Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Prime minister to celebrate bill to MPs ahead of vote, but fast-tracking of legislation faces condemnation
The UK’s post-Brexit trade deal with Brussels delivers a “historic resolution” making the country a “friendly neighbour” to the EU, Boris Johnson will tell MPs on Wednesday as they vote on the agreement.
The deal is expected to sail through the parliamentary approval process in just a day, with the backing of Labour and after the pro-Brexit European Research Group of Conservative MPs indicated on Tuesday that it would support it.
“The great strategic prize of the 21st century is the full economic, political and social empowerment of women,” said William Hague, when he was foreign secretary. “There are still large parts of the world who are undervaluing, under-utilising, under-developing half their population.” That was five years ago, and there is still a long way to go. I am speaking out now, because we are about to go into reverse.
Parliament’s women and equalities committee, which I chair, isn’t afraid to take the prime minister to task when his policies fall short in providing for the marginalised and under-represented. We’ve held the government’s feet to the fire on the domestic abuse bill, the role of women in the response to Covid-19 and the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on BAME communities. But the need to level up society doesn’t stop at our borders, and many of the world’s poorest countries are also the most unequal.
PM says he is confident trade deal will withstand ‘ruthless’ scrutiny from Eurosceptics
The EU and the UK government have published the full text of the Brexit trade deal less than a week before it is due to be implemented, as Boris Johnson urged his backbenchers to support the agreement when it reaches parliament next week.
The deal, which comes to more than 1,250 pages, will be voted on in the House of Commons on Wednesday, a day before the Brexit transition period ends.
Parliament should be recalled to deal with the crisis of coronavirus, not just that of leaving the EU
In January 1979, a beleaguered Labour prime minister, James Callaghan, returned from a Caribbean summit to a country that appeared in crisis. A week earlier, truck drivers had gone on strike, cutting off petrol supplies in the “winter of discontent”. When the prime minister arrived at London’s Heathrow airport, he held a press conference in which nothing memorable was said. Instead, in a phrase that has become code for political complacency, Callaghan became for ever associated with the following day’s Sun newspaper headline: “Crisis? What crisis?”
His fate was sealed. Callaghan lost the next general election to Margaret Thatcher. The lesson for politicians is the importance of perception in a crisis. If something feels like a crisis, it is effectively a crisis. Britain now confronts its most serious emergency since the second world war. It faces the unprecedented challenge of coronavirus while adjusting to a new diminished status outside the European Union. The country’s health service is at breaking point, and its future as a unified state is on the line. All this goes unmentioned by Boris Johnson, perhaps because he disingenuously promised that Brexit would save the NHS.
Boris Johnson is confident he can sell the trade deal to Brexiters, according to the FT (paywall).
Sebastian Payne and George Parker report that Downing Street has been preparing the ground for weeks with the ERG, ensuring that senior backbenchers were aware of the shape of things to come and compromises being made.
Senior members of the group have already welcomed Johnson’s imminent deal as the “Christmas Eve Agreement”, a reference to the 1998 Belfast Good Friday Agreement that secured peace in Northern Ireland.
Indications from senior figures within the ERG suggest that many of its members will accept the compromises negotiated by Johnson and Lord Frost.
If they want help from the party to stay in parliament, then they’ll back the deal.
In case you’re just joining us, the final stage of the negotiations for a post-Brexit trade deal has been delayed after it emerged that the European commission was using out-of-date figures to calculate the reduction in the amount of fish that member states can catch in British waters after 1 January.
A deal was due to be announced early this morning but the announcement had to be postponed when officials noticed a discrepancy between two sets of fishing figures and realised that the numbers used in the negotiation appeared to be out of date.
The hardline Tory Brexiter’s family made a fortune from their Caribbean plantations where thousands died. Now he faces urgent calls for reparations
Drive into Dorset on the A31 and you roll past a high brick wall butted up tight to the road that seems to go on for ever. Every so often it doglegs at a monolithic gateway crowned by either a lion or a stag. This is the “great wall of Dorset” that runs for three miles, contains some 2m bricks and shields Charborough Park from the outside world. The wall creates an air of foreboding about what might lie inside. This is home to Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, the Conservative MP for South Dorset, who lives in the palatial Grade I-listed Charborough House, hidden from public view within the 283-hectare (700-acre) private grounds.
The park, with its outstanding garden and ancient deer park, is just a part of the 5,600 hectares of Charborough estate that makes Drax and his family the largest individual landowners in Dorset. The mainly 17th-century mansion, with its 36-metre (120ft) folly tower, is the model for Welland House in the Thomas Hardy novel Two on a Tower.
We return to speak to the people we interviewed pre-election last December. How have they fared?
The mist of uncertainty that worried east Belfast voters in the run-up the general election has given way, a year later, to a depressing clarity: things have got worse. Covid-19 has battered Northern Ireland’s economy, health system and power-sharing government. And Brexit has become only more ominous, with warnings of possible disruptions to trade and food supplies in January.
Latest updates: EU’s chief Brexit negotiator says gaps on level playing field, governance and fisheries are still not bridged
RTE’s Europe editor, Tony Connelly, has posted a thread on Twitter with the full comments from Simon Coveney, the Irish foreign minister, this morning.
“Having heard from Michel Barnier this morning, really the news is very downbeat. I would say he is very gloomy, and obviously very cautious about the ability to make progress today.
2/ "There was news last night on some media sources that there was a breakthrough on fishing. That is absolutely not the case from what we’re hearing this morning,” he said.
Mr Coveney said that fisheries, the level playing field and governance remain “very problematic.”
3/ “There really was no progress made yesterday, that’s our understanding and so we’ve got to try to make a breakthrough at some point today, before the two principals, the Commission president and the prime minister speak later on this evening.
4/ “Unfortunately, I’d like to be giving more positive news, but at the moment these negotiations seem stalled, and the barriers to progress are still very much in place.
5/ “We haven’t, through the negotiating teams, found a way to find compromises that can progress these negotiations towards a successful conclusion.
6/ “There is still time. Lunchtime seems a long way away now, given the intensity of these discussions, but that’s where we are, and anyone who is briefing that there are breakthroughs in either of these two big areas...I don’t think is accurate.”
£350-a-day position as government adviser made via ‘direct appointment process’
A close friend of the prime minister and his fiancee was given an official position at the Home Office without the role being publicly advertised, a freedom of information request has revealed.
Nimco Ali, who is reportedly godmother to the son of Carrie Symonds and Boris Johnson, was appointed adviser on tackling violence against women and girls in October.
Boris Johnson suffered his worst Commons rebellion tonight as 55 Conservative MPs opposed the government’s new coronavirus tiers despite the prime minister pleading with them as they cast their votes.
Johnson was forced to rely on Labour’s abstention from the vote to avoid defeat on a tightened system of measures that will plunge 99% of England into the strictest tiers from Wednesday.
It’s no surprise Boris Johnson’s fiancee has his ear. But the former spin doctor may be turning into another unelected decision-maker
There could only be one winner. Shimmying across her office rooftop while miming valiantly to a Taylor Swift song, the new Tory MP Dehenna Davison beat a strong performance from veteran London politician Andrew Boff (resplendent in full drag and feather boa) to win the LGBT+ Conservative group’s virtual lip sync battle last month.
And laughing along over Zoom from her living room, her rescue dog Dilyn barking in the background, was Carrie Symonds. The prime minister’s 32-year-old fiancee not only judged the virtual fundraiser in aid of LGBT+ candidates but persuaded her partner to join her briefly on camera. Gone, apparently, was the Boris Johnson who wrote of “tank-topped bumboys” in a 1998 newspaper column. The one who, as London’s mayor, once wore a pink Stetson for Pride is back.
MPs campaigning against chancellor’s plans believe they can ‘humiliate’ the government into U-turn
Senior Tories fear that the cut to Britain’s aid budget will become permanent, amid a growing campaign inside and outside parliament to reverse the decision.
Conservatives opposed to the move are already vowing to “humiliate” the government by forcing it to stand by its manifesto commitment to spend 0.7% of GDP on overseas aid – a vow chancellor Rishi Sunak said he would breach in his review of public spending last week. He announced that £4bn would effectively be cut from the aid budget by reducing it to 0.5%, despite pleas from Tories and the archbishop of Canterbury.
Akshata Murty, Sunak’s wife, holds multimillion-pound portfolio making her richer than the Queen
The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, is facing questions over the transparency of his financial affairs after a Guardian investigation established that his wife and her family hold a multimillion-pound portfolio of shareholdings and directorships that are not declared in the official register of ministers’ interests.
Akshata Murty, who married Sunak in 2009, is the daughter of one of India’s most successful entrepreneurs. Her father co-founded the technology giant Infosys, and her shares in the company are worth £430m, making her one of the wealthiest women in Britain, with a fortune larger than the Queen’s.
Reduction came before this week’s move to slash UK spending on poorer nations to 0.5% of national income, with girls worst affected
The overseas aid budget for education was slashed by more than a quarter by the government this year, even before this week’s further axing of a third of aid spending, according to analysis seen by the Guardian.
As anger met the government’s announcement this week, it was revealed that it has already reneged on the Tory manifesto pledge by cutting primary and secondary education funding as part of £2.9bn of cuts made by Dominic Raab in July. On Wednesday in parliament, while announcing he would seek to legally cut the aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income, Raab reiterated a promise to prioritise girls’ education, which was immediately dismissed as “empty rhetoric” by the shadow international secretary.
The foreign secretary has decided legislation is required to cut the aid budget since the current fiscal uncertainty means the government may feel obliged to miss the commitment to spend 0.7% on gross national income on overseas aid for longer than a year.
Legislation would be laid, Dominic Raab told MPs in an oral statement, but he did not give a date for doing so. The Foreign Office has indicated it is unlikely to be introduced until the second half of next year.
The former prime minister David Cameron’s political legacy will be permanently dominated by Brexit, an event he misjudged and abhorred. But until now he could at least comfort himself with one positive foreign policy achievement to his name. He was prime minister when the UK for the first time met its goal of spending 0.7% of its gross national income on overseas aid, and also enshrined it in law in 2015, so apparently entrenching Britain’s commitment to the world’s poorest.
There are no grounds for breaking legal commitments or for turning our backs on countries and people at a time of great need, write Sam Hickey, Uma Kambhampati and others
News that the UK government is set to renege on its commitment to spending 0.7% of gross national income on foreign aid could not come at a worse time for the world’s poorest countries and people and for international cooperation more broadly (UK aid budget facing billions in cuts, 17 November). The World Bank estimates that the Covid-19 pandemic will push an extra 88-115 million people into extreme poverty this year alone, rolling back years of progress that UK aid has helped contribute to. While there is room for debate about the best way to set aid budgets, there are no grounds for breaking legal commitments or for turning our backs on countries and people at a time of great need.
Taken together with the parallel proposals to boost spending on national defence and to restrict employment within the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to British nationals – which will greatly limit the talent pool from which to recruit and undermine FCDO’s ability to operate effectively in different contexts – this latest move suggests Britain is rapidly becoming a parochial rather than progressive presence in the world. The UK, with its reputation as a global leader on foreign aid and for scientific excellence in vaccine development and beyond, remains well placed to play a leading role in both responding to the pandemic and helping to build a more equal, safer and sustainable global order.
Boris Johnson will meet his cabinet remotely on Sunday to decide how people will be able to gather with loved ones at Christmas, before the announcement of a new Covid winter plan.
The prime minister, who is self-isolating, will then confirm by video to parliament on Monday that national restrictions will end on 2 December and be replaced by the three-tier regional system, with even tighter controls in some areas.
Boris Johnson and his health secretary, Matt Hancock, acted “unlawfully” when appointing three key figures – including the head of NHS Test and Trace, Dido Harding – to posts in the fight against Covid-19, according to a legal challenge submitted by campaigners to the high court.
The Observer has seen details of documents from those pursuing the case – and initial responses from government lawyers – relating to the call for a judicial review into the appointment of Baroness Harding, who is a Tory peer, and into those of Kate Bingham to the post of head of the UK’s vaccine taskforce and Mike Coupe to the role of director of testing at NHS Test and Trace.
Most of the public would rather have a locked-down Christmas than have a new lockdown imposed in January, a new poll suggests.
With the government considering the extent to which restrictions should be lifted to limit the impact on Christmas family gatherings, the latest Opinium poll for the Observer found that the public opted for a locked-down Christmas over new January restrictions by a margin of 54% to 33%.