PMQs was a good one, and he even managed to adopt a cordial tone towards Nigel Farage. Being nice and personable does not guarantee success in politics, but it is a start and it helps to explain why Burnham is currently the most admired of the party leaders.

Harriett Baldwin (Con) asked Burnham to rule out any deals with the Green party in the light its motion saying “Zionism is racism”.

Burnham replied:

Can I condemn the motion that was passed unequivocally?

It is wrong. It is antisemitic, and this side of the house will have nothing to do with it.

And we will always take the right response when it comes to any partnerships we have with other parties.

We cannot support a partnership with a party that holds [the] position that has recently been adopted.

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said every week unidentified males from Iran are arriving in the UK on small boats. He asked Burnham to accept this was a national security emergency.

Burnham began his reply recognising that the person accused of killing Ann Widdecombe has been charged with planning an attack against Farage. He went on:

Can I start by recognising it’s been a hard time for him and his family. There’s a lot we disagree on, but I defend his right to say it, and I will work hard to secure his safety.

On Iran, he said:

We’ve seen the issues at RAF Fairford recently, and they have been dealt with in the right way with the utmost seriousness by the police and security services.

And the key point is, of course, we do need to get, boat crossings down. I hope he would recognise that they are coming down. Removals are up. There is much more to be done, but there is clearly progress in the right direction.

Davey asked Burnham to accept that President Trump’s decision to buy diesel from Russia is “yet another shameful Trump betrayal of the Ukrainian people and European security”.

Burnham said he called President Zelenskyy on Saturday “because I recognised it was another very dark and difficult moment for him”.

But he said that his role was to “try and repair bridges so that the support comes back”. He wanted to bring people together.

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, got a huge cheer when he spoke – a reference to his success in seeing off a supposed threat to his leadership. (See 10.55am.)

He asked when Burnham would hold another round of cross-party talks on social care reform.

Burnham welcomed Davey’s commitment to this issue, and said he was determined to change the system.

He said he would organise more cross-party talks, “certainly before the end of the year, but hopefully within the next month”.

Badenoch said she met a beauty salon owner yesterday struggling with taxes. She went on:

That is the brutal reality for tens of thousands of small business owners.

She said Burnham promised the biggest change for 40 years when he became PM. But now he is promising a no change budget, she said.

Burnham said he used his conference speech to address difficult decisions.

But he ended praising Badenoch for what she said in her conference speech criticising ethnonationalism.

I’m going to commend her for drawing a line on a decade of division where she drew a line with the party over [Reform UK] there for suggesting that her children weren’t British. That is wrong in every single respect.

She was brave and she was right to call it out. That is what I want to see more of in the next decade as we go forward.

Badenoch said she met Milburn and he told her the report would be published before the budget. Now it is coming after the budget, she said. She said the PM should cut welfare to fund higher defence spending.

Burnham said the government would honour its commitments on defence spending.

He went on to taunt Badenoch over her party conference “Iron Dome” interviews.

I recall an interview recently about the Conservatives’ plans for an Iron Dome. And then she said it isn’t our plan. And then it emerged that it was briefed by her team, which doesn’t sound like she’s in control of her own policy on defence.

And then under questioning on LBC for [Nick] Ferrari, she said you’ve got to speak to a defence expert about exactly how it will work. Well, obviously we worked out in that interview she wasn’t a defence expert.

Badenoch claimed Burnham was delaying a decision because he was afraid of upsetting his backbenchers.

Turning to welfare, she said today’s Times says two million people are getting sickness benefits “and they may not even be sick”.

Burnham said the government commissioned the Alan Milburn review to reform welfare.

Badenoch moved on to the Jackdow and Rosebank gas and oilfield applications. She said:

The fact is this prime minister will say anything instead of dealing with the tough decisions that only he can take, like on Britain’s energy security.

In July, he said he would approve the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields in the North Sea. What’s he waiting for?

If he’d approved them back then, we would have British gas warming British homes this winter.

Burnham said the government has had to take time making a decision because the decisions taken by the last Tory government were overtuned in court. They messed it up, he said.

Badenoch claims that yesterday the head of MI5 had to slap down Burnham over his Russia comment. She claims she has never heard that before.

This is the first time I have ever heard the head of MI5 slap down a prime minister for doing Russia’s dirty work for them.

Either the prime minister knew what he was doing on that podcast, trying to undermine the 2016 referendum, or he opened his mouth on a matter of national security and said the first thing that came into his head.

So does the prime minister agree with the director-general of MI5 that talking up Russian interference was a mistake?

Burnham says, if Badenoch had read in full what Ken McCallum said yesterday, she would not say that. He went on:

I think it’s important that we are clear-eyed about what happened in the past. There is, incontrovertible evidence that outside actors, enemies to this country, have interfered in our democratic processes, and it is inconceivable that that was not taking place across the whole of the last decade.

Badenoch was referring to McCallum saying it was important not to overstate the impact of Russian interference in the Brexit referendum.

Kemi Badenoch says she thinks Burnham’s “carefully worded” answer on Manchester won’t suffice.

She also refers to Burnham’s comments about defence and welfare, and about Russia and the Brexit referendum, and she asks if he ever gets tired of putting his foot in his mouth.

Burnham says he is glad Badenoch has raised Russia again. He says:

It gives me an opportunity to say to the whole house how I intend to lead this country. We have lived through a decade of division, and we know that hostile actors have been seeking to interfere in our democratic process. That is a matter of fact.

He says that, when Badenoch was a minister and in charge of the elections bill, she said she had not even read the Russia report.

He goes on:

I will draw a line. I will defend our democracy, and I will lead this country forward with positivity, unity and hope in the next decade.

Jerome Mayhew (Con) asks if anyone from Manchester City raised with him, or anyone from his team, the charges the club was facing from the Premier League.

Burnham says the club did not raise that issue with him.

He says he has released information about his contacts with the club.

UPDATE: Mayhew said:

The prime minister sees himself as a man of candour.

So will he tell the house, did anyone associated with the running of Manchester City football club raise the charges they were facing, and have now been found guilty of, either with him or any member of his team?

And Burnham replied:

They did not raise those issues with me.

I’m very happy for everything to be set out in full.

It is why I asked the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), in response to a call from the leader of the opposition and others, to set out a full statement of my key dealings with the owners of Manchester City football club.

That statement was published on Monday, and it includes the issues in the news today.

That is the position.

Andy Burnham starts by saying he worked with David Amess on the Commons health committee when he was a new MP. He says he was “very fond” of Amess, and he says there is more work to be done on protecting MPs.

He says he is meeting President Zelenskyy later.

And he pays tribute to a Manchester councillor who has died.

UPDATE: I have corrected the final paragraph. Burnham was paying tribute to Pat Karney, a Manchester councillor who has died after almost 50 years in public life. There are tributes to him here at the Manchester Evening News. Earlier, I wrongly said he had retired. I’m sorry for the error.

Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker, makes a short statement ahead of PMQs saying tomorrow is the fiftth anniversary of the murder of David Amess.