UK government urged to honour pledge to Afghan refugees’ families

Exclusive: Charities and activists call on PM to follow through on pledge to allow families to resettle in UK

More than 100 charities and activists are calling on the prime minister to facilitate the resettlement of family members of thousands of Afghans who came to the UK under a government scheme.

The government pledged to resettle family members in the UK but at the moment there is no mechanism for them to do this. Campaigners have accused the government of abandoning Afghans in danger who were promised the right to reunite with family members in the UK.

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British Council workers in Afghanistan step closer to UK relocation

Minister speaks of ‘progress’ on security checks, but Foreign Office clarifies no green light yet for contractors

A group of 47 British Council contractors forced to live in hiding since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan have cleared the penultimate hurdle for being accepted on to a scheme designed to relocate them in the UK.

The group was said to have passed security checks and been invited to provide biometrics at a visa centre, after which they would have to have a final set of security checks.

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Labour dismisses Rishi Sunak’s five new pledges as mostly ‘so easy it would be difficult not to achieve them’ – as it happened

Prime minister urges public to judge him on whether he delivers on new pledges but Labour says most ‘were happening anyway’. This blog is now closed

Lucy Powell, the shadow culture secretary, has issued a statement welcoming the government’s proposal to abandon the privatisation of Channel (without actually putting it in those terms). She says the government should never have floated the plan in the first place, and that it has been a “total distraction” for the broadcaster. She says:

The Conservatives’ vendetta against Channel 4 was always wrong for Britain, growth in our creative economy, and a complete waste of everyone’s time.

Our broadcasting and creative industries lead the world, yet this government has hamstrung them for the last year with the total distraction of Channel 4 privatisation.

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Strikes, elections and Dominic Raab: Rishi Sunak’s headaches to come in 2023

PM has reinstated ‘boring government’ but smooth relations with backbenchers are unlikely to last

At the end of one of the most tumultuous years of politics in decades, Rishi Sunak is confident he has successfully managed to calm Tory MPs and – in the words of one senior aide – “bring back boring government”.

He has sought to kick some controversial pieces of legislation into the long grass, performed quick U-turns and managed to satiate a parliamentary party with a seemingly unquenchable thirst for regicide.

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Inflation, waiting lists, strikes, rail chaos, climate emergency: the 2022 polycrisis

Almost every facet of life in the UK – courts to cost of living, transport to healthcare, environment to asylum system – is at breaking point

In mid-November Rishi Sunak was asked in a Channel 4 interview to name one public service that “was working, adequately, working properly”.

The prime minister didn’t give a direct answer. But the exchange feeds into an ever-more-common discourse: that the UK is facing “polycrisis” in almost every facet of life in Britain. From courts to the cost of living, transport to healthcare, environment to the asylum system – everywhere appears to be affected.

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Home Office urged to reunite Eritrean family separated as they boarded boat

Appeal for UK authorities to bring over mother who was left in France after smugglers departed shore with her three children

The Home Office is under pressure to reunite a family of Eritrean asylum seekers after smugglers forced three children, the youngest aged just five, to cross the Channel on a small boat before their mother could get on board with them.

The woman, 31, who was staying in northern France hoping to reach the UK, paid smugglers for places on a dinghy for herself and her three children, a boy aged 14 and two girls aged nine and five, to cross the Channel on 16 December. She said she believed the UK was the place where she would find safety and a respect for the human rights of her family.

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‘We are overjoyed’: the family finally united in the UK after fleeing Yemen

Half the Hareth family obtained visas, but three sons faced years of danger and uncertainty, until they were recognised as refugees

A refugee family have celebrated their first festive season safely together in two and a half years after the Home Office abandoned threats to deport three of them because they arrived in the UK on a small boat.

The Hareth family – mother, Ferdowz, and father, Hussein, both 55, Hamzah, 27, Hassan, 25, Hazem, 24, and Azzam, 14, fled war in Yemen, but had very different journeys to the UK and contrasting experiences of dealing with the Home Office even though their circumstances were identical.

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‘I’m in a safe place’: Ukrainian refugees’ mixed feelings about Christmas in UK

People taking refuge are grateful to their hosts but rue spending the festive season far from their families

Like many Ukrainian refugees, Yuliia Kashperenko will spend Christmas away from home this year.

She feels upset at the thought of being away from her family and friends in Ukraine, but comforted to know she will spend the holiday with her host and their children in south London.

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UN human rights chief says UK should rethink plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda

Exclusive: Volker Türk critical of scheme he considers ethically problematic and believes government must look again at how to deal with people-smuggling gangs and the treatment of refugees

The new UN human rights chief has urged the British government to reconsider its plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, warning that in the past similar “offshoring” schemes had led to “deeply inhuman” treatment of refugees.

In his first public comments on the controversy since taking office two months ago, Volker Türk rejected prime minister Rishi Sunak’s description of the £140m deal as “common sense”, saying that as well as being legally and ethically problematic it was also “very costly” and unlikely to work.

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‘I am very scared’: refugees await judgment on UK’s Rwanda policy

Law courts will deliver their verdict on Monday on whether plans to export asylum seekers are lawful

It has been more than three months since two of the UK’s most senior judges sifted through thousands of pages of evidence and heard opposing arguments from some of the country’s lawyers about whether or not the government’s controversial plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda are lawful. On Monday at 10.30am, at the Royal Courts of Justice, they will deliver their judgment.

The government’s plan to export asylum seekers from one of the world’s richest countries to one of the world’s poorer nations, 4,000 miles away, is so radical that no other country has attempted anything like it.

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‘Life is ebbing away’: Egyptians face peril at sea in dangerous new exodus to Europe

Poverty puts thousands into the grip of people smugglers plying a deadly trade in the Mediterranean

Youssef initially doesn’t want to remember the treacherous boat journey that took him from Egypt, then to Tobruk in Libya and finally to Italy, but he knows clearly why he left.

A young man in his 20s, Youssef is recently married and expecting a baby in a few months, and fears about the increasing cost of living in Egypt overwhelmed him. He gave in and contacted a people smuggler on the internet, using a Facebook group where those looking to migrate can post information about crossings.

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Suella Braverman feeding Farage politics, says outgoing government adviser

Nimco Ali says Rishi Sunak should sack the home secretary, or risk losing the next election

An outgoing government adviser has criticised Suella Braverman for allegedly encouraging an increase in racism in Britain and “normalising” the politics of Nigel Farage.

Nimco Ali, who is stepping down from her role as the government’s adviser on tackling violence against women, added that Rishi Sunak should sack Braverman, warning that keeping her on as home secretary will see him lose the next election.

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Tories ‘at risk from rightwing insurgency’ warns donor Lord Cruddas

Peer says Conservatives no longer party of centre right and are threatened by Reform UK, Brexit party successor, if Nigel Farage takes leadership

The Conservative party is under threat from a rightwing insurgency after a “drag to the left” under Rishi Sunak, one of its biggest recent donors has warned, amid growing tensions on the Tory right.

Peter Cruddas, the peer who has given the party more than £3.5m, said the Conservatives were “no longer a centre-right party” under Sunak, adding that he refused to back it financially until it changed course.

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Ministers accused of unlawfully denying Afghan journalists UK visas

Ben Wallace and Suella Braverman ‘turned their back’ on former BBC journalists who are in danger, high court told

Ministers have unlawfully “turned their back” on former BBC journalists whose lives are at risk from the Taliban by refusing to relocate them from Afghanistan to the UK, the high court has heard.

Eight Afghan journalists, who worked in high-profile roles for the BBC and other media agencies in the country from which British troops withdrew last year, are challenging the decision to deny them UK visas.

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Channel deaths: desperate call from boat raised alarm for rescue operation

Skipper of fishing vessel tells how his crew spent two hours pulling 31 people from the freezing water

Four people died and more than 40 were rescued after a desperate call to a charity warned that a boat carrying asylum seekers including children had capsized in the Channel on Wednesday morning.

An unidentified man on the sinking vessel, in a recording obtained by the Guardian, asked at 2.53am for the alarm to be raised to save his family who were in the icy waters.

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‘You could see the panic’: how the Channel small boat incident unfolded

Experts said lessons appeared to have been learned from previous incidents as teams scrambled into action after dinghy capsized

The emergency call came through at 2.53am. “Please help me bro, please, please, please. We are in the water. We have a family.”

The unidentified man, on a stricken dinghy, used WhatsApp to contact the French NGO Utopia 56, a humanitarian association, which works to support migrants in the camps in northern France.

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PMQs live: Rishi Sunak quizzed by Keir Starmer over nurses’ strikes

Latest updates: prime minister faces Labour leader ahead of industrial action by nurses on Thursday

Yesterday Mark Harper, the transport secretary, claimed that public support for the rail strikes was declining. Today Ipsos has published some polling that backs up this claim, although support for the RMT has not collapsed, and public opinion is still divided. It puts support for the strikes at 30%, down from 43% in September. And opposition to the strikes is at 36%, up from 31%.

Yesterday Savanta published polling showing a similar trend. It said that net support for the rail workers on strike was +21 in October (those supporting them, minus those not supporting them), and that now it was down to +13.

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Four people dead after small boat incident in Channel

Major search and rescue operation launched after incident off Kent coast

Four people have died after a migrant small boat got into difficulties in the Channel, a UK government spokesperson said.

A major search and rescue operation was conducted off the coast of Kent by British and French authorities after receiving a distress call at about 3am on Wednesday.

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Rishi Sunak says changes to asylum system should lead to ‘vast majority’ of Albanian applications being refused – live

Prime minister makes statement in Commons, saying he wants to abolish backlog of unprocessed asylum claims by end of next year

The Conservative MP Adam Afriyie has been made bankrupt after a judge in a specialist court heard how he owed around £1.7m, PA Media reports. A bankruptcy order was made against Afriyie, who represents Windsor, at an online hearing in the insolvency and companies court today by judge Nicholas Briggs.

This story, by my colleagues Heather Stewart and Rowena Mason last year, explains the background to this case.

We completed our enquiry into the impact of the ending of freedom of movement on the adult social care sector in April and submitted the report to government and parliament. We recommended that care workers continue to be eligible to apply for a health and care worker visa and made some additional recommendations for changes to the immigration system to ease the burden on social care employers and migrants.

However, our main recommendation was that a minimum rate of pay should be established for care workers at a premium to the statutory minimum wage where care is being provided with public funds. We suggested that this should initially be set at £1 per hour above the national living wage but expected a more substantial premium to be needed to properly address the crisis in social care recruitment and retention.

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Rishi Sunak tells MPs he will clear asylum backlog by end of 2023

PM says he has signed deal with Albania and will resume ‘hostile environment’ checks on bank accounts

Rishi Sunak has insisted he can clear a backlog of nearly 100,000 asylum claims by the end of next year as part of a set of policies that include resuming “hostile environment” checks on bank accounts suspended after the Windrush scandal.

The prime minister outlined a five-point plan in the Commons including law changes to criminalise and then remove tens of thousands of people who claim asylum after travelling to the UK by small boats, and a deal with Albania to aid removals to the Balkan state.

A small boats command, with an extra 700 staff from Border Force, the National Crime Agency and other agencies, to combat people smugglers and the surge in arrivals across the Channel.

An end to the use of hotels for more than 40,000 asylum seekers. They will be sent to disused former military bases, holiday camps and student accommodation.

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