misleading

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer will give his backing to the chancellor’s Budget in a speech on Monday, and commit the government to going “further and faster” on pro-growth measures.

He will say Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s statement will help to alleviate cost of living pressures, lower inflation and ensure economic stability.

It comes as the Treasury faces questions over whether it was transparent about the state of the public finances in the run-up to the Budget.

The Conservatives claimed Reeves misled the public by being too pessimistic about the economic outlook when official forecasts painted a more upbeat picture.

No 10 has denied that Reeves misled voters and defended her statement.

Despite the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) downgrading growth from next year, the prime minister will argue that “economic growth is beating forecasts”, but the government must do more to encourage it.

Protecting investment and public services will further drive financial growth, Sir Keir is expected to say.

The prime minister will also promise to cut “unnecessary red tape” in infrastructure after a report found the UK had become the most expensive place in the world to build nuclear power infrastructure.

He will call for reform in the sector and an urgent correction to “fundamentally misguided environmental regulation”.

Business Secretary Peter Kyle is to be tasked with applying the lessons of the nuclear power report to infrastructure more widely.

The prime minister’s speech on Monday, just five days after the Budget, may suggest some nervousness over how the government’s economic plans have been received by the public, though No 10 say a statement was already planned.

In the days since the Budget, Downing Street has been forced to publicly back Reeves after she was accused by political opponents of repeatedly warning about a downgrade to the UK’s economic productivity forecasts, paving the way for tax hikes.

In a letter to MPs sent on Friday, the chairman of the OBR revealed that he told the chancellor on 17 September that the public finances were in better shape than widely thought.

The Conservatives have accused Reeves of giving an overly pessimistic impression of the public finances as a “smokescreen” to raise taxes.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said the letter showed Reeves had “lied to the public” and should be sacked.

Last week, a spokesperson for the Treasury said: “We are not going to get into the OBR’s processes or speculate on how that relates to the internal decision‑making in the build‑up to a Budget, but the chancellor made her choices to cut the cost of living, cut hospital waiting lists and double headroom to cut the cost of our debt.”

Both the chancellor and Badenoch are scheduled to appear on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme.

LONDON — The BBC apologized Thursday to President Trump over a misleading edit of his speech on Jan. 6, 2021 but said it had not defamed him, rejecting the basis for his $1 billion lawsuit threat.

The BBC said Chair Samir Shah sent a personal letter to the White House saying that he and the corporation were sorry for the edit of the speech Trump gave before some of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as Congress was poised to certify the results of President-elect Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

The BBC said there are no plans to rebroadcast the documentary, which had spliced together parts of his speech that came almost an hour apart.

“We accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action,” the BBC wrote in a retraction.

Trump’s lawyer had sent the BBC a letter demanding an apology and threatened to file a $1 billion lawsuit for the harm the documentary caused him. It had set a Friday deadline for the BBC to respond.

The dispute was sparked by an edition of the BBC’s flagship current affairs series “Panorama,” titled “Trump: A Second Chance?” broadcast days before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

The third-party production company that made the film spliced together three quotes from two sections of the 2021 speech, delivered almost an hour apart, into what appeared to be one quote in which Trump urged supporters to march with him and “fight like hell.”

Among the parts cut out was a section where Trump said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.

Director-General Tim Davie, along with news chief Deborah Turness, quit Sunday, saying the scandal was damaging the BBC and “as the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me.”

The apology and retraction came as BBC acknowledged that its Newsnight program in 2022 had also misleadingly spliced together parts of Trump’s speech.

Melley writes for the Associated Press.

Manchester Airport has defended itself after data revealed that it had the most delayed flights among major airports in the UK during the first half of 2025, with less than three-quarters of flights departing on time

Manchester Airport has defended itself, hitting back with a strong statement after it emerged that the travel hub was ranked as the worst major UK airport for flight delays so far this year.

A study of Civil Aviation Authority data compiled by AirAdvisor found that just 71.5 per cent of flights at the airport left on schedule during the first six months of 2025. The figure falls considerably short of the 77 per cent national average.

Manchester Airport, the biggest UK airport outside of London, has dismissed the data as “misleading to passengers”, arguing that numerous factors contribute to flight delays that are beyond the airport’s control. These include issues such as extreme weather, cabin crew shortages, inbound flight delays and air traffic control staffing.

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A Manchester Airport spokesperson said: “The punctuality of flights can be affected by a number of factors, most of which are outside of an airport’s control. These include inclement weather, airline crew shortages, delays to inbound flights, and even things like continental air traffic control issues including capacity restrictions and industrial action.

“As such, it is inherently misleading to passengers to imply a link between airports and delays – although periodically we do see companies doing this in order to promote themselves and sell particular products or services. In reality, passengers can feel assured that the vast majority of flights that leave Manchester Airport do so on time.”

In turn, the airport’s size and extensive route network can impact the figures for delayed flights, its spokesperson claimed. As Britain’s largest airport outside of London, Manchester serves more than 200 destinations worldwide, with many long-haul routes originating from destinations such as the Middle East and Asia.

These long-haul flights will depart from their home countries, fly into Manchester and then return. This means that if any delays occur at their point of origin, it creates a domino effect on Manchester’s timetable, which then appears in the CAA statistics.

Flight delays are further compounded by air traffic control staffing shortages across Europe, alongside airspace restrictions in Russia, the Middle East and Pakistan – all factors that are beyond the airport’s control, according to its spokesperson.

However, it’s not all bad news, as the statistics reveal progress compared to last year, when only 69.5 percent of Manchester Airport flights departed on time.

Following closely behind Manchester Airport in the charts is Birmingham International, with 72.5 per cent of flights leaving on time, while Stansted and Bournemouth Airports ranked a joint third with 73.5 per cent. The CAA, which gathers punctuality data from 25 UK airports, defines a flight as ‘on time’ if it departs from or arrives at the gate within 15 minutes of its scheduled time.

The top 10 worst major airports for delays in 2025, according to AirAdvisor, are as follows:

1. Manchester – 71.5 per cent of flights were on time
2. Birmingham International – 72.5 per cent
3. Stansted and Bournemouth – 73.5 per cent
4. Bristol – 74.5 per cent
5. Teeside – 75 per cent
6. Newcastle, Gatwick and Jersey – 75.5 per cent
7. Exeter – 76 per cent
8. Edinburgh – 76.5 per cent
9. Southampton – 76.5 per cent
10. Cardiff – 77.5 per cent

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