Suella Braverman will meet police and national security officials at No 10 to discuss ‘accelerated’ risk
UK ministers will hold an emergency meeting of its Cobra committee amid concerns that the Israel-Gaza conflict has raised the possibility of a domestic terrorist incident.
The home secretary, Suella Braverman, will meet national security officials and police at No 10 on Monday to assess the security risk after the deadly Hamas attack on Israel more than three weeks ago.
Continue reading...Tom Pursglove, minister in DWP, photographed with Bone two days after suspension over bullying and sexual misconduct
A minister has been photographed campaigning with the former Conservative MP Peter Bone, who was suspended from parliament last week after an investigation found he had engaged in bullying and sexual misconduct.
Tom Pursglove, a minister in the Department for Work and Pensions, was photographed by The Sunday Mirror canvassing in Northamptonshire with Bone two days after his sanction was ratified by MPs.
Continue reading...Scottish first minister expresses relief after communications were cut off during Israeli bombardment
Scotland’s first minister has expressed relief after discovering his parents-in-law in Gaza are alive, although they have run out of clean drinking water.
Humza Yousaf said the welcome news had come through on Sunday morning, hours after describing his worries about whether they were alive or dead following the imposition by Israel of a communication blackout in Gaza on Friday.
Continue reading...Keir Starmer has ‘listened’ to rebels and will ‘continue engaging’, says Peter Kyle, amid mounting pressure from senior party figures
Members of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet will not be punished if they break party ranks by demanding a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, because Labour is a “diverse party”, Peter Kyle has suggested.
The shadow science, innovation and technology minister also rejected claims that Labour was taking Muslim votes for granted, and said the party was not basing its policy on the conflict around what might win votes.
Continue reading...Home Office has imposed a 15 December deadline to eject people who worked for UK in Afghanistan from hotels, say councils
More than 1,000 Afghans in the UK face being made homeless days before Christmas after the Home Office imposed a fresh deadline to eject them from hotels.
The Local Government Association (LGA) revealed the number of at-risk Afghans, which includes families, after the Home Office last week imposed the new deadline of 15 December.
Continue reading...Fee income for 20 largest operators – many private equity-owned – soars as councils struggle to meet costs
The biggest private providers of children’s homes in England made profits of more than £300m last year, as concern mounts over the conditions some children are being placed in and the spiralling costs for councils.
Fee income for the 20 largest operators of independent children’s homes totalled £1.63bn last year, a 6.5% increase on the previous year. And 19% of that – £310m – was recorded as profit, according to an independent analysis. Half of the top 20 providers have some private equity or sovereign wealth fund ownership.
Continue reading...People with families in Gaza call on British government to help get them out and to join calls for ceasefire
On Friday evening, as Israeli air and ground forces ramped up their operations in the Gaza Strip and a communications blackout fell across the embattled territory, Salim Hammad received a text from the UK Foreign Office notifying him of a possible increase in attacks and violence.
“What are we supposed to do with that information?” said Salim, a 34-year-old doctor in Oxford whose father, Abdel, is stuck at the Rafah border crossing.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Vince Cable, Chris Huhne and Norman Lamb claim they were targeted for stories or to 'exert political influence’
Two former Lib Dem cabinet ministers and a former party whip are suing the publisher of the Sun and the defunct News of the World, claiming that their phones were hacked for stories or to “exert political influence”, including when Rupert Murdoch was seeking approval for a takeover of BSkyB.
Journalists working at Murdoch’s newspapers are said to have unlawfully targeted the former business secretary Vince Cable as well as Chris Huhne, a former energy and climate change secretary, and Norman Lamb, a whip and sometime adviser to the then deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg.
Continue reading...Constrained on multiple fronts by finances and resistance from both wings of his party, the PM still has a few vote-winning options
Exhausted by scandals, deflated by byelection defeats and uninspired by their leader at Conservative party conference, many of Rishi Sunak’s MPs are not looking forward to the next year in politics. “It’s hard to muster the enthusiasm to come out fighting given everything that has happened,” said one Tory adviser.
But Sunak appears still to be energised by the prospect of governing for at least another 12 months – and has explicitly said he wants to get things done in the next year. “What can a country achieve in 52 weeks? Watch this space,” his new promotional video said this week.
Continue reading...Campaigners call for Sir Robert Goodwill to resign as Guardian reveals he is also head of ‘destructive’ rural pressure group that backs trophy hunting
The Conservative chair of the environment select committee has been urged to resign as the Guardian revealed he is also chair of a group endorsing nature policies described by critics as “destructive and dangerous”.
Sir Robert Goodwill, who chairs the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Efra) select committee (Efra), is tasked with holding the environment secretary to account on nature and environmental targets. He became chair of the committee after his predecessor, Neil Parish, resigned after a pornography scandal.
Continue reading...Derbyshire and South Yorkshire MPs say agency ‘not up to the task’ after people received warnings too late
MPs in areas of England worst hit by Storm Babet have called for a review of Environment Agency (EA) failings after reporting that some residents received flood alerts only after their homes were flooded.
Toby Perkins, the Labour MP for Chesterfield, said some people at Tapton Terrace in the Derbyshire town, where 83-year-old Maureen Gilbert was found dead in flood water, only received a phone call from the early warning system after their houses had been deluged.
Continue reading...Those unable to leave or with family trapped there say they feel hopeless and have had no help
In late August, Nasser Hamid Said made an emergency trip from London to Gaza with his wife and two children after the death of his sister. For the past 20 days the family have been caught up in an altogether different nightmare: sheltering with relatives amid nonstop Israeli airstrikes and growing fears of an invasion.
“I’m fearful for my children,” he said over the sound of airstrikes in the city of Jabalia. “We need from our government just help to get out. What are they waiting for? I don’t understand.”
Continue reading...Gillian Keegan says to trust in due process as eighth Conservative loses whip over sexual misconduct allegations since 2019
A cabinet minister has said there is no “cultural issue” with Tory MPs after Crispin Blunt became the eighth Conservative during this parliament to lose the whip over allegations of sexual misconduct.
Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, said all the individual incidents were separate and that the prime minister expected due process in the investigation into Blunt.
Continue reading...UK refusing to commit to EU pledge to stop cutting tariffs on big producers despite bananas being as cheap today as three decades ago
It is one of the few British supermarket staples to have bucked the trend during the cost of living crisis, with the price of a bunch of bananas today no more expensive today than three decades ago. Every country in the world with cheaper prices than the UK has its own producers of the fruit.
The government has now been accused of pursuing an irresponsible post-Brexit policy that could reduce the price of bananas further in the shops – but at the cost of the livelihoods of thousands of workers on small plantations in some of Africa’s poorest countries.
Continue reading...Shadow chancellor says she holds her ‘hands up’ in response to FT piece on seemingly copied passages in work on female economists
Rachel Reeves has said she holds her hands up and acknowledges making mistakes in her new book about female economists after she faced allegations of plagiarism.
The shadow chancellor admitted on Thursday that some sentences in her book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, were “not properly referenced in the bibliography”.
Continue reading...Labour leader will also meet MPs today to discuss party’s position on Israel and Gaza
Rishi Sunak will be taking PMQs shortly. It will be his first prime minister’s questions with Keir Starmer since his visit to Israel and the Middle East.
Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.
When Rishi Sunak became prime minister a year ago today, he took immediate action to support families with the cost of living, paying half their energy bills. Since then we have made good progress towards halving inflation, growing the economy, reducing debt, cutting NHS waiting lists, and stopping the boats.
But for the last 30 years, the prime minister recognises that there has been too much short-term political decision making, politicians taking the easy way out, ducking the hard choices, rather than fixing the underlying problems.
The prime minister has proven he is the only person who is determined to change that.
Continue reading...Party to encourage Wellingborough voters to sign petition if Commons votes to suspend Bone on Wednesday
Labour is ramping up plans to force another byelection ahead of a vote on Wednesday to suspend Peter Bone from parliament for six weeks.
Bone was stripped of the Conservative whip after being found by a watchdog to have bullied and harassed a member of staff and exposed his genitals near their face.
Continue reading...The foreign secretary, James Cleverly, claims he’s making a difference in the Middle East but barely has a walk-on part
It’s all very confusing. On Monday, during his statement to the Commons, I could have sworn I heard Rishi Sunak say – with great modesty – he had been vitally important in international efforts to limit the violence in the Middle East. Only his personal interventions with Benjamin Netanyahu, Mohammed bin Salman and Abdel Fatah al-Sisi had prevented an even worse humanitarian catastrophe. Some were even proclaiming him to be a global peacemaker. A saviour among men.
So it was a surprise on Tuesday to hear James Cleverly making pretty much the same claims for himself during Foreign Office questions. Time and again, the foreign secretary would preface an answer with a reference to his own diplomatic missions to the Middle East. He alone had a full grasp of what was at stake as politicians from Israel, Turkey, Egypt and Qatar had begged him for advice. Sure, the prime minister had done his bit, but that had been largely cosmetic. The real donkey work had been done by him. The Great Jimmy Dimly.
Continue reading...Lawyers argue Home Office failed to properly consider whether Begum had been groomed before stripping her of UK citizenship
Shamima Begum’s lawyers argued before the court of appeal on Tuesday that it was unlawful to deprive her of British citizenship because she was a victim of trafficking when she left the UK for Islamic State territory in Syria at 15.
Samantha Knights KC, her barrister, told the start of a three-day hearing that the Home Office and a lower court had failed to properly consider whether she was groomed – and called for the decision to be overturned.
Continue reading...Ex-SNP leader says she passed first time but the challenge of learning took her well out of her comfort zone
Nicola Sturgeon has announced on social media she has passed her driving test at the age of 53.
The former first minister of Scotland said she was successful on her first attempt. She posted a photograph of herself and Andy McFarlane, her driving instructor, on Instagram on Monday.
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