Roy Harrison, who came to Britain from Jamaica aged six, fighting deportation notice
A man caught in the Windrush scandal has resorted to sleeping in a freezing bin shed because the Home Office has not regularised his status and is trying to deport him.
Roy Harrison, 44, arrived in the UK as a six-year-old. He had been abandoned as a newborn in Jamaica by his mother and left on his grandmother’s doorstep.
Continue reading...Labour leader would negotiate new deal with EU, which would be put to a public vote alongside remain
Jeremy Corbyn would take a “neutral stance” in a future Brexit referendum, he has announced, after facing mounting pressure in recent days to pick a side.
Appearing in a special BBC Question Time programme, in which Boris Johnson was attacked over racism and Jo Swinson found herself on the back foot over Brexit, Corbyn confirmed for the first time he would not campaign either for leave or remain.
Continue reading...Home Office unhappy with Foreign Office for potentially opening door to more Isis returnees
No other British children are expected to be repatriated from Syria in the foreseeable future, despite the announcement from the foreign secretary on Thursday that a small number of orphans who had been caught up in the conflict with Islamic State had been brought home.
Home Office officials view the repatriation of the children, who cannot be named for legal reasons, as highly exceptional – and there is unhappiness with the Foreign Office for potentially opening the door to more Islamic State returnees.
Continue reading...UK criticised for defying UN deadline to hand over control of Indian Ocean territory
Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to renounce British sovereignty of the remote Chagos Islands and respect a UN vote calling for the archipelago to be handed back to Mauritius.
In comments that appear to commit Labour to return the Indian Ocean islands, the party’s leader said on Friday he intended to “right one of the wrongs of history”.
Continue reading...‘Investment blitz’ promised as experts taken aback by scale of Labour’s tax and spend plans
Jeremy Corbyn has urged the public to vote for his “manifesto of hope” as he unveiled plans for the most dramatic increase in tax and spending in more than half a century if Labour wins power next month’s general election.
In an upbeat launch event at Birmingham City University, the Labour leader said he welcomed the hostility of the billionaires, bad bosses and dodgy landlords who would lose out from his policies.
Continue reading...Party promises record investment blitz and to scrap tuition fees and universal credit
Corbyn is now responding to questions from students at the venue, Birmingham City University.
He says young workers will benefit from the living wage.
Q: Some voters do not see you as patriotic. Is that fair?
Corbyn replies:
Yes, I do support this country. I am patriotic about this country.
Continue reading...Prospect of crashing out of EU leaves UK more exposed to global financial risks, thinktank says
The UK’s GDP growth rate will slip to 1% next year even if a no-deal Brexit is avoided, according to the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation.
The OECD said the economy would slow down from growth of 1.2% this year if parliament passes Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal before the 31 January deadline, before returning to 1.2% in 2021.
Continue reading...Contributions from European countries drop as progress on 0.7% target goes into reverse
Less than 10% of EU aid money reaches the countries where it is most needed, according to a study that found levels of assistance had dropped for the second year running.
The EU and its member states remain the biggest development donor group in the world – investing €71.9bn ($61bn) in 2018, more than half of global aid – but its contribution was 5.8% lower than in 2017, the European NGO network, Concord, found in its AidWatch report.
Continue reading...PM’s apparent blunder over £12,500 threshold could benefit him amid ‘factchecking’ row
Boris Johnson has said he wants to raise the national insurance threshold to £12,500, letting slip a major Tory tax cut from the manifesto as he was speaking to workers in Teesside.
The prime minister blurted out the key announcement as he was pressed by an employee at a fabrication yard about whether he would help “people like us”, not just the rich.
Continue reading...Labour leader claims service will be sold by PM, who keeps repeating Brexit mantra
Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn have clashed over which of them is best placed to safeguard the NHS if they win the general election, with the Labour leader accusing the prime minister of being ready to sell it off to US corporations.
In a testy live debate on ITV, during which the prime minister repeatedly returned to the claim that he would “get Brexit done”, both men lavished praise on the NHS, but Corbyn said Johnson would put it up for sale.
Continue reading...All the day’s developments on the campaign trail before Johnson and Corbyn’s first TV debate
Boris Johnson has gone for some Rocky Balboa-type posturing ahead of tonight’s ITV debate. (See 2.33pm and 4.50pm.) As you would expect, Jeremy Corbyn’s warm-up routine is rather different.
Labour leader @jeremycorbyn has arrived for the #ITVdebate, saying he hopes for a respectful debate and prepared by eating a Caesar salad#GE2019 #Leadersdebatehttps://t.co/itw9efaa2W pic.twitter.com/Z2PVqCmgEd
And here is another useful Twitter thread on the likely impact of the debate tonight, from the academic Prof Tim Bale. It starts here.
THREAD: Did a @SkyNews bit today on debates. Here's (some of) what we think we know from research in the UK and elsewhere. 1/8
Continue reading...Planned changes would be biggest shakeup to country’s electoral system for 50 years
A bill is being introduced that would give the vote to 16- and 17-year-olds in many elections in Wales and empower local authorities to decide which voting system they use.
The Labour-led Welsh government said the planned changes would be the biggest in the Welsh electoral system since the voting age was reduced to 18 in the UK half a century ago. They come as a bill to reduce the voting age to 16 for Welsh assembly elections nears the end of its journey through the Senedd.
Continue reading...Party under pressure on climate crisis as Corbyn says Johnson can not be trusted
The Conservative party’s record on tackling the climate crisis was condemned by leading scientists and former government advisers on Sunday, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn warned that the forthcoming election was the last chance to halt the escalating emergency.
Experts accused the Conservatives of copying rightwing politicians in the US by deliberately weakening environmental protections. Meanwhile, new analysis by Labour reveals that environmental policies put forward since 2017 and opposed by the Tories would have led to emissions reductions of over 70m tonnes a year by 2030 – more than the annual emissions of Portugal.
Continue reading...Youth campaigners have stepped up efforts to oust Boris Johnson from his constituency with grassroots organisations increasingly hopeful they can make history by ensuring he is the first prime minister to lose their seat at a general election.
Despite speculation that Johnson might have relocated to a safer seat, it was confirmed on Thursday that he would stay put, ignoring an internal assessment from the intelligence agency GCHQ that he is potentially at risk.
Continue reading...Nick Boles says ‘final resolve’ of supporters was lacking
Advanced plans for another centrist political party to be launched after Brexit were developed by MPs earlier this year, it has emerged.
Dozens of figures from inside and outside Westminster were involved in the project, designed to go public once a second Brexit referendum was no longer possible.
Continue reading...The second day of impeachment hearings featured compelling testimony from Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine who was sacked by Trump. Yovanovitch evidence drew links between corrupt elements in Ukraine and the Trump administration's push to force her from her post. She said she was 'shocked and devastated' by Trump's personal attacks on her. As she spoke, Donald Trump attacked her on Twitter, prompting the Democrat chair of the hearing, Adam Schiff, to read the tweets to Yovanovitch in real time. 'The effect is intimidating,' she said, as Democrats accused the president of witness intimidation on a day of high political drama
Continue reading...PM makes false statements about Brexit being ‘blocked’ and his record as London mayor
Boris Johnson is facing criticism over a series of inaccurate statements made in a flurry of live broadcast interviews during a difficult day of campaigning.
The prime minister was challenged on Friday on subjects as varied as crime, Brexit, the abandoned London garden bridge project and the number of children he has fathered.
Continue reading...Document to reiterate radical 2017 commitment to ‘sector-wide collective bargaining’
Labour’s manifesto will reaffirm plans for the most dramatic shift in conditions for employees in Britain since the 1980s – including changing the way wages are set for 20 million workers.
The “clause V” document, which will be agreed by senior party figures at a meeting on Saturday, is expected to be launched by Jeremy Corbyn next week.
Continue reading...Jeremy Corbyn will announce free internet plan in speech in Lancaster, while prime minister is in Oldham
Johnson is now asked whether he has done enough for the flood victims. He says you can never do enough for someone who has suffered in a flooding. Of course there’s always more you can do, he says, but he will make sure that the insurers don’t “weasel out of their obligations” to the flood victims. His government has put far more into flood defence than previous Labour governments, he says, 2.6bn.
They move on to migration. Is net migration going to rise and fall under a Conservative government? Johnson says “it’s a great thing” that there are “more EU nationals in the UK than ever before”. Once we come out of the EU, in January, we will take control of our borders, the PM says. When pressed for particular target numbers, Johnson says he doesn’t want to play the numbers game. He says the problem is uncontrolled immigration, and that this is what Labour wants to pursue. He brings up an Australian-style point-based immigration system again. Is a brain surgeon or a porter getting more points? His analysts haven’t decided yet, the PM says.
Over 20 years, the debate about freedom of movement has become skewed by a hostile narrative. By Rachel Shabi
Few chance encounters have had a greater political impact than Gordon Brown’s fateful meeting with Gillian Duffy on an April morning in Rochdale in 2010. When the then prime minister was caught on a hot mic calling the Labour-voting pensioner a “bigoted woman” – after she cornered him with complaints about immigrants “flocking” into Britain – it did not just sink his floundering campaign. It set the tone for the way immigration would become the most toxic issue in British politics for the decade to come.
When New Labour came to power in 1997, just 3% of the public cited immigration as a key issue. By the time of the EU referendum in 2016, that figure was 48%. During those intervening years, the issue came to dominate and distort British politics – exactly according to the script established by Bigotgate. Brown’s gaffe both consolidated and gave credence to a political coding that would shape everything that came after: the “hostile environment”, the Windrush scandal, the EU referendum and the revival of Britain’s far right – deploying a narrative in which sneering, out-of-touch, big-city politicians who favour foreigners and open borders are hopelessly oblivious to the struggles and the so-called “legitimate concerns” of ordinary working people (who, in this scenario, are always white).
Continue reading...