Town hall leaders condemn ‘ill-thought-out’ plan to merge English councils

Survey reveals senior officials think changes will do little to address local authorities’ dire financial crisis

Ministers’ plans to shake up the structure of English local government by merging councils are “ill-thought-out”, “insane” and a “bizarre diversion” that will fail to deliver savings, according to a survey of town hall leaders.

The depth of unhappiness with the plans is revealed in an annual poll of senior councillors and executives, most of whom said the changes would be costly, time-consuming and do little to address the dire financial crisis facing councils.

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‘I was devastated’: MP hopes her story will help improve maternity care for disabled women

Exclusive: Marie Tidball tells of her experiences with NHS as report finds 44% higher risk of stillbirth for disabled women

When doctors tried to work out whether Marie Tidball would need a specially designed birth plan, one asked her to lie fully clothed on the bed and spread her legs in the air so they could see how far they could open.

The incident was one of several occasions when Tidball, now a Labour MP, felt neglected during her pregnancy and early motherhood because of the NHS’s failure to adapt on account of her physical disabilities. Tidball has physical impairments affecting all four of her limbs and had major surgeries on both her hips and legs as a child.

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Starmer highlights UK’s war record in implicit rebuke to Vance as Lib Dems mock Badenoch for defending him – as it happened

Interventions follow US vice president’s comments about ‘20,000 troops from some random country that has not fought a war in 40 years’. This live blog is closed

In response to a question about intelligence cooperation with the US, Sir David Manning, a former ambassador to Washington, said he thought this would become “more difficult” because there was a problem of trust. He explained:

If you have some of Trump’s appointees in these key jobs who have very strange track records, and have said very strange things about Nato allies, the Nato alliance and so on, and you have people in the administration who seem to be, let’s say, looking for ways of appeasing Russia, then you have a problem on the intelligence front, because these are not the values that we have.

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Starmer welcomes Zelenskyy’s offer to work with Trump on Ukraine peace deal – as it happened

PM says any deal must be ‘lasting and secure’ following fiery Trump-Zelenskyy meeting last week and UK weekend summit. This live blog is closed

Lisa O’Carroll is the Guardian’s acting Ireland correspondent.

Michelle O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s first minister, has described a decision to build thousands of lightweight missiles for Ukraine in a Belfast factory as “incredulous”.

I find it really incredulous that at a time when public services are being cut left, right and centre.

At a time when we have endured 14 years of austerity ... I think at a time like that, rather than buying weapons of war, I would rather see the money invested in public services.

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Trump commitment to peace in Ukraine sincere, Starmer says, but minerals deal not enough to provide US security guarantee – live

Prime minister says UK must strengthen relationship with US for security

As Jakub Krupa and Martin Belam report on our Europe live blog, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, is floating proposals for a month-long ceasefire in Ukraine covering air, sea and attacks on critical infrastructure.

In interviews this morning, Luke Pollard, the defence minister, played down reports that this is a plan that Britain is formally backing. Asked about French government claims to this effect, he replied:

No agreement has been made on what a truce looks like, and so I don’t recognise the precise part you mentioned there. But we are working together with France and our European allies to look at what is the path to how … we create a lasting and durable peace in Ukraine.

You wouldn’t expect me to get into the details of what that plan looks like, because at the moment, the only person that would benefit from those details being put in the public domain before any plan is agreed would be President Putin.

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Tories compare Nigel Farage to Jeremy Corbyn over Ukraine war

Reform leader accused of ‘equivocating over Russia’s illegal war’ after criticising Volodymyr Zelenskyy

The Conservatives have compared Nigel Farage to Jeremy Corbyn after the Reform UK leader said Volodymyr Zelenskyy had been “rude” to Donald Trump, as well as criticising the Ukrainian president for not wearing a suit to the Oval Office.

The Liberal Democrats accused Farage of parroting White House talking points after Farage denied that Elon Musk and Steve Bannon had given Nazi salutes, saying their gestures were “out to the side and not in front”.

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‘Worse than the Tories’: cultural figures question Labour plans for arts in schools

Government must scrap English baccalaureate to make arts more accessible to working-class children, critics say

Leading cultural figures have expressed doubts about the government’s commitment to restoring the creative arts in English schools, with one warning that Labour has “lost the plot” and “the current signs are they are worse than the Tories”.

When Labour won the election, it promised to expand opportunities for working-class children by broadening the school curriculum to include more drama, art, music and sport alongside the core academic subjects.

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UK and France will work on own Ukraine peace plan, says Keir Starmer

PM says he and Macron have agreed to begin talks as Europe scrambles to respond to White House disaster

Britain and France will work on their own peace plan for Ukraine, Keir Starmer has said, as European leaders scrambled to respond to Friday’s disastrous White House meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The prime minister told the BBC on Sunday that he and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, had agreed to begin negotiations separate to those between the US and Russia, after a series of hurried phone calls on Saturday evening.

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Labour must target deprived areas or lose out to Reform, says former minister

Peer argues that national ‘trickledown’ approach will fail to benefit those in most need

Keir Starmer’s government must strictly target the delivery of its core “missions” at areas of maximum deprivation or lose huge numbers of votes to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, an independent commission led by a former Labour cabinet minister will suggest this week.

The Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods (ICON), chaired by Labour peer Hilary Armstrong, a former party chief whip and housing minister, will say the government risks “wasting billions of pounds in higher public spending while failing to transform the places that need it most” unless it adopts the targeted approach.

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Anneliese Dodds resigns over Keir Starmer’s decision to cut aid budget

Exclusive: International development minister warns it will be ‘impossible’ to retain funding in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine

Anneliese Dodds, the international development minister, has quit her post over Keir Starmer’s decision to slash the international aid budget by almost half to pay for an increase in defence spending, warning it could enable Russia and China to further their global influence.

The senior Labour MP, who attended cabinet, predicted that the UK pulling back from development would bolster Moscow, which has already been aggressively increasing its presence worldwide, as well as encourage Beijing’s attempts to rewrite global rules.

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Cuts to UK vaccine funding could lead to ‘huge numbers’ of child deaths overseas

Exclusive: Hundreds of thousands of world’s poorest children could die if aid programme slashed, experts warn

Hundreds of thousands of children in the world’s poorest countries will die if the UK cuts back funding for a hugely effective vaccination programme as part of its significant reduction in overseas aid, the Guardian has been told.

According to data collated by the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi), to which the UK has previously been one of the main contributors, even a small cut in UK funding would be expected to result in millions fewer vaccinations, leading to huge numbers of preventable deaths.

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Grenfell Tower: seven organisations face debarment from government contracts

Possible action comes as ministers announce plans to improve building safety and strengthen accountability

Seven organisations involved in the Grenfell Tower disaster face possible debarment from government contracts as ministers set out plans to improve building safety and strengthen accountability.

The government has accepted the findings of the final Grenfell Tower inquiry report and pledged to take action on all the recommendations.

Consulting on a new college of fire and rescue later in 2025 to improve training and professionalism of firefighters.

Stopping unqualified individuals from making critical fire safety decisions, by legally requiring fire risk assessors to have their competence certified.

Continuing implementation of a new residential personal emergency evacuation plan policy to improve the fire safety and evacuation of disabled and vulnerable residents in high-rise and higher-risk residential buildings, engaging with relevant stakeholders on the implementation.

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No 10 talking to ex-Boris Johnson aide Munira Mirza about multiculturalism

Contact could unsettle some in Labour given her past record on the issue including criticism of Lammy report

Downing Street has been holding discussions with Munira Mirza, a longstanding and often controversial aide to Boris Johnson who has repeatedly criticised ideas about structural and institutional racism, it is understood.

Although it is believed that No 10’s contact with Mirza has been limited to a handful of calls at most, and that she is among a range of outside voices Downing Street has spoken to, her involvement in any sort of discussions with the government is likely to spook some Labour MPs.

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Badenoch challenges Starmer over defence spending and Chagos deal ahead of his Trump meeting – UK politics live

PM fields questions on his announcement that the UK will raise defence spending and cut the foreign aid budget

PMQs is about to start.

Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.

The threat from the far right is real, but that leaves me all the more convinced that working together is not only the right choice, but the only choice …

More unites us than divides us. Now is the moment to make that real by uniting behind shared values, shared standards of behaviour and shared political norms, and unite against the rise of the far right.

I want us to work together to agree a common approach to asserting the values of our country, to bringing people together and creating a cohesive society where everyone feels at home …

It is time to come together, to draw a line in the sand, to set out who we are and what we believe in, because a politics of fear is a politics of despair …

I want to work with other political parties to set out clearly and boldly to the public what we can agree on as the norms and the values of our society and how we can protect those because I think they are under threat, I think they’re under very, very vigorous threat, from the politics of Farage.

Farage has been for years leading the argument which has been hostile to migration. And I think it’s based on a fundamentally racist view of the world. I reject that. I think migration is an advantage for Scotland.

There is a very live and active threat to our security from the aggression of Russia, and I think Farage is an accomplice to the Russian agenda and an apologist for the Russian agenda.

So to anybody in this country who thinks that Farage represents a means of protecting this country from the external threats that we face, I would say, have a good close look at what Farage has been connected with and what his MPs are saying about the Russian threat and their trivialisation of the Russian threat.

I’m simply making the point today that it’s important that those of us who are repulsed by the politics of Farage and the far right come together to … stress the importance of the values that we hold dear.

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Starmer can only hope slashing aid to boost defence wins Trump’s favour

PM’s Washington trip clear impetus for abrupt news of budget switch to meet defence commitment by 2027

Before Keir Starmer’s meeting with Donald Trump on Thursday, the prime minister thought it necessary to offer the president a gift. Britain’s defence spending will increase by 0.17 percentage points to 2.5% of GDP by April 2027, he told MPs in a hastily arranged Commons statement. The money, he added, would be taken directly from the overseas aid budget, whose level will be cut by nearly half to 0.3%.

The last measure is a remarkable turn for a Labour government. Uncomfortably, it comes at a time when Donald Trump wants to shut down perhaps the entire $40bn US aid budget – and at a stroke eliminates a signature commitment from the Blair-Brown years. It was back in 2004, when Tony Blair was prime minister, that Labour first committed to increasing aid spending to 0.7% of GDP.

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Ministers urged to add audiobooks to England’s new schools curriculum

Charity calls for move after poll finds ‘crisis’ levels of reading for pleasure and rise in 8- to 18-year-olds enjoying audio

The government has been urged to include audiobooks in the new schools curriculum in England, after research showed fewer children were reading books for pleasure and more were listening to them instead.

A poll by the National Literacy Trust (NLT) found that children’s enjoyment of listening to audio and podcasts had risen compared with the previous year, overtaking their enjoyment of reading for the first time since the charity began asking about audio in 2020.

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Starmer announces ‘UK’s largest packet of sanctions’ against Russia since early days of war with Ukraine – UK politics live

​PM says Trump has ‘changed global conversation on Ukraine’ as he pledges more military aid and sanctions

Keir Starmer called for support for Ukraine to be boosed in three ways in his virtual speech to the conference in Kyiv.

First, military support should increase, he said.

The UK is doing that, providing £4.5bn pounds in military aid this year, more than ever before. We’re doing more than ever to train Ukrainian troops helping Ukraine to mobilise even further. And we are proud to have taken on the leadership of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group.

So today, we’re announcing the UK’s largest packet of sanctions since the early days of the war, going after Russia’s shadow fleet and going after companies in China and elsewhere who are sending military component.

Later day, I will be discussing further steps with the G7. But I am clear that the G7 should be ready to take on more risk, including the oil price cap, sanctioning Russia’s oil giants and going off the banks that are enabling the evasion of sanctions.

President Trump has changed the global conversation over the last few weeks, and it has created an opportunity.

Now we must get the fundamentals right if we want peace to endure. Ukraine must have a seat at the table, and any settlement must be based on a sovereign Ukraine backed up with strong security guarantees.

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‘Real anger’: Labour can expect hostile reception at farmers’ annual gathering

UK food producers plan more protests over inheritance tax changes ahead of this week’s NFU conference in London

The suits and black cabs which typically dot the streets around Westminster have been frequently replaced by the wellies, tweed jackets and tractors of aggrieved farmers of late. The next protest in London by the nation’s food producers is expected on Tuesday morning, ahead of the annual get-together of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU).

Farmers have regularly swapped their fields for the city since October, when changes to inheritance tax (IHT) for agricultural businesses were announced by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, angrily protesting and waving banners.

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‘Starmer’s big moment’: can PM persuade Trump not to give in to Putin?

The UK leader has been advised to choose his words carefully at this week’s crucial White House meeting

Keir Starmer lays down Ukraine peace demand ahead of Trump talks

When Keir Starmer is advised on how to handle his crucial meeting with Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday, he will be told by advisers from Downing Street and the Foreign Office to be very clear on his main points and, above all, to be brief.

“Trump gets bored very easily,” said one well-placed Whitehall source with knowledge of the president’s attention span. “When he loses interest and thinks someone is being boring, he just tunes out. He doesn’t like [the French president, Emmanuel] Macron partly because Macron talks too much and tries to lecture him.”

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Watchdog investigates Andrew Gwynne over offensive WhatsApp messages

MP was sacked as a minister and suspended from Labour party after messages were revealed

Parliament’s standards watchdog has launched an investigation into Andrew Gwynne, who was sacked as a minister over offensive comments made on a WhatsApp group.

The MP was also suspended from the Labour party after messages were revealed in which he said he hoped a pensioner who did not support him would die before the next set of elections.

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