Good morning. Keir Starmer is travelling back from the G20 summit in Brazil, but he won’t be in the Commons in time for PMQs, and so Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, will be taking questions on his behalf. In line with recent practice, Kemi Badenoch, the new Conservative leader, won’t go up against a deputy, and she will miss the session too. The Tories don’t have a deputy leader, but Badenoch is getting Alex Burghart, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, to stand in for her.
The PM might not be answering, but that does not mean the questions get any easier. The situation in Ukraine is looking increasingly perilous, inflation is going up, and figures out yesterday have reignited the row about the government’s decision to cut the winter fuel payment. But the Conservatives may also want to ask about farmers, and the plan to extend inheritance tax to some farms. Traditonally the Tories have liked to think of themselves as a pro-countryside, pro-farming party, and they will have been reassured by the fact that, when they lined up alongside farmers at yesterday’s rally, they did not just have Jeremy Clarkson with them; the Liberal Democrats, the Green party, Greenpeace and even Just Stop Oil were on the farmers’ side too.
Now the Tories have combined backing the NFU with another deep-seated rightwing obsession – attacking the BBC. In comments that have provided the Daily Telegraph with its splash, Stuart Andrew, the shadow culture secretary, has attacked the BBC for producing a factcheck analysis saying that some of the claims made by the pro-farming lobby about the impact of the inheritance tax change are exaggerated. He said:
The job of BBC Verify is to do exactly that but they’ve failed on their own terms.
The government is refusing to say how many family farms are subject to their tax raid, only offering partial and out of date statistics which fail to account for the full scale of their reforms.
The taxpayers pay for the BBC to be independent and free from bias, not for them to regurgitate Labour lines.
This matter should be immediately looked into and corrected.
The Telegraph story also makes much of Jeremy Clarkson, the TV celebrity and farmer, accusing the BBC of bias because a BBC reporter had the temerity to ask him at yesterday’s rally about the fact that he bought a farm at least in part to dodge inheritance tax – something that he has been happy to boast about in the past.
Andrew’s broadside against the BBC seems to have been inspired by this BBC Verify article and this video summary by Ben Chu, a BBC Verify correspondent, in which he said that claims from the Country Land and Business Association that 70,000 farms would be affected by the change was “almost certainly an overestimate”. Chu had sound grounds for saying this, for the reasons set out in a Treasury letter to the Commons Treasury committee, and the BBC is standing by its story. As it should; most reasonable commentators would agree these reports were fair, not biased. But the row illustrates how hard it can be for a governing party to win an argument when attacking media institutions trying to report impartially becomes part of the opposition’s modus operandi.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9am: Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, gives a speech to the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s conference.
9.30am: Lord Darzi, the leading surgeon and former health minister, gives evidence to the Commons health committee about the report he wrote for the government on the state of the NHS.
10am: Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, gives evidence to the Commons housing committee about the government’s housebuilding plans.
Noon: Angela Rayner, the deputy PM, faces Alex Burghart, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, at PMQs.
3.20pm: Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, gives evidence to the Commons women and equalities committee about non-consensual intimate image abuse.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X because the site has become too awful. But individual Guardian journalists are still there, I have still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary. I was trying Threads for a bit, but I am stepping back from that because it’s not a good platform for political news.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.