Governments at Westminster and Holyrood should make all their own decisions, working together in a modern partnership of equals.
• Ed Miliband has challenged David Cameron to accept a £5,000 cap on political donations and a ban on MPs accepting new directorships from 2015. In a clear attempt at PMQs to regain the moral high ground on the party funding issue, Miliband also said there should be a limit on the amount MPs can earn from second jobs and he accused the Conservatives of passing legislation to benefit their wealthy donors. The Labour leader said the Conservative Party had received £25m in donations from hedge funds while giving the same group a £145m tax cut in the last budget. As David Cameron taunted him over Labour’s links with the unions, Miliband said:
I will tell you what the difference is [between Labour and the Conservatives] – 6p a week in affiliation fees from ordinary people up and down the country against a party funded by a few millionaires at the top. What is shameful about it is that you don’t even know about the extra tax cut you gave to hedge funds.
Cameron rejected Miliband’s proposals. Although he was in favour of a cap on political donations, £5,000 was too low because it would lead to the taxpayer having to pay more for political parties, he said. On MPs having outside jobs, he said that he favoured transparency and that MPs could benefit from experience gained from second jobs. He also said the real problem with party funding was with Labour’s links with the unions.
Here are the figures – £8 million from Unite, £4 million from GMB, £4 million from Unison. They have bought the policies, they have bought the candidates and they have bought the leader.
• William Hague has been criticised for allegedly calling a Labour MP, Cathy Jamieson, a “stupid woman” during PMQs. The exchange came after Jamieson asked Cameron whether Tullow Oil chief executive Aidan Heavey’s donations to the Tories had influenced Mr Hague’s intervention in a tax dispute involving the company. Cameron said donations to the Conservative party did not buy votes at conference or a say in the selection of candidates or the party leader.
• Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, has said that further action might be needed to clamp down on payday lenders. As the Press Association reports, he told a committee he believed the firms “operate in an area” around benefits claimants and he was “not happy” about the situation. The government was looking at the lenders’ business model “quite severely”, he said. Labour MP Glenda Jackson asked if he was speaking to the industry, claiming: “They protest that they don’t take benefit claimants, but on an anecdotal level they most certainly do.” Duncan Smith replied:
I personally dislike payday lenders. I put that on record quite happily. We are, as a government, the Department for Business is looking at their business model quite severely at the moment. My instinct, my sense of this, is that they do operate in an area around our claimants and I’m not happy to see them in that area. So the Government is looking at all of that at the moment and I am strongly of the opinion that the action we are taking and further action may be necessary.
• Liam Byrne, the shadow work and pensions secretary, has said that universal credit is behind schedule and that it has become “the biggest white elephant in Whitehall”. He was speaking after the Department for Work and Pensions said it would be introduced in six new areas from October. He said it was originally meant to be rolled out for all new claims from October.
• Philip Hammond, the defence secretary, has said that the number of British troops in Afghanistan, currently at around 7,900, will fall to 6,000 this autumn in line with the aim to reduce numbers to 5,200 by the end of the year.
• The intelligence and security committee has said that al-Qaida forces fighting with rebels in Syria represent the most serious terrorist threat to the UK because they could gain access to chemical weapons. As the Press Association reports, the ISC said extremist elements in Syria were assessed to represent “the most worrying terrorist threat” to the UK and its allies. In its annual report, the committee said there was “serious concern” about the security of the “vast stockpiles” of chemical weapons amassed by the regime of president Bashar Assad. They are thought to include sarin, ricin, mustard gas and VX – described as “the deadliest nerve agent ever created”. MI6 chief Sir John Sawers told the committee there was the risk of “a highly worrying proliferation around the time of the regime fall”. The committee said:
There has to be a significant risk that some of the country’s chemical weapons stockpile could fall into the hands of those with links to terrorism, in Syria or elsewhere in the region. If this happens, the consequences could be catastrophic.
• Liam Byrne, the shadow work and pensions secretary, has urged the government to produce a report on the impact of all welfare changes on the disabled. Speaking before a Commons debate on the subject, he said:
The idea that a cumulative impact assessment of welfare reform on disabled people is too hard to carry out just isn’t true. Using publicly available data, we’ve calculated how many people will be hit by simultaneously cuts to benefits. In total 3.7 million disabled people will suffer, while the worst-affected will be hit by six different cuts, each losing £4,600-a-year as a household.
There are more details of what a cumulative impact would show on this Demos blog.
• Ministers are considering giving MPs from English constituencies a “veto” on legislation applying only to England, it has been reported.
• The Lib Dems have welcomed figures showing that inequality fell after the coalition’s first year in office. (See 10.14am.) Stephen Williams, a Lib Dem MP, said:
The ONS figures confirm that the tax and benefits system we have created leads to income being shared more equally between households than ever since 1986.
We will be doing more in the coming years to build on this towards the fairer society Liberal Democrats want to see to enable everyone to get on in life.
For more details, visit www.guardian.co.uk
692267eb6296b24d95460b08b8cd0044 bc106dac224dc04a660f9a9434b799c2