Andy Burnham promised a different kind of leader’s speech for his first Labour conference as Prime Minister, and he was not lying.
The speech was crammed full of radical policies on the state pension triple lock, electoral reform and a change to Britain’s relationship with Europe which appeared to leave open the possibility of rejoining the EU.
Triple lock
Burnham announced that to help fund his commitment for free at the point of use social care in Labour’s next election manifesto, he would bring an end to the triple lock, under which the state pension rises each year in line with the highest of inflation, wages or 2.5 per cent.
What we know about Ranulph Fiennes care home row
Once described as “the world’s greatest living explorer”, Sir Ranulph Fiennes disappeared from public view in 2024.
Members of his family allege they have not been allowed to visit him.
Who is Ranulph Fiennes?
- Ranulph Fiennes, 82, is a famed explorer, known for his Transglobe Expedition.
- He is related to actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes.
- In September this year, his relatives raised the alarm that they had not been allowed to visit him.
- Fiennes disappeared from public in 2024 after opening up about his Parkinson’s diagnosis.
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Allegations of a family rift
In September, published its first story airing concerns from friends who alleged Fiennes’ wife, Louise Millington-Cotes, was not allowing anyone else to see him.
The newspaper reported allegations that Fiennes had been moved around multiple care homes under false names.
Campaign to free him
The explorer’s stepson, Alex Millington-Cotes, has said he is desperate to visit Fiennes again, and told the BBC he wants power of attorney removed from his mother.
“He’s not an isolated type of person, and so to see him isolated now is very painful,” he said.
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King urged to help
- Concerned friends reportedly wrote to King Charles, an old friend of Fiennes’, but the Palace was also unable to get through to him.
- Alex Millington-Cotes has launched a fundraiser to “locate and safeguard” the explorer.
Louise Millington-Cotes has not responded to the allegations
When you could buy gene-edited bananas that don’t go brown
Step aside banana bread, scientists at a start-up in Norwich have created bananas that keep their colour in your fruit bowl for longer before turning brown.
The flashy new fruit can even stay yellow for up to 24 hours after peeling.
Everything you need to know
- Tropic Biosciences has developed gene-edited bananas which can last longer.
The start-up used the CRISPR-Cas9 process to tweak three genes which make bananas turn brown.
It means the fruit does not produce the polyphenol oxidase enzyme responsible for pesky fruit-bowl browning.
The bananas have marketing approval from the environment secretary but must pass the Food Standards Agency’s (FSA) checks before they can go on sale.
Why is this significant?
According to Gilad Gershon, the CEO of Tropic, the edited bananas can resist browning by an extra day or two. He said this would “open up a lot of value in reducing waste”.
It is not known how long it could take for the FSA to approve the bananas for safe sale in the UK. If they make it through, they will need to be labelled as “gene edited”.
How long will the warm weather last for?
Tuesday is set to be warm and sunny, with a brief spike in temperatures, but later in the week, the mercury will struggle to get beyond 20°C.
Warmer than average
On Tuesday, temperatures are set to hit 26°C in London and parts of the South East, continuing into a muggy night.
Met Office meteorologist Clare Nasir forecasts:”A breezy day, but also a warm one… temperatures today will be well above average for this time of year, particularly for England and Wales.”
Fresher end to the week
- Nasir warned there is a risk of “some intense bursts of rain” followed by showers on Wednesday.
- The Met Office forecast that the weather will turn “a little fresher from Thursday with showers or longer spells of rain at times, mainly in the west”.
- As the week goes on, temperatures are set to drop, with very few areas expected to reach 20°C or above.
Snooker champion Graeme Dott jailed for child sex abuse
Former snooker world champion Graeme Dott has been found guilty of sexually abusing two primary school-age children.
In August, he was found guilty of two counts of lewd, indecent and libidinous behaviour and on Tuesday he was sentenced to seven years in prison.
What you need to know
The High Court in Edinburgh heard how Dott subjected a girl and a boy to multiple incidents of abuse, with the girl targeted between 1993 and 1996 and the boy between 2006 and 2010.
The jury heard Dott exposed himself in front of both children, touched them inappropriately and kissed them.
What did the victims say?
- One of Dott’s victims, now in her 40s, told the court Dott had sexually abused her on multiple occasions.
- The second victim, now in his late 20s, also said he was sexually abused on multiple occasions.
- Lord Harrower, the judge, told Dott he had “robbed the complainers of a significant part of their childhood”.
- He added the behaviour bore “the hallmarks of grooming”.
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Men feel happier than women about how they look, study finds
Researchers at the BI Norwegian Business School also found men overestimated their IQ, while British people generally rated themselves less attractive than other nationalities.
What did the study find?
- Men consistently gave themselves higher ratings for physical attractiveness than women.
- Participants scored themselves between 0 and 100.
- On average, men scored 6-8 per cent higher than women.
- How attractive the participants were considered by other people was not part of the study.
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A closer look at the study
The study also found that men and women with higher IQs tended to rate themselves as less attractive.
Britons generally rated themselves less attractive than their American, Australian, Canadian and South African counterparts. Researchers suggested this could be a symptom of British manners, with more emphasis on “modesty or understatement”.
What does this mean?
Professor Adrian Furnham, who led the study, noted men often overestimate their IQ, while women typically underestimate it.
He said the similar gap in attractiveness self-ratings could be another indication of “male hubris versus female humility”. He added that more intelligent people could be “more honest”.
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How the UK could rejoin the EU, step by step
Labour grandees have urged Andy Burnham to start preparing to reverse Brexit – but high hurdles would have to be overcome.
Why is it coming up now?
Sadiq Khan said he wants Britain to return to the customs union “almost straight away” and provision in the next Labour manifesto to reverse Brexit without a referendum.
However, experts are sceptical. Polls indicate a narrow majority of Britons support the idea of rejoining, but it may require more support before we could rejoin.
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What the process could look like
Experts warned it could also take five to 10 years to get back in.
Here’s how rejoining might look:
- A second vote is not technically necessary but leading experts think a referendum would likely be needed to provide a stable mandate to start negotiations with the EU.
- If the UK applied to rejoin, the EU would need to ensure the applicant met the 1993 Copenhagen Criteria.
- If talks then began, there would be a series of big issues to resolve.
- The EU could demand that Britain use the Euro and become part of the Schengen Area.
The expert analysis
Experts disagree on the likelihood the UK could be allowed to opt-out of either the Schengen Area or the Euro. Dr Thomas Sampson, economist and Brexit expert at LSE, suggested it is possible the EU would be willing to let Britain rejoin under the same deal.
But others suggested the EU would want to lock the UK into the Euro to “make it harder for [us] to ever leave”.
- The European Commission would need to approve any deal for the UK to rejoin. A majority of MEPs in the European Parliament would also have to vote in favour and all the bloc’s member states.
- Professor Catherine Barnard, an expert in EU law at the University of Cambridge, thinks negotiations and ratification could take as long as a decade.
- If talks did not start until after a Labour general election victory in 2029, it could be 2040 before Britain was back in the bloc.
Watch more from The i Paper
New treatment for ultra-rare ‘second skeleton’ disorder
Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP) is a “devastating, irreversible” genetic condition.
What is FOP?
- According to the charity FOP Friends, there are around 70 known people with FOP in the UK.
It is one of the rarest diseases in the world, affecting around one in a million people.
FOP is a genetic condition which leads to the body creating extra bones in locations where they should not form, including inside muscles, tendons and ligaments.
What is the treatment?
A new “disease modifying” treatment has been shown to reduce new bone growth by more than 90 per cent, reduce flare-ups and potentially offer hope for new surgical options in the future.
The drug garetosmab is an antibody that blocks a protein called activin A, which has been found to be critical in the development of new abnormal growth development in people with FOP.
63 adults were involved in the trial, which saw a massive reduction in flare-ups in the groups which received the treatment.
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Writing in , the authors said they expect the drug to enable “long term preservation of mobility and function”.
Chris Bedford-Gay, FOP Friends founder, said the community “has desperately waited for a way to stop FOP in its tracks”. He added this “is the moment a life-changing treatment comes that bit closer”.
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The Prime Minister said that he would continue with the lock for the rest of this parliament, but from April 2030 “we will adjust it”.
Stories broke last night that Burnham would use the speech to signal an end to the lock. But the big surprise was that he provided the detail about what would replace it. “The state pension will continue to rise every year at least by prices or 2.5 per cent,” he said. “And it will hold its value relative to earnings over time so that pensioners will always share in the rising prosperity of the nation.”
A long term buffer is expected to be in place to protect the growth of the state pension from falling behind earnings growth.
Burnham admitted that the move could lose him votes. “I won’t pretend some of this won’t be difficult,” he said. “I accept I may pay a political price. But someone has to go through the pain barrier and rip the plaster off.”
Electoral reform
Burnham said that Labour would have a commitment to overhaul Britain’s electoral system in the party’s next manifesto.
Signalling his intention to move away from Britain’s first-past-the-post system to a proportional system, he said: “We will contest the next election with a manifesto commitment to change the electoral system so that everyone’s vote counts and everyone’s voice is heard.”
First-past-the-post elects the candidate with the most votes in each constituency, while proportional representation allocates seats more closely in line with each party’s share of the vote.
In the meantime, he announced plans for a “national commission” to explore voting reforms.
The Prime Minister said that Britain needed to change its long-term relationship with the EU.
He said that at the UK-EU summit planned this autumn he would “take the opportunity to lay out to the country what I believe the different options are for Britain’s long-term relationship with our European partners”.
Burnham did not provide details on what these options would be, but what was almost as telling was his decision not to rule things out. It suggests that the possibility of Britain fully rejoining the bloc could be on the table.
Other options could be ditching Sir Keir Starmer’s red lines around rejoining the single market and customs union, or potentially seeking the “associate” member status which Brussels recently offered to Canada.
“We will not give Britain the clear path we need into the rest of the century until we decide on a long-term relationship with what is still our largest market,” he said. “I cannot say to you that where we are is good enough. Brexit has done more harm than good.”
The Prime Minister said that he would try to “find consensus” around one of the options “which will give us clarity about our position and the future of the continent that we live in”.
One of the main themes of the speech was a promise to bring “strong public control” to “essentials” like energy, housing and water. Burnham announced a path to public ownership of water firms in cases where they are failing.
The Prime Minister said that water had become a “symbol of what has gone wrong with Britain – a service where the shareholders never lose and the public never win, from which some have syphoned out easy money while the public picked up the bill for the sewage in our seas. It stinks.”
He announced that the Environment Secretary Angela Eagle would “present a strengthened Water Bill to Parliament”.
Unexpectedly, he said the “centrepiece” of the bill would be the “repeal of Margaret Thatcher’s ideological ban on public ownership of water companies”.
He said this would “start a 10-year journey to a very different water system” in which mayors would have “new powers to hold water companies to account, with tougher consequences for those which repeatedly fail”.
Burnham said that “where private companies serve the public interest, we will support them” but warned there would be “consequences” for failing firms “including taking back control or ownership”.
The i Paper revealed on Monday that Burnham would signal his intent to take firms like Thames Water into public ownership.
Fuelled by emotion
In a break from the traditional conference speeches from party leaders, Burnham was somewhat emotional.
He took a long pause in the speech before talking about his late father, Roy, who died earlier this month at the age of 86 with Alzheimers disease.
Appearing to hold back tears, the conference gave the Prime Minister a round of applause as he gathered himself.
When he spoke again, he said that on the day his father died, the Scottish First Minister John Swinney claimed he would be the UK’s last prime minister.
Burnham said he was not looking to seek “sympathy” or to criticise Swinney.
He went on: “I relay it because I want you to know how it made me feel. Utterly determined to prove him wrong.”