Sunday Telegraph News

Goldman Sachs operates a 'culture of bullying', according to a former managing director who is suing the bank over claims its working conditions led to his mental breakdown.

Labour government will on Monday set out details of how it plans to slash red tape to boost business, as it struggles to deliver growth nine months after winning power. Chancellor Rachel Reeves' shake-up comes after Prime Minister Keir Starmer took aim at the nation's «flabby state», sparking anger from unions who called on him to avoid the «incendiary rhetoric» of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) in the US. The finance ministry said regulators would be summoned to the prime minister's Downing Street office on Monday to hear Reeves announce her «action plan to deliver on the pledge to cut the administrative cost of regulation on business by a quarter». The «radical» plan would cut «costly red tape» such as the «hundreds of pages of guidance on protecting bat habitats which goes far beyond legal requirements», said a statement, referring to the £100 million ($130 million) spent on a bat tunnel by the company building Britain's new high-speed HS2 train line. The tunnel has become a lightning rod for criticism of the planning system, with the Prime Minister describing it as «absurd».

opinion polls released late on Saturday presented a grim picture for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's Conservative Party, and one pollster warned that the party faced "electoral extinction" in July 4's election. The polls come just over halfway through the election campaign, after a week in which both the Conservatives and Labour set out their manifestos, and shortly before voters begin to receive postal ballots.

military instructors to Ukraine, rowing back from reported comments by his defence minister that he wanted to begin training Ukrainian troops in the country. To date, Britain and its allies have avoided a formal military presence in Ukraine to reduce the risk of a direct conflict with Russia. British defence minister Grant Shapps, who was appointed to the role last month, said in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph newspaper that he wanted to deploy military instructors to Ukraine, in addition to training Ukrainian armed forces in Britain or other Western countries. Hours after that interview was published, Sunak said there were no immediate plans to send British troops to Ukraine. «What the defence secretary was saying was that it might well be possible one day in the future for us to do some of that training in Ukraine,» Sunak told reporters at the start of the governing Conservative Party's annual conference in Manchester. «But that's something for the long term, not the here and now. There are no British soldiers that will be sent to fight in the current conflict.» Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Sunday said any British soldiers training Ukrainian troops in Ukraine would be legitimate targets for Russian forces Britain has provided five-week military training courses to around 20,000 Ukrainians over the past year, and intends to train a similar number going forward. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Shapps said there was scope to offer military training within Ukraine after a discussion on Friday with British military chiefs. «I was talking today about eventually getting the training brought closer and actually into Ukraine as well,» he was quoted as saying.