Category Archives: Keir Starmer

Starmer challenged on promise of ‘zero-tolerance’ on antisemitism and racism

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Senior lawyer who carried out inquiry into Labour party’s culture says transparent systems needed to tackle issues

Keir Starmer has faced criticism for vowing to adopt a “zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism and racism” without having the transparent systems in place to tackle such issues.

Martin Forde KC, the senior lawyer who carried out an inquiry into the party’s culture, said he has become “irritated” by the phrase, which the Labour leader used last month after the ECHR lifted the party out of two years of special measures over its past failings on antisemitism.

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ITV news is more trusted than BBC after Lineker row and Sharp controversy

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Poll finds ITV news is more trusted source of information and trust in BBC has slipped

The BBC has slipped behind ITV as Britain’s most trusted news source in the wake of the row over Gary Lineker’s suspension, according to a new poll for the Observer.

The corporation remains one of the most trusted providers, according to the latest Opinium poll. Two in five trust BBC News and 26% distrust it, giving it a “net trust” of +14%. ITV recorded a net trust score of +23%.

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No 10 refuses to give details of how £4bn pay deal for health workers will be funded – as it happened

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Downing Street reveals cost of improved pay offer for nurses and paramedics but will not say where the money will come from

Downing Street says the improve pay offer for health workers in England announced yesterday will cost around £4bn.

At the morning lobby briefing, a No 10 spokesperson said the “non-consolidated element for 2022-23” – the one-off payments worth up to 8.2% – would cost an extra £2.7bn.

Analysis showed that in two years’ time - by which point Labour could have won a general election - two million people could face paying taxes of up to 55 per cent on their pots as a result of [Rachel] Reeves’ policy.

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Braverman says it will be ‘very clear’ to voters at next election if ‘stop the boats’ plan has worked – UK politics live

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Latest updates: home secretary says ‘it’s vital we fix this problem’ as Rishi Sunak prepares to face Keir Starmer at PMQs

Suella Braverman has denied the government is breaking the law with its illegal migration bill in interviews this morning. But, as my colleague Aletha Adu reports, Braverman struggled to clarify if the Olympian Sir Mo Farah would have been deported as soon as he turned 18 years old under the proposed regulations.

Good morning. When Rishi Sunak made five pledges in January, four of them looked relatively easy to meet, and one of them looked impossible. He promised to “pass new laws to stop small boats, making sure that if you come to this country illegally, you are detained and swiftly removed”.

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Rishi Sunak’s asylum plan could lead to more small boats crossings in short term, says border officials’ union – live

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Immigration Service Union says criminals will get people across channel before rules change

Good morning. Rishi Sunak started the year with two urgent, intractable problems in his in-tray. Last week he unveiled a solution to the Northern Ireland protocol problem which has attracted more support, and less opposition, than had been expected. Tomorrow he will unveil his legislation to “stop small boats”.

Sunak announced the key elements of his plan in December. There has been more briefing over the weekend, but nothing that substantially alters what we were told three months ago, and nothing that addresses the claims made by many experts in asylum law who argue that trying to stop small boat crossings by legislating to say that people who arrive in the UK illegally will be banned from claiming asylum here just won’t work. The Nationality and Borders Act passed last year already says migrants arriving in the UK illegally are not eligible to claim asylum, but the small boats keep coming.

Not as things stand at the moment. In fact, it’s actually going to be the converse when these things are published and announced in this way.

What it actually does is fuel the service, if you like, that the criminals provide.

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Nearly twice as many voters believe Labour has UK’s best interests at heart

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Poll finds 41% of people say Keir Starmer’s party better at backing national interest, compared with 23% for Rishi Sunak’s Tories

Almost twice as many voters believe Labour under Keir Starmer has the nation’s best interests at heart than say the Tories do under Rishi Sunak, according to the latest Opinium poll for the Observer.

The findings will disappoint Conservatives after a week in which Sunak managed to strike a well-received deal with the EU on the Northern Ireland protocol, an international negotiating success that enhanced his position as party leader and prime minister.

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‘He’s gone full Trump’: Tories turn on Boris Johnson over Partygate

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Senior MPs blast ex-PM’s ‘wicked’ claims after his backers level new accusations against Keir Starmer’s appointment of Sue Gray

Tory support for Boris Johnson is draining away tonight as party grandees likened his response to a cross-party parliamentary inquiry into whether he misled MPs over “Partygate” to the lies of former US president Donald Trump.

Several Conservative MPs in senior positions reacted with disbelief after Johnson and his dwindling band of allies questioned the work of the independent Commons privileges committee and accused it of an “outrageous level of bias”, after it said on Friday there was a significant volume of evidence suggesting that the former PM may have misled parliament.

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New evidence shows Boris Johnson may have repeatedly misled Commons over Partygate, say senior MPs – live

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Former prime minister will give evidence to privileges committee inquiry from 20 March over claims he misled MPs over lockdown parties

The privileges committee report out today includes evidence that has not been made public before, suggesting Boris Johnson was not being honest with MPs when he told them the Covid rules were followed at all times in No 10.

It includes this paragraph.

The evidence strongly suggests that breaches of guidance would have been obvious to Mr Johnson at the time he was at the gatherings.

There is evidence that those who were advising Mr Johnson about what to say to the press and in the house were themselves struggling to contend that some gatherings were within the rules.

The committee of privileges today is taking further steps in its inquiry into the conduct of Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP. Mr Johnson has accepted the committee’s invitation to give oral evidence in public in the week beginning 20 March.

The exact date and time of the evidence session will be announced shortly. The session arises out of the referral from the House of Commons of the matter to the committee. The session, which will be held in public, will see the committee’s members, comprised of four Conservative, two Labour and one SNP member, question Mr Johnson on a range of matters arising from evidence submitted to the inquiry, as set out in a report published today.

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Boris Johnson allies furious as Keir Starmer hires Sue Gray as chief of staff

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Friends of former PM say appointment calls into question parliamentary inquiry into whether Johnson misled MPs

Allies of Boris Johnson have launched an all-out effort to scupper a parliamentary inquiry into Partygate after the senior official who led an initial inquiry into the scandal was unexpectedly unveiled as Keir Starmer’s new chief of staff.

The hire is a major coup for Starmer, who has been looking to appoint a veteran civil servant to prepare the party for government.

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Kemi Badenoch dismisses idea of trialling menopause leave because it was proposed ‘from a leftwing perspective’ – as it happened

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Minister for women and equalities dismisses suggestion government should pilot menopause leave for women

PMQs is about to start.

Sammy Wilson, the DUP’s chief whip, has said that he thinks the Stormont brake – the mechanism at the heart of Rishi Sunak’s deal to revise the Northern Ireland protocol – will turn out to be “fairly ineffective”.

Let’s not underestimate the fact that when the EU introduces new laws in the future, it will have an impact on Northern Ireland. And the point of the brake was meant to be to give a means for unionists to oppose that. I think it will have to be used on lots of occasions, though I suspect to be fairly ineffective.

As long as it takes us to get, first of all, the analysis, and secondly, the answers from the government, before we make that decision, that’s the time we’ll take.

But the one thing I’ll say to you is that we will not have a knee-jerk reaction to this deal. It means too much to us. And we have got to give it real consideration.

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Foreign Office scaling back support for UK Sikh activist held in India, Keir Starmer says

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Sunak’s government has refused to echo assertion that Jagtar Singh Johal is being arbitrarily detained

Rishi Sunak and the Foreign Office appear to be scaling back the UK’s support for Jagtar Singh Johal, the British Sikh activist held in an Indian jail for five years, his family and Keir Starmer have said.

Sunak’s government has refused invitations to echo Boris Johnson’s assertion that the Indian government has arbitrarily detained Johal, a term seen as significant because it means the UK does not recognise there is a proper legal basis to hold him.

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Starmer makes it his ‘personal mission’ to tackle domestic violence

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Labour leader tells Women’s Aid conference he will use his own experience as DPP after collapse in number of charges

Keir Starmer has vowed to make it his “personal mission” to stand up for victims of domestic violence, after a collapse in the number of charges brought for the crime.

The Labour leader said that as the director of public prosecutions he had witnessed “the devastating impact domestic violence has on victims and their families”, and how abuse often escalated into other forms of serious violence.

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Sunak sets out Northern Ireland trade deal to MPs as Labour vow to back agreement – as it happened

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Rishi Sunak and Ursula von der Leyen say ‘Windsor framework’ has been reached after four months of negotiations. This blog is now closed

Q: Why do you say you will back the PM’s deal when you have not seen the detail? And would you like to see Northern Ireland within the scope of the European court of justice, or outside it?

Starmer says he knows Northern Ireland well and knows the detail. Any deal will be an improvement on the status quo. That is why he is saying he would back it. He says the deal will not come as a surprise.

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Luciana Berger rejoins Labour after Keir Starmer’s antisemitism apology

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Jewish MP left party four years ago over its handling of the issue under Jeremy Corbyn

Luciana Berger has returned to the Labour party after an invitation and apology from Keir Starmer, four years after leaving the party over its handling of antisemitism cases.

“The Labour party has turned a significant corner under Keir’s leadership,” Berger said in a tweet on Saturday. “I’m pleased to be returning to my political home.”

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Lord Sainsbury returns to the Labour fold with £2m donation

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The former chair of the supermarket chain was a big donor to Blair and Brown but cut off his support under Corbyn

Keir Starmer’s election war chest has been given an extraordinary boost after one of the biggest New Labour-era donors returned to the party fold with a £2m donation, the Observer can reveal.

David Sainsbury, who was consistently one of the largest donors under the last Labour government before withdrawing his support, has now renewed his backing with his first multimillion-pound donation since 2016.

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UK politicians mark anniversary of war with renewed call to send arms to Kyiv

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They stopped short of Boris Johnson’s demand for UK to ‘break the ice’ and supply Ukraine with fighter jets

UK political leaders have marked the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a renewed call to support Kyiv with additional weaponry – but stopped short of the firm commitments on fighter jets demanded by Boris Johnson.

With James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, in New York for a meeting of the UN security council, Rishi Sunak hosted the Ukrainian ambassador at Downing Street, with a national minute’s silence planned for 11am on Friday.

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Keir Starmer rejects claims Labour’s five ‘missions’ are vague or easy to achieve – UK politics live

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The Labour leader will set out his party’s five ‘missions’ for government in a speech later

In an interview with BBC Breakfast this morning Keir Starmer defended the special immigration appeals commission (Siac) decision yesterday to refuse Shamima Begum’s appeal against the decision to remove her British citizenship. Starmer said “national security has to come first”.

Yesterday, after the Siac decision was announced, the Conservative party was tweeting a clip from an interview that Starmer gave to Sophy Ridge on Sky News in March 2019 saying that the decision by the then home secretary, Sajid Javid, to deprive Begum of her citizenship was “wrong”.

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Sunak suggests MPs will vote on proposed NI protocol deal and accuses Starmer of wanting to ‘surrender’ to EU – UK politics live

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Latest updates: PM says Commons will be given a chance to ‘express its view’ on any final deal

British Steel has announced the closure of the coking ovens at its Scunthorpe works with the loss of 260 jobs, my colleague Jasper Jolly reports.

Graeme Wearden has reaction to this on his business live blog.

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No 10 says ‘unresolved issues’ remain in Northern Ireland protocol talks with EU – UK politics live

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Latest updates: government warning comes as former NI secretary says Good Friday agreement needs reform

Minette Batters, president of the National Farmers’ Union addressed the annual farming conference in Birmingham this morning with a grave tone. Pointing out that farmers across the country are going out of business, with the fastest reductions in some sectors such as salad since records began, she said that farmers are facing a huge squeeze and lack of support from government.

She said the Conservatives were “running out of time to walk the walk” and that food security was under severe threat as farmers face rising input costs, inflation, avian influenza and the climate crisis.

As a member of parliament for a farming constituency. I’ve worked with farmers and the NFU for years. I’ve even rolled up my sleeves and done the early morning milking at Wensleydale.

Now I know how important your work is. And I know that it’s more than just work. It’s a way of life that is passed down through the generations.

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Government to hold new talks with EU on NI protocol ‘in coming days’, says foreign secretary – as it happened

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James Cleverly’s comments come after No 10 said ‘no deal has been done as yet’

James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, will discuss the Northern Ireland protocol in a call with the European Commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič this afternoon, PA Media reports. They will be joined by the Northern Ireland secretary, Chris Heaton-Harris, amid expectations both sides are inching closer to a deal.

Micheál Martin, the Irish foreign minister and tánaiste (deputy PM), has urged UK politicians not to play politics with the Northern Ireland protocol negotiations. Speaking in Brussels, where he has been attending the EU foreign affairs council, he said:

I think what’s very important is that everybody now from here on think about the people of Northern Ireland.

Not power play, not politics elsewhere, I think the people of Northern Ireland have had enough of that, of people playing politics with their future. And, in my view, my only concern is that the people of Northern Ireland voted [in last May’s assembly election], they want their institutions [at Stormont] restored.

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