Burnham is told axing pension triple lock would be ‘electoral suicide’ as he prepares to address Labour conference – UK politics live

Burnham is told axing pension triple lock would be ‘electoral suicide’ as he prepares to address Labour conference – UK politics live

Union leader says getting rid of triple lock not ‘the right thing’ as the PM prepares to lay out his ‘hope comes from honesty’ vision in Liverpool this afternoon Burnham promises to roll back privatisation with government-backed grid plan Haroon Siddique is the Guardian’s legal affairs correspondent. Ed Miliband has said it was never anyone’s intent to criminalise “elderly people, vicars and grannies” who have been arrested for supporting Palestine Action. I can’t believe in your heart of hearts that you really think proscribing Palestine Action with all those elderly people and vicars and grannies and so on as a terrorist organisation was a sensible political … I don’t think anyone’s intent was to have those people criminalised. But obviously the supreme court has got to look at this issue and obviously it’s something we keep looking at as government. We welcome the foreign secretary’s honesty on this matter. He has finally admitted that it wasn’t the government’s intention to criminalise people for peacefully protesting against the genocide and the proscription, let alone to treat them as terrorists. Basically he’s acknowledged that the government didn’t properly think the proscription through and that it’s had a disproportionate impact on the right to free speech. You’d think that leaves the government in an impossible position for defending the proscription before the supreme court. We gladly accept the offer Ed Miliband made in Pizza Express to have a conversation with us. Ministers have told The Independent that the prime minister is building the case to put rejoin in the manifesto at the next election. They have said it is now a question of “how it is expressed in the manifesto, rather than if” … One senior minister told The Independent that “the mood has completely changed on this subject.” I think we can frankly get more from what we need for our people, for our businesses here, by pragmatically looking at this through a trade lens. How can we improve that trade relationship, rather than these constitutional questions, which, frankly, you know, they cause a lot of uncertainty for business. Look at the arrangements we’ve already got. You don’t add a lot more to it through a customs union ... and you’d be having to, you know, frankly, accept a whole range of alignment on regulatory issues. What will Europe be in the future? I mean, there are clearly very challenging politics in Germany. It’s very clear that the French presidential election could be different. I honestly don’t know if you will evolve in one direction or the other. So I can’t really give you an answer to that. Continue reading...