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A rapid rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine across the UK’s four nations lifted GDP by 2.1% in March, helping prevent a steep fall during the first three months of the year, according to official figures. My colleague Phillip Inman has the story here.
Related: UK economy rebounds in March after rapid Covid vaccine rollout
Ed Miliband, the shadow business secretary and former Labour leader, has also been talking about how his party needs to do better. He was doing a morning interview round this morning (he is speaking at the end of the Queen’s speech debate later), and here are the key points he made.
We propose a £30bn green infrastructure plan, absolutely we should be doing that.
We should be bolder, of course we should be bolder.
I’ll tell you what my explanation is.
We had our worst election results since 1935 in 2019, that we have a mountain to climb, that Keir Starmer has provided new leadership, he has put the remain-leave argument behind us, but we all have a collective responsibility to show exactly what we stand for going forward.
What I’m interested in is what we do now. You don’t blow the final whistle on the match a third of the way through the match, which is where we are probably in this parliament; we go out and we fight for what we believe in.
That’s what we’ve got to do as a party – look to the country, as Angie Rayner is saying.
Where is the plan? As well as not having a financing system we have got to have a proper investment in social care going forward. We have got to start paying our social care workers decently.
What we have seen in this pandemic is our key workers – who do some of the most important jobs in our country – often paid the least.
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