Summary
• The Bank of England has raised interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point to 4.25% in response to higher-than-expected UK inflation and signs that Britain’s economy was holding up better than feared. In a fortnight of heightened unease in global financial markets, the Bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) voted by a majority of seven to two to increase the base rate for the 11th time in a row.
• Rishi Sunak has saved more than £300,000 in tax thanks to a cut he voted for in 2016, according to an analysis of his tax records. The prime minister has paid just over £1m in tax over the past three years, most of which was accrued on the gains he has made on his US-based investment portfolio. But that figure would have been £308,167 higher had the top rate of capital gains tax (CGT) not been cut by the Conservative government in 2016.
• Keir Starmer has vowed to halve violence against women and girls within a decade, setting out one of Labour’s core missions on crime as “unfinished business in my life’s work to deliver justice”. Starmer, whose speech in Stoke-on-Trent launched the second of his five “missions”, said he wanted to “imagine a society where violence against women is stamped out everywhere”.
• Starmer published his recent tax returns, as he pledged to do so this morning a day after Rishi Sunak became the first prime minister since David Cameron to do so. They show he earned £275,000 in the last two years and paid £118,000 in tax.
• Junior doctors in England will strike for four days between 11 and 15 April, the British Medical Association has said. Dr Vivek Trivedi and Dr Robert Laurenson, co-chairs of the BMA junior doctors’ committee, said: “It is with disappointment and great frustration that we must announce this new industrial action.
• The Albanian prime minister has criticised the UK home secretary, Suella Braverman, calling the singling out of migrants from his country a “disgraceful” moment for British politics. Edi Rama, who is in Britain for talks with Rishi Sunak, said Braverman’s comments last year about “Albanian criminals” crossing the Channel in small boats, could themselves be considered a crime.
• Nicola Sturgeon has said being first minister “of the country I love has been a profound honour”. Speaking at her 286th and final FMQs, Sturgeon paid tribute to those who lost their lives to Covid-19 and singled out efforts to distribute money to low income families with children as the policy she was most proud of.
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Starmer publishes tax returns
The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, has published his recent tax returns, as he pledged to do so this morning a day after Rishi Sunak became the first prime minister since David Cameron to do so.
They show he earned £275,000 in the last two years and paid £118,000 in tax.
Keir Starmer has released his tax returns for 2020/21 & 2021/22
— Ben Quinn (@BenQuinn75) March 23, 2023
He earned £275k in the last two years&paid £118k tax pic.twitter.com/xNCUStatMr
Questioned by reporters at a Labour event this morning, Starmer also said that his plans to reverse the chancellor’s lifetime pension allowance (LTA) reforms would not exclude targeting the benefits he received as head of the Crown Prosecution Service.
The Labour leader has been accused of hypocrisy in wanting to block Jeremy Hunt’s plans to relax the tax rules on pensions for the wealthy while he reportedly benefits from a generous “tax-unregistered” scheme from his time as director of public prosecutions (DPP).
But Starmer said he did not want a “tax advantage” from the pension scheme he was involved in before he was elected as an MP, as he committed to putting himself “in the same position as everybody else in this country”.
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