Liz Kendall says Elon Musk’s X must urgently deal with ‘appalling’ sexualised deepfake content produced by Grok AI – as it happened | Politics – Beragampengetahuan
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Starmer tells cabinet ‘governments don’t lose because polls go down’ – as YouGov puts Labour behind Reform UK and Tories
Before Christmas Keir Starmer was hoping to use this week to highlight the government’s determination to bring down the cost of living for people. As explained on the blog yesterday, Donald Trump has blown this out of the news with his raid on Venezuela.
But Starmer has not abandoned the plan and, according to a Labour readout from the political cabinet this morning, he told his colleagues that the government should “keep a relentless focus on the cost of living, show relentless delivery of change people can feel and bring relentless clarity to drawing the choice ahead”.
Referring to that choice, Starmer said:
A Labour government renewing the country or a Reform movement that feeds on grievance, decline and division.
They want a weaker state, they want to inject bile into our communities, they want to appease Putin. This is the fight of our political lives and one that we must relish.
Starmer also urged his ministers to ignore the polls
I do not underestimate the scale of the task. But I have no doubt about this team. Governments do not lose because polls go down. They lose when they lose belief or nerve. We will do neither.
(While Starmer is right to say that politicians should not be paralysed by poor poll ratings, because they can change a lot over three years [and sometimes they were wrong too], they can’t ignore polls either. Governments may not lose because polls go down, but normally they do lose when polls go down. A YouGov poll out today has Labour for the first time in third place behind Reform UK and the Tories. See 10.44am.)
Lucy Powell, the deputy Labour leader, attended politcal cabinet. According to the readout, she thanked Starmer and his team “embracing me as deputy leader” and said that she relished “helping to tell the story of whose side we are on”.
Ministers then discussed “successful recoveries of centre-left parties in Norway, Australia and Canada through focussing on delivery and cost of living issues”.
Key events
Afternoon summary
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The manufacturer of the faulty Horizon system has made no provision in its accounts to contribute towards compensation for wronged subpostmasters, the company’s European boss has told MPs. As PA Media reports, reiterated Fujitsu’s commitment to make a “moral contribution” to financial redress during his appearance at the business committee – for which the government has set aside £1.8bn. Around 1,000 people were wrongly prosecuted and convicted throughout the UK between 1999 and 2015 as a result of Horizon, with a significant number contemplating self-harm and some taking their own lives.
Starmer is shortly due to join other European leaders at a press conference in Paris after their Coalition of the Willing meeting. There is coverage on our Europe live blog.
For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.
Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
No 10 appoints health policy expert as head of PM’s delivery unit
Axel Heitmueller has been appointed as the new head of the prime minister’s delivery unit, Downing Street has announced. He has been working in the policy unit as a health specialist. Previously he worked as CEO of Imperial College Health Partners, and he has also worked for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
No 10 said Heitmueller would “advise ministers and drive forward the government’s vision for national renewal to ensure more people get help with the cost of living and see a change in their bills, communities, and health service”.
Stormont’s two main parties split over draft budget for Northern Ireland
Stormont’s main parties remain at loggerheads over proposals for a new multi-year budget after the finance minister published his version of the spending plan, PA Media reports.
John O’Dowd’s move to initiate an eight-week public consultation exercise on a draft budget came amid an ongoing disagreement within the powersharing administration on how funds will be allocated to individual departments, PA says. The Sinn Féin minister urged Executive colleagues to engage with his proposals in a “constructive manner” and keep their “eyes on the prize” of setting a multi-year budget – something Stormont has been unable to do for more than 10 years. However, in a signal of how far apart the two lead executive parties remain on the issue, the DUP rejected the draft spending plan as “deeply flawed” and in need of “significant changes”.
West Midlands chief constable tells MPs decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from match not politically motivated
Police chiefs facing scrutiny over a decision to ban fans of an Israeli football team from attending a match in Birmingham have insisted the move was not politically influenced, PA Media reports. PA says:
West Midlands police (WMP) leaders defended their position at the home affairs committee this afternoon after being recalled to give further evidence over the controversial decision to ban fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv from attending a Europa League match against Aston Villa on 6 November.
Supporters of the Israeli football team were barred from travelling to the game at Villa Park by the local safety advisory group (Sag), which cited safety concerns based on advice from the police force.
The decision by the Sag – which is made up of representatives from the council, police and other authorities – sparked political outrage, including from Keir Starmer.
Since then, doubts have been growing over the intelligence used by police, including disputes over the accuracy of information.
WMP chief constable Craig Guildford told the cross-party group of MPs: “From everything that I’ve read, and the commanders that I spoke to, I do not believe that there was political influence on that decision.
“Lots of local politicians and local members of the community I’m sure wanted to try and influence it, but I honestly don’t think it was influenced.”
The fixture had been classified high risk by WMP, with the force pointing to alleged violent clashes and hate crime offences that occurred during the 2024 Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam.
However, Dutch police have disputed the accuracy of this information, the Sunday Times reported.
Guildford defended claims put to him by committee chairwoman Karen Bradley that it feels like the force was “scraping” to find a reason to justify the ban.
“I’m really sorry if it comes across in that way. That was absolutely not the case,” he said.
The committee heard West Midlands police thought “vigilante groups” from the local community posed a threat to Maccabi Tel Aviv fans when it decided to ban them from the game.
MPs heard the force had information from as early as 5 September last year that the Israeli visitors would be targeted with “violence”.
Assistant chief constable Mike O’Hara said: “We got a lot of information intelligence to suggest that people were going to actively seek out Maccabi Tel Aviv fans and would seek violence towards them.
“So we had sort of like a bubbling position locally.
“We had people purporting to be Maccabi fans online who were goading local community members and saying, ‘this is what you’re going to get’.
“This was all forming part of the heat of the situation, so based on that, the commanders tried to make the right decision.”
WMP had previously been warned over misleading parliament after evidence given to the home affairs committee last month by O’Hara suggested the police had been told by members of the Jewish community they did not want Maccabi fans to attend the match.
The force later clarified it was not his intention to imply that and subsequently apologised when pressed for more clarity by Bradley.
Kent water failure was foreseen and could have been stopped, regulator says
The failure at a water treatment centre that left tens of thousands of Tunbridge Wells households without water (see 4.38pm) was foreseen weeks before it happened and could have been stopped, the regulator has said. Helena Horton has the story.
A reader asks:
You see a lot of letters from MPs on official parliament headed paper posted online, is there a costing of these letters?
Yes, there is.
MPs can spend up to £11,000 a year postage-paid envelopes and House of Commons stationery.
And if you want to find out how much individual MPs claimed for these items in the 2024-25 financial year, the figures are here.
South East Water boss defends his firm’s response to Tunbridge Wells water shortage crisis
The chief executive of the water company responsible for 24,000 customers experiencing water outages last month told MPs his company did “so much” to respond to the crisis, PA Media reports. PA says:
Tens of thousands of people were left without water in Tunbridge Wells for days after a “water quality issue” at the Pembury water treatment works.
David Hinton, the chief executive of South East Water (SEW), was criticised by MPs for a “fundamentally lacking” human response to the crisis during an environment committee hearing this morning.
Hinton, who has an annual base salary of £400,000, told the committee he “hates it” when things go wrong, but was picked up by MPs for a lack of accountability in his responses.
The problems in Tunbridge Wells began on Saturday 29 November and continued for almost two weeks.
Originally, properties experienced a loss of water or low pressure before the company brought back undrinkable water so that people could shower and flush their toilets.
A “boil water notice” was then put in place until 12 December, when the company reported it had “changed” its water treatment processes.
Hinton blamed a lack of infrastructure in the South East for the failures and said that the risks are “inevitable” without investment.
Hinton also said that in the “absence of the infrastructure” they had focused resources on the response, including “mobilising” 100 people on the ground.
“We’ve done so much in terms of the response,” he said.
But Alistair Carmichael, the Lib Dem chair of the committee, said: “I would have more sympathy for this line of reasoning if this had come out [of] a clear blue sky but it didn’t, did it?
“There was repeated failures down the years, up to and including the warnings from the drinking water inspector last year.
“Essentially, it looks to me like your procurement, your quality control, your contingency arrangements at site were just not adequate.”
In 2023, SEW was found to be the worst company for supply interruptions in the UK, since then there have been multiple high profile outages.
Last year, Hinton received a £115,000 bonus for his work at SEW.
Severin Carrell
Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.
An independent investigation has found that Angela Constance, the Scottish cabinet secretary for justice and home affairs, “unintentionally” breached two parts of the ministerial code, but will escape formal sanction.
Constance was the focus of a storm whipped up by opposition parties before the Christmas recess after it emerged she misrepresented the stance of Prof Alexis Jay on the case against an inquiry into grooming gangs in Scotland.
Labour and the Conservatives called on her resign in the hope of wounding the Scottish National party government in advance of May’s Holyrood elections.
Her boss, John Swinney, the first minister, announced his advisors on the ministerial code had decided the two breaches were “inadvertent without any deliberation or intention to mislead.” Constance would be reproached but no other action would be taken.
MSPs to get 4.3% pay rise, taking annual salary to £77,710
Severin Carrell
Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.
The pay for MSPs in Scotland’s devolved parliament will rise to £77,710 in April, after Holyrood’s cross-party corporate body agreed an above inflation 4.3% pay rise.
A parliament spokesperson said that pay increase, which leaves MSPs earning a little over twice the average wage of £38,464.40 in Scotland, had risen in line with the annualised average weekly earnings index figure for September 2025 – a measure Holyrood has used since 2022.
Jackson Carlaw, the former Scottish Conservative leader who chairs the corporate body, stressed when he announced the pay rise that MSPs’ pay was still below that for MPs and for members of the Welsh Senedd.
He said it also left MSPs lagging 8.2 percentage points below the consumer prices index rate of inflation, a real terms pay cut of about £5,300. (CPI does not include housing costs, however, which if applied would reduce that deficit somewhat.)
Addressing Holyrood’s finance and public administration committee, Carlaw said:
I do not say this to virtue signal, but to counter the inevitable reporting of any increase that is generated by actions of the corporate body, and point out that that still leaves us behind Westminster and the Senedd when the initial arrangement between the three parliaments was that the Scottish parliament MSP sat in the middle of the street.
Office staffing costs for MSPs would rise by the same rate to £169,000 per member, while the parliament’s overall budget would rise to £150m, equivalent to 0.255% of the Scottish government’s overall budget of £60bn.
Carlaw noted that that budget was, in cash terms, twice as large as Holyrood’s budget in 2007. But he said that while day to day costs were being cut, rising staffing costs and costs for next May’s parliament election had driven up overall spending.
Liz Kendall says Elon Musk’s X must ‘urgently’ deal with ‘appalling’ sexualised deepfake content produced by its Grok AI
Liz Kendall, the science secretary, has said that sexualised deepfake content being produced by Grok AI on Elon Musk’s X social media platform is “absolutely appalling, and unacceptable in decent society”.
As Amelia Gentleman, Helena Horton and Dan Milmo report in our story on this from yesterday, there has been a growing outcry over the way X (formerly Twitter) has an AI feature that allows users to create degrading images of children and women with their clothes digitally removed.
Despite multiple global protesters, and investigations being launched by regulators, the problem does not yet seem to have been resolved.
The issue is particularly embarrassing for the government for two reasons. First, only last month Keir Starmer specifically said the government would ban apps that allow this sort of image to be created. He said:
We are going to aim to make it impossible for children to take, share or view a nude image, and we’re banning apps that create deepfakes.
Starmer posted that message on X. And the Grok semi-naked deepfake feature is also awkward for the government because it has revived complaints about why the government continues to use X as a communications platform when, even before this scandal was exposed, it was already reviled for weak moderation policies that have led to a surge of hate speech on the platform.
Yesterday, when asked about the problem and why it was continuing to use X, Downing Street said that it always kept its communication strategy under review and that the Online Safety Act was designed to address this sort of problem. Ofcom also announced it was urgently contacting X to find out what it was doing to ensure it complied with the law.
Today Liz Kendall, the science secretary, has intervened with a statement saying that the sexualise deepfake content produced by Grok was “absolutely appalling” and that she would back Ofcom in taking any enforcement action.
She said:
What we have been seeing online in recent days has been absolutely appalling, and unacceptable in decent society.
No one should have to go through the ordeal of seeing intimate deepfakes of themselves online. We cannot and will not allow the proliferation of these demeaning and degrading images, which are disproportionately aimed at women and girls.
X needs to deal with this urgently. It is absolutely right that Ofcom is looking into this as a matter of urgency and it has my full backing to take any enforcement action it deems necessary.
Services and operators have a clear obligation to act appropriately. This is not about restricting freedom of speech but upholding the law.
We have made intimate image abuse and cyberflashing priority offences under the Online Safety Act – including where images are AI-generated. This means platforms must prevent such content from appearing online and act swiftly to remove it if it does.
Violence against women and girls stains our society – and that is why we have also legislated to ban the creation of explicit deepfakes without consent, which are both degrading and harmful.
Make no mistake – the UK will not tolerate the endless proliferation of disgusting and abusive material online. We must all come together to stamp it out.
Kendall did not address the calls for the government to stop using X. But in the Lords yesterday Ruth Anderson, a government whip (formerly Ruth Smeeth, when she was a Labour MP), answered a question about this. She said that with 19.2 million Britons using X, and 10.8 million families describing it as their main source, the government still felt it worth posting on the platform. She said:
The government use an audience-first approach, assessing all communication channels against the GCS [government communication service] Safe framework. Paid advertising on X has been suspended since April 2023; the platform is used only for organic content. We continuously evaluate all channels’ value for money and brand safety and use a wide range of digital platforms to reach all UK audiences.
Anderson herself has not posted on X since December 2024.
Some organisations have already left X because of the way the platform has become more toxic under Musk. In November 2024 the Guardian announced that it was no longer using for any of its official accounts, although we still consult it as a news source and some journalists still post there.
An X spokesperson said:
We take action against illegal content on X, including child sexual abuse material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary.
No 10 declines to back Badenoch’s claim that Trump’s overthrow of Maduro ‘morally’ right
Downing Street has declined to back Kemi Badenoch’s claim that the American operation to depose and arrest Nicolás Maduro was “morally” right. (See 9.20am.)
At the lobby briefing this morning, asked if Keir Starmer agreed with the Tory leader’s comment, the PM’s spokesperson said:
The prime minister is a world leader, not a commentator [giving] a running commentary on foreign policy decisions taken by other countries and I’m not going to get drawn into that now.
But we’ve also been very clear abour our views on the fall of the Maduro regime. It turned a functioning democracy into a hub for organised crime with corrupt ties to Iran and Hezbollah, aligned support from Russia, involvement in illicit finance, sanctions evasion, narcotics trafficking and illegal gold trading. We are on the side of the Venezuelan people as they look towards a peaceful transition to a democratic government.
The spokesperson adopted a similar line about not wanting to give a “running commentary” on global affairs when asked about Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, saying that Greenland should “obviously … be part of the US”. The spokesperson referred to the statement signed by Starmer and other EU leaders (see 12.57pm), but said he would not provide a commentary on every remark coming out of the US.
But, when asked about Miller’s comment about might being right (“we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”), and whether Starmer agreed, the spokesperson did give a substantive answer – albeit one that was a bit waffly. He said:
There have always been moments that lead us to question whether the rules-based international order is working as intended. The prime minister has alluded to that by repeatedly saying the world is more volatile than ever before.
But he’s clear that he has the prosperity and security of the UK at the forefront of his mind in every international engagement that he undertakes. And defending democracy, standing up for human rights and the rule of law are obviously principles that this prime minister cares about deeply.
Whilst there are obvious threats to that world order, our strategic partnerships with our allies are as close as ever. And we remain clear-eyed about the challenges we face and the complex issues we have to navigate that.
But this prime minister is clear that by beragampengetahuan in our defence, and by building stronger partnerships, we can protect our interests and be strong abroad.
But the spokesperson refused to accept the argument that the US might be one of the “obvious threats to … world order”. Asked to say where the threats were coming from, he cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Asked if Starmer regarded Trump as a threat to European security, the spokesperson replied: “No.”
No 10 won’t say if it regards interim leader of Venezuela as legitimate
Downing Street has declined to say whether it regards Delcy Rodriguez, who has been approved by the US as the interim leader of Venezuela, as the new, legitimate leader of the country.
Rodriguez was vice president before Nicolás Maduro, the president, was seized by US forces on Saturday and taken to the US where is now in jail and facing criminal charges.
At the No 10 lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson said there there was no update on whether UK sanctions on Rodriguez would be lifted.
Asked if the UK regarded her as a legitimate president, the spokesperson said:
It’s a fast-moving situation. We are focused on supporting stability in Venezuela and the best interests of the Venezuelan people.
Starmer joins European leaders in saying Denmark and Greenland, ‘and them only’, must decide Greenland’s future
Keir Starmer has joined the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and Denmark in releasing a joint statement on Greenland saying the Arctic territory belongs to Denmark.
Here is the text.
Frances Mao has more on this on our Europe live blog.
Starmer tells cabinet ‘governments don’t lose because polls go down’ – as YouGov puts Labour behind Reform UK and Tories
Before Christmas Keir Starmer was hoping to use this week to highlight the government’s determination to bring down the cost of living for people. As explained on the blog yesterday, Donald Trump has blown this out of the news with his raid on Venezuela.
But Starmer has not abandoned the plan and, according to a Labour readout from the political cabinet this morning, he told his colleagues that the government should “keep a relentless focus on the cost of living, show relentless delivery of change people can feel and bring relentless clarity to drawing the choice ahead”.
Referring to that choice, Starmer said:
A Labour government renewing the country or a Reform movement that feeds on grievance, decline and division.
They want a weaker state, they want to inject bile into our communities, they want to appease Putin. This is the fight of our political lives and one that we must relish.
Starmer also urged his ministers to ignore the polls
I do not underestimate the scale of the task. But I have no doubt about this team. Governments do not lose because polls go down. They lose when they lose belief or nerve. We will do neither.
(While Starmer is right to say that politicians should not be paralysed by poor poll ratings, because they can change a lot over three years [and sometimes they were wrong too], they can’t ignore polls either. Governments may not lose because polls go down, but normally they do lose when polls go down. A YouGov poll out today has Labour for the first time in third place behind Reform UK and the Tories. See 10.44am.)
Lucy Powell, the deputy Labour leader, attended politcal cabinet. According to the readout, she thanked Starmer and his team “embracing me as deputy leader” and said that she relished “helping to tell the story of whose side we are on”.
Ministers then discussed “successful recoveries of centre-left parties in Norway, Australia and Canada through focussing on delivery and cost of living issues”.
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