The Conservatives want to brand Burnham’s administration as a ‘traditional tax and spend socialist government’
Andrew Griffith has delivered his speech, and he is now taking questions.
Q: You want the government to pause the making tax digital programme. Is that an admission that the last government got this wrong when it introduced it?
It is an admission that despite [good] intentions, the execution of that has left a lot to be desired.
In fact, coming to parliament from business, I can confess the law that we pass the most often is the law of unintended consequences. And I think making tax digital is a good example of that.
The truth is that Burnham and Miliband ignored the advice they were given – which was that if they were determined to sanction Israel, they should not do so before the Israeli election on 27 October.
It may not be surprising that this was the message from the Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, when Miliband called him on 11 August to warn sanctions were imminent. ‘He said postpone it until after the elections,’ a diplomatic source confirms. It was also the message the Israeli embassy in London – and its new chargé d’affaires Chris Cantor – was relaying to the Foreign Office. ‘Their message was clear: why do it now? Wait until after the elections, because something might change,’ a senior Labour figure says.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
09/17/2026 - 05:08
09/17/2026 - 05:00
The US decision to remove limits on coal and gas plant emissions is rooted in a perception of manliness in these industries
You can impress a certain kind of person at a party by reciting the fact that there are more yoga instructors in the US than there are coalminers. In fact, the disparity is greater than this catchy phrasing suggests: there are actually more yoga instructors in the US than there are people employed in the entirely of the coalmining industry, miners and otherwise. It’s not even especially close: about 38,000 people in the US work in coal, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to about 100,000 yoga instructors who are registered with the Yoga Alliance, an industry group.
If you looked only at the numbers, you might think a politician would be incentivized to talk about the interests of the yoga industry, about the dignity that yoga jobs give to American families, or about the need to foster growth in the yoga industry, more than they talk about these things for coal; after all, yoga, not coal, is putting food on the table in more American households. But no politician would ever talk about the interests of yoga teachers, or wax poetic about their role in the American dream, the way they do with coal miners; if they did, they’d be laughed out of the room. And we all know why: yoga is thought of as decadent, cosmopolitan and feminine, while coal mining is imagined as hardscrabble, honorable and masculine.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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09/17/2026 - 01:00
Research finds many in England lack proximity to green and blue spaces as Labour urged to speed up manifesto pledge
Nearly half of all parliamentary constituencies in England have low access to nature despite a government target to ensure everyone is within a 15-minute walk from a green or blue space, new research reveals.
The analysis by the Wildlife Trusts comes as the charity presents a green paper to ministers in an attempt to speed up Labour’s manifesto promise to improve access to nature and promote biodiversity.
Make it more affordable for local authorities to use compulsory purchase powers for land purchase.
Establish a community right to buy land for nature access.
Treat nature as essential infrastructure, and free up capital funds to pay for the ongoing maintenance of natural spaces.
Make it mandatory for developers to create climate- and nature-friendly housing estates.
Make access to major rivers, especially those in urban areas, a statutory right.
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09/16/2026 - 23:00
Analysis of global resources reveals depletion in world’s water savings bank to 42% below normal levels last year
Rivers across the world experienced one of their driest years in more than three decades in 2025, a comprehensive study of global water resources has found.
The assessment of the global water cycle by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reveals a depletion in the world’s water savings bank: the amount of freshwater held on or under the ground, including groundwater, lakes, rivers, snow, ice moisture in the soil and inside plants and trees, was 42% below normal across the world last year.
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09/16/2026 - 23:00
As three siblings came of age and had to leave their pack, scientists tracked the dogs’ perilous 2,500-mile odyssey to find their own territory
It sounds like a Disney movie: three wild dogs, all brothers, on an epic journey to find a home of their own after their family tells them to leave. They dodge cars and hunters in search of a new life, navigating bushmeat snares and the hostility of a human-dominated landscape until they find a new haven on the African savannah.
But this is exactly what happened in Zambia last year, when three endangered African wild dogs made the longest-ever recorded single journey of any mammal from the continent. The brothers travelled more than 2,500 miles (4,100km) over eight months in their “dispersal” – when a young dog comes of age and must establish new territory to find a mate and start a family of their own.
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09/16/2026 - 23:00
Initiative aims to keep alive age-old skill, and at Muchelney Abbey in Somerset improve habitat for rare shrill carder bee
It sounds like something out of a Thomas Hardy novel: a merry band of men and women roaming the West Country cutting meadows by hand in exchange for hunks of bread and cheese.
But the conservation charity English Heritage is recruiting a team of volunteer scythers to maintain 21st-century meadowland in the old-fashioned way.
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09/16/2026 - 21:22
The behaviours we observed could represent grief, but they could also reflect maternal attachment, confusion or instinctive caregiving
It was a tragic sight.
One day last July, a newborn humpback whale calf lay motionless on the seafloor, just a kilometre off Australia’s Gold Coast. The encounter was captured through underwater video.
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09/16/2026 - 18:01
Scientists say global heating was a destabilising factor in collapse of 200,000 sq metre glacier in August
Climate breakdown probably weakened the glacier that collapsed causing catastrophic floods and killing hundreds of people in Nepal and Tibet last month, the first scientific study of the disaster has found.
Researchers identified unusually warm conditions before the glacier’s collapse, which sent an avalanche of 110m cubic metres (3,885 cu ft) of snow and ice into the valley below. This triggered flash floods on an almost unprecedented scale, hitting communities downstream without warning.
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09/16/2026 - 07:00
Claims that dismantling pollution rules will lower energy bills and have little climate impact are far from convincing
In allowing US power plants to emit any amount of planet-heating pollution they wish to, the Trump administration made two striking claims – that this will cut Americans’ electricity bills and that the pollution itself doesn’t really matter anyway. Both claims struggle to stand up to even basic scrutiny.
On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it would erase any limits on emissions from coal and gas plants that are dangerously heating up our planet. This move, which follows a similar dismantling of pollution limits from cars ands trucks, is part of a broader push to eliminate the longstanding legal authority of this, or any future, US administration to deal with the climate crisis.
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09/16/2026 - 07:00
Exclusive: Plastic surfaces form hotspots with an increase of antibiotic-resistant genes, study finds
Microplastics act like a “Trojan horse” delivering pollutants, pesticides and bacteria through the soil, a five-year multinational research project has found.
The EU-funded project, which has so far resulted in 22 peer-reviewed studies, found microplastics in the soil of all 227 agricultural fields it tested across 11 European countries. The researchers said this poses a global threat, with healthy soils essential for life on Earth.
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