Starmer highlights UK’s war record in implicit rebuke to Vance as Lib Dems mock Badenoch for defending him – as it happened | Politics

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has become notably less enthusiastic about defending Donald Trump and his administration over the past week or so. He used to be the Trump team’s biggest cheerleader in UK politics. But when JD Vance, the vice president, appeared to belittle the value of British troops yesterday, while Kemi Badenoch defended him, Farage said Vance was “wrong, wrong, wrong”.

Some new polling helps to explain this. Just over two weeks ago Trump had a net favourability rating of +38 with Reform UK supporters in the UK, according to YouGov. Now it is down to -8. To achieve a popularity collapse that rapid requires a Liz Truss level of awfulness.

Trump’s favourability ratings have also fallen over the same period with the supporters of other political parties, and with voters as a whole, but nothing like to the same extent. Mostly that is because he was hugely unpopular all those groups in the first place.

The polling also shows that Keir Starmer’s ratings have risen over the past fortnight – although he is still considerably more unpopular than he was at the time of the general election.

And Farage’s ratings have got worse during the same period.

Anti-abortion campaigners start Lent vigil in Scotland, observing new buffer zone law

Libby Brooks

Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent.

The first day of the annual Lent anti-abortion prayer vigil, led by the US-based group 40 Days for Life in Glasgow and other cities and towns across the UK, passed off without incident today as the protesters observed Scotland’s new buffer zones that protect women using healthcare services from intimidation or harassment.

A handful of people, some carrying rosary beads and others placards reading “choose life”, gathered under a leaden sky on the far side of the dual carriageway that leads to the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, some distance from the main entrance to the maternity unit where protesters have previously gathered, causing distress to women using the services as well as healthcare practitioners working there.

Gillian Mackay, the Scottish Greens MSP who spearheaded the bill that secured 200 metre wide safe access zones, or buffer zones, said this was “an important step forward”. She said:

Safe access zones were introduced to protect patients and staff at our hospitals and to keep the protesters at bay, and that is what they have done. The fact that only a small number of protesters turned up and they have been consigned to roads that are further from the hospital is an important step forward.

Two weeks ago, Police Scotland made the first arrest of a 74-year-old protester who allegedly breached the exclusion zone, days after the US vice-president, JD Vance, spread inaccurate claims about Scotland’s rules.

Vance told the Munich Security Conference that the Scottish government had written to householders within the exclusion zone warning them that private prayer indoors could breach the new law, a claim which was entirely wrong.

The Guardian has previously reported on the impact of the 40 Days for Life protests, which are held daily during the period of Christian Lent, has had on women and healthcare workers. Some 76 consultants at the QEUH wrote to the Scottish government urging them to consider buffer zones before the bill was introduced.

In the Commons MPs have started a debate on the Foreign Office “estimates” (spending plans). MPs can debate, and vote on, how governments raise money in considerable detail (through the finance bill), but they have little say over how money gets spent. There are three days set aside every year for debates on the estimates, but there is limited scope to change anything (amendments calling for increased spending are not allowed), and in practice these just turn out to be general debates.

Today’s debate was opened by Sarah Champion, the Labour chair of the Commons international development committee, and she used her speech to restate her opposition to the cuts in aid spending announced last week.

She said that by taking 40% out of official development assistance (ODA – the Whitehall term for international aid), the PM was “taking the axe to our most effective tool for reducing global conflicts and for increasing our own national security”. She went on:

I urge the prime minister to recognise that if we abandon our commitments to the world in this way, we will see greater numbers of people displaced from their own homes as a rota of climate disasters, poverty and war.

More people will lose hope and instead look to extreme ideologies for the answer and civil societies will no longer have the skills to hold rogue governments to account.

It concerns me greatly, as it should the whole House, that the government has yet to carry out an assessment of the impact of their decisions, which is being rushed through without proper scrutiny.

Andy Burnham says ‘snobbery in education’ persists, at launch of report about relative outcomes for boys worsening

Jessica Murray

Jessica Murray is a Guardian social affairs correspondent.

Andy Burnham said there’s “a snobbery in education” that prioritises academia over technical skills, and is contributing to a crisis among Britain’s young boys who are experiencing soaring unemployment rates and a drop in earnings.

At the launch of a new report by the Centre for Social Justice which found the gender pay gap has been reversed for young men, who now earn less than their female counterparts, Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, called for an overhaul of the education system. He said:

We need an education system that’s built on true parity between academic and technical, with a radically reformed curriculum which is very much about the modern world. We haven’t believed that in this country there’s been a snobbery in education for as long as I’ve been alive, that some things are seen as better than others.

The Lost Boys report found that since the pandemic, the number of males aged 16-24 not in education, employment or training (NEET) has increased by 40%, compared to 7% for females.

Burnham said the education system’s failure to promote and encourage technical skills has meant boys are being left behind, and is having “disastrous consequences”.

He cited the large numbers of males being excluded from schools and placed in pupil referral units. “We shouldn’t be surprised at some of the outcomes that we are seeing,’” he said.

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, has attacked Kemi Badenoch for her defence of JD Vance. He posted this on Bluesky.

Right now, Kemi Badenoch is doing more to defend JD Vance than the US is doing to defend Ukraine.

Davey made a very similar point yesterday.

In the Economist this week Bagehot argues that being leader of the Liberal Democrats has become the easiest job in British politics and he argues that in part this is because the Tories keep defending a deeply unpopular Trump administration. The Badenoch/JD Vance comments are just the latest example. Bagehot says:

When it comes to international affairs, the Lib Dems can take the easy, popular and right option. Donald Trump is reviled in Britain. Labour MPs are hemmed in by diplomatic niceties of government. Conservativism has evolved into brain-dead contrarianism to the point where Elon Musk, one of Mr Trump’s wingmen, calling for Sir Keir Starmer to be jailed over his handling of grooming gangs attracted little condemnation from the party’s MPs. Sir Ed [Davey] was one of the few British politicians able to say that a megalomaniac billionaire demanding the prime minister be sent to jail was, in fact, not on.

John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, has said he is “troubled” by reports there could be a benefits cut announced by the chancellor later this month. (See 9.23am.)

Speaking to PA Media, Swinney said:

I’m troubled by the reports that are coming out of the UK government about reductions in welfare spending, because I think that will inevitably add to the challenges that are faced by individuals facing vulnerability in our society.

My top priority is to eradicate child poverty and I can’t imagine that will be helped if the UK government is reducing welfare spending into the bargain.

Swinney also called for “an honest debate about public expenditure and taxation”. He said:

I tried to have that during the election campaign, where I pointed out the pressures on the public finances and on our public services, and I have to say neither the Labour or Conservative party were particularly interested in having that honest debate during the election campaign.

But if we want to have a society that’s got good public services, that supports people who face difficulty and a society that can protect itself in the difficult international times that we face just now, we’ve got to have an honest debate about taxation.

Keir Starmer told MPs that the government remains committed to national minority status for Cornwall during a St Piran’s Day PMQs

St Piran’s Day, or the Feast of Saint Piran, is the national day of Cornwall, held on 5 March every year.

As PA Media reports, the Cornish people were first recognised as a national minority group in 2014. It means they are classified under the European Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, the same as the UK’s other Celtic people – the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish.

Perran Moon, Labour MP for Camborne and Redruth, told Starmer that “hundreds of thousands of people in Cornwall and around the world” were today celebrating St Piran’s Day. He went on:

Will the prime minister confirm our government’s commitment to national minority status for Cornwall and will he join me in wishing Cornish folk the world over a very happy St Piran’s Day?

Starmer replied:

Let me wish him, his constituents and everyone in Cornwall a very happy St Piran’s Day.

We do recognise Cornish national minority status, not just the proud language, the history and the culture of Cornwall, but its bright future, and I know that he and Cornish colleagues will continue to be powerful voices for Cornwall.

As PA reports, neither St Piran’s Day nor St David’s Day on 1 March are bank holidays. St George’s Day, celebrated in England on 23 April, is also not a bank holiday.

But people in Northern Ireland and Scotland receive bank holidays to mark patron saints’ feast days – St Patrick’s Day on 17 March and St Andrew’s Day on 30 November.

UPDATE: St Andrew’s Day is more of an optional bank holiday in Scotland, according to this note from the Scottish government.

Badenoch does not approve of ‘Twitter pile-ons’ against Vance, her spokesperson says

Peter Walker

Peter Walker is a senior Guardian political correspondent.

Kemi Badenoch is maintaining her position of seemingly being the only person in UK politics who did not think JD Vance was referring to the UK or France when he disparaged a planned European peace deployment to Ukraine as “20,000 troops from some random country that has not fought a war in 30 or 40 years”.

The US vice president’s comments provoked outrage and criticism from many British politicians, even Nigel Farage, but Badenoch said she believed Vance’s subsequent tweets saying he did not mean either country – although he did not specify which other nations he was referring to.

Speaking after PMQs, the Badenoch’s spokesperson said she did not believe in “inciting Twitter pile-ons on the vice president”. He said: “

The fact is that he didn’t say Britain or France in his original answer, and then when he saw that it was being alleged that he had, he came out and clarified that he wasn’t talking about Britain and France.

Asked who Badenoch thought was being referred to, he replied: “That’s for JD Vance to answer.”

The spokesman confirmed that after the Tory defence spokesman, James Cartlidge, joined the criticism of Vance, the party’s chief whip had told MPs “that views don’t necessarily need to be aired on Twitter”.

He added:

She wants to deal with facts. And what she would say is that when there is a very heightened international diplomacy going on, a sort of Twitter pile-on, on the vice president of our closest ally, is not helping to bring about a peace in Ukraine, which is what we should all be focused on.

Diane Taylor

A majority of British people think government should use money from frozen Russian assets to fund the rebuilding of Ukraine, according to new polling. Three in five Britons (58%) back this approach.

Over 70% of Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat voters back this approach, along with 48% of Reform voters.

The polling, conducted by More in Common, on behalf of the research and campaigning organisation Future Advocacy earlier this month, surveyed 2,000 people for their views on how the UK government should finance humanitarian assistance to Ukraine. This follows chancellor Rachel Reeves’ decision to loan more than £2bn of the UK’s approximately £18bn in frozen Russian assets to fund weapons in Ukraine.

Support for using Russian funds to finance humanitarian aid follows the government’s roll-back on international aid last week, which saw the UK’s aid budget slashed to support increased defence spending.

More in Common UK associate director Conleth Burns said:

This polling shows clear public support for using frozen Russian assets to support the UK’s commitments on humanitarian aid to help with the rebuilding of Ukraine. Even after last week’s cut to the aid budget, the public are open to alternative funding avenues for Britain to deliver on its humanitarian commitments to the people of Ukraine.