Rachel Reeves told it would be ‘politically suicidal’ to impose further cuts as economy falters – UK politics live
John McDonnell says more cuts would be ‘a disaster for the country’ and steer voters towards Reform
The Departmen for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ food chief has told farmers they should be making products such as crisps or flavoured gins on their farms rather than outsourcing their production.
Farmers have been furiously protesting against the government after it introduced an inheritance tax on their assets, which they argue would cause their families to have to sell up because the value of their land dwarfs the meagre returns made from selling food. Research has found that farmers get less than 1p for every loaf of bread or block of cheese sold in the supermarket, and farmers tend to make a 0.5%-1% annual return, with an average £30,000 income.
If the objective in terms of diversifying farm income is to bring parts of the supply chain on to farm, so you’re not just producing the primary product, so potentially doing some processing or marketing as well.
If you’re producing potatoes, you’re then able to turn it into crisps, or you could be producing flavoured gin or whatever.
Last night I met rape gang survivors from Oldham and Rotherham. Their stories were shocking and it reaffirmed my belief that none of the victims in this scandal will get justice until a national inquiry has uncovered the full truth of what happened, why and who was involved in the cover-up.
The Conservative Party is under new leadership, and I won’t rest until the victims get justice.
Among those offences we know about in 2023, 83 per cent were committed by white people – broadly in line with the general population. About 2 per cent were committed by Pakistani men, also broadly in line with the population.
While 18 per cent of suspects in all group-based sexual abuse cases were non-white, that figure jumps to 30 per cent for suspects in group-based child sexual exploitation cases. A total of 23 per cent of group-based exploitation cases were Asian, including 7 per cent Pakistani, although there are also a large number of suspects whose ethnicity is unknown.
One: that ethnic minority men are more likely than the general population to be perpetrators of this kind of abuse. Two: that grooming gangs are not “predominantly” run today by ethnic minority men, Asian or otherwise.
Indeed, look closer, and there are plenty of cases of group-based exploitation by predominantly white gangs. In April 2023, 21 people, all white, were convicted of serious organised sexual offending against children in Walsall, after West Midlands police’s largest child sexual abuse investigation.
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