The chancellor has been slated by politicians, the public and campaigners for pushing ahead with brutal welfare cuts – but there were other options

There is growing criticism of Rachel Reeves for her orthodox approach to managing the public finances. While it is clear that modest reductions in spending put forward in the spring statement cannot be described as a return to austerity, they are expected to deliver considerable harm to vulnerable people at a time when wealth inequality continues to rise.

Critics also believe the chancellor’s policies to improve living standards are flawed, and more radical reforms of the way Britain’s economy operates need to be supported by the government. Here we look at some of the options open to the chancellor.

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The nomination by Conservatives of the former chief inspector of schools has been met with outrage by the headteacher’s family, and called ‘obscene’ by school leaders

Amanda Spielman, Ofsted’s chief inspector when headteacher Ruth Perry took her own life after a bruising inspection, is poised to join the House of Lords after being nominated by the Conservatives, the Observer can reveal.

Spielman, who earlier this month launched what was widely seen as an overtly political attack on Labour’s schools bill, is one of several names on former prime minister Rishi Sunak’s list, due to be put forward for King Charles’s approval as part of the annual birthday honours. Her nomination was met with outrage by Perry’s family, while school leaders described it as “obscene” and “an insult to every teacher in the country”.

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Female MPs say they are unnerved by how women seem to be taking brunt of anger over government decisions

As Keir Starmer’s cabinet gathered last week, a female minister spoke directly to the prime minister to complain about the leaks and briefings she saw directed against other women around the table.

The women were listed by name, including the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson; the work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, and the home secretary, Yvette Cooper. Starmer was furious and said he would no longer tolerate malicious briefings, and that there would be consequences if it did not stop.

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Billboards in Birmingham cite party leader’s remarks about a new funding model as local elections campaigning begins

Labour has begun an all-out assault on Nigel Farage over his views on the NHS in the run-up to key elections in May, as the Reform UK leader prepared to host what is billed as his party’s biggest ever rally in Birmingham.

In a coordinated campaign before Farage spoke at a 10,000-person event in the city on Friday evening, Labour paid for nearly a dozen billboard posters around the city with messages about his talk about replacing the NHS with an insurance-based healthcare system.

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Firms who wine and dine officials may gain a seat at the policymaking table while the third sector is squeezed out

• Government officials treated to hospitality 3,500 times in five years, study finds

Ministers from Keir Starmer downwards have sometimes seemed perplexed about what they see as the fuss made over their acceptance of hospitality in the last nine months.

From their point of view, free tickets to concerts and sporting events are a paltry form of compensation for the disruption to their private lives that comes from being a frontline politician.

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Some of firms providing meals and tickets also among those to secure most meetings in key departments

• Analysis: Ministers must ask why they are offered freebies

Ministers, senior officials and special advisers were treated to hospitality including lunches, dinners, and sometimes tickets on about 3,500 occasions in five years, according to a new study.

Some of the firms that provided the hospitality were also among those to secure the most meetings in key government departments, underlining the potential benefit to offering “freebies”.

Senior Treasury officials accepted hospitality from HSBC at least 10 times, and the bank also had 24 meetings with officials during the period – more than any other stakeholder.

Top Treasury officials also accepted hospitality from Barclays 11 times over that time, and the bank had the third highest number of meetings at 17.

Between them, the two banks provided hospitality or attended meetings with senior officials or ministers in the Treasury on average 1.2 times a week, the report found.

One of the top providers of hospitality to Treasury ministers was the lobbying group UK Finance, which was also in the top four organisations to get the most meetings with Treasury ministers.

Gareth Davies, the permanent secretary of the Department of Business and Trade (DBT), accepted tickets to the Chelsea flower show courtesy of the consultancy firm Oliver Wyman, as well as Bafta and Olivier awards tickets from a film company and theatre group, all in 2024.

At the DBT, accounting giants KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and Oliver Wyman were in the top five firms giving hospitality to senior officials. Those three firms were also in the top seven firms getting the most meetings.

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Britain’s PM has not been open with his citizens for fear of backlash from Washington, but this crisis demands honesty

Boris Johnson is an unlikely role model for Keir Starmer. The Etonian bluffer and the stolid lawyer could hardly be more different, but there’s one thing the former prime minister got right. Five years ago this week, Johnson spoke to the country in a direct, televised address that conveyed the seriousness of the threat Britons faced and steeled them for the pain to come. Now Starmer needs to do the same, not because there is a pandemic on the way – but because Donald Trump is already here.

That six-minute video message of Johnson’s was transformative. It signalled that we had entered a period of emergency in which almost everything we had taken for granted – including basic human liberties – would no longer apply. “ Stay at home,” he said and, with few exceptions, we did. Johnson framed the sacrifice as an act of patriotism, implicitly drawing on memories of blitz-spirit solidarity: “I know that as they have in the past … the people of this country will rise to that challenge.” They did. Hence the fury when it emerged that Johnson and his circle had not themselves made the sacrifices that they had demanded of everyone else, a fury that drove him and eventually his party from power. But it all began with that TV address.

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Ministers seek carve-out from import taxes before 2 April deadline – but critics believe they may have offered too many concessions

UK ministers and senior officials at every level are holding talks with US counterparts this weekend in a last-ditch effort to secure a carve-out from swingeing import taxes.

Government sources said ministers were raising Donald Trump’s looming tariffs as the “No 1” issue in every conversation with the US.

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Michael Stewart had led counter-terrorism programme since 2020, and reviews exposed its basic failures

The head of the government’s controversial counter-terrorism programme Prevent is leaving his position after a damning inquiry revealed the strategy’s failures in relation to the Southport attack.

Michael Stewart had spearheaded the programme – which aims to to stop people from becoming involved in or supporting terrorism – since September 2020.

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Justice secretary says ‘all options are on the table’ and threatens to change law

Keir Starmer has said that he is “disappointed” at the Sentencing Council’s refusal to agree to the government’s request to withdraw the guidelines that have led to claims it is promoting “two-tier” justice. (See 11.44am.) Asked about the Sentencing Council’s letter this morning, he said:

Look, I’m disappointed in this response, and the lord chancellor is obviously continuing to engage on this, and we’re considering our response.

All options are on the table. I’m disappointed at this outcome, and now we will have to consider what we do as a result.

Farage wants you to eat chlorinated chicken just so he can keep licking the boots of his idol Donald Trump.

It’s so pathetic and unpatriotic.

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Concerns over sentencing guidelines are genuine but government also hopes to win admirers with tough attitude

• Starmer ‘disappointed’ as Sentencing Council rejects calls to review ‘two-tier’ justice rules

From one perspective, having a stand-up row with an organisation meant to advise the government on a key policy area is a bit unseemly. But it is fair to say that Downing Street is ready – you could even say happy – to take on the Sentencing Council.

The row over a review of sentencing guidelines for England and Wales escalated on Friday after the Sentencing Council rejected government demands that it U-turn over a plan for judges to take account of pre-sentence reports before jailing people from ethnic or religious minorities.

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PM said ministers would consider next steps over guidance for judges in England and Wales aimed at tackling bias

• UK politics live – latest updates

The prime minister has signalled he is prepared to change the law to stop the introduction of “two-tier” sentencing guidelines, after an arm’s-length body resisted pressure to scrap them.

Keir Starmer said “all options are on the table” after the Sentencing Council for England and Wales refused to back down despite pressure from ministers.

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Neoliberalism destroys democratic hope and the far right fills the political void. We need a new politics of belonging, not Labour’s craven appeasement of capital

The democratic recession does not begin when a far-right party takes office. It begins when a centrist party crushes hope in democracy. When Keir Starmer’s government takes a chainsaw to people’s aspirations for a fairer, greener, kinder country, he cuts off not just faith in the Labour party but faith in politics itself. The almost inevitable result, as countries from the US to the Netherlands, Argentina to Austria, Italy to Sweden show, is to let the far right in.

So what’s the game? Why adopt policies that could scarcely be better calculated to prevent your re-election? Why stick to outdated fiscal rules when projections suggest they’ll make almost everyone worse off, especially those in poverty? Why impose devastating attacks on wellbeing, such as sustaining the two-child benefit cap, freezing local housing allowance and cutting disability benefits?

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison, is published in paperback this week

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Exclusive: Matthew Doyle is second senior member of PM’s team to be in post for less than a year after election

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer’s director of communications, Matthew Doyle, is standing down from his role after nine months in No 10, the Guardian understands.

Doyle is the second senior member of Starmer’s team to be in post for less than a year after the election, following the departure of Sue Gray as his chief of staff in the autumn.

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The PM offers a political hybrid designed for a fickle electorate. There are short-term electoral gains to be won, but risks in the long term

For more than eight months now, since shortly after Labour won power, more and more people have been outraged by the government’s moves to the right. Starting with its decision to keep the Conservatives’ cruel two-child benefit cap last July, the government has regularly given these critics reasons to feel shocked, betrayed or just disappointed.

From deportation videos to Keir Starmer’s declaration that “I like and respect” Donald Trump, from repeated public sector cuts to the chancellor Rachel Reeves’s talk of “ tearing down regulatory barriers” in this week’s spring statement, Labour has often behaved as if the boundaries between its supposedly centre-left politics and the politics of the right or even the far right have simply melted away.

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The government has put improving the NHS at the heart of its plans, but will it be able to deliver on its promises? And how long could it take to turn the health service around? Pippa Crerar asked health secretary Wes Streeting at a special Guardian Live event. In a wide-ranging discussion, he also took questions on others issues including assisted dying, transgender rights and the war in Gaza.
To purchase the full event video on demand, go to the theguardian.live

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Exclusive: Simon Blake says progress of government’s bill could be exploited by those attacking rights globally

The new head of Stonewall has pledged to fight for a ban on conversion practices that includes “every member of the lesbian, gay, bi and trans community”, as he said that the progress of Labour’s bill may be exploited by those pursuing global attacks on LGBTQ+ rights.

With the UK government expected to publish draft legislation this spring, Simon Blake said: “It’s really important that a conversion practices bill covers all practices designed to try to change or correct somebody’s sexual or gender identity.”

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Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff uses maiden Lords speech to emphasise importance of public servants

Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff Sue Gray has told No 10 to be “careful” about civil service cuts and derogatory language about the work of Whitehall.

Making her maiden speech in the House of Lords, Gray made the case that civil servants were integral to realising the government’s objectives and would be listening to language that referred to them as “blobs” and “pen-pushers”, and to talk of cuts with “axes” and “chainsaws”.

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The government’s plan to ramp up defence spending means relying on carbon-intensive industries – and those won’t be the only policy compromises they have to make

The UK will become a “defence industrial superpower”, said the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in Wednesday’s spring statement, an ambition that will involve using much more steel, one assumes.

Now comes news that the Chinese owner of the UK’s second largest steel plant may close its two blast furnaces as early as June, which would further erode the UK’s already-thin steel-making capabilities. Indeed, closure of Scunthorpe would also mean an end to domestic steel-making from scratch using traditional carbon-intensive blast furnaces – the other two, at Tata’s Port Talbot site, closed last year.

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About a third of children were living in deprivation even before this week’s benefit cuts. This appalling situation can’t go on

A record 4.5 million children in the UK were growing up in poverty in the year to April 2024, according to figures released on Thursday, which provide a chilling backdrop to the government’s newly announced benefit cuts. Staff at a Blackpool charity, Disability First, have received “ terrified phone calls” as claimants struggle to understand how the disability benefit reductions in the chancellor’s spring statement will affect them.

About a third of children live in deprivation. Those with lone parents, or two or more siblings, or in families where someone is disabled are overrepresented among the poorest households. This is hardship of a scale and severity that can be hard to comprehend for those who have not experienced or seen it. Recent research from the Trades Union Congress revealed that 17% of workers surveyed had skipped a meal to save money over a three-month period. As well as shortages of food, the poorest families face problems with housing and essentials such as clothing, toiletries and furniture. Headteachers have reported pupils being exhausted due to lack of sleep, and distressed by feelings of shame, among poverty’s detrimental effects.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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It was a morning from hell for the chancellor. After the spring statement and Trump’s overnight tariffs, time for a kicking

That screeching noise you can hear? It might just be the government trying to avoid making contact with reality.

You know the saying. Go to sleep on it. Things will look better in the morning. Well, that didn’t quite work out for Rachel Reeves. She went to bed on Wednesday with everyone from all sides of the political spectrum giving her a hard time for the spring statement that definitely wasn’t an emergency budget. Because an emergency budget would suggest that something had gone wrong in the last six months. And Rachel was certain that everything was tickety-boo.

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The ‘party of change’ says it’s bound by fiscal rules. What voters hear is that all governments are the same, and things will never get better

It was change that won it. That was the single word to which Labour eventually boiled down all its complex ambitions; the six-letter slogan plastered triumphantly across its manifesto, because by the summer of 2024 change was pretty much the only thing the people of an exhausted country could all agree on. What kind of change exactly had by that point almost ceased to matter. Anything but this, millions of us told ourselves, as we scattered our votes in all directions.

It was clear even at the time that there were tensions between that urgent, almost reckless hunger for change and the naturally careful, cautious instincts of a steady-as-you-go incoming prime minister and chancellor. But Labour papered over them with the impenetrable mantra that, actually, if you think about it, “stability is change”. Well, actually, it isn’t. That line was never going to hold, and with Wednesday’s spring statement it finally broke.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Chancellor delivers a spring statement strong on wishful thinking and light on compassion for those hit by cuts

• UK politics live – latest updates

Whatever you do, just don’t call it an emergency budget. It’s a SPRING STATEMENT, you halfwits. Everything is totally normal. This is precisely the fiscal event that Rachel Reeves had always planned to give. Why the long faces? What could be more Labour than implementing massive welfare cuts just days before the tax rises you imposed last autumn come into effect? Just another day in Westminster.

“I have full confidence in the chancellor,” Keir Starmer declared at prime minister’s questions. You couldn’t help wondering if this was the equivalent of a football club chair insisting that the manager’s job was safe just days before sacking him. There again, Keir isn’t spoilt for choice over possible replacements. Reeves looks to be by far the best qualified member of the cabinet. It probably hadn’t occurred to you that things could be even worse.

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The chancellor boosted defence spending while piling on further welfare cuts – all set against gloomy growth forecasts

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