Afternoon summary
Labour has hit back at Unite after the union claimed it was suspending Angela Rayner’s membership and threatened to reconsider its links with the party because of the government’s failure to support its members in the Birmingham bin strike. In response, a Labour source said:
Angela’s not interested in silly stunts, she’s interested in changing workers’ lives. Unite rejected a deal in Birmingham and their demands would have undermined equal pay, discriminating against female workers. Angela won’t be pushed around, and she quit Unite some months ago.
Angela’s been fighting for equal pay for decades as a trade unionist and as a home care worker has experienced what it was like to be paid less as a working class woman for the same work.
Labour should raise national insurance in the budget in the autumn, Ed Balls, the former shadow chancellor, has said. (See 4.10pm.)
Rupert Lowe did not breach MPs’ rules on donations, over hundreds of thousands of pounds he raised for an inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal. Yesterday it emerged that Daniel Greenberg, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, had launched an inquiry into this. (See 11.24pm.) This afternoon Greenberg said in a statement:
Following a complaint from a member of the public that Mr Rupert Lowe MP had failed to register donations made to a crowdfunder organised by him in connection with his parliamentary activities, I opened a formal inquiry on 10 July 2025.
My inquiry sought to confirm whether these donations qualified as registrable interests and whether Mr Lowe had failed to register them within the 28-day window set by the House.
During the inquiry, Mr Lowe provided evidence that a number of donations made to the crowdfunder did cross the threshold for registration but that they were not accepted until 23 June 2025.
As such, the 28-day window set by the house for the registration of those interests has not passed and no breach of the Rules has occurred.
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Ed Balls says Labour should raise national insurance in autumn budget
Labour should raise national insurance in the budget in the autumn, Ed Balls, the former shadow chancellor, has said.
Balls made the comment in the latest episode of his Political Currency podcast, which he co-hosts with the former Tory chancellor George Osborne. Although Balls now works as a broadcaster and podcaster, he is still seen as one of the leading economic thinkers in Labour politics, having worked for years as Gordon Brown’s chief adviser, served in cabinet, and then held the Treasury brief in Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet.
Discussing how the government could raise the revenue it needs, in particular to fill the £6bn financial hole caused by two recent U-turns, Balls said he thought the government should raise national insurance. He said:
I would do employees’ national insurance, and I would also do a penny on corporation tax - or 2p - and at the same time do an enterprise, capital gains tax-style cut for people growing their businesses.
Balls said he did not think the government would raise income tax, and he said he could not see how the government would “get out of this now” without raising one of the two other big tax levers available to the Treasury, national insurance and VAT.
In its manifesto Labour promised not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT – the main taxes imposed on workers. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, did raise employer national insurance, but she argued that this did not breach the manifesto pledge because it is paid by firms, not their workers.
Raising employee national insurance would be a definite breach of the manifesto. At PMQs on Wednesday Keir Starmer said he would stick to the manifesto tax commitments.
Balls argued this was the wrong approach. He said:
It’s much better to be open and level with people and ask everybody to make a contribution, because we need to have strong public finances and to invest in public services, and I would say, to bring child poverty down as well. But you can’t do that while sticking with manifesto commitments which box you in too hard…
[Reeves and Starmer have] got to open up about what’s happened and what they’re now going to do, and blaming their backbenchers, or trying to say that they’re sticking to the letter of a manifesto commitment they’re actually breaking, is the wrong strategy.
Balls has argued that the pre-election tax pledges went too far in ruling out tax increases a Labour government might find essential. In his podcast he said the government should have warned the public earlier this year that some of those pledges would have to be broken. He said:
They never prepared the ground for the degree of the squeeze on the public finances, which was coming over the years ahead … They could have opened the books [after the election] and said, there is a huge problem in our public services, which is going to require us to be honest with you about the scale of what needs to be done on taxation.
They could have used the Trump presidency and the tariff shock and the big downgrades to global growth to say, ‘look, we suddenly have greater pressures on our defence spending, but the economy is going to slow this year because of the tariff shock, and therefore we need now to reconsider our fiscal position.’
But having used none of those opportunities, they’re now in a position where, in July, looking forward to the budget, the framing is that they’re going to have to raise taxes to sort out a fiscal gap not caused by long term growth, or failure to make big, long term fiscal decisions by the previous government or Donald Trump – but because of their U-turns, and that is a bad place for them to be.
Balls has often used his podcast to to make relatively critical comments about the the government’s economic strategy. Quite what impact this has had on relations between his wife, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, and her Treasury colleagues remains something of a mystery.
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