Robert Jenrick rejects claim Tory MPs put him in final two for leadership ballot by mistake – UK politics live

Robert Jenrick is now taking questions after his speech.

Q: Kemi Badenoch is ahead with the members. What do you have that she doesn’t?

Jenrick says he thinks he has consistently focused on the issues that matter to people – the NHS, immigration and the economy.

(This implies he thinks Badenoch hasn’t, but he does not say that.)

Q: Do you think you could be in the final two by mistake?

Jenrick says there is always horse trading in these contests. But he says he thinks Tory MPs voted for “the best placed people to lead this party forward”.

Religious hate crime as recorded by the police in England and Wales reached a record high following the start of the Israel-Gaza war, according to Home Office figures released today.

The figures show that religious hate crime as recorded by the police has gone up 25% in the past year. There was a particularly sharp spike in hate crimes directed against Jews, but there has also been a significant increase in hate aimed at Muslims.

But hate crime overall was down in the year ending March 2024, the figures show.

Commenting on religious hate crime, the report says:

There was a 25% increase in police recorded religious hate crime over the last year, up from 8,370 to 10,484 offences. This is the highest annual count in these offences since the hate crime collection began in the year ending March 2012.

The increase in offences was driven by a sharp rise in religious hate crimes targeted at Jewish people since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Since the spike, the number of offences has declined but to a level higher than seen before the conflict.

Annually, there were 3,282 religious hate crimes targeted at Jewish people in the year ending March 2024, more than double the number recorded the previous year (1,543). These offences accounted for a third (33%) of all religious hate crimes in the last year. By comparison, the proportion in the previous year was 20%.

There was also an increase in religious hate crimes targeted against Muslims since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict, with 3,866 offences in the latest year, up 13% from 3,432 recorded the previous year. In the last year, almost 2 in 5 (38%) of religious hate crimes were targeted against Muslims.

The report says there were 140,561 hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales in the year ending March 2024, a fall of 5% compared to the previous year. Even though religious hate crimes were up, other categories of hate crime fell.

The waiting list for routine hospital treatment in England has climbed to its highest level for 10 months, PA Media reports. PA says:

An estimated 7.64 million treatments were waiting to be carried out at the end of August, relating to 6.42 million patients – up from 7.62 million treatments and 6.39 million patients at the end of July, NHS England said.

These are the highest figures since October 2023.

The list hit a record high in September 2023 with 7.77 million treatments and 6.50 million patients.

Earlier there was a post in the blog says that, although the overall number of NHS England hospitals waits was up, the number of individual patients affected was slightly down. That was based on a PA Media report that has now been withdrawn. PA says that is because NHS England issued revised figures.

Trade unions are generally strongly in favour of the employment rights bill, but Unite, Britain’s largest private sector union, has repeatedly complained about Labour not doing more. In her statement about the bill, Sharon Graham, Unite’s general secretary, said that it was an important step forward, but that in some respects it contained “more holes than Swiss cheese”. She said:

This bill is without doubt a significant step forward for workers but stops short of making work pay.

The end to draconian laws like minimum service levels and the introduction of new individual rights, for example on bereavement leave, will be beneficial. But the bill still ties itself up in knots trying to avoid what was promised. Failure to end fire and rehire and zero hours contracts once and for all will leave more holes than Swiss cheese that hostile employers will use.

The bill also fails to give workers the sort of meaningful rights to access a union for pay bargaining that would put more money in their pockets and, in turn, would aid growth.

Unite will continue to make the workers’ voice heard as we push for improvements to the legislation as the bill goes through parliament.

Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, has accused the Conservative government of waging “poisonous culture wars” against road users.

She was speaking in transport questions in the Commons and responding to the Lib Dem MP Wera Hobhouse, who was asking if the government would do more to make roads safer for cyclists.

Haigh replied:

I’m grateful to her for raising that point and it sits at the heart of our ambition to develop the new road safety strategy.

The previous government pursued poisonous culture wars against road users of all descriptions. We are determined to take back streets for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers. And that will be at the heart of our new ambition for the road safety strategy.

Haigh was referring to measures announced by Rishi Sunak last year, when he claimed that local authorities were engaged in a “war on motorists” and proposed various measures to back drivers.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, has arrived in Downing Street for talks with Keir Starmer and the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, Eleni Courea reports.

Zelenskyy is due to give Starmer details of what he calls his “victory plan” for the war against Russia. He had been due to meet Starmer and other world leaders at a summit in Germany at the weekend, but that was postponed after President Biden said he could not attend because of Hurricane Milton.

Good morning. During the election campaign Labour promised to produce an employment rights bill within its first 100 days in office. The anniversary is on Saturday, and, just in time for the deadline, the bill is being published today. It is hugely important to the trade unions, who provide the institutional backbone to the Labour party, and, as Jessica Elgot reports in her overnight story, millions of workers will gain new rights as a result.

The government claims the scope of the reform is huge – 9 million people will gain new rights against unfair dismissal, more than 1 million low-paid workers on zero hours will have the right to job security on a new contract, an extra 30,000 parents will gain new rights to paternity leave, and 1.5 million will be newly entitled to unpaid parental leave.

Ministers also believe the bill will help at least 1.7 million people into the labour market who are not working because of family commitments – and who would benefit from new policies on flexible working and parental leave.

Here is Jess’s story.

In its news release about the bill, the government says it includes 28 separate employment reforms. Here is our explainer.

Labour has consulted extensively on the proposals, and it has made considerable efforts to accommodate business opinion; the unions have not got everything they were asking for, and there is quite a lot of important, smallprint detail about how proposals will work in practice yet to be finalised. Keir Starmer has spoken a lot about his desire for Labour to be seen as pro-business, not anti-business, and he does not want these plans to scare corporate Britain.

The TUC has described the bill as “a positive new chapter for working people in this country”. In a statement Paul Nowak, its general secretary, said:

Driving up employment standards is good for workers, good for business and good for growth. It will give workers more predictability and control and it will stop good employers from being undercut by the bad.

While there is still detail to be worked through, this bill signals a seismic shift away from the Tories’ low pay, low rights, low productivity economy.

Some of the big business organisations have yet to give their overall verdict on the bill. But the Federation of Small Businesses, which is one of the lobby groups always most hostile to new regulation, has been hyper-critical. Tina McKenzie, its policy chair, said in a statement:

This legislation is rushed job, clumsy, chaotic and poorly planned – dropping 28 new measures onto small business employers all at once leaves them scrambling to make sense of it all. Beyond warm words, it lacks any real pro-growth element and will increase economic inactivity, seriously jeopardising the government’s own 80% employment target.

The FSB response has been picked up by the Daily Mail, which is the only pro-Tory paper to splash on the bill.

Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, was doing a morning interview round this morning. On the Today programme, asked to respond to the FSB criticism, he said:

I would reject that very strongly.

First of all, there’s no surprises here. Everything in this package was in the manifesto.

Second of all, there is a very strong business rationale for these measures in terms of getting more people into work, in terms of making sure there’s a link between job satisfaction and productivity.

It levels the playing field to what a lot of businesses are already doing, actually, to a higher standard than those measures in the bill would bring forward.

It gives more incentives for training. We have listened and worked very closely with specifically the Federation of Small Businesses.

He also said a lot of the criticism reminded him the claims, made by the Conservatives and some business groups, that when the last Labour government introduced the minimum wage, it would lead to mass job losses. When it was put to him that the measures in this bill would deter firms from hiring new workers, Reynolds replied:

I reject that entirely.

And I think, to be honest, a lot of those points remind me of [opposition to] the introduction of the minimum wage, which, again, were not found to be true once it came in.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

Morning: Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, is meeting Keir Starmer for talks in Downing Street. Mark Rutte, the new Nato secretary general, is also attending.

After 10.30am: Lucy Powell, the leader of the Commons, takes questions from MPs on next week’s Commons business.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

12pm: Robert Jenrick, one of the two Tory leadership candidates left in the contest, gives a speech in London.

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