Jeremy Corbyn says Labour MPs are ‘seething with anger’ about Keir Starmer’s stance on the two-child benefit cap – UK politics live | Politics

Downing Street has also confirmed that, when the illegal migration bill gets royal assent (see 9.33am), that will not mean that the Home Office will automatically start detaining asylum seekers prior to their removal from the UK.

The PM’s spokesperson said that, when the bill became law, the home secretary would have the power to detain asylum seekers in this way. But the legislation does not “require” her to do that.

The government does not want to start detaining asylum seekers until it also has the power to remove them to a third country. Rwanda is the only option at the moment, but the court of appeal recently ruled that removing asylum seekers to Rwanda was unlawful, and the issue now has to be resolved by the supreme court.

The spokesperson said the government wanted the act in place before the supreme court case concluded. But he said Suella Braverman, the home secretary, would not seek to detain people ahead of removal to a safe third country while the Rwanda policy was still being challenged in the courts.

The first asylum seekers will be housed on the Bibby Stockholm barge at Portland in Dorset later this month, Downing Street said this morning.

Speaking at the daily lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson said:

It’s undergoing final inspections upon arrival. That’s the last part of the process ahead of the first group of asylum seekers moving into the vessel later this month.

Five Labour metro mayors are preparing to take legal action in a bid to stop the “rushed” planned mass closure of railway station ticket offices, PA Media reports. PA says:

Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, who is one of those involved, declared “we will fight this all the way” as he launched a bid to prevent the action.

Train operators unveiled proposals earlier this month to close nearly all station ticket offices in England after Transport Secretary Mark Harper urged them to cut costs.

They launched a three-week consultation on the measure.

Industry body the Rail Delivery Group (RDG) insisted ticket office staff will be moved onto station platforms and concourses to “modernise customer service”.

But Burnham said: “These closures will affect over 2,000 jobs. It’s just not the case that this is about redeploying staff. This will be a serious reduction in the level of support available to people when they are travelling. It will further erode what remains of trust in travelling on our trains and we think it is the wrong move at the wrong time.

“We’re very worried that these plans are being railroaded through. Today we are confirming that as five mayors representing millions of people across England, we are fighting back.”

The other mayors involved are: Tracy Brabin of West Yorkshire; Steve Rotheram of Liverpool City Region; Oliver Coppard of South Yorkshire; and Dr Nik Johnson of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.

Burnham said the “rushed” consultation “does not provide a legal basis” for closing ticket offices, meaning it “should be declared null and void”.

He went on: “Section 29 of the Railways Act 2005 sets out a very clear and detailed process which must be followed if a train operating company proposes to close a station or any part of a station. That process has simply not been followed in this instance.

“For instance, it requires a 12-week consultation. Of course that is nothing like what is being currently undertaken by the train operating companies.”

The mayors intend to send a pre-action protocol letter to operators in their areas, setting out why they believe closing ticket offices in this way is unlawful.

A spokesperson for the RDG said: “All train operators are complying with the consultation process as set out in the Ticketing and Settlement Agreement.

“They include proposals which, across the network as a whole, would see more staff on concourses and ticket halls to help passengers than there are today, helping with a whole range of needs, from buying tickets to journey planning and helping with accessibility needs.”

Mish Rahman has posted the full text of his statement about the decision to block him from the contest to be Labour’s next candidate for Wolverhampton West on Twitter. (See 11.34am.)

He says it is a matter of “serious concern” that he was blocked because of how he voted on a matter before the national executive committee (NEC). And he says that, even though he has been blocked from being on a longlist himself, as an NEC member he is still choosing who gets included in other longlists. He says:

As a two term, currently elected member of Labour’s NEC, I have chaired panels for longlisting in other parliamentary selections – I am therefore allowed to longlist candidates but not to be longlisted myself.

I was blocked for how I voted on the NEC in relation to the composition of party disciplinary structures, following the EHRC report. This was a position shared by an array of NEC members, including trade union representatives. Being blocked for casting a vote in a democratic process should be a serious concern for all of us in the Labour party.

Momentum, the leftwing Labour group, has condemned the decision to exclude Rahman from the selection contest. A Momentum spokesperson said:

The vital signs of Labour party democracy are flashing red. It is simply indefensible that a member of Labour’s own executive can be blocked from standing for selection for a free vote on the NEC despite previously being entrusted with overseeing MP selections elsewhere.

Labour MPs are “seething with anger” about Keir Starmer’s decision to say the party would not get rid of the two-child benefit cap, Jeremy Corbyn said this morning.

Corbyn, Starmer’s predecessor as leader, told LBC that he had spoken to “quite a lot of Labour MPs” about this issue. He went on:

They are seething with anger, particularly as commitments have been made regularly by the party that we would take children out of poverty. Even the Blair government, which Keir Starmer often quotes, did do a great deal to lift children out of poverty by not having a two-child policy …

Even in areas like mine, there are high levels of child poverty – probably 40% of the children in my constituency. All across the north-east, which Jamie [Driscoll] represents – a third of all children across the whole of the region are living in poverty. That has got to go and got to change.

And it’s the Labour party that ought to be offering that pathway to change and it’s not doing it at the moment.

Corbyn, who has been suspended from the parliamentary Labour party over his response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission into antisemitism in the party when he was leader, has been banned from standing as a candidate again for the party at the next election.

In the interview he said he had not ruled out standing as an independent candidate in the next London mayoral election, but he did not elaborate, saying he wanted the interview to focus on child poverty.

Leftwing NEC member blocked from standing in contest to be Labour MP

Aletha Adu

Keir Starmer faces fresh protests over a parliamentary selection after a member of Labour’s governing body was blocked from standing in Wolverhampton.

Mish Rahman, a notable Muslim voice within the party and graduate of the inaugural Bernie Grant leadership programme, has been blocked from the longlist for the new Wolverhampton West seat.

Rahman, one of the few leftwingers left on the national executive committee, had won the backing of seven trade unions and affiliated societies, which would normally have seen him automatically longlisted. But officials said he was being blocked because of his response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report into Labour and antisemitism.

After he was blocked last week, Rahman used the party’s new selections appeal process, but his appeal was not upheld.

The appeal panel accepted that Rahman was not opposed to the EHRC report itself. But Rahman did oppose some party rule changes that were proposed, and discussed at the NEC, as a consequence of the report, and the appeal panel concluded this meant his candidature posed “a risk to the party’s electoral chances”.

Rahman is now the third graduate of the Bernie Grant leadership programme – aimed at empowering BAME Labour members to run for office – to be blocked from standing.

Reflecting on his failed bid to stand as an MP, Rahman said:

This is not a shock – it is what I and my team expected.

None of my fellow Bernie Grant leadership programme alumni have been selected.

We were told the party would support us towards leadership positions as black and ethnic minority activists – yet after this longlisting process, nothing has changed.

More than 28,000 people in England and Wales have been convicted of breaches of Covid-19 regulations, despite the government’s insistence that it never intended to criminalise people for minor infractions during the pandemic, Maeve McClenaghan reports.

The SNP has accused the Scottish Labour party of trying to face both ways at the same time on the two-child benefit cap.

Yesterday Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, said that he was opposed to the policy, and wanted to see the cap removed as quickly as possible, but that he acceped that Keir Starmer could not afford to do everything he wanted to immediately. Lucy Powell, the shadow culture secretary, made a similar argument this morning (see 10.21am), insisting the two positions were not inconsistent.

But Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s leader at Westminster, told the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland:

Anas Sarwar appears to be rubbing some Brasso on his neck this morning, because he is trying to con the people of Scotland into believing he is against the policy when just yesterday on the television he was saying he backs Keir Starmer’s position.

The reality is that London Labour have given a diktat to the Scottish Labour leader that he needs to support their ridiculous and heinous position in relation to this policy and Anas Sarwar has followed suit.

Asked if he was saying that Sarwar was not being sincere when he said he opposed the cap, Flynn said there was a “big difference” between campaigning against something and getting rid of it while in power.

One of the curiosities of political journalism is that, when a politician says something blindingly obvious, it can sometimes count as news. Andrew Bowie, an energy minister, was in that category this morning when he was asked on Times Radio about the three byelection on Thursday, where the Conservative party is defending majorities of 20,137 (Selby and Ainsty), 19,213 (Somerton and Frome) and 7,210 (Uxbridge and South Ruislip).

“Of course it’s possible we could lose all three,” Bowie said.

But he went on:

But it’s also possible that we might win all three. I’m an optimist, I’m a Scottish Conservative and Scotland football fan – I have to be an optimist.

At Westminster the general assumption is that the Conservatives will lose all three seats – and that the chances of them winning all three are about as slim as the chances of Scotland winning the next World Cup.

Lucy Powell, the shadow culture secretary, has played down claims that Labour is split over whether or not to reverse the two-child benefit cap.

In an interview with Sky News this morning, she claimed that there was no contradiction between viewing the policy as a bad one, and accepting it would have to stay until money could be found to reverse it.

She even defended the position by saying “there is no money left” – a line used in a joke note left by a Labour Treasury minister for his successor in 2010 which has been used endlessly by the Tories ever since as supposed proof of Labour’s economic irresponsibility.

Keir Starmer triggered a row on this issue on Sunday when he suggested the party was committed to keeping the two-child benefit cap – a policy which has been widely criticised for forcing families into poverty, while failing to have the behavioural impact ministers expected when it was introduced.

Starmer’s comments caused alarm within his party because he went further than other shadow ministers, like Rachel Reeves, who have left open the possibility that a Labour government might abolish the cap.

Explaining Labour’s position, Powell told Sky News:

We’ve opposed this policy, this is not a good policy. We’ve opposed it for many years through parliament, but we’re now in a very different economic situation.

As a famous phrase would go, there is no money left, the government has absolutely tanked the economy.

I don’t know it is dividing the shadow cabinet.

When it was put to her that Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow work and pensions secretary, has described the cap as “heinous”, she replied:

Both can be true at the same time, that things can be a bad policy, they can be bad politics, but the economic reality is what we’re now faced with.

There are lots of bad policies … we’re not implementing them, it’s about not reversing [them].

A barge that will be used to house 500 asylum seekers has belatedly arrived at Portland, Dorset, after voting in the House of Lords paved the way for the government’s illegal migration bill to become law, Ben Quinn reports.

Good morning. Shortly after midnight the government won the last of five votes in the House of Lords on the illegal migration bill, meaning the amendments to the bill passed by peers last week have been reversed, the bill is now broadly as the government wants it (it accepted some concessions in the early phase of ‘ping pong’) and it is now due to get royal assent, possibly very soon. The full story is here.

Officially, the Lords did not back down. There were five divisions last night, and the government won all of them.

But at least one vote was pulled, after Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, decided not to put his amendment, saying the government should produce an international strategy for tackling migration, to a vote.

And some of the peers who voted against the government on this bill in earlier divisions were not in the voting lobbies last night. In votes on this bill earlier this month there were up to 235 peers voting against the government. Last night the anti-goverment vote was never higher than 200, and the Tories won with a higher-than-usual turnout of Tory peers although their majority was only seven on one vote. The opposition went down fighting, but the numbers imply they weren’t trying as hard as in the past – which is normal in a chamber where it is accepted that ultimately the elected house has to have its way.

All this is very good news for the Home Office. But there was less good news for them on the Today programme this morning when Sir Mark Rowley, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, gave them a kicking over their failure to change rules that make it very hard for him to sack rogue officers.

Rowley has been complaining about this every since his appointment. Here is a story from November last year, and in January he went futher, saying the regulations were “crazy”. Ministers said they would do something about this. But still nothing has happened, and Rowley said he was “frustrated” about the lack of action. He said:

The government announced a review that was, I think, due to report in May to look at police regulations and making the sort of changes I’d asked for. We haven’t yet heard the results of that review, and I’m frustrated. I need those changes in regulations to help me get on with them because some of the processes are too long, too bureaucratic.

And some of the decisions are made outside the Met. So people we’ve decided shouldn’t be police officers – an independent lawyer says, ‘Well, bad luck, you’ve got to keep them.’

That can’t be right. No other employer that has to deal with that. If I’m trying to get the minority out the organisation, whilst helping the majority of my people succeed, it’s not helpful to have useless, slow bureaucratic processes.

Asked why the government was taking so long to respond, Rowley replied:

I don’t know. There are legal technicalities and I’m sure there’s lots of reasons for them to work through. But I’m in a man in a hurry. We’re an organisation in a hurry to build the trust of Londoners and I’d like that support as quickly as possible.

Rowley also claimed that leaders in other organisations did not face the same constraints.

Why are we pretty much the only organisation where the leaders aren’t able to decide whether people stay in the organisation or no ….

You’re robustly challenging me on the culture of the Met and our ability to build trust in communities. It seems a little perverse, doesn’t it, that I don’t get to decide who works here. That’s a bit weird, and I don’t think anybody else works in an organisation where that’s the case.

Rowley was being interviewed because today the Met is announcing its New Met for London plan. Vikram Dodd has more on that here.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Rishi Sunak chairs cabinet.

11am: Grant Shapps, the energy secretary, gives a speech at the launch of Great British Nuclear.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

12.30pm: Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, gives a statement to MPs about his defence command paper.

2.30pm: Tim Davie, the BBC director general, gives evidence to the Lords communications committee.

4.15pm: Keir Starmer gives a speech at the Future of Britain conference organised by the Tony Blair Institute. Afterwards he will take part in a Q&A with Blair himself.

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