Afternoon summary
Rishi Sunak has come under pressure to provide clarity on Britain’s long-term strategy in the Red Sea as he resisted calls for MPs to be given a vote, insisting the new airstrikes against the Houthis on Monday night were carried out in self-defence.
Jeremy Hunt’s scope to cut taxes by about £20bn in his March budget has been boosted after the latest official figures showed UK government borrowing halved in the past year.
Labour would let optometrists deal with some common eye problems such as cataracts and glaucoma in high-street opticians as it seeks to make the NHS in England more productive, Karin Smyth, a shadow health minister, has said.
Huw Merriman, a transport minister, has lashed out at a satirical Radio 4 show as being “completely biased” in the latest allegation from the Conservatives about BBC impartiality.
Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, has described the number of pupils not in school in England as a national scandal. Speaking in a Commons debate on a Labour motion to legislate to set up a national register of children not in school, she said:
It is a national scandal that every day, every week, so many children are not in school. Absence from school is not simply a problem in itself, it is a symptom of deeper problems and a cause of further problems.
Labour lost the vote by 303 votes to 189 – a majority 114.
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Trust in government in UK has fallen sharply in recent years, survey shows
Edelman, a global PR firm, has for more than 20 years been publishing a global survey showing how much people in different countries trust institutions such as their government or media. The 2024 figures, out today, are quite damning for the Conservative party and Rishi Sunak’s administration. Here is an extract from the Edelman news release.
Since 2021, trust in government overall fell by 15 points while, trust in local government also plummeted, from 53% to 41% over the same period. The timeframe suggests the incumbent government led by Rishi Sunak hasn’t been able to shake off the impact of either the Partygate scandal or the economic shock of Liz Truss’s short-lived tenure as prime minister.
A record high 69% of people now believe that the government only serves the interests of certain groups – up 23 points since 2021; 63% of people believe the government is “corrupt and biased” – again up 23 points since 2021; while less than a quarter (24%) consider government “honest and fair”; and 3 in 5 (60%) deem the government “completely ineffective as an agent of positive change”, another record change – up 19 points since 2021.
The report also contains a chart showing the UK near the bottom of a list of countries for trust in government, with trust falling seven points on the previous year. The figures are based on replies when people were asked if various institutions in their countries could be trusted to do what was right.
But look who comes top: Saudi Arabia, followed by China, both repressive regimes. This suggests that in some countries this particular trust index is not so much a measure of the inherent integrity and honesty of the government in charge, but more a measure of whether people feel it is safe to criticise their rulers when responding to opinion polls.
The 30% figure for the UK is still very poor when ranked against more comparable countries, such as France (39%), Germany (42%) and Ireland (45%). But it is not a record low; Edelman says this is just the lowest figure since 2012.
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