Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Ursula von der Leyen expected to talk up future negotiations during visit to London
The EU’s opening negotiating position on the future relationship will lack detailed demands to avoid an early clash with Boris Johnson as both sides seek to take the heat out of the coming post-Brexit trade and security talks.
In that vein, the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, is expected to talk up the prospects of the coming negotiations during a visit to London on Wednesday.
Exclusive: leaked resolution by main political groups follows threats of deportation made by British minister
The European parliament will express its “grave concern” about the attitude of Boris Johnson’s government to the 3.3 million EU citizens living in the UK following threats of deportation made by a British minister.
In a leaked resolution drafted by the main political groups and due to be backed by MEPs next Wednesday, Johnson’s administration is accused of creating “anxiety” in recent months.
Ian Murray, Labour’s only surviving MP in Scotland, is preparing to enter the contest to become Labour’s deputy leader on a platform of constitutional reform and countering nationalism.
Murray, an arch critic of Jeremy Corbyn’s and an opponent of Brexit, is expected to signal his intention to run tomorrow after being asked to stand by other Labour MPs. His plans to run are thought to depend on getting sufficient early nominations, but it would fuel the brewing conflict between the party’s pro-Corbyn wing and its centrists.
There are no doubts that constitutional and nationalist issues are engulfing our politics. I have the experience and knowledge of dealing with both, and the Labour party has ducked this issue for too long. English nationalism from the Tories and Scottish nationalism from the SNP are squeezing the Labour Party and we must stop it.
[The] danger for our party across the UK is what I have been warning of since 2015. If we don’t tackle the big constitutional issues with reference to our own values and the national interest, then we lose our core purpose.
After listening to Angela Rayner’s speech this morning, my colleague Kate Proctor concluded it was hard to see why she was running for the deputy Labour leadership when she might be a strong candidate for leader. (See 12.23pm.) It is not hard to see why. It’s a good speech, with some compelling lines and a superb opening.
Here is the opening.
I wanted to make this speech here, on the estate where I grew up and lived for most of my life.
I talk about my background because for too long I felt I wasn’t good enough; I felt ashamed of who I was. It took me time for that shame to turn into pride.
We fell into the trap of describing a platform of revolutionary change. By the standards of recent politics, it was, and rightly so.
But actually, we could have told a simpler story.
Many of the friends I grew up with, my own family even, voted to leave the EU.
They felt like we treated them as embarrassing aunts or uncles.
There are also lines beyond which there is no dialogue and no compromise possible.
And the first line in the sand is antisemitism.
Nor should we take for granted the new voters we have won over, any more than we should have done those we have lost.
For all that’s said about London, we made no net advance in seats there either. We faced a fight to hold others like Dagenham and Rainham - a place that, like my own constituency, has so much to gain from a Labour government, but where too many people felt our party had lost touch with them.
Across Europe social democratic parties are collapsing.
The once mighty German SPD, the biggest and oldest social democratic party in the world is on 11 percent
I don’t pretend that I have all the answers. That is the point of being a collectivist. That by the strength of our common endeavour, we achieve more than we do alone.
That final sentence is a quote from the new Clause IV introduced by Tony Blair.
I owe much of my life to Labour.
The Labour governments that provided the welfare state, Sure Start, and the minimum wage, which gave me the help I needed to not just survive but succeed.
Prime minister also intends to press his Brexit bill through Commons in three days
Boris Johnson will host the president of the European commission, Ursula Von Der Leyen, in Downing Street this week as he prepares to take Britain out of the EU at the end of this month, kicking off a race against time to secure a free trade deal.
The prime minister will use the comfortable majority he won at last month’s general election to press his Brexit bill through the House of Commons in three days when MPs return to Westminster on Tuesday.
YouGov poll shows Starmer in lead to head party over nearest rival Rebecca Long-Bailey
Sir Keir Starmer, the favourite to succeed Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, has called for the party to become a “trusted force for good” as up to nine rival candidates consider whether to stand next week.
The shadow Brexit secretary is seen as the candidate to beat following a YouGov poll showing he has a commanding lead over nearest rival and Corbyn ally Rebecca Long-Bailey, the shadow business secretary.
PM talks up Britain’s future as he attempts to reach out to those who did not vote Tory
Boris Johnson has pledged to represent remainers and work with them as “friends and equals”, in a New Year’s Day message in which he sounded upbeat about the UK’s fortunes in the 2020s.
The prime minister, who is seeing in the new year on the private Caribbean island of Mustique, said he was “acutely aware” that millions of people did not vote for him despite the Tories’ landslide election victory.
Plan to drop dedicated fund while defence spending rises dismissed as false economy
The European commission has been accused of seeking to cut EU funding for the continent’s poorest people by 50% to secure post-Brexit cost savings and extra funds for defence projects.
Jacques Vandenschrik, the president of the European Food Banks Federation, said the EU executive’s proposed spending plans for the next seven years posed a risk not only to the most vulnerable but to the stability of wider society.
Ursula von der Leyen airs concerns about PM’s refusal to extend negotiations past 2020
Boris Johnson should reconsider his refusal to extend the 11-month timeframe available for agreeing a deal on the UK’s future relationship with the EU after Brexit, Ursula von der Leyen has suggested.
The European commission president said she had “serious concern” about the limited time available for the negotiations and emphasised the need to keep all options open.
Total monthly applications exceeded 100,000 in January, March, April and May
Almost a million Irish passports were issued in 2019, the country’s government has announced.
The figure is a new record and represents a 7% increase on 2018. Simon Coveney, Ireland’s foreign affairs minister, said: “2019 was another bumper year for the Passport Service. The award-winning Passport Online [service] expanded in 2019 to include first-time applicants in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Great Britain and Europe. Irish citizens including children can also renew their passports online 24/7, from anywhere in the world.”
European commission’s VP writes ‘love letter’ to Britons, saying UK unnecessarily damaged by Brexit
Britain has been unnecessarily damaged by Brexit and “more will follow”, the vice-president of the European commission has written in a “love letter” to the British people in which he promises a warm welcome back should attitudes change.
Frans Timmermans, who is Ursula von der Leyen’s deputy in her role as European commission president, writes that British scepticism of the EU had been an asset to the bloc as he expresses his own feelings of rejection ahead of the country’s impending departure on 31 January, likening himself to a jilted “old lover”.
Brexit, millennials, binge-watching… every word in the English language was coined by someone. What’s it like to be an accidental wordsmith?
Are we living through a golden age of linguistic inventiveness? Buzzwords and neologisms – from office jargon to the lexicons of democratic chaos in Britain and the US, as well as the ever-expanding culture wars – rain down on us every day, and can gain global currency at the speed of fibre-optic cable. Many, of course, fail – like “Brixit”, an early rival to Brexit, or “Generation Me”, one proposed label for what we now call millennials. Others rapidly become part of the modern conversation. Why, for example, do critics call young, supposedly over sensitive and easily triggered people “snowflakes”? Because in Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club, Tyler Durden says: “You are not special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.”
Palahniuk’s contribution, however, was accidental. He later explained: “Back in 1994, when I was writing my book, I wasn’t insulting anyone but myself… My use of the term ‘snowflake’ never had anything to do with fragility or sensitivity.” Instead, he was using it as a means of “deprogramming himself”, so he didn’t believe in his own praise. But the point is that you can’t control what usage will do once it’s out of your hands: a much wider uptake can shift the meaning. The term “woke”, for example, is now used mockingly for a kind of overrighteous liberalism; but its first recorded use, by the African-American novelist William Melvin Kelley, was meant to indicate an awareness of political issues, especially those around race, a positive usage that still also persists.
Bishop of Dover, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, says damaging rhetoric has harmed society as a whole
The Church of England’s first black female bishop has said the debate around Brexit damaged society and contributed to the death of the MP Jo Cox.
Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the former chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons, said the arguments around Brexit had had a harmful effect both on parliamentarians and on society as a whole.
Location for talks to be split with Brussels in symbolic shift marking UK’s non-EU status
London is expected to co-host the next stage of post-Brexit negotiations with Brussels in a symbolic shift marking the UK’s position outside the EU after 31 January.
The most likely location for the talks involving teams led by Michel Barnier for the EU and a yet-to-be-identified minister for the British government is the Cabinet Office in Whitehall.
Lawyers warn loss of reunion rights for unaccompanied refugee children will put them in danger
The loss of family reunion rights for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children will leave them with “no options” except taking dangerous routes and using smugglers, charities in France and Greece are warning.
The prime minister, Boris Johnson, faced criticism after he told parliament he had dropped a promise to replace the EU law that allows child refugees stranded in Europe to reunite with family members in the UK after Brexit.
Britain has taken a pivotal step towards leaving the European Union as Boris Johnson was rewarded for the Conservatives’ thumping general election victory with a majority of 124 for his Brexit deal in the House of Commons.
Addressing MPs on Friday morning, the prime minister sought to draw a line under three years of bitter parliamentary conflict, urging his colleagues to “discard the old labels of leave and remain”.
Brexit secretary Steve Barclay said the general election had delivered a clear instruction to parliament to leave the EU and so MP should respect that decision and back the bill.
This bill is not a victory for one side over the other. The time has come to discard the old labels to move from the past divisions and to come together as one United Kingdom.
Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary who is predicted to run for the Labour leadership, warned Conservative MPs to “be careful”. “Doing things because the government has a majority doesn’t mean those things are right,” he said.
He said that the move to water down commitments to child refugees is an example of that. “That is a moral disgrace,” he said.
I turn to my own benches. We may have lost the general election, but we have not lost our values and our beliefs and we must fight for them – day in, day out – in this parliament and we will.
That doesn’t mean that the deal negotiated by the prime minister is a good deal. It isn’t. It was a bad deal in October when it was signed. It was a bad deal when it was first debated in this House in October. It was a bad deal last Thursday and it’s a bad deal today.
EU president warns of time running out in the expected 11 months available to strike deal
Ursula von der Leyen has warned that a cliff-edge Brexit at the end of 2020 will hurt the UK more than the EU as she laid out her intentions to “make the most” out of the “extremely challenging” 11 months available to strike a trade deal.
The European commission president acknowledged the danger of time running out during the negotiations, a risk many fear has been amplified by Boris Johnson’s symbolic decision to legislate to block an extension of the transition period.
Boris Johnson’s plan to make it illegal for the government to extend the Brexit transition period beyond 11 months has been described as “strange” by Ireland’s deputy prime minister, as Brussels prepared to limit the scope of the coming negotiations.
Simon Coveney said it amounted to the “UK deciding to tie itself in terms of options” while the director general for trade in the European commission, Sabine Weyand, said the ambition of any deal would need to be pared back.