Afternoon briefing Wednesday 12th November

0:00This episode of the Times Radio News Briefing is sponsored by PwCWC. Staying competitive means getting ahead, not just keeping up. So how do business leaders cut through the noise and focus on what really matters? PwC takes you further with tech, from optimising the systems that put your data to work, to scaling AI from proof of concept to competitive edge. PwC helps you meet tomorrow's tech demands so you can compete at a speed that rewrites the rules. Discover more at pwc.co.uk. This is your Times Afternoon Briefing for Wednesday the 12th of November. West Streeting has said briefings about him supposedly plotting against the Prime Minister are self-destructive.

0:44The health secretaries criticise Number 10 for promoting the rumours, not Sir Keir Starmer. Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator at the Times, says elements of Downing Street did believe there was a challenge coming. They wanted to head that off. And if you were sort of thinking about this in a roundabout way, you might say, well, they've got a public denial from West Streeting. Nobody's going to move after the budget. that's a victory even if it's very painful. Actually speaking to MPs last night and this morning I think the opposite is true. I think if anything it has radicalised MPs and other members of the cabinet against them.

1:22Seven men have been charged with more than 40 offences as part of an investigation into group-based child sexual exploitation in Bristol. Reporter Sinead Garvin has more. The alleged offences by a group of men aged 19 to 26 are against 11 teenage victims between 2022 and 2025, according to Avon and Somerset Police, who've been investigating for two years. The charges include rape, sexual exploitation of children and supplying ecstasy and cocaine. The police has published the suspects' names, each of their individual charges and ethnicities, saying four of the seven men are Arab and the other three's ethnicity is not disclosed.

2:04A record four million people, an increase of a million in a year, are claiming universal credit and face no requirements to look for work. Some are adults in full-time education, but many are signed off for long-term sickness. Director of Policy at the Centre for Social Justice, Joe Shallum, told Times Radio that some of the increase is explained by people being moved onto universal credit from benefits which are being discontinued. I think it's about three quarters of a million people have moved over since the election and that's going to be driving up the numbers. People with disabilities are moving straight on to the kind of no work requirements bit of the UC system.

2:40But look, there is undoubtedly a deeper issue at play here, a problem with the broken incentives within the welfare system that are leading to thousands, if not millions of people languishing outside the Labour force. The Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick has told Times Radio that posting a video in which the Justice Secretary David Lammy was edited to look like he was wearing a clown costume was not racist. The Labour MP Uma Kumar complained, saying he was using historic racist tropes in a deeply problematic way. The MP Dawn Butler also called on him to delete the tweet immediately. Mr Jenrick was asked on Times Radio whether he was making any racial connotations.

3:19No, none whatsoever. In fact, it's a disgusting smear against me. We can't have a situation where clowns are racist. Keira Knightley and comedian Joe Wilkinson, who recently took part in The Traitors, play a romantic couple in Waitrose's Christmas ad this year. It's a four-minute rom-com about them connecting over a shared love of food. For more stories like this, listen throughout the day to Times Radio.

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