Latest updates: Labour deputy leader says her expenses were necessary for work and accuses government of wasting taxpayer’s money
The UK’s former chief Brexit negotiator has urged ministers to “fully and enthusiastically embrace the advantages of Brexit”, portraying a private meeting of prominent former leave and remain campaigners to discuss how to move on from Brexit in the national interest as a plot to undermine the deal he struck with the EU.
The two-day summit, revealed by the Observer on Sunday, was attended by the government minister Michael Gove, who is a former co-leader of the official Brexit campaign, and senior members of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet.
That’s why so many of those responsible for Theresa May’s failed backstop deal were there, while I and those who actually delivered the Brexit agreements were not.
Brexit doesn’t need ‘fixing’. It needs this Conservative government, elected with a huge mandate on a Brexit programme, to fully and enthusiastically embrace its advantages instead of leaving the field to those who never wanted it in the first place.
I and millions of others want the government to get on with that instead of raising taxes, deterring investment and pushing public spending to its highest level for 70 years.
In the big picture, what we’ve seen since 2010, is an 85% reduction in this. All of this data is publicly available online, it has been since 2012 – something which didn’t happen under the last Labour government.
We publish it on a monthly basis. The Labour party has spent half-a-million pounds asking parliamentary questions, 2,500 of them, wasting my civil servants time for information that is already publicly available and that they hid when they were last in office.
I don’t think any government minister would have been involved in that decision.
I could be wrong but that’s not my [understanding]. What wouldn’t normally happen is a spending of around £3,000 going over a minister’s desk because, if you did, that’s all ministers would do on a daily basis.
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