If this is an attempt by some in the Brexit camp to cow civil society into silence on the EU referendum, it’s bound to fail. The public has heard a lot from industry leaders about how a vote to stay or leave will affect UK businesses - there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be hearing from environmental groups about how it will impact our environment and quality of life.
But Leave.EU said environmental charities should not be spending money on pro-EU campaigners. Its spokesman Jack Montgomery said:
People will be very disappointed to see environmental charities using their donations to campaign on behalf of Brussels, especially considering the destruction its fisheries policy has wrought on the marine environment and the recent diesel scandal.
Sadly, the EU uses a significant portion of the money it takes from us to buy support from these organisations, and the In campaign threatening that it will be taken away after Brexit has them scared.
Tristram Hunt, the former shadow education secretary, has said Harold Wilson would be “slightly horrified” by the way Labour is becoming a protest party, rather than a party of government, under Jeremy Corbyn. (See 3.38pm.)
The existing Sunday trading regulations are simple, popular and easily understood by retailers, shopworkers and customers. What the government is now proposing is to take one regulation that covers the whole of England and Wales, turn it into over 300 different regulatory regimes and within each of those there can be zones down to street level.
This is the nightmare scenario that will see retailers strangled in red tape as they try to deal with separate Sunday trading rules across the country. This complex scheme is somewhat ironic when the government claims to champion the cutting of red tape for business.
The proposal to have tourist zones is drawn so loosely that practically any shop could claim to be included simply because they have customers from outside the borough in which they are located. It could particularly benefit out of town retail parks over town centres. The worries of principled MPs who have deep concerns about the effects of extended Sunday trading have not been addressed.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) could be forced to pay compensation to victims subjected to sex offences at the hands of Libyan soldiers while training in the UK, the Press Association reports.
Five Libyans were jailed last year after a court heard they raped and sexually assaulted victims in Cambridgeshire after a collapse of discipline at Bassingbourn Barracks where they were based.
Their arrests brought an end to a British government promise to help war-torn Libya by training army cadets in the UK following the 2011 collapse of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.
The incidents prompted the MoD to send 300 soldiers back to their home country prematurely, ending an agreement to put 2,000 soldiers through basic infantry and junior command training in an attempt to help rebuild the troubled nation.
The MoD confirmed on Monday that it was considering legal claims from victims.
A spokeswoman said: “We can confirm that compensation claims have been received by the department. As the claims are ongoing we are unable to comment further.”
Today another politician has been intervening from beyond the grave. Friday marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Harold Wilson, by one measure Labour’s most successful prime minister (he fought five general elections as leader, and won four of them). They were talking about him on the Daily Politics earlier and two Labour MPs, Mary Creagh and Tristram Hunt, were asked what Wilson would have made of the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn.
Not much, they both replied. (Admittedly, Creagh and Hunt are both on the right of the party, not the Corbyn wing.)
Creagh replied:
I think [Wilson] would look at us as a party that is not making the progress that we should be making.
And Hunt said:
Harold Wilson famously thought that the Labour party was the natural party of government. He did not believe the Labour party was a protest movement protesting outside other party conferences. He thought it should be round the table delivering social justice for the people it came into being to represent. And I think he would be slightly horrified by some of the tendency towards endless protests rather than thinking about how we get into power and do what Labour governments are about, tackling inequality, promoting education, dealing with technology, putting us at the heart of Europe.
In an analysis for the Times’s Red Box email, Matthew Goodwin, the academic and Ukip specialist, says that a study of all polling since David Cameron’s EU renegotiation concluded two weeks ago suggests that in practice the polls have barely moved.
Over the past two weeks, since the renegotiation, no fewer than 11 polls have asked people how they intend to vote at the referendum.
Across all of these polls the average support for Remain has been 43 per cent and for Leave 39 per cent, with 18 per cent saying they don’t know how they will vote. So, a tight race.
If we compare these averages to those during the first half of February, before the announcement of the renegotiation detail, then Remain has remained static on 43 per cent, Leave has lost one point, and the Undecided have grown by one point.
So, if anything, and at a stretch, you could suggest that the renegotiation might have made a few more people slightly more confused about how to vote. But there has certainly not been a bounce for Remain.
Chris Grayling, the leader of the Commons, has accused the British Chambers of Commerce of being “spineless” for its treatment of John Longworth. Grayling, who is campaigning for Britain to leave the EU, said he accepted Number 10’s assertion that it did not put pressure on the BCC’s board to remove Longworth after he spoke out publicly in favour of Brexit. The board suspended Longworth because officially the BCC is neutral and Longworth subsequently resigned. Grayling said this was “disgraceful”.
I think what’s happened to him has been disgraceful, frankly. The fact that a prominent business figure has stood up and said ‘I believe Britain should leave the EU’ is a view we should be listening to and certainly the way the BCC has approached this in terms of just forcing him out has been wholly unacceptable and in my view has brought that organisation into some degree of disrepute ...
I think the question for this is why were the BCC so willing to move to remove someone who had expressed a personal view, a stated personal view. Almost regardless of the debate about where how and when this came from, why was the board of the BCC so spineless that it was not prepared to accept the views of one of its senior people and to give them the freedom that David Cameron has given his ministers. I think it’s just shameful.
But David Davis, the Conservative MP and a spokesman for the Grassroots Out campaign (GO), suggested that Longworth was the victim of a Number 10 witch hunt. In a statement announcing that he will use the Freedom of Information Act to try to get details of Number 10’s communications with the BCC about this, he said:
The last thing we want to see is a witch-hunt against business leaders brave and astute enough to make the argument that Britain would be better off economically if it regained the power to strike its own trade deals and was freed of the crippling burden of red tape, costing many billions a year, imposed by Brussels.
Downing Street has form in this respect. It has already admitted it made a “mistake” in adding the name of General Sir Michael Rose, the former special forces commander, to a letter from former military leaders supporting Britain’s continued membership of the EU.
Number 10 has hinted that there was contact between Downing Street and the BCC about Longworth’s speech, but insisted that “no pressure” was applied for his resignation. (See 12.20pm.)
Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, has suggested that he could vote to leave the EU. In an interview on the World at One, he claimed he had not yet made up his mind as to how he would vote in the referendum. He appeared to criticise the government and Remain/Leave campaigns for not setting out the arguments properly. He said:
I think that you and the BBC have a vitally important role here because the protagonists don’t seem to be capable of setting out carefully and dispassionately the arguments. We need the BBC to explain to everyone the arguments for and the arguments against. There are good arguments for both sides of this debate.
Asked to give his own objective analysis, he said he would need a two-hour programme to do that. And, when asked if he had made up his own mind yet, he replied:
I’m still waiting to hear the facts and the arguments from I hope the BBC which will enable me to make up my mind.
David Cameron has said there is “no prospect” of Britain joining a common European Union asylum system. As the Press Association reports, arriving in Brussels for talks on the migration crisis, Cameron said he supported moves to close the Balkan route used by migrants to travel to northern Europe after arriving in Greece. But he insisted that the UK’s opt-out from the Schengen agreement meant there could be no question of Britain joining any new EU asylum system.
We have an absolutely rock-solid opt-out from these things so there is no prospect of Britain joining a common asylum process in Europe. We will have our own asylum approach, our own way of doing things, keeping our borders. It underlines the best of both worlds, the special status that we have.
There is more coverage of the summit here, on our live blog.
Today, in a written ministerial statement, James Brokenshire, the Home Office minister, has said that ODWs will in future no longer be tied to working for a single particular employer. Here’s an extract.
The government’s concern is that if ODWs were able to change employers and significantly prolong their stay, irrespective of whether they have reported this abuse and whether there is evidence that such abuse has taken place, they may be less likely to report abuse. This may perpetuate a revolving door of abuse in which perpetrators remain unidentified and free to bring other domestic workers to the United Kingdom with impunity.
The government does, however, acknowledge the case which has been put forward for providing ODWs with an immediate escape route from abuse. On the basis of advice from the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner we have therefore come to the view that there should be two distinct elements to our approach to the employer tie. First, we will provide those admitted as ODWs with the ability to take alternative employment as a domestic worker with a different employer during the six month period for which they are originally admitted. This ability to take alternative employment will not depend on whether or not they have been found to be the victim of abuse.
The World at One plays a clip of a BCC member saying Longworth should not have given his personal view on Brexit in his speech. He was there to represent his members, the BCC member said.
Longworth says he felt it important to share some of the facts about this with the public.
Q: What contact was there between Number 10 and the BCC about your speech?
Longworth says he is not aware of any contact between Number 10 and BCC after the day of the conference.
It is normal for government departments to make their views known, “often in a very strident way”.
Q: Including asking for someone to be sacked?
Longworth says he has no knowledge of that.
Q; If you had called for Britain to stay in the EU, would you still be in your job?
Rachel Reeves says Labour must focus more on key issues, not 'internal policy debates'
Rowena Mason
Rachel Reeves, the former work and pensions secretary, now a backbencher, gave a wide-ranging speech on the economy that sounded like a pitch to be future shadow chancellor - or chancellor.
Three of her big policy ideas were flat pensions tax relief, a move towards universal childcare and more borrowing to invest in infrastructure projects that have a commercial rate of return.
But she also had this to say about whether Labour’s current economic
policies are credible:
I was very pleased at prime minister’s questions last week that Jeremy Corbyn focussed on issues of childcare because those are the things that resonate with people. They are the areas where we need to show we are on the side of ordinary people to contrast us with the Conservatives. More of what Corbyn did last week at PMQs, more focus on bread-and-butter issues, is really important. We’re beginning to move in that direction but there are too many times where, like the Conservative party, we are focusing on some of the internal policy debates.
Asked whether she thinks Jeremy Corbyn can win the 2020 election, she said:
We’ve got over four years to get this right. I am absolutely certain Labour can win the next election. The way to do that is to take a long hard look at ourselves, understand why we lost the last election and focus relentlessly on holding the government to account and issues that matter to ordinary people. Those are issues like pensions, childcare, having enough money at the end of the month to do things like putting into savings, and to ensure that people have a home of their own or if they are renting having that security that homeowners have. The Tories are making huge mistakes. I believe we can win the next election but it is a huge mountain to climb. Every day not focusing on those key issues is a day wasted.
Rachel Reeves Photograph: Mike Kemp/In Pictures/Corbis
Here are the key points from the Number 10 lobby briefing.
Number 10 hinted that there was contact between Downing Street and the British Chambers of Commerce after John Longworth’s pro-Brexit speech on Thursday. The prime minister’s spokeswoman repeatedly refused to deny that Number 10 had been in touch with the organisation. But she insisted that “no pressure” was applied for Longworth’s resignation.
Of course Number 10 talks to business organisations regularly. But if you are referring to Mr Longworth’s decision to step down, that is entirely a matter for the BCC. We should be absolutely clear that no pressure was applied by Number 10 ...
This is a decision for Mr Longworth and the BCC. The president of the BCC has set out very clearly the reason behind that decision.
Asked if Number 10 initiated the talks, or if Longworth’s name came up, the spokeswoman said she would not get into “a blow-by-blow [account] of those conversations”. She also declined to say how she defined “pressure”, saying the reporter who asked the question was “missing the point”.
Downing Street rejected Longworth’s claim (see 10.37am) that the government has been scaremongering about Brexit. The spokeswoman said David Cameron had made it clear that he wanted the government to set out the facts, so that people could listen to the arguments about EU membership.
We do think that freedom of expression must be fully respected [in Turkey] and we continue to urge the Turks to work towards the full protection of fundamental rights.
But she played down suggestions that Cameron would raise the issue at today’s EU/Turkey summit.
It is understood there is “serious concern” in Downing Street about the format of the debate. No 10 officials have also said Cameron will not take part in an earlier showdown in front of a BBC1 Question Time audience if he has to compete with a fellow Tory. “We’re not doing blue on blue,” one said.
The spokeswoman said that Downing Street still wanted to see detailed proposals from the BBC and that no decisions had yet been taken as to what debates Cameron might participate in.
No 10 does not deny contact between Downing Street and BCC after Longworth's speech
I’m just back from the Number 10 lobby briefing.
The prime minister’s spokeswoman is not denying that there was contact between Downing Street and the British Chambers of Commerce after John Longworth’s Brexit speech on Thursday. But the spokeswoman insisted that No 10 had not pressurised for him to be sacked.
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