Transport secretary: government putting ‘passengers first’ unlike previous Tory decisions to ‘deliberately provoke and prolong’ strikesTransport secretary Louise Haigh has said the government is putting “passengers first” in attempting to resolve the train drivers’ pay claim, rather than taking the approach of the previous Conservative government, which she said,“deliberately provoked and prolonged” strikes.In a video posted to social media, she said:
When I became transport secretary, I said we’d move fast and fix things, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.
I am delighted that we have put forward a three-year pay deal so that drivers across our railways can vote on it, and hopefully bring an end to over two years of damaging strikes that have cost the taxpayer more than £800m pounds in lost revenue and hurt the economy even more.
The previous government deliberately provoked and prolonged these strikes and hurt passengers and the economy. In direct contrast, this Labour government will always put passengers first.
I promised to move fast and fix things, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. That’s why we’ve agreed a deal with @ASLEFunion which – if members agree – will put an end to the rail strikes after two long years👇 pic.twitter.com/d75Gu1mFOZ— Louise Haigh (@LouHaigh) August 15, 2024

ShareKey eventsShow key events onlyPlease turn on JavaScript to use this featureWelsh secretary Jo Stevens has been talking about Tata Steel and Port Talbot on the BBC Radio 4’s World At One programme, where she said: “Everything is on the table in terms of what we want to talk to Tata about, I can’t go into kind of the commercial sensitivities of it, but we want to protect as many jobs as possible.”PA Media reports Stevens said: “I want to see all types of steel products made in the UK, and I want to see as many as possible made here in Wales.“As part of the overall discussions with Tata, we want to secure investment from the private sector – and Tata being an obvious partner – into the future of steel making in the UK. And so I think what I can say is that all options are on the table. That better deal has to involve looking at every possible option.”SharePA Media is carrying a quote from a government spokesperson about today’s court ruling that tens of thousands of people have been wrongly convicted of train fare evasion because of flawed court procedures.The spokesperson said: “We acknowledge the chief magistrate’s judgment and welcome the apology from train operators. While fare evasion should be tackled, the right process should be followed at all times. The people affected will be directly contacted in due course to resolve the cases in accordance with the judgment.”In written submissions for a hearing in July, Greater Anglia said it acknowledged “a series of significant errors” had occurred and wanted to “apologise unreservedly” to those affected. A spokesperson for Northern Rail said: “We would like to apologise again for the errors that have occurred. We will now work with the court to implement today’s findings,” adding “We are unable to respond to individual inquiries in the meantime.”It is unclear that those affected will be content with apologies. PA Media also spoke to Sarah Cook, whose prosecution was one of the test cases.The 42-year-old pet shop owner from Barnsley was fined £475 under an SJP prosecution after she did not pay a £20 fine for travelling without a ticket between Wombwell and Barnsley in November 2022.She said that she had been waiting to hear back for a year on an appeal against the original fine, before being told she had been prosecuted.She said: “It is a kick in the teeth. I know some people would say take the win, sit back, appreciate that. For me, although money at the time was an issue, for me more than the money was the stress. I have not got a criminal record, I’m not somebody out there committing crimes, and for somebody to say you could have a criminal record, you could potentially face jail time if you have been a repeat offender, to me that was terrifying.”She continued: “For them, their punishment is ‘we’re sorry’, and there is a bit of me that thinks I don’t know if that is good enough.”ShareAnother Conservative leadership hopeful, Robert Jenrick, has used today’s growth figures to attack Labour’s assessment of its economic inheritance.Notably silent on why there was a corner that needed turning, Jenrick posted to social media to say “The UK now has the fastest growth in the G7. Double France. Four times the EU average. Under the Conservatives, the economy turned a corner. Don’t let Labour convince you otherwise.”Earlier Labour’s chief secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, said “The last Conservative government left this new Labour government with the highest tax burden since the 1940s, the highest debt burden for over 60 years and a huge cost for just paying the interest on that debt every single month.”ShareA 15-year-old boy has become the first to be charged with the more serious offence of riot in relation to disorder in Sunderland on 2 August, the Crown Prosecution Service said, PA Media reports.Most people so far have been charged with violent disorder, which carries a maximum sentence of five years for adults, but the charge of riot for adults carries a maximum sentence of ten years.ShareUpdated at 15.09 CESTThere are, if my abacus is correct, 79 days until we find out who the next leader of his majesty’s official opposition is going to be, which means, especially on quiet news days, we have got a lot more campaigning by Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel, Mel Stride and Tom Tugendhat ahead of us.James Cleverly has just posted a video where he says the key to success is to “make fewer promises, and the ones we do make, make them on the issues that matter the most, and make sure we do what we say we are going to do.”He then went on to say “it is very tempting” to just make “easy” promises to people when you want their vote, and illustrated it with the suggestion that he was wearing red socks because of one such ill-advised exchange.ShareHeadteachers in Scotland will be able to ban mobile phones in schools – but the Scottish government does not intend to bring in a nationwide ban on the devices in classrooms.A Scotland-wide ban on the devices in schools is “not considered to be appropriate or feasible”, new guidance from ministers has stated.It comes as SNP education secretary Jenny Gilruth said there “are undoubtedly growing behavioural issues associated with mobile phones”.As a result, she said the guidance makes clear head teachers will be “empowered to take action up to and including whole school bans” where they believe this to be necessary.Making clear ministers are “not introducing a monolithic national policy”, PA Media report the education secretary said: “The Scottish government does not intend to dictate approaches to our headteachers – they know better than anyone the specific approach which will work best in their school.”ShareTugendhat accuses Labour of ‘feeding union paymasters’ by trying to end rail strikes which Labour say previous government ‘provoked and prolonged’Conservative leadership challenger Tom Tugendhat has said that the proposed pay deal with train drivers that the transport secretary has described as “putting passengers first” is in fact just “feeding union paymasters”.Speaking to GB News from Ynys Môn, the shadow security minister said “I think this is again the Labour party feeding the union paymasters that they’ve always obeyed.”Earlier transport secretary Louise Haigh said the new Labour government had promised to “move fast and fix things” and said they were. She said a pay deal whould “hopefully bring an end to over two years of damaging strikes that have cost the taxpayer more than £800m pounds in lost revenue and hurt the economy even more.”She accused the Tories of “deliberately provoking and prolonging” strikes, and said “In direct contrast, this Labour government will always put passengers first.”Tugendhat, who was in government from September 2022 until July 2024 during the 14 years that Conservatives were in power, said “I’m afraid what this isn’t focused on is the real need for massive investment that we need to make a commitment to.”He said: “We need … to make sure that people, the traveling public, those people who are actually delivering the jobs and the opportunities that the British people need to survive, and to deliver a greater future, that they actually have the full opportunity to enjoy the services that we need. Now that’s where the challenge comes.”He criticised the deal for not having any associated changes in working conditions, saying “Whenever we’ve done pay rises, Conservatives, we’ve always asked for productivity benefits. We’ve always asked for transformations in working environments, to make sure that we’re getting more bang, as it were, for your buck. So that people’s money – after all, it’s not government money, it’s your money – actually goes further.”Mick Whelan, secretary-general of Aslef, earlier told listeners of LBC that he believed members would vote to accept the pay deal.ShareTom Tugendhat has played down the impact of people inciting violence online, suggesting that arresting people for what they have posted online is not getting to the root cause of what has been causing violence.The Conservative leadership candidate told viewers of GB News:
This isn’t about the technology, it’s about the root causes. Of course you and I would both argue that people should be civil online, just as they should be civil on in person. Of course we should, but that’s not the root cause.
The root cause is that there are people with fanatical and hateful ideas in our country, who were trying to divide us, who are secretarian of various different kinds, or who are trying to express political views through violence. Now that’s just wrong.
And it’s also wrong that we have got a series of criminals who simply haven’t been detained over many years. And indeed, as you’ve already seen, those who committed the riots in recent weeks have a pattern of crime, many of them for burglary and assault, and frankly, they should have been in prison years ago. What they’re doing is they’re exploiting the opportunity to commit more crime.
I’ve always been at the opinion that, you know, what happens online is a bit different. Twitter isn’t Britain, right? It’s a perspective. It’s a view. But it’s not the same thing. Crime is actually happening on our streets. And I think that’s priority to be made now.
ShareSpeaking on GB News, Tom Tugendhat has repeated his call for a change in the culture of police leadership in the country, and for the setting up of a new national security police force.The Conservative leadership candidate told viewers:
We need to look at the way in which the National Police Chiefs Council and the College of Policing are operating. We need to make sure we’re getting the right leaders in.
What we’ve got here is a situation where we haven’t got two-tier justice, we’ve got completely inconsistent justice. We don’t have police officers regularly arresting – and I don’t blame the individual officers. This is a question of leadership. This is a question of making sure we get the right decisions by police leaders and political leaders, and that’s not what we’ve seen from Keir Starmer. It’s not what we’ve seen from Yvette Cooper.
Tugendhat again called for the Metropolitan police to be stripped of its counter-terrorism duties, which could be taken up by a new national security police force. He said:
The Metropolitan police have two duties. They have one, which is obviously their territorial policing responsibility, you know, keeping people safe on the streets. And then they have the national responsibility, counter terrorism policing and so on. Now I think, frankly, that’s just too great a span. I’d like to see a new police force, the national security police force, set up, so that it’s actually able to operate supporting counter-terrorism operations around the UK.
You’ve heard me saying how Iranian agents have tried to do harm in our country. You’ve heard that the National Security Act that I introduced has already led to more arrests in my time as security minister of Chinese and Russian agents than in the previous decade. You know, we need to be absolutely up to date on this and responsive to the threats that we really do face.
ShareRegardless of whether they cancelled their summer holidays or not – and our community team are harvesting your views of whether Keir Starmer did the right thing here – there are very few politicians on the airwaves this week during recess, and of those that are, most of them are vying to be the next leader of the opposition.Tom Tugendhat has just appeared on GB News from Ynys Môn where as part of his pitch to lead the Conservatives he was saying that the senior members of the party need to listen to their members more. He told viewers:
It’s an amazingly beautiful place, and it’s not my first visit. I’m here because for me, Unionism is absolutely indivisible from Conservatism. You know, this is all about who we are as a country. We are so much stronger together. We are a fantastic country.
Very sadly, the failures of the Conservative party at the last election, that loss of trust that we all know about, that we’ve really got to fix, has led to there being no Conservative Welsh MPs.
Now we’ve got to turn that around. And that starts by listening to our members, listening to people on Ynys Môn, and listening to people in Wales and across the United Kingdom.
ShareScotland’s cabinet secretary for finance and local government, Shona Robison, has said the Scottish government’s finances require “exceptional measures” to be put in place and confirmed a freeze in public sector recruitment in all but “essential frontline” posts.PA Media quote her telling BBC Radio Scotland: “We have said essential frontline posts will be able to be recruited.”She added the Scottish government would be “making sure that the controls on recruitment are enhanced to make sure we prioritise only those essential frontline posts.”The finance secretary has already imposed emergency spending controls across Scottish government departments, with further spending in 2024-25 said to be only permitted if it is “truly essential or unavoidable.”The Scottish finance secretary criticised the UK government for failing to ensure rises for NHS workers and council staff are fully funded, and said that “has led to the position where we are having to take these exceptional measures in order to constrain spend and create the headroom to manage.”Share