Keep calm and announcement on
Your Weekend Wire by Eliza Snider, Cary Mitchell and Oliver Nicholls
It’s been a week of fire and brimstone.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham launched yet another announcement blitz spanning education, submarines and adult social care. Then the Department for Education lost over half a million records to a cyber attack. Uh oh.
Meanwhile, wildfires are raging across the South and East of England, Scotland, Spain and France.
And Russia continues to push NATO’s boundaries, stoking fresh questions around the UK’s approach to defence. Our CEO digs into what it means for the UK.
Now read on for your Weekend Wire.
After two weeks on the job, here’s what the new crop of Ministers have said about UK-EU relations - and what it could mean for a relationship reset.
Stronger still
Incoming Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband has pledged to put the UK’s relationship with the EU at the heart of his foreign policy, even saying that “Britain’s national economic and security interests are served by having a stronger relationship with our European allies.”
To prove his point, he has already visited his counterparts in France and Spain to show solidarity amid ongoing wildfires and to discuss trade.
Firm on the ‘red lines’ for now…
Returning Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds used an interview with the Financial Times to argue against joining the customs union. He said it was “unrealistic, in a world of US tariffs, for the UK to be in a customs union ‘with a political entity that we’re not a part of.”
Reynolds is right that a customs union would involve unpalatable trade-offs: we would lose our ability to set trade policy, without gaining enough economic growth to make up for it.
That’s why EU membership is the best option for the UK. It provides transformative economic growth, worth six times our combined post-Brexit trade deals, shields us from the impact of US tariffs, and it gives us an equal seat at the table in Brussels.
Our latest study, commissioned by Best for Britain and carried out by Frontier Economics researchers, has found the UK’s re-entry to the EU would boost Britain’s economy by at least £92 billion.
…But Falconer leaves the door ajar
Hamish Falconer, the new minister in charge of the UK-EU reset, told Sky News he wants to ‘go further’ than the existing deals that have been previously negotiated, pointing to new threats in defence, economic security and disinformation as priority areas.
Falconer now reports into the Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office, giving Britain’s overseas embassies a bigger role in delivering the reset. Rejoining the EU, Falconer said, is not on the table ‘today’ but he left the door open for future conversations, and suggested that any manifesto commitment on rejoining would be a question for the Labour Party.
Busy Bee Burnham
He’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere. From social media videos to influencer collabs to official announcements, the new PM was booked and busy.
Tuesday saw Burnham make a move towards a revamped education curriculum, designed to encourage students to explore technical training and vocational education in schools, which they can combine with core subjects. If interested, they could then go on to study for technical qualifications rather than A-levels.
While Wednesday was commitment-light (except a promise to speed up the adult social care review), the big news was Burnham taking questions from the media live on camera for the first time since becoming PM.
On Thursday, the government unveiled £8.4 billion for the Dreadnought nuclear submarine program; the boats that will carry Britain’s nuclear deterrent from the early 2030s. No.10 has framed this announcement as the start of a “reindustrialised Britain” with “British money, spent on British workers, British firms and British skills, in the places that were written off for forty years.”
Finally, Friday saw Burnham take the first major step towards his promise of decentralisation, putting more power in the hands of regional governments. Starting from 2028, mayors will keep a share of income tax generated in their area as well as business rates by April 2027.
Cheque Yourself
John Healey has announced that his first Budget as Chancellor will be delivered on October 28 and move “money and power out of Westminster, and into every postcode around Britain.”
Promising a budget “built on fiscal discipline” Healey will need to account for the last two weeks of cost heavy announcements while also navigating the fiscal rules and Labour’s 2024 manifesto pledge not to raise that levy, national insurance or VAT.
There’s a new sheriff in town
Labour’s Bev Craig has officially been crowned as the new mayor of Greater Manchester. Craig secured the victory after beating Reform UK’s Sian Astley by 309,525 to 157,178 after second-preference votes were added.
More than two million people across Greater Manchester’s 10 boroughs were eligible to vote in the contest but turnout was just under 25%.
Craig has promised that every decision she will take as mayor will “pass the test of making your life better.”
War, What Is It Good For?
On Monday, Burnham hosted Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy as his first foreign visitor. The pair toured a naval base in an effort to show that Britain’s ongoing support for Ukraine amidst the war with Russia.
Less than 36 hours later, a Russian missile crashed into Poland, violating Polish airspace. This was part of an overnight attack on Ukraine which killed at least nine people. NATO has confirmed it’s in close contact with Polish authorities. The Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Alexus G. Grynkewich, said the Western defensive alliance would “continue to take all necessary measures to defend NATO territory.”
This Russian overstep raises the important question of where the UK stands in relation to war and national security. Best for Britain CEO Naomi Smith answers via Substack about the necessity of UK-EU allyship over American unreliability to defend our borders:
“A wise Prime Minister would stop asking only what Britain can give Ukraine and start asking, urgently, what Ukraine can teach Britain.”
Rule of three
A couple of weeks ago we did a comprehensive round-up of the questionable money issues surrounding Reform UK and Nigel Farage (and given the slew of revelations since then, it’s already out of date). However, Reform’s Robert Jenrick assured journalists this week that “Reform is certain that all the electoral rules were followed.”
Well that’s all right then, as long as they’re sure.
This week’s allegations are that convicted fraudster, minor aristocrat and (maybe or maybe not) Reform UK staff member, George Cottrell, sent his mother more than $2 million just 24-72 hours before she made a large donation to Reform UK and/or to a company controlled by Reform’s Richard Tice - which then made donations to Reform UK. It’s not exactly clear, but the Met Police have an ongoing investigation into the company’s donations.
Political donation rules say that the ‘true source’ of donations to parties must be declared to the Electoral Commission. The Chair of the Labour Party, Bridget Phillipson MP, has written to the Commission urging them to investigate.
As Best for Britain’s Cary Mitchell rightfully says:
“Scrutiny of political donations is a critically important part of the electoral process, allowing voters to assess who is seeking to represent them, and evading it demonstrates a fundamental contempt for voters and the UK’s values as a parliamentary democracy.”
Hacked to school
The Department for Education (DfE) has had 607,000 records stolen and put online in a huge cyber-attack revealed this week. The DfE says the lost data included parent and staff names and contact information, as well as some details relating to the post-Brexit replacement for Erasmus+, the Turing Scheme, for students studying abroad.
The same hackers stole more than 100,000 records from the Police National Legal Database (PNLD) and have sent blackmailing messages to both them and the DfE threatening to publish more records online unless they pay an unspecified amount of money.
Scary stuff, but the government says the National Cyber Security Centre and the National Crime Agency are on the case and both the DfE and PNLD have reported themselves to the Information Commissioner.
Bring on the rain
This summer’s rolling heatwaves across Europe have left vast swathes of our continent highly susceptible to wildfires. Huge areas of France and Spain are battling fires that have been burning all week with many thousands of residents and tourists forced to evacuate.
Our own traditionally damp island has not escaped. The Cairngorms National Park has been burning for two weeks with more than 500 firefighters struggling to contain the blaze; evacuations have taken place in Suffolk as flames overtook the countryside, close enough to the Sizewell B nuclear power plant that smoke raised concerns for the plant’s operations; East London and Essex saw several fires this week with hundreds of firefighters attending; and the risk of more fires continues as half of England is now in drought.
The severity of the wildfires this year has been attributed to the ‘whiplash’ of extreme weather, from an exceptionally wet winter and spring that encouraged greater than usual plant growth to an exceptionally hot and dry summer that turned all those plants into kindling. Extreme weather events are becoming more common with changes to our climate and our own Josh Edwicker wrote about Net Zero and the need for UK-EU cooperation on the climate.
Love lost, love found
Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP Diane Abbott has been let back into the Labour Party, following a year-long suspension for an antisemitism row. A party spokesperson said Abbott had “apologised” following an independent process and that she would be readmitted into the parliamentary party, meaning she can once again sit as a Labour MP.
East Kilbride and Strathaven MP Joani Reid has also been readmitted to the party after she said she had “voluntarily” suspended herself after her husband was arrested on suspicion of spying for China.
Cache me if you can!
Social websites such as Instagram and TikTok are replacing traditional media as the way we get our news. We explored the good, the bad and the ugly of media consumption on our Substack this week.
“The digital world is a double-edged sword, where we must balance its role in civic participation and audience reach, with the need to wade through misinformation and unlabelled AI content that isn’t subject to regulation.”
Tiger numbers in Nepal have clawed their way to an estimated 429 tigers up from 121 in 2010, following decades of sustained, collaborative conservation efforts.
Announced by the government of Nepal earlier this week, it represents one of the world’s most significant endangered species recoveries happening right meow.
Repeat cringe offender Donald Trump is back in this week’s column after posting a bizarre video of him and JD Vance inside a “Rick and Morty”-style cartoon. It features MAGA hats and, unfortunately for this author, the beloved Diet Coke.
It’s too ick-inducing to share a link.
So will Burnham keep up the flurry of announcements? Will the heatwave break?
Let’s see what August has in store.
See you next week!
Eliza Snider, Cary Mitchell and Oliver Nicholls
Senior Press Officer, Executive Director of Operations and Strategy, and Policy Senior Manager
Best for Britain