Labour dismisses Reform UK MSP candidates as ‘hopeless Tory rejects and oddballs’ as one is suspended – as it happened

Nigel Farage with Reform UK’s leader in Scotland, Malcolm Offord, and Holyrood candidates at the party’s Scottish conference yesterday. Photograph: Andrew MacColl/Shutterstock

4.50pm GMT

Afternoon summary

• Cabinet ministers have been studying a blueprint for Labour to radically overhaul its economic offer and messaging, including devolving tax powers, abolishing national insurance, and major property tax changes.

• Reform UK has suspended one of its Scottish candidates after it emerged he had been struck off as a company director, and the party faces growing attacks for fielding candidates making Islamophobic remarks.

• Three victims of IRA bombings who sued Gerry Adams alleging he was a member of the paramilitary group and culpable for the attacks have withdrawn their lawsuit on the last day of the civil trial.

• Richard Hermer, the attorney general, has challenged Kemi Badenoch to say whether she would object to Jewish prayer in public, after the Conservative leader backed one of her shadow ministers who said an Islamic prayer event was intimidating and un-British.

For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.

Updated at 4.50pm GMT

4.45pm GMT

Polanski defends his plans for more borrowing, saying they are 'exact opposite' of Liz Truss's

Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, has rejected claims that his economic plans make him a leftwing version of Liz Truss.

In his economy speech on Wednesday, Polanski confirmed that favoured more government borrowing and that he was opposed to the way the government’s fiscal rules currently constrain spending.

This has let to him being accused of having unfunded spending plans – just as Truss did in the mini-budget that almost led to a financial crash, and resulted in government borrowing costs soaring.

But, in his interview with Nick Robinson for the Political Thinking podcast, Polanski claimed that what he was proposing was completely different. He said:

Liz Truss was doing the exact opposite of what I was saying [in the speech]. She was borrowing to fund unfunded tax cuts. But I’m talking about borrowing to invest in infrastructure, in capital spending.

I’m not talking about borrowing to fund unfunded tax cuts for multi-millionaires and billionaires. I’m talking about borrowing to fund transport, education, health. Because actually, if you don’t invest in these things, it costs so much more because it’s a nonsense economy.

Polanski said the government is too short-term in its assessment of whether borrowing for investment was good value. He said part of the problem related to people viewing government finances as like a household budget.

Polanski also suggested that part of Truss’s problem was that the markets did not believe she had a coherent strategy.

He said he was not proposing that the government should borrow whatever it wanted. He said the government should borrow in accordance with an economic plan.

And that had to be communicated to the financial markets, he said.

This is a key point. Bond markets aren’t ideological. They just want to know that there’s a plan, there’s stability and certainty. And what we saw over five Tory prime ministers and, now Keir Starmer, is a lack of a plan.

Polanski also admitted that he had put off agreeing to the Political Thinking interview, despite being invited on six months ago, because he wanted to develop his economic thinking. He said the expert economists he had consulted recently included Joseph Stiglitz, who has won a Nobel prize, Mariana Mazzucato and Ann Pettifor.