UK News
Badenoch claims police who arrested Henry Nowak influenced by guidance saying ‘hate crimes should be treated as priority’ – UK politics live | Politics
Badenoch claims police who arrested Henry Nowak influenced by guidance saying hate crimes should be treated as priority
Kemi Badenoch starts by talking about the video filmed by the police as they arrested Henry Nowak.
She says it was hard to watch because she “found myself willing the police to stop, to at least consider Henry’s story and check if he had been stabbed”.
She says she met Nowak’s family last week. They do not want this case to be used to divide people.
She goes on:
They want the police to become an institution that we can trust again.
And if we want to honour that wish to honour Henry’s memory, we need to ask the right question.
I believe that question is why did the police take an accusation of racism more seriously than the claim that Henry had been stabbed?
This question goes beyond policing.
Why are public bodies so unable to act with common sense when race or identity is involved?
Why are they so distracted, busying themselves with things that have nothing to do with their core function?
Badenoch says the speech she is giving today is the basis of work she has been doing for months on equality law. Some of what she says will be “very uncomfortable” for some people.
She goes on:
In some ways I feel for those police officers because they were following guidance. They have been trained on guidance which does not apply equality under the law. Guidance which says hate crimes should be treated as a priority. Many people don’t know what is in this guidance and that is why it needs to be exposed.
UPDATE: As explained earlier (see 9.20am), the judge who presided over the trial of Nowak’s killer did not endorse this theory in his summing up.
Key events
Q: Do you think people who run staff networks in the civil service, like groups for minority ethnic staff (see 12pm), should be allowed time off for those activities, or access to facilities?
Badenoch said her experience of staff networks in the civil service was that they were run by people “furthering their own personal careers at the expense of other civil servants”.
They should not be supported with taxpayers’ money, she said.
Q: Does the entire Conservative party agree with you on this?
Badenoch said she had been very clear about the direction the Tory party was going in. She went on:
I said that we’re signing a contract about the agenda we’re taking into government, because I want everybody to understand what it is we’re going to deliver.
If there is a Conservative, MP who does not believe in equality under the law or wants different treatments for different groups on the basis of skin colour or protected characteristics, then they are probably are not a Conservative MP.
Q; What is your response to the Telegraph story today about a secret report saying the last government wasted £28bn?
The report, by Rozina Sabur, says:
Terrorists, hostile states and gangsters have been given more than £28bn of taxpayers’ money, including through aid payments, according to a secret government report.
The Telegraph can reveal details of a dossier showing that billions of pounds went to organised crime, with millions going to Russia and Islamic State.
It demonstrates that foreign aid and Covid relief loans were appropriated on a vast scale by Britain’s enemies, with the money beyond reach and those who took it unpunished.
More than £28bn ended up in the hands of those wishing to harm Britain between 2015 and 2021, according to the report, which was commissioned and produced by the Cabinet Office but was buried during the previous government.
Badenoch said she thought the government should always be wary of giving away large amounts of money in grants.
But she claimed this story was related to the topic of her press conference. She said she was a Treasury minister at the time of Covid. And the Treasury was under a lot of pressure to ensure that ethnic minority businesses were getting full access to Covid bounceback loans, she said.
Badenoch says she agrees with Idris Elba having ‘woke James Bond would ‘ruin entire franchise’
Q: Idris Elba says audiences do not want to see a black actor playing James Bond. Would you like to see someone from a different background playing 007?
Badenoch replied:
I agree with Idris Elba that we should not make James Bond woke because that will ruin the entire franchise.
But Badenoch said that was a decision for the people who make the films. And audiences would deliver their verdict. She believed in capitalism, she said, and that was how it worked.
Q: It is almost 10 years since Theresa May gave her ‘burning injustices’ speech when she became PM. She said: “If you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white.” Do you think those injustices have been tackled?
Badenoch said she wishes May had spoken to her before the speech, because she would have encouraged her to frame it differently.
I do believe that everyone suffers injustice; it doesn’t matter the colour of your skin.
I do think that if you are an ethnic minority, or any kind of minority, it is the fact of being in a minority that means that you are probably more likely to experience something that the majority group does not, whatever minority you are. That is a fact.
That is why we have an Equality Act. That is why those laws are there to prevent discrimination.
But when you have public bodies then going beyond preventing discrimination to achieve outcomes, try and do something different, and accept any mention of racism as true without examining the facts, that is a problem.
Badenoch says identity-based staff networks in police, and public organisations, should not have say over policy
Q: Are you opposed to the police and other public sector organisations allowing staff to set up and run groups for staff members from different minority ethnic groups?
Badenoch said she did not like groups like this. But she believed in freedom of association. She went on:
If you are black police officers and you want to hang out together and go to the pub, or play tennis, that’s fine.
But should you organise within the police and start changing policy on the basis of your race? No.
And the way I know that that is not the right answer is because if you swap the races and if you had the White Police Officers Association and said that they should start making policy for white people in the police, I think everyone would be up in arms ..
I don’t think those identity networks in the civil service, or the police, should have any say in public policy or how those organisations are run.
Q: Do you think Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, was right to stop the Met police signing a contract with Palantir? What do you think of that?
Badenoch agreed that was an example of Khan putting ideology ahead of the need to focus on getting results.
Q: Do you think subjecting more black boys to stop and search could inflame tensions?
Badenoch dismissed this concern. She said:
Some people who will feel uncomfortable. But the truth is that, when black boys are searched, more knives are found. The incidence of knife carrying is higher.
So we can’t leave people to carry knives because we think that we’ve we searched enough people for today because that means someone else’s life gets lost.
And the people who tell me more than anyone that they want to stop and search are the mothers of young black boys who have been killed by their peers …
I’m not going to run away from an outcry and allow other people’s children to be killed, just so I can have a quiet life. That is not fair.
Q: Have you got plans to go further in changing equality law, or is it just this?
Badenoch said she had been looking at this for years and there was “a lot that needs to be done”. She said her party was also looking at how this applied in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland because those countries were all run by parties that want to break up the UK.
She said she wanted to stop “lawfare” in a range of areas.
Badenoch accuses police leaders of wrongly accepted their officers institutionally racist
Q: Do you think the police can be trusted to deal with racially-charged outcomes?
Badenoch replied:
I do think that most frontline police officers are good people.
I think a lot of the issues have actually been with the senior police chiefs.
They were the ones who I spoke to, and they were the ones who told me, ‘Come on, you don’t understand. We really are institutionally racist’, and then could not explain exactly how they were.
Badenoch said this was not an anti-police speech.
This is not an anti-police speech. It’s actually pro-police because I want to free them to be able to do their jobs without worrying about box ticking or compliance on issues that are not core to the function of saving lives and catching criminals.
Badenoch claims public sector equality duty ‘creating inequality of outcomes’
Q; Are you giving up on trying to reduce inequality of outcomes?
Badenoch claimed that the public sector equality duty was “creating inequality of outcomes”. And it was destroying trust in institutions, she said.
UK News
More than half of clean energy schemes needed for Labour’s 2030 target offered grid connection | Renewable energy
More than half the renewable energy projects needed to meet the government’s clean power targets by 2030 are now able to plug into the electricity grid after years of delay, according to the system operator.
The National Energy System Operator (Neso) has offered more than 700 clean energy projects in Great Britain a grid connection date since the start of the year, after a two-year process to unblock a bottleneck that threatened to delay projects into the 2030s.
These projects represent almost 60% of the 1,200 clean energy schemes that will need to begin generating electricity by the end of the decade to meet the government’s goal of creating a virtually carbon-free grid by 2030.
The Labour party came to power almost two years ago with a promise to double the UK’s onshore wind, triple its solar power and quadruple its offshore wind capacity in an unprecedented buildout of renewable energy.
However, there were doubts about whether the ambition was achievable, given the years of lengthy delays to connect to the grid amid a surge of speculative applications that created a logjam in the “first come, first served” queueing system.
After a two-year process to clear the backlog that began in late 2023, the system operator pulled the plug on hundreds of speculative projects which had stopped “shovel-ready” schemes from connecting to the power grid and began offering connection dates to projects which are ready to be built.
Michael Shanks, the energy minister, said: “Upgrading the grid and making it easier for clean power projects to connect to it will help protect bill payers from fossil fuel price spikes.
“This milestone is a landmark step in putting connections reform into action – with offers issued to over 700 shovel-ready projects that will help to bring down bills for good with clean energy that we control.”
The ready-to-go energy projects – including wind and solar farms, battery storage, gas and hydro plans – amount to 37 gigawatts of new electricity capacity, or just over a third of the 100GW which will be needed to meet the target.
Under Neso’s new rules, projects must meet stricter criteria to apply for a grid connection, including securing planning permission and land rights, and must be in alignment with the government’s clean energy targets.
These standards mean that only projects that are highly likely to be delivered in the coming years will be offered a date to connect to the grid. Previously, the connections queue grew significantly to more than twice the capacity needed to achieve net zero by 2050 owing to speculative “zombie projects”.
Kayte O’Neill, Neso’s chief operating officer, said the latest “milestone” showed that its reforms were “delivering real results”.
“These offers give developers the certainty they need to invest, supporting economic growth,” she added. “They also help deliver the reliable, clean and affordable energy system Britain needs. With over half of offers made, we are focused on the next phase of delivery.”
Residents have been forced to flee their homes in Belfast amid disorder on the streets following a knife attack.
Houses and cars have been set on fire, while all public transport has been paused in the city.
A 30-year-old Sudanese man is due to appear in court on Wednesday charged with attempted murder following the attack in north Belfast on Monday night.
A man in his 40s remains in hospital with serious injuries to his eyes, neck and back.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland have called for calm as “sporadic pockets of disorder” have broken out across Northern Ireland in response to the attack.
Read more on this story.
UK News
Middle East crisis live: Iran launches broad retaliatory attacks after US strikes over downed helicopter | US-Israel war on Iran
Opening summary
Welcome to our live coverage of the crisis in the Middle East.
Iran says it has launched a missile attack at an airbase in Jordan hosting US forces, after also targeting Kuwait and Bahrain. The Revolutionary Guards said missiles have targeted the Muwaffaq Salti airbase, which is known to host US F-35 fighter jets and other aircraft.
Neither Jordan nor the US has acknowledged any attack, but if confirmed it would likely be the first time that Iran has targeted Jordan since the start of the ceasefire in April.
The US strikes on Iran followed the downing of a US Apache helicopter over the strait of Hormuz, from which two crew members were rescued in a stable condition. In a post on social media Trump said the US “must” respond to the helicopter crash.
Here is the latest:
-
The US launched multiple waves of strikes on Iran in response to a military helicopter crash off the strait of Hormuz that Donald Trump said Iran had downed. The Associated Press reported that the Apache helicopter that crashed went down after colliding with an Iranian drone, but it was not clear whether the collision was intentional.
-
US strikes were reported across Iran’s southern coast, on the strait of Hormuz. After more than three hours of military action, US central command (Centcom) said strikes were “completed”, adding that the US remained ready to defend against “unjustified Iranian aggression.”
-
Soon after, Iran launched retaliatory attacks against the US, according to the countries state media, which said American bases in the region and the US fifth fleet in Bahrain were targeted with drones. Kuwait and Bahrain issued air raid alerts and reported that air defences were active in repelling attacks. Iran also claimed it had targeted a US base in Jordan with long range missiles.
-
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said no attack would go “unanswered”, soon after the US launched strikes on Iran. Posting an image of the strait of Hormuz with the label, “Forever Persian Gulf”, Araghchi says that “despite its defeats on the battlefield, the U.S. opted to test our determination.”
-
Five hours before the airstrikes, Trump had posted on social media that the US “must” respond to the helicopter crash, from which two crew members were rescued in stable condition. Before his social media post, however, Trump appeared to downplay the crash, telling the Wall Street Journal in a phone interview that it “wasn’t a big deal” and that “the pilot is fine.”
-
Iranian state media reported that no air military operations have taken place in the strait of Hormuz over the past 24 hours, according to Reuters.
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Lebanon’s health ministry said 11 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes on the southern city of Tyre on Tuesday. The state-run National News Agency (NNA) had reported the first strike taking place not long before Israel’s military issued an evacuation warning for the entire city and surrounding areas ahead of strikes there.
Key events
The precarious US-Iran ceasefire explained
Wednesday’s strikes by the US on Iran are just the latest in a series of ceasefire breaches that have escalated considerably in the last two weeks.
After weeks of conflict, the US and Iran agreed to a ceasefire on 8 April and entered into protracted negotiations to reopen the strait of Hormuz and resolve the issue of Iran’s nuclear program.
Since then the US and Iran have exchanged strikes on at least four occasions, but in every instance both sides have characterised their actions as “measured” and “limited”, and stressed the importance of maintaining the ceasefire.
The ceasefire faced its biggest test on Sunday, when Iran launched missiles at Israel in response to Israeli strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs. The Israeli military launched airstrikes on Iran in retaliation; the first exchange of fire between the two countries since the ceasefire was reached.
Fears of a return to a full-scale regional war in the Middle East eased on Monday, with Israel and Iran saying they had halted attacks on each other after an appeal from Donald Trump to “immediately stop shooting”.
The breaches of the ceasefire fly in the face of Trump’s continued claims that a longterm deal with Iran is close. The US president is reportedly very close to agreeing to a series of Iranian demands that would allow the strait to reopen to traffic, and begin the process of a new round of nuclear negotiations. However Trump has for weeks promised that a deal is close, but failed to follow through on those promises.
US House speaker Mike Johnson is among the many senior American officials who have been playing down the significance of the strikes.
He called the strikes on Iran “targeted”, “proportional” and “defensive in nature.”
Johnson said he spent several hours earlier in the situation room with Trump, the vice-president, JD Vance, secretary of state, Marco Rubio and defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, discussing the Iran war and other matters.
“We lament that has become necessary,” he said.
But he said after Iran struck US assets and personnel in the region, “We can’t allow that.”
Nearly all the missiles and drones launched by Iran over the last few hours were intercepted, a US officials has told the Reuters news agency.
The US official said that the military was not aware of any reports of harm to US personnel, or known damage to US locations at this time.
According to the official, the US struck nearly 20 targets in Iran on Wednesday morning.
We’ll bring you more on this when we have it.
Jordan says Iranian missiles shot down before they reached their target
Jordanian armed forces said on Wednesday they intercepted and shot down five missiles launched from Iran toward the al-Azraq area in Jordan.
The military said that debris from the interception operation fell on Jordanian territory but caused no injuries or material damage.
Earlier Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they had launched a missile attack at an airbase in Jordan hosting US forces, after also targeting Kuwait and Bahrain. The missiles targeted the Muwaffaq Salti airbase, which is known to host US F-35 fighter jets and other aircraft.
As the US launched several waves of strikes on Iran, Asian share markets fell and oil prices surged.
Escalating tensions in the Middle East have unsettled markets, dimming hopes for an end to the months-long war that has pushed commodities higher and stoked inflation worries.
Japan’s Nikkei fell 0.9% while the tech-heavy South Korean KOSPI slumped 2%.
Oil prices climbed about 1% in early trade, moving away from a seven-week low touched in the previous session. Brent futures rose 0.9% to $92.29 a barrel, while US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude climbed 0.8% to $88.97.
“Oil holding around $90 despite fresh Iran headlines suggests markets are not pricing a sustained supply disruption. That leaves room for a bigger repricing if energy infrastructure, shipping routes or U.S. involvement escalate,” said Charu Chanana, chief investment strategist at Saxo in Singapore.
US investor will be focused on inflation data, which is set to be released later on Wednesday. The report – covering the last 12 months through to May – will gauge the impact of the war, with a Reuters survey of economists predicting that inflation likely increased 4.2% in the perdiod.
Opening summary
Welcome to our live coverage of the crisis in the Middle East.
Iran says it has launched a missile attack at an airbase in Jordan hosting US forces, after also targeting Kuwait and Bahrain. The Revolutionary Guards said missiles have targeted the Muwaffaq Salti airbase, which is known to host US F-35 fighter jets and other aircraft.
Neither Jordan nor the US has acknowledged any attack, but if confirmed it would likely be the first time that Iran has targeted Jordan since the start of the ceasefire in April.
The US strikes on Iran followed the downing of a US Apache helicopter over the strait of Hormuz, from which two crew members were rescued in a stable condition. In a post on social media Trump said the US “must” respond to the helicopter crash.
Here is the latest:
-
The US launched multiple waves of strikes on Iran in response to a military helicopter crash off the strait of Hormuz that Donald Trump said Iran had downed. The Associated Press reported that the Apache helicopter that crashed went down after colliding with an Iranian drone, but it was not clear whether the collision was intentional.
-
US strikes were reported across Iran’s southern coast, on the strait of Hormuz. After more than three hours of military action, US central command (Centcom) said strikes were “completed”, adding that the US remained ready to defend against “unjustified Iranian aggression.”
-
Soon after, Iran launched retaliatory attacks against the US, according to the countries state media, which said American bases in the region and the US fifth fleet in Bahrain were targeted with drones. Kuwait and Bahrain issued air raid alerts and reported that air defences were active in repelling attacks. Iran also claimed it had targeted a US base in Jordan with long range missiles.
-
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said no attack would go “unanswered”, soon after the US launched strikes on Iran. Posting an image of the strait of Hormuz with the label, “Forever Persian Gulf”, Araghchi says that “despite its defeats on the battlefield, the U.S. opted to test our determination.”
-
Five hours before the airstrikes, Trump had posted on social media that the US “must” respond to the helicopter crash, from which two crew members were rescued in stable condition. Before his social media post, however, Trump appeared to downplay the crash, telling the Wall Street Journal in a phone interview that it “wasn’t a big deal” and that “the pilot is fine.”
-
Iranian state media reported that no air military operations have taken place in the strait of Hormuz over the past 24 hours, according to Reuters.
-
Lebanon’s health ministry said 11 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes on the southern city of Tyre on Tuesday. The state-run National News Agency (NNA) had reported the first strike taking place not long before Israel’s military issued an evacuation warning for the entire city and surrounding areas ahead of strikes there.
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