Exclusive: London mayor says poverty, alienation and ill health must be tackled to prevent crimes, after London sword attack

Too many people with mental health issues who have committed violent crimes missed out on treatment as a result of cuts to support services, Sadiq Khan has warned.

In an interview with the Guardian ahead of this week’s local elections, he said such crimes were preventable and said years of austerity has left NHS mental health provision on its knees.

Five simple policy ideas could generate billions for a Labour chancellor and end the threat of continued austerity

• Richard Murphy is professor of accounting practice at Sheffield University Management School and director of Tax Research LLP

“How are you going to pay for it?” Over the past 14 years, it would seem that no other question has been so destructive for British society. That is because the vast majority of the country’s leading politicians still seem to believe that additional public spending or investment is impossible to finance. The result is a belief, explicitly stated or not, in the need for continued austerity, which is the policy that has seriously undermined UK economic performance since 2010.

It was when Labour’s shadow leader of the House of Commons, Lucy Powell MP, said that there was “no money left” in July 2023 – echoing Liam Byrne’s infamous note to Gordon Brown in 2010 – that I thought it was time to show she was wrong about this. The Taxing Wealth Report 2024 is the result.

Labour’s priority must be to restore Sure Start and financial support to low-income families

There is a depressing reality related to the poverty figures that show that last year one in six British children lived in families suffering from food insecurity and one in 40 children lived in a family that accessed a food bank in the previous 30 days (“ Poverty data is a mark of shame for Tory rule ”). The punishing austerity package that George Osborne and David Cameron inflicted on those who are trapped in low-income families was the benchmark for the years of rising poverty levels that we see today.

You correctly highlight the need for Labour, if they win the next election, to prioritise lifting children and their families out of poverty. Alongside reversing tax cuts and borrowing to restore financial support to low-income families, they should also restore New Labour’s flagship Sure Start policy, invest in our crumbling schools infrastructure, incentivise teachers and ensure that NHS staff, rail workers and other people on low incomes are paid a decent wage in a secure job.
Stuart Finegan
Lewes, East Sussex

The UK’s creative skills have never been in higher demand, writes James Purnell , while Gush Mundae says we can’t wait for Labour to fix things, and Dan Thompson takes inspiration from the New Deal

Charlotte Higgins makes a passionate case for creating more equal access to the arts for the cultural health of the nation ( Arts funding has collapsed under 14 years of Tory rule. Here are three ways Labour can fix it, 19 March ). As she rightly argues, the personal and civic benefits of the arts are enormous. Equally remarkable is the economic impact of the UK’s creative industries, which have grown at 1.5 times the rate of the wider economy for the past decade, generating more wealth than aerospace, the life sciences and automotive sectors combined.

That is why we need to nurture and protect the country’s pipeline of talent into the sector – ensuring that everyone not only has access to the arts, but also the opportunity to receive an arts education at university. This means widening access through maintenance grants, retaining the ability of overseas students to bring their talents to our shores and, more broadly, getting our higher education system on to a sustainable footing.

Despite being called continuity Hunt, the shadow chancellor has set out a proposal for meaningful change

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt likes to tell business leaders not to worry about political instability and more policy upset. He claims to be carefully building policy that will survive – win or lose the next election. If the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, succeeds him, accepting nearly all his proposals, be reassured, he says, there will be continuity rather than change. In the run-up to her important Mais lecture last week , the pre-briefings seemed to warrant his judgment.

She would reaffirm her iron attachment to fiscal rules and budgetary discipline, we were told. After all, she had beaten a wholesale retreat from Labour’s cornerstone £28bn green spending commitment . In successive fiscal “events”, she has accepted all the proposed tax cuts, not even reinstating the cap on bank bonuses. There was chatter describing her as “continuity Hunt”. Even Margaret Thatcher, we read, would be invoked as a change agent she admired. Unite sharpened its claws, writing off the lecture even as Reeves spoke as “for the birds”. Only a “sustained rise in public investment in infrastructure”, declared general secretary Sharon Graham, “can turn the tide on decline”. Two days later, columnist Owen Jones resigned from the Labour party , citing the refusal to challenge catastrophic Tory policies in “a race to the bottom”.

Many local authorities are increasingly rejecting requests to assess children who need help in schools, new data reveals

Councils are increasingly ­rejecting requests to assess children for ­special needs such as autism amid the financial crisis in the education system, according to figures seen by the Observer . Long-term underfunding combined with rising demand ­aggravated by the pandemic has left many councils facing significant ­deficits on their schools budgets.

Freedom of information data sourced by the website Special Needs Jungle shows that councils in England have responded by increasingly refusing to carry out education, health and care needs assessments (EHCNAs).

Britain can’t afford the tax cuts announced in the budget

As the dust settles on the budget, it’s time to reflect on the real task facing anyone trying to govern Britain.

The tax cuts announced are paid for with big spending cuts to come: unprotected departments (like councils and prisons) face 13% (£19bn) cuts by 2028-29. Most people think delivering them is impossible, because they’ve seen the state of public services. But let’s focus on why they would also be terrible for our democracy and politics.

Readers on the lottery that British healthcare has become, with many forced to go private to get the necessary treatment to stay alive

Many people may be shocked by your article on the role of private hospitals in reducing the NHS waiting list, but it doesn’t tell the whole story ( Private hospitals ‘cannibalising’ NHS in England by doing 10% of elective operations, 8 March ). I decided in desperation to go to a private hospital for a consultation more than 12 months after an initial NHS diagnosis. I saw a doctor who offered me the latest treatment; his quote was £8,000. This, and second thoughts about going private, made me give up on the idea. Months later, I got a letter from the same private hospital offering a pre-consultation for the procedure, which was “to be paid for by the NHS”.

I discovered that the named consultant was the head of department in the specialism at the local NHS hospital. In fact, several of the doctors in that specialism are also treating patients privately in the nearby private hospital. I find it hard to get my head around this game of musical chairs. It surely brings into question the ethics of a profession that is in effect, to coin a phrase, stealing your watch and charging you to tell you the time.
Name and address supplied

Unfunded pledges and election gimmicks – from Tories or Labour – are last thing Britain needs

Before his budget last week, Jeremy Hunt said he knew voters could see through gimmicks . “And we are not going to do gimmicks on Wednesday”. Fast forward and what did the chancellor offer? A tax-cutting budget where taxes were still actually rising, and the promise of more funding for public services grounded in a £20bn austerity drive.

Having made very few new pledges that hadn’t been leaked to the media, the most attention-grabbing promise Hunt made was to declare an ambition to abolish employee national insurance – an unfunded commitment worth more than £40bn; equivalent to the annual transport budget.

Before a general election it might be tempting to promise the world, but it would be better to be honest