Closing Summary
We are now closing the live blog. Here is a summary of today’s events:
Rachel Reeves said she “of course” had not lied about the state of the public finances before the budget. “Of course I didn’t,” she told Trevor Phillips on Sky News.
Reeves said she “did not accept” the suggestion that she misled the public in the run-up to the budget. Speaking to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, Reeves said: “I do not accept that at all. The OBR numbers themselves, which I agree with and we knew they were going to be published, they are very clear that there was less fiscal space than there was just a few months ago in the spring. And we needed not less but more fiscal headroom …” The chancellor told Kuenssberg that growth is the government’s top priority.
The chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility, Richard Hughes, has said he will continue to lead the watchdog unless he loses the confidence of the chancellor, the Treasury committee or parliament. The OBR’s investigation into the leak is expected to report to the chancellor on Monday.
Asked if Hughes’s position is safe, Rachel Reeves said she will study the contents of the report on Monday, but that she has a “huge amount of respect” for him and the budget watchdog. She told Sky News: “We will get a report tomorrow, the report that looks at what happened about that budget leak. It was clearly serious. It was clearly a serious breach of the protocol, but I’ll see that report tomorrow.”
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, when interviewed by Trevor Phillips on Sky News, said that Reeves’s budget has made the nation poorer and that she “should be resigning” having done a “terrible” job. adding the government had delivered a “budget for benefits”. Badenoch reiterated her calls for the chancellor to resign on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, after accusing Rachel Reeves of breaking promises not to raise taxes.
The founding conference of the new leftwing party Your Party currently headed by Jeremy Corbyn narrowly voted for it to have a “collective leadership” in a win for Zarah Sultana, who has been at loggerheads with the former Labour leader. The results were announced this morning after a chaotic start to the conference in Liverpool when Sultana, a former Labour MP who now sits as an independent, boycotted the first day amid disagreements over how Your Party should be run.
Prior to his speech, Jeremy Corbyn announced that the official name of Your Party was … Your Party. Members chose between Your Party, Our Party, Popular Alliance and For The Many.
In his speech, Corbyn said “there is no handbook on how to set up a political party, but we have come a long way and learned a lot along the way”. He called for a challenge to the “economic orthodoxy”.
Corbyn used his conference speech to call for unity in the party to “fight back against the rise of the far right”. He said: “Our party, your party, this party, we have got to be in the forefront of the fight against racism and discrimination in any form whatsoever in our society. And that means we have to be well organised.”
Despite not entering the conference on Saturday, Zarah Sultana gave a speech in the main hall on Sunday afternoon as scheduled.
Sultana said she was honoured to co-found Your Party with Jeremy Corbyn, for whom she has an “enormous amount of admiration and respect”. She said that Your Party must never become “Labour 2.0” as she condemned expulsions as “unacceptable”.
She said the Labour government is “weak and pathetic” as the party does not have the “political will” to confront the “parasites who own Britain” and said [Keir] Starmer, [David] Lammy and [Shabana] Mahmood should be “held in the docks of The Hague” over Gaza.
Sultana also issued calls to “abolish the monarchy” after branding Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor a “parasite”. Sultana also apologised for “hiccups” in the foundation of Your Party, saying some of it was her “fault”. She added that centrist politicians “presiding over decay” could pave the way for fascism if the far right capitalises on people’s rage.
Updated
