Angela Rayner rages at Keir Starmer and backs Number 10 of north plan

Angela Rayner has hit out at Sir Keir Starmer in her first intervention since the Prime Minister resigned. The former deputy prime minister criticised his record in government as one of “defending the status quo” in a speech to the Left-wing New Economics Foundation think tank last night.

Ms Rayner, who quit his Cabinet in a row over her tax affairs, also warned that Labour would not defeat Nigel Farage's Reform UK "with caution".

And she gave her backing to incoming prime minister Andy Burnham’s plans to move power out of Westminster and into town halls around the country.

A former Labour health minister and forced adoption survivor has said she is looking forward to “being released from my shame” when she and other campaigners get a state apology.

Ann Keen was sent to a Swansea mother and baby home in 1966, when she was 17.

Asked if she would accept the Government apology today, Ms Keen told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Oh, absolutely, we all need this apology because we have always been accused of giving up our babies and we didn’t give them up.

“In particular, so many were taken without our knowledge and in my own instance, I went to see my baby on the eighth day because I was told I could have him for 10 and they said: ‘Oh no, he’s gone now. You were getting far too close’.”

Ms Keen, who was the MP for Brentford and Isleworth for 13 years, said she thinks the Government has “done the best they could, because it’s so complex”.

“I understand why the Prime Minister’s team wanted to get this right, because we’ve now got the opportunity to really put this wrong right, we’ve been waiting a long time, and so today I’m just looking forward to today and being released from my shame,” she said.

The Government is “looking at every route” to remove the ringleader of a Rochdale grooming gang from the country, a minister has said.

Asked about calls to deport Shabir Ahmed, who will be released on Thursday after serving 14 years in prison for multiple sexual offences, Baroness Jacqui Smith told LBC that Andy Burnham was “right” to say he should be removed.

She said: “There are two problems here. Number one, there are a very small number of people who came to this country over 50 years ago from Commonwealth countries where the law doesn’t allow them to be deported.

“And secondly, of course, in order to deport somebody, the country to which you are going to deport them needs to be willing to take them.

“We’ve removed this man’s British citizenship, he’s a Pakistan citizen, but there is also work that needs to happen in order to persuade Pakistan to take him back.”

She said: “We are looking within Government at everything that we could possibly do in order to review the law in order to persuade Pakistan to take him.”

“We’re doing everything we can, looking at every route to get this guy out of the country,” she added.

Britain is in the grips of a deepening crisis of numeracy in the young, a leading peer has said. It follows reports that the treasury dropped a critical maths test for new recruits. Mandarins ditched the Numerical Reasoning Test (NRT) and claimed it was having an "adverse impact on candidate diversity"

Now Lord Agnew, a former Treasury Minister, has said the news is "just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Britain's deepening crisis with numeracy." Speaking to the Daily Express, the peer, who chairs the Numeracy for Life Committee in the House of Lords, warned that there has been an "unmistakable lowering of the importance we place on numerical skill right across our institutions" which was having a "devastating effect".

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A minister has acknowledged there will be further “difficult choices” on funding the defence investment plan (Dip).

Asked about £4.7 billion of unfunded spending in the Dip, skills minister Baroness Jacqui Smith told Times Radio: “We have made some quite difficult choices to redistribute, for example, capital spending in order to put in place the funding necessary to deliver the defence investment plan, in the way in which we have done.

“And there will continue to be difficult choices to be made about how we prioritise defence.”

Sir Keir Starmer’s plan to boost defence spending by £15 billion is facing fresh scrutiny after Downing Street was unable to say where exactly the cuts required to pay for it will come from.

The Prime Minister unveiled the defence investment plan earlier this week but the Government is yet to spell out where £4.7 billion will come from with a decision to be made at the autumn budget.

But questions have been raised over where the remaining £10.3 billion cuts to Whitehall spending which will fund the plan will come from after the Government was unable to provide detail.