In interviews today Keir Starmer has for the first time given a detailed explanation as to why he chose to accept an accommodation donation worth £20,000 around the time of the general election. (See 9.49am.)

But if he expected the opposition to accept his explanation and let go of the story, he’ll be disappointed. The Conservative party has just issued a fresh attack on Starmer over this, in the form of a statement from Kevin Hollinrake, the shadow business secretary. He said:

This row isn’t about the preferential treatment he has given his child during their education, whilst taxing the schooling of thousands of others; nor is it about him and his wife being lavished with designer clothes whilst pensioners face the choice between heating and eating this winter.

This is about Keir Starmer, and his top team, thinking the rules don’t apply to them. They have become utterly addicted to luxury clothing, holidays and services provided by their mega donor whilst expecting everyone else to tighten their belt. Why does he always think he’s a special case?

Labour promised to be a government of service but all they’ve offered is a government of self-service.

According to polling by YouGov, 80% of Britons do not think politicians should be allowed to accept gifts like clothes or concert tickets.

That figure includes 29% of people who think that it was acceptable for politicians like Keir Starmer to have accepted donations like this, because that was within the rules, but that the rules should be changed to stop this; and 51% who said accepting gifts should be banned, and that even knowing the rules allowed it, it was wrong for the politicians who did accept gifts to do so.

Keir Starmer has arrived at the UN general assembly where he will have various meetings on the Middle East and Ukraine, before making a speech later.

Asked for his message to Britons in Lebanon, he said they should not wait to be evacuated at a later date and should “leave and leave immediately” via commercial flights.

He said:

I am very worried about the escalation. I’m calling for all parties to step back from the brink, to de-escalate. We need a ceasefire so this can be sorted out diplomatically.

But I have a very important message for British nationals in Lebanon which is: the time to leave is now.

The contingency plans are being ramped up but don’t wait for those, there are still commercial flights. It’s very important that they hear my message, which is to leave and to leave immediately.

Michael Gove, the former cabinet minister and one of the leaders of the Vote Leave Brexit campaign, has been named as the new editor of the Spectator magazine, weeks after the GB News backer Sir Paul Marshall completed a £100m takeover of the politically right-leaning magazine, Mark Sweney reports.

Stephen Timms, a welfare minister, has said that over time the winter fuel payment cuts could actually reduce pensioner poverty, because it is encouraging pensioners to claim pension credit.

Speaking an an interview with Radio 4’s World at One, broadcast after Labour delegates voted for a motion saying the cut should be reversed, Timms, the minister for social security and disability, said:

The chancellor has made decisions which need to be made to sort out the very serious problems in the government finances which we’ve been left with.

And I’m hoping that, over time, this measure will actually reduce pensioner poverty by increasing the take-up of pension credit.

We have seen quite a big boost in the number of people applying for pension credit over the last few weeks, and I think that is likely to continue.

The only pensioners who will continue to get the winter fuel payment, which can be worth up to £300 per household, are pensioners on pension credit, a benefit paid to those with the lowest incomes.

According to the latest government figures, only 63% of pensioners who are eligible for pension credit claim it. The government said earlier this month up to 880,000 pensioners could be missing out, and it has launched a campaign to encourage them to claim. Three weeks ago the government said applications were up 115%.

But a DWP equality impact assessment published on 13 September said that the department expected take-up to rise by just 5 percentage points. It said:

Out of the total c.10m who will lose out in the 1st year of the policy, we estimate that around 880k of these will be pensioners who would be entitled to pension credit if they claimed it, but have not done so. The modelling underpinning the policy costing assumes a 5 percentage point “loss aversion” increase in PC take-up (from 63% to 68%), reducing this to around 780k and increasing the PC caseload by around 100k.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a thinktank focusing on poverty, has said that means-testing the winter fuel payment, in the way that the government is doing, could push an extra 100,000 pensioners into poverty.

According to an analysis by Steve Webb, a former Lib Dem pensions minister, for Lane Clark and Peacock, pensions consultants, there are about 1.9 million pensioners living in relative povery. Only about 300,000 of them are getting pension credit. Of the other 1.6m, only around half of them might be eligible for pension credit, he says. He says the other 800,000 do not qualify for pension credit, but pushed below the poverty level by housing costs.

If all pensioners eligible for pension credit were to claim it, the government would not save any money from the winter fuel payment cut. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has claimed she would not mind this outome, because it would mean poorer pensioners were benefiting.

The Green party says it backs Unite’s call for the government to impose a wealth tax as an alternative to cutting the winter fuel payment. (See 11.21am.) In a statement following the Labour conference vote against the cut, Carla Denyer, the Green party’s co-leader, said:

Today’s vote at Labour party conference leaves Labour ministers out in the cold. There is a groundswell of support - from opposition parties, unions, many Labour MPs, health workers, disability groups, charities supporting pensioners, as well as others - for ensuring millions of pensioners keep warm this winter.

Targeting some of the most vulnerable to fix the supposed black hole in the public finances is cruel and unnecessary.

There is another way. A fairer way. As the successful motion by Unite makes clear, taxing multi-millionaires and billionaires a little more would not only easily cover the cost of winter fuel payments for all pensioners but also generate additional funds for much needed investment in our health and social care services.

As Phillip Inman reports, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has significantly increased its growth forecast for 2024. He explains:

Describing the UK’s economic growth as “robust”, the OECD upgraded its growth for 2024 to 1.1% from a forecast of 0.4% made in May, as the country recovers from a mild recession at the end of last year. The forecast of 1.2% growth in 2025 was maintained.

In the May forecast, the UK was behind all other nations in the informal bloc but is now expected to outpace Japan, Italy and struggling Germany. Britain is now on par with Canada and France but behind the US.

Rishi Sunak, the former PM, and Jeremy Hunt, the former chancellor, have both been posting about this on X. They dispute Labour’s claim that the Conservatives left the economy in a poor state, and they argue that these figures show they left the economy in a strong state.

This is from Sunak.

Labour inherited the fastest growing economy in the G7.

But the Prime Minister and Chancellor constantly talking the economy down has already had a damaging impact on consumer and business confidence.

Time to stop playing politics and put country first, party second.

And this is from Hunt.

The OECD data today yet again shows that Labour were left a strong economic inheritance, despite their desperation to say otherwise. The Chancellor’s choices at the Budget will be hers and hers alone.

The OECD figures are about the state of the economy generally. Labour’s main complaint about the Tories has been about the state of the public finances (and the £22bn gap it claims to have found between what the Tories were planning to spend this year, and the money they had to fund this), although Labour also argues the economy has been underperforming for years.

They get to the winter fuel payments vote. The chair takes the vote by a show of hands. A lot of hands go up against, the motion, and there are calls for a card vote. The chair rejects that. But she says the motion was carried.

In her speech Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, said:

Friends, people simply do not understand, I do not understand, how our new Labour government can cut the winter fuel allowance for pensioners and leave the super-rich untouched.

This is not what people voted for. It is the wrong decision and needs to be reversed.

Friends, we are the sixth richest economy in the world. We have the money. Britain needs investment, not austerity mark two. We won’t get any gold badge for shaving peanuts off our debt.

These fiscal rules are self-imposed and the decision to keep them is hanging like a noose around our necks.

Friends, our public services and British industry need investment now. It’s no good having sympathy for workers at Grangemouth losing their jobs. They don’t need pity. They need Labour to step up to the plate and not allow a billionaire, who buys a football club as a hobby, to throw these workers on the scrap heap.

We cannot leave Britain at the whim of footloose corporations.

Hoping for them to invest is a prayer not a plan.

Yes, Britain is broken. Yes, the Tories have left a mess and yes, they are to blame.

But Labour is now in government, and we can’t keep making everyday people pay. Friends, I keep hearing, ‘a wealth tax is too difficult, would take too long’.

I say absolute rubbish. We seem to be able to get workers paying their taxes in a matter of weeks!

The system is rigged and the country knows it.

At the Labour conference the debate on the winter fuel payment motion is starting.

Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, is speaking.

She is moving a composite motion that says Labour should:

1. Reverse the introduction of means-testing for the Winter Fuel Allowance

2. Ending fiscal rules which prevent borrowing to invest

3. Commit to public services and infrastructure, ensuring any public expenditure gaps, at a minimum, are restored through taxing wealth and that there are no further cuts to welfare provision for working people and pensioners.

4. Introducing a wealth tax on the top 1%, an excess profits tax, equalise capital gains tax with income tax and apply national insurance to investment income

5. Delivering the investment necessary for a workers’ transition to Net Zero

In his interview with Sky News Wes Streeting, the health secretary, also suggested he would like to see a national debate on whether smoking should be banned in outdoor spaces, like pub gardens.

In the summer it emerged that a ban of this kind is being considered by the government.

Streeting said:

We are looking at a range of other measures to also help people who are currently smoking to quit and also to deal with the scourge of second-hand smoke and passive smoking, which is also harmful. We’ll be setting out our proposals on that shortly.

Asked if he will ban smoking outside pubs, he said:

Look, that’s one of the measures that I’m considering, and I’m up for a national debate on this issue.

We have got to do two things – reform the health service, but also reform public health, because we might be living longer, but we’re becoming sicker sooner and there is a heavy price being paid for that in our economy, our public finances and in our own health.

In an interview with Sky News, Wes Streeting said waiting lists would be “demonstrably lower” than they are now. He said:

By the next general election, waiting lists will be demonstrably lower because I know that’s how I will be judged, how the prime minister will be judged, how the government will be judged - people will judge us by our actions, not just our words ultimately.

The most recent figures showed the NHS England waiting list for treatments at 7.62m in July, relating to 6.39m people.

But Wes Streeting’s speech was not all negativity about the NHS. He also argued that, as a national service, it had data-sharing potential that made it ideally suited to maximise the benefits that technological advances will bring. He explained:

Advances in genomics and data mean the healthcare of the future will be more predictive, more preventative and more personalised than ever before.

Detecting from birth a child’s risk of disease so we can act to keep them well; spotting cancer earlier, saving countless lives; treating patients with targeted medicines.

To make these advances a reality for the many not the few, we need a universal health service, free at the point of need – able to share data, partner with innovators, and adopt new technologies at scale.

Such a service would be unique in the world.

Conference, the good news is, that service already exists - it’s called the National Health Service.

And our job is not just to get the NHS back on its feet, we must make it fit for the future. And that is what our ten-year plan will achieve.

Streeting said some of this reform was already happening. And he said that he wanted to ensure NHS patients get the same choices available to people who go private. He said:

If the wealthy are told to wait months for treatment, they can shop around. But working people can’t.

And if they pay top dollar, the wealthy can be treated with cutting-edge equipment and technology. But working people can’t.

Our ten-year plan will give all patients - rich and poor alike - the same information, the same choice, the same control.

Now I know there are some on the left who cringe at this. Who view choice as somehow akin to marketisation.

But our party has always believed that power should be in the hands of the many, not the few.

That public services exist to serve the interests of the pupil, the passenger, the patient above all else.

That world class services shouldn’t just be the preserve of the wealthy.

This passage could have come straight out of a speech by Alan Milburn in the Tony Blair years; extending patient choice in the NHS was one of their top priorities.

In his speech Wes Streeting, the health secretary defended his decision to publish a report from Lord Darzi highlighting huge problems with the NHS. The findings were “grim”, he said. He went on:

I know the doctor’s diagnosis can sometimes be hard to hear. But if you don’t have an accurate diagnosis, you won’t provide the correct prescription.

The BBC is today reporting that there is growing unease in the NHS about Streeting’s decision to label the NHS as broken. (On his first day in office, Streeting put out a statement saying: “From today, the policy of this department is that the NHS is broken.”) In his report, Nick Triggle says:

One hospital leader told the BBC: “We understand the politics of what the government is doing – they feel they need to establish in the public’s mind what a difficult inheritance they have been given … But there’s an increasing nervousness that if it continues much longer it could spook patients and make it really difficult to raise staff morale. Hope is important.”

Similar views are being expressed privately at NHS England. Sources there said officials had made the government aware of its concerns about the messaging and is monitoring the impact it is having on patients coming forward for check-ups and appointments.

Streeting did not explicitly refer to these claims in his speech. But the line about the importance of a “doctor’s diagnosis” can be read as a rebuttal.

And Streeting even used a phrase in his speech specifically criticised in the BBC report. Triggle quoted an unnamed hospital leader saying talk of a cancer diagnosis being a death sentence in the UK was “the wrong tone”. The source was talking about Streeting, and his officials, saying that because of poor survival rates, cancer is more likely to be a death sentence in the UK than elsewhere. Presumably Streeting read Triggle’s report, but it did not stop him using the same phrase again today. In his speech he said:

Cancer – more likely to be a death sentence here than in other countries.

One of the most significant passages in Keir Starmer’s conference speech yesterday was the passage where he talked about trade-offs in politics, and how it was important to tell people that to achieve positive outcomes, they sometimes had to accept consequences they might not like.

Speaking to reporters on his flight to New York, Starmer said this was something politicians did not talk about enough. Talking about his speech, he said:

It’s the first [conference] we’ve had for 15 years with Labour in government, but also really importantly, the first big opportunity to say not only what are we doing – the sort of ‘what did we inherit’, the doom and gloom if you like, and the immediate difficult decisions – but also why are we doing it …

I’m convinced that if we take the difficult decisions now, we can get to where we need to. So that was part of it.

Obviously, I’ve wanted to have my say about the trade-offs that I think are needed because I don’t think we discuss those enough.

At the Labour conference in Liverpool Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is speaking now.

According to an overnight briefing from the party, he will say that parts of the country with the highest number of people out of work due to ill health will receive priority support to cut NHS waiting lists.

The briefing says:

Under the plans, teams of leading clinicians are being sent to hospitals to roll out their reforms and get patients treated faster.

Top doctors who have developed new ways of working are delivering up to four times more operations than normal. Operating theatres at Guys and St Thomas’s in London run like a formula one pit stop to cut time between procedures.

The teams are starting with 20 hospital trusts in the parts of the country with the biggest rates of economic inactivity.

I will post more from the speech when I’ve seen the full text.

Keir Starmer has said that he accepted accommodation during the election period so that his son, who was doing GCSEs, would not be disrupted by journalists regularly doorstepping their family home.

In the register of members’ interests, Starmer has declared accepting a gift of accommodation from Lord Alli, a longstanding Labour donor. It is valued at £20,437, covering the period from 29 May to 13 July.

The home used by the Starmers has been described in reports as a £18m penthouse.

In an interview with the Today programme, explaining why he accepted the donation, Starmer said:

My boy, 16, was in the middle of his GCSEs. I made him a promise, a promise that he would be able to get to his school, do his exams, without being disturbed.

We have lots of journalists outside our house where we live and I’m not complaining about that, that’s fine.

But if you’re a 16-year-old trying to do your GCSEs and it’s your one chance in life – I promised him we would move somewhere, get out of the house and go somewhere where he could be peacefully studying.

Somebody then offered me accommodation where we could do that. I took that up and it was the right thing to do.

In the same interview, he also explained, in more detail than before, his decision to accept gifts of clothing and tickets to football matches.

On clothing, he implied that because of the campaign, he was short of time to buy clothes himself. He said:

In a busy election campaign, as we’ve had this year, where I’m across the country pretty well all the time, we had people coming forward saying ‘I can help’, and some people came forward and said ‘I can help by donating clothes, so you don’t have to worry about that and [you can] get on with it.’

He said that was “in opposition, when we were running around”. He said he would not be accepting clothing donations again.

And, on football, he said that he had a season ticket to Arsenal, and went to matches with his son. But as a result of security they could not to in the stands. Arsenal had offered him the option of going into the directors’ box when he wanted to attend a match, he said. He said he could not pay for that, because “you can’t buy a ticket in the directors’ box”. Accepting donations meant he could continue “to do something which is really special to me, which is to go to football with my boy”.

In a separate interview with LBC, asked if he would apologise for accepting these donations, Starmer replied:

I’m not going to apologise for not doing anything wrong.

Keir Starmer has said that he wants long-term benefit claimants to have to look for work if they can.

In an interview with the Today programme, he said:

I think the basic proposition that you should look for work is right.

Obviously there will be hard cases, but the way I would do it is to say yes, that’s the basic proposition, but we also want to support that so that more people can get into work.

He also said he had studied schemes where firms support people getting back to work after a long-term illness. He said:

Quite often I think what lies behind this is a fear for someone who’s been on long-term sickness, that can they get back into the workplace? Are they going to be able to cope? Is it all going to go hopelessly wrong?

Yes they need to be back in the workplace where they can, but I do think that if we can put the right support in place, which I’ve seen pilots of, they work pretty well, and we want to see more of those across the country.

Keir Starmer has said he wants to meet Kamala Harris and Donald Trump before the US election. As Rowena Mason reports, Starmer also refused to back Angela Eagle, the Home Office minister who said Trump’s rhetoric was fuelling outright racism when he spoke to journalists travelling with him to New York. Here is Rowena’s story.

Good morning. Keir Starmer is in New York, where he will be addressing the United Nations general assembly later, but the Labour party conference still has half a day to go in Liverpool. Starmer gave a series of media interviews before he left and they are playing out this morning. Speaking to Susanna Reid for ITV’s Good Morning Britain, he refused four time to apologise to pensioners for the cut in winter fuel payments. Delegates will debate the decision at the conference this morning, and they are expected to support a motion championed by the Unite union condemning the decision.

On ITV Starmer was asked if he would apologise to a pensioner like Chrissy, who has arthritis and who told the programme she was dreading winter because her fuel bills would go up by £40 a month, and she would lose the winter fuel payment. Starmer dodged the question, and instead said:

Well, I am really concerned that we’ve been put in this position. When you inherit an economy with £22bn missing, it is a really difficult set of choices.

But Reid persisted, and by question three and four, Starmer was saying it was the Tories who should apologise. He said:

The people who should be saying sorry are the last government who left a hole of £22bn, and they should be sorry for that and they should apologise for that.

I will post more from Starmer’s interviews soon.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10am: Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is speaking at the Labour conference.

10.45am: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, is speaking at the conference.

10.55am: Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, delivers her speech.

11.45am: Ellie Reeves, the Cabinet Office minister, wraps up the conference.

5pm (UK time): Keir Starmer is due to speak at the UN security council.

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