David Lammy told MPs he had received reassurances about its neutrality in the wake of a review of alleged links between its staff and terror groups.

The UK was among several countries to suspend donations in January, after Israel alleged 12 UNRWA staff were involved in the October 2023 attacks by Hamas.
[…]
Speaking in the Commons, Mr Lammy said "no other agency" was able to deliver aid at the scale required to alleviate the “desperate" humanitarian situation in Gaza.

He added UNRWA was feeding more than half the territory's two-million population and would be "vital for future reconstruction".

He said he had been "appalled" by Israel's allegations, but the claims had been taken "seriously” by the United Nations.

He had been reassured the agency "is ensuring they meet the highest standards of neutrality" in the wake of the April review, he added.

This included "strengthening its procedures, including on vetting," Mr Lammy said.

He told MPs a resumption of the UK's £21m annual funding would include money put towards “management reforms” recommended by the UN review.

The Foreign Office said £6m would be given to UNRWA's flash appeal for Gaza, and £15m to the agency's budget to provide services in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and wider region.

[…] Following Labour’s victory, the share prices of the major housebuilders rose, and the new Chancellor bragged about meetings with asset managers like BlackRock who were just waiting to invest in UK housing.

This enthusiasm from major real estate investors is for Labour’s housing and planning policies. Last week, Bloomberg described Labour’s proposals as a ‘revolution in planning’, while Rachel Reeves called planning ‘the single greatest obstacle to our economic success’. Planning, an area of the state which had received little attention from Labour or the Left, is now the central and defining area for reform in the incoming government’s programme. For Labour, planning reform is the key to unlocking growth, drawing upon a set of supply-side planning and housing policies developed by organisations that now tend to self-refer as part of a ‘YIMBY [Yes In My Backyard] movement’. Unfortunately, their proposals draw more from right-wing think tanks, astroturf campaigns and asset managers than they do the demands of workers, tenants and the labour movement.
[…]
The YIMBY view, which several leading UK politicians apparently endorse, is not simply that more homes need to be built, which is a fairly banal view. The YIMBY position, long held by right-wing think tanks, advocates for liberalising planning regulations to address the (largely imagined) problem of the NIMBY [Not In My Backyard], thereby stimulating mass private sector housebuilding and alleviating the housing crisis by reducing sale and rental prices.

There are three problems with their basic proposition. First, it is by no means clear that even a large-scale private house-building programme, such as building over 300,000 houses a year, would significantly decrease prices. The best that high rates of building could do is help slow the rate of price increases. However, since the early 2000s, the average house price to average income ratio has doubled its historical norm, rising from 4:1 to around 9:1. Based on recent annual average wage growth, it would take around 25 years of zero price growth to return back to something like affordability. Private housebuilding, which with a fair wind usually settles at around 170,000 a year, could easily be bolstered with a social housing programme that would reduce the rents paid by those currently in private rental housing more directly and more swiftly whilst hitting the 300,000 a year target. The impacts would be felt within years, not decades, as well as reducing the substantial housing benefit bill (a staggering £23.4 billion in 2022)

Second, it is also not clear that the various proposals to reform planning, ranging from zoning systems to Labour’s vague promise to ‘bulldoze’ regulations, would even lead to such a housing boom. Private housebuilders build at rates that ensure their profitability — it’s not in their interests to ramp up house-building rates beyond a certain point without some form of state subsidy. While it is true that planning is a source of delay and uncertainty for development, this is because it has been decimated as a public service through austerity and various policy ‘streamlining’ exercises. A strong public planning system linked with an actual industrial strategy can help us find a way through the pressures and trade-offs inherent in land-use decisions rather than creating folk devils out of groups of pensioners with a WordPress site.

Third, the YIMBY proposition is one that elides the problem of what constitutes demand for land and housing. The affordability problem began in the early 2000s, as demand for land and housing in major cities was increasingly driven by those with significantly higher spending power than individual households. Institutional investors, buy-to-let landlords, and a variety of international investors seeking ‘safe havens’ all bought up huge amounts of property in major cities. Added to this, the reduced capacity of local authorities to lead housing development and provide social housing has meant that demand for land is increasingly driven by those who have greater access to credit and can outcompete households, increasing rents and sale prices.
[…]
Rejecting YIMBYism does not mean rejecting housebuilding. What we want to see is houses as homes, not new opportunities for upward wealth redistribution. Indeed, the reason the YIMBY ‘movement’ exists is to divert focus from the real, egalitarian solutions for the housing crisis the Left has put back on the table in recent years, such as rent controls, major social housing programmes, and reversing austerity — solutions which require a shift in power against the rentiers that dominate the UK economy and a government with the courage to take that on.

Vance has previously described Britain under Labour as the first “truly Islamist” country with a nuclear weapon.

Lammy told BBC Breakfast: “Let me just say on JD Vance that I’ve met him now on several occasions, we share a similar working class background with addiction issues in our family. We’ve written books on that. We’ve talked about that.

“And we’re both Christians so I think I can find common ground with JD Vance.”
[…]
Expanding on his views on Vance on BBC Radio 4, Lammy said he had started to discuss the US view on global defence at the security conference in Munich in February.

“Yes, he has had strong things to say about European defences, and he has had a point of view about Ukraine,” Lammy said. “That’s why I’ve been engaged with JD Vance for many, many months.”

The foreign secretary once called Donald Trump a “neo-Nazi sociopath” and “a tyrant in a toupee”, but has distanced himself from those comments as the US presidential election has approached.

More recently Lammy has spoken at conservative events in the US, telling the Hudson Institute in May that he “gets the agenda that drives ‘America first’”.

Archive

Southern Water had asked regulator Ofwat to approve a 73 per cent rise in household bills over the five years to 2030 before inflation, but in proposals published last week, the regulator put forward a 44 per cent rise for Southern. It believes the company can deliver services to its 4.2mn customers in south-east England at “less cost than it requested”.

It also told the company to rewrite its “inadequate” business plan, saying it did not meet “minimum” standards.

In its annual report last week, Southern revealed it had awarded chief executive, Lawrence Gosden, a £183,000 bonus for the year to March 31, increasing his total pay for the year to £764,000. Stuart Ledger, chief financial officer, was given a £128,000 bonus, taking his total pay to £610,000. None of the executives were paid bonuses in the previous year.
[…]
According to the Consumer Council for Water, Ofwat’s proposed increase for Southern would raise average household bills from about £451 per household per year to £722 by 2030, after annual inflation of 2 per cent is included. The regulator will make a final ruling on how much the water companies can put up their prices by the end of the year.

Southern swung from a £202mn profit to a £210.9mn loss in the year to the end of March 2024, as a result of higher energy, labour and financing costs. It is liable for a £54mn fine if it fails to resubmit an improved business plan by Christmas. It is also on Ofwat’s financial health watch list, along with Thames Water and South East Water.

As honeymoon periods go, Keir Starmer’s has been mostly chocolates and flowers. Over the first 10 days in office, the new prime minister has been gifted a jump in personal poll ratings, a Nato summit, and the rare national optimism that comes with England making it to a Euros final.

On Wednesday, though, watch out for the first marital row. As the government sets out its inaugural king’s speech, a Labour backbencher, Kim Johnson, will throw the leadership a test: an amendment calling for the two-child benefit limit to be scrapped.

The policy was a conspicuous absence in the party’s election manifesto, and pressure is mounting on Starmer to repeal the 2017 cut, as figures last week showed a record 1.6 million children have now been hit by the policy, with a staggering 93% of affected parents less able to afford food.
[…]
That the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will reportedly use Wednesday to enshrine her “fiscal rules” on borrowing into law – a plan that is widely seen as at best, arbitrary and at worst, nonsensical – will only deepen the cracks. The message to restless backbenchers is loud and clear: there is no room in the king’s speech to commit to feeding hungry children – but plenty for rules that’ll make it harder to raise the cash to do it.

In many ways, Labour’s stubbornness over the two-child limit shows the stranglehold “fiscal responsibility” has over future policy. At this point, the doctrine is less a helpful bit of discipline and more reminiscent of a cult, a dead-eyed chant that increasingly blinkers the leadership from common sense. Under this hyper self-restraint, even a highly cost-effective move that would quickly lift hundreds of thousands of children above the breadline is dismissed. What’s left is a shallow senselessness: a “child poverty” strategy that refuses to scrap a key driver of child poverty.
[…]
From bankrupt councils to NHS waiting lists and overcrowded prisons, Labour is effectively in a state of cognitive dissonance: it acknowledges the scale of the crises that the party has inherited from the Conservatives and is positioning itself as the fixer, but falls short of committing to spend the money needed to do it. Starmer’s recent pledge to give Ukraine £3bn a year “for as long as it takes” shows there is money available if the government chooses to find it. Not all spending is treated equally: to some, using resources to boost health or the benefits bill is wasteful, while funding defence is prudent.

In lieu of injections of cash, Labour is focusing on “reform” as a means for renewal: from rights for workers to the deregulation of housebuilding and an emphasis on preventive healthcare. That’s fine. But in politics, much like in life, there really are some problems that can only be solved by writing a cheque.

The electorate, tired of a country where nothing seems to work any more, appear to understand this more than those they’ve elected. The latest Ipsos poll shows that of people who voted for Labour this month, more than three-quarters expect the government to spend more on public services, as well as improve living standards for people on low incomes.

The quirk of Starmer’s majority is that he has at once a strong mandate and no real mandate at all. A manifesto designed to be as unthreatening and vague as possible was effectively a Rorschach test: voters saw what they wanted to see. The many non-voters, meanwhile, saw nothing at all. As prime minister, Starmer – managerial, efficient and nonideological to the point of pride – is a political blank canvas, a mood board for the public to project their varied expectations on. That hope is in limited supply and cynicism high does not mean there is not a deep desire out there for change. Few people voted for more food banks.

In the coming months, when the public grow impatient and the honeymoon period starts to wane, Starmer will have to make his peace with taxing the super-rich, borrowing or both. The alternative is a rudderless society, perpetually stuck in the ashes of Conservative decline, and a Labour party losing ever more alienated voters to the Greens, independents or Reform. Winning power is one thing, knowing what to do with it once you have it is quite another.

Link. He's only posted this on Twitter for whatever reason, here's what he wrote:

Puberty Blockers. A 🧵

Children’s healthcare must always be led by evidence.

Medicine given to children must always be proven safe and effective first.

I know there’s lots of fear and anxiety.

Let me explain why this decision was taken.

Cass Review found there is not enough evidence about the long-term impact of puberty blockers for gender incongruence to know whether they are safe or not, nor which children might benefit from them.

The evidence should have been established before they were ever prescribed.

The NHS took the decision to stop the routine use of puberty blockers for gender incongruence/dysphoria in children.

They are establishing a clinical trial with NIHR to ensure the effects of puberty blockers can be safely monitored and provide the evidence we need.

The former Health Secretary issued an emergency order to extend the restriction on prescription to the private sector, which I am defending.

Puberty blockers have been used to delay puberty in children and young people who start puberty much too early.

Use in those cases has been extensively tested (a very different indication from use in gender dysphoria) and has met strict safety requirements.

This is because the puberty blockers are suppressing hormone levels that are abnormally high for the age of the child.

This is different to stopping the normal surge of hormones that occur in puberty. This affects children’s psychological and brain development.

We don’t yet know the risks of stopping pubertal hormones at this critical life stage.

That is the basis upon which I am making decisions.

I am treading cautiously in this area because the safety of children must come first.

Some of the public statements being made are highly irresponsible and could put vulnerable young people at risk.

I know there’s lots of fear and anxiety. I am determined to improve the quality of, and access to, care for trans people.

I hope this thread provides some context for the caution and care I am taking when it comes to this vulnerable group of young people.

The decisions I am taking will always be based on evidence, rather than politics or political pressure.

The US Air Force has been sending unmarked planes from Britain’s base on Cyprus to Israel since it began bombing Gaza, it can be revealed.

The planes are all C-295 and CN-235 aircraft, which are believed to be used by American special forces.

Declassified has found 18 of these aircraft which have gone from the sprawling British air base on Cyprus, RAF Akrotiri, to Israel’s coastal city Tel Aviv since October 7.

[RAF] Akrotiri is the key node in the international effort to arm and provide logistical support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.

But the UK government has always refused to divulge any information about US activities at Akrotiri, which is known to include transporting weapons to Israel.

Asked in May how many US Air Force (USAF) flights had taken off from the base since October 7, [then] defence minister Leo Docherty said: “The Ministry of Defence does not comment on the operations of our Allies.”

But Declassified discovered the unmarked planes that flew from Akrotiri to Israel from November to June have a serial number showing they are operated by the USAF. Most of these journeys had the flight number GONZO62.

Six more unmarked C-130 planes have gone from Akrotiri to Tel Aviv since the bombing of Gaza began, which are believed to be USAF, but it was not possible for Declassified to locate their operator.
[…]
A spokesperson for the UK Ministry of Defence would only tell Declassified: “In response to the situation in Israel and Gaza, we are working with international partners to de-escalate the conflict, reinforce stability and support humanitarian efforts in the region. Any use of UK bases will be in line with these objectives.”