Housing Secretary Steve Reed has repeatedly stressed on this morning’s media round that the government has ‘ruled out’ imposing a one-year rent freeze. Reed my lips: no rent freeze…
He told Sky News:
“Yeah, I ruled it out in Parliament just a couple of weeks ago… and the reason we’re doing that is the Scottish government tried it… It ended up with one of the biggest increases in rent people have ever seen, and a reduction in the number of homes that are available to rent.”
Which sounds reassuring, but it was also Steve Reed – then Defra Secretary – who was ambushed by Rachel Reeves’ disastrous changes to inheritance tax for farmers at her first Budget. The rent freeze briefing this week came from the Treasury. ‘Fool me once’…
Starmer spoke to Nick Robinson for the Today Programme on Polanski’s criticism of the Golders Green police officers:
“I want everybody just to imagine what it might be like. You’re trying to arrest someone who has already attacked two people and has no regard for life. We know that tasers were fired. I know from my own experience with the police, that there are only two shots in a taser, and once you’ve shot them, there’s nothing left. There’s a guy on the ground, he’s got a rucksack on. And I don’t know what was going through the mind of those officers, but if I was there, I’d be thinking, he’s going to detonate something. He’s going to blow me up and everybody around here. In those circumstances, I think you can quite see why what could have gone through their mind is, we need to do whatever we can to disable this guy…
Now, when I then see Zack Polanski come out and retweet or support a criticism of that, I think it’s disgraceful… He’s not fit to lead any political party.”