Ed Miliband to announce total ban on fracking – UK politics live

Keir Starmer told Sky News that he had “no personal issue with Andy [Burnham] in the slightest” when asked by Sky’s Beth Rigby if he would prefer the Greater Manchester mayor to “just shut up”.

Starmer’s allies were infuriated by Burnham’s interventions last week, and his suggestion that he would be available to replace Starmer as leader. But his apparent disloyalty triggered a backlash, and as the conference closes there is a consensus that Burnham overplayed his hand, and the threat he posed to Starmer has (at least temporarily) receded.

Asked about Burnham, Starmer said:

Andy Burnham is doing a fantastic job as the mayor of Manchester. I actually worked closely with him. We’ve reset that relationship between Westminster and our mayors, and we’re working well together. So I’ve got no personal issue with Andy in the slightest.

Helena Horton is a Guardian environment reporter.

Ed Miliband will be announcing the fracking ban (see 9.19am) as part of the North Sea Transition consultation results which are coming out this autumn. There will be new legislation to permanently ban the extraction method.

He plans to take on Reform UK by sending campaigners out to the 141 seats at risk of fracking, in a series of campaigns labelled “Send the Frackers Packing”.

Labour say they will be “ensuring the 141 constituencies that sit above shale gas areas are protected from dangerous unsafe operations.” Miliband’s own seat sits above shale gas.

There have already been fractures in Reform over the fracking issue, with Lancashire council, which is under Reform control, saying it would not welcome drilling in the area. Richard Tice and Nigel Farage have both backed the energy extraction method and (incorrectly) claim it would quickly bring down bills.

Fracking faces resistance in local areas because it can blight water and air quality, and the industrial sites are viewed as an eyesore. There is also a risk of earthquakes and the gas is a fossil fuel which contributes to climate breakdown.

In his interviews being broadcast this morning, Keir Starmer was repeatedly asked about criticism of his leadership, and calls in the party for him be replaced. He dismissed these suggestions.

He told the Today programme that he did not enter politics to be popular.

I didn’t come into politics as some sort of popularity contest. I came in with one focus, which is changing my country for the better.

He repeatedly brushed asked the criticism by arguing that he had been under-estimated in the past, and that he had a record of proving his critics wrong. He told Sky News:

I took over as leader of our party. And people said to me, you’re not the right person to change the party. I said, yes, I am, and we did it.

Then people said to me, you’ll never win an election. We went on and got a landslide victory.

Now they say to me, you’re not able to change the country. We will change the country, and I will be judged at the next election.

When Kate McCann from Times Radio asked him if he would be willing to stand aside for someone else if he thought another leader had a better chance of winning the election, Starmer said that he won the last election and that he intended to “carry out the mandate we were given at that election, which is to change the country”.

Some people have argued that it is a mistake for Keir Starmer and Labour to talk about Nigel Farage and Reform UK as much as they have. There is a case for saying that this just shores up the credibility of a party with only five MPs, and it switches the news agenda towards immigration and small boats (issues where Reform UK polls well) and away from “Labour issues” like health.

And art of this argument is that, by calling the Reform UK migration policy racist, Labour is also making it easier for Farage to leverage grievance (which, as Starmer himself argued in his speech yesterday, is part of what lies behind Reform UK’s electoral support.

In his interview with Starmer, Robert Peston from ITV News put it to Starmer that he had just given Farage “the platform that he craves”.

Starmer replied:

I think it’s a mistake to pretend this isn’t the fight of our times.

If it is the fight of our times, we’ve got to recognise that, and we’ve got to be in it. I think simply ignoring it is a mistake, a political mistake.

If you look across Europe, most centre-right parties are withering on the vine. That’s what’s happened to the Conservative party here. This is not a UK issue, you can see it in other countries. It’s a pattern.

To ignore it, pretend it doesn’t exist and not run towards the fight and win the fight, would be a grave mistake for our country.

In a response to Keir Starmer’s conference speech, Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, claimed yesterday afternoon that the PM’s comments about his party would put his activists at risk of attack from the “radical left”.

In his interviews, Starmer rejected that claim.

In his interview on GB News, when he was asked about the Farage claim and it was put to him that he was inflaming tensions, Starmer replied:

No, not at all. There is a political fight that has to be had, and it’s about the future of our country.

And when Kate McCann on Times Radio put it to Starmer that, in using provocative language, he was adopting tactics used by Farage himself, Starmer said that his language was appropriate because this was not a normal political battle. He said:

This is a different fight to the traditional Labour/Conservative fight. You can see versions of this going on in many other countries across Europe. I think that if Reform were to gain power, they would tear our country apart and fundamentally change us as a country.

In interviews this morning Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s head of policy, accused Starmer of inciting violence against Farage. He told Times Radio:

We have seen the most extraordinary 48 hours of demonisation, and I’m going to say it again, incitement to violence against the man who is the bookmakers’ favourite to be the next prime minister.

Yusuf also claimed the parliamentary security department had cut Farage’s security detail by 75%, without saying why. He said party donors had stepped in to make up for this.

Helena Horton is a Guardian environment reporter.

Ed Miliband is due to take to the stage to deliver his speech today, and he is set to announce a “total ban” on fracking.

There is currently a moratorium on the controversial energy extraction method which involves drilling deep into the earth then shooting at high speed a mixture of sand, water and chemicals to dislodge shale gas. Reform UK supports fracking across Britain, but it is unpopular as it causes earthquakes.

Miliband told the campaign group 38 Degrees:

I am about to announce something you have been calling for and campaigning on, which is to ban fracking for good. You called for it, I’m going to do it, thank you for your campaigning.

Veronica Hawking, campaigns director at 38 Degrees said:

What an amazing result for our environment, our local communities, and the thousands of committed people and groups right across the country who’ve spent years fighting for fracking to be banned for good – including the many who signed 38 Degrees supporter Geoff’s recent petition. Not long ago, it felt like fracking might make a comeback, with Reform UK pushing to put it back on the agenda. But thousands of us stood up, demanded a permanent ban, and made our voices impossible to ignore.

There is not currently a permanent ban in law, just a temporary moratorium, which was briefly lifted by Liz Truss in 2022 then reinstated by her successor Rishi Sunak.

Keir Starmer has said he will look at how international law is being interpreted by British courts in an effort to tackle small boats, which he labelled “Farage boats” because of their increase in number since Brexit, Eleni Courea reports.

Related: Starmer to rethink human rights law to tackle ‘Farage boats’

Keir Starmer has said that he does not think Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, or his supporters are racist.

He made this point in several of the interviews being broadcast this morning, explaining that that what he is calling racist is the Reform UK migration policy announced last week that could lead to hundreds of thousands of people with indefinite leave to remain in the UK being told they must leave the country.

The single most important comment from Starmer during this party conference probably came on Sunday, on the BBC, when Laura Kuenssberg asked him if he thought the Reform UK policy was racist and Starmer said he did. This interview signalled a transformation in how Labour will fight Reform UK, which has a lead of about 10 points over Labour in the polls. Much of Starmer’s speech yesterday was just devoted to fleshing this argument out. But it has led to Labour figures repeatedly being asked about Farage potentially being racist, sometimes with embarrassing results.

In an interview with Sky News, Beth Rigby asked Starmer if he thought Farage was racist. Starmer replied:

No, nor do I think Reform voters are racist.

They’re concerned about things like our borders. They’re frustrated about the pace of change.

So I’m not for a moment suggesting that they are racist. I was talking about a particular policy and making a distinction – and a really important distinction in my mind – between deporting those who have no right to be here, illegally here, which this government is doing and I agree with, and, on the other hand, reaching into migrants lawfully here who’ve been here for years working in our hospitals, our schools, and deporting them. That to me would tear our country apart.

In other interviews, asked if he was calling people who voted Reform UK, Starmer said “not in the slightest”.

In his interview, Robert Peston, ITV News’ political editor, pointed out that, if Starmer does not think Reform UK supporters are racist, he is out of step with the plurality of voters who do. He referred to some polling by YouGov for his Peston programme that illustrates this.

Peston asked Starmer how he could call a policy racist, but not the people supporting it. Starmer just gave a version of the answer he gave to Sky, saying:

I am not calling Reform voters racist. Most of them are simply concerned and frustrated because they want to see change and are concerned that we secure our borders, as I am. That is not racist.

Good morning. Keir Starmer recorded about 10 broadcast interviews yesterday afternoon, after his conference speech, on the basis that they would all be broadcast this morning. They are playing out now. As you would expect, they are very repetitive – a lot of the questions and the answers are the same – but there are still plenty of new lines in them.

One of his most audacious answers came when he was speaking to Christopher Hope, political editor of GB News, Reform UK’s favourite TV channel. Hope asked if the government would stop the small boats, and Starmer said that the returns agreement that he negotiated with France would make a difference. But then he went on to claim that they were “Farage boats, in many senses” because after Brexit the Dublin convention returns agreement that used to be in place no longer applied.

Here is Starmer’s answer in full.

The returns agreement with France is important because we need to establish that if you come by boat, you will be returned to France.

I accept the numbers [returned so far under the agreement] are low. We had to prove the concept and prove that it could work. We’ve now done that. But now we need to ramp that up.

I would gently point out to Nigel Farage and others that before we left the EU, we had a returns agreement with every country in the EU. And he told the country it will make no difference if we left. Well, he was wrong about that. These are Farage boats, in many senses, that are coming across the channel.

Starmer does not seem to have used this line in other interviews and it is not clear yet whether this is the start of a sustained government attempt to rebrand these as “Farage boats”, or whether Starmer was just trying to wind up Hope, who often asks questions that reflect the views of his Farage-loving viewers.

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, made a similar argument in his party conference speech. John Rentoul, the Independent commentator who is broadly sympathetic to Labour, said this morning Davey and Starmer were both wrong to argue that being out of the Dublin convention made much difference to small boat arrival numbers.

Surprised by PM repeating Ed Davey’s bogus analysis: boats are nothing to do with Brexit; & the Dublin convention never worked

But in fact the Dublin convention probably isn’t the key issue. Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the Migration Observatory, a migration thinktank, argued recently that Brexit is making the small boat problem worse because the UK no longer has access to an EU fingerprint database, and that means asylum seekers can come to the UK knowing they won’t automatically be thrown out because they have applied in another European country. He said:

There’s also increasing evidence of a Brexit effect [in explaining why migrants want to leave France and come to the UK]. We speak with asylum seekers now, and often they’ve claimed asylum in the EU country, sometimes been refused, but they understand that because the UK is no longer a part of the EU, and no longer party to the EU’s fingerprint database for asylum seekers, if they can get to the UK, they have another bite of the cherry and another chance to secure asylum status and remain in Europe.

There are plenty more lines in the Starmer interviews. I will post them shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: The conference starts, and the main speakers are Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, at 10.30am, Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, at 10.40am, Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary who is winding up the conference as incoming chair of Labour’s national executive committee, at 11.15am.

11.30am: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, and Lucy Powell, the former Commons leader, take part in a deputy leadership hustings.

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