Brexit: Labour MPs to hold no-confidence vote in Jeremy Corbyn - as it happened

27 Jun 201604.45 EDT

Libby Brooks

Alex Salmond, the former Scottish first minister, was on Good Morning Scotland this morning and he spent most of his interview praising Nicola Sturgeon for her “clarity, persuasiveness and certainty”.

He added that, despite the obvious implications yesterday, Sturgeon had not suggested that Holyrood had a legal veto over Westminster’s Brexit legislation but simply that the Scottish parliament could withhold its consent as a political gesture.

He also criticised Boris Johnson for appearing to change the grounds on which Brexit would happen. “We don’t even know where the Brexit camp is going to take the policy of the UK,” he said.

27 Jun 201604.43 EDT

Severin Carrell

Scottish voters remain unconvinced about the case for a fresh independence referendum according to a new Survation poll, despite Nicola Sturgeon’s assertion on Friday that a second one was “highly likely” after Scotland opted heavily in favour of remaining in the EU.

Just under 45% of those Survation polled for the Daily Record over the weekend said Nicola Sturgeon should not hold a second vote, against 42% who said she should. Excluding don’t knows, that left 52% of Scots against a second referendum.

But asked how they would vote if one were held today, the yes vote had a clear six point lead, with 47% in favour of independence against 41% against; excluding 10% don’t knows and 2% who wouldn’t give a view, that gave a 54% yes vote and 46% against.

Those figures follow other polls over the weekend putting a yes vote as high as 59% - a marked jump since Friday’s Brexit vote. But these levels do not yet reach the consistent 60% threshold in favour of independence that the Scottish National party is looking for.

With the Record now openly supporting Sturgeon’s preparations for a second referendum, its poll also found that more SNP supporters voted leave than other parties: 29% of SNP voters backed Brexit, compared to 27% of Scottish Tories, and 17% Labour and 16% Lib Dem voter.

27 Jun 201604.41 EDT

Darling says vacuum at top of politics could 'make a bad situation worse'

Matthew Weaver

Labour’s last chancellor Alistair Darling says he is more worried about the economy now than he was at the time of the financial crash.

Speaking on the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he urged the government to fill the “damaging” political vacuum left by the referendum to provide the markets and businesses with greater certainty. He said:

We have got no government. We have got no opposition. The people who got us into this mess have run away, they have gone to ground and we now have a four month gap before we are likely to get a new prime minister, during which things may be said which will make a bad situation worse. It is not a happy situation which is why I’m more worried now than I was in 2008 ...

I accept that the new negotiations can’t start until we have a new prime minister, but we cannot have a four-month period during which nothing happens.

Darling, one of the leading campaigners for staying in the EU, also criticised Boris Johnson’s claim in his Daily Telegraph column that the referendum was not about immigration. He said:

Free movement of people ... is such a pivotal issue. For Boris Johnson to say ‘oh we didn’t mean it about immigration’ and that somehow things can carry on, the entire Brexit campaign was based on scares about immigration and free movement, so we cannot wait for four months and not discuss these issues, because the rest of the world will look in amazement.

Boris Johnson seems to be taking this as a big game, where the last four months were just a jolly laugh, where it didn’t matter and nothing is going to change.

The risk is, the longer there is uncertainty, people will decide to put their investment and jobs elsewhere. What I’m really concerned about is this gap between now and October when we’ll have a new prime minister, where if we don’t do some serious thinking about what our options are, and if we don’t start engaging with the European Union itself, the risk is we make a bad situation worse. If you leave a vacuum in politics, where you have got all this constitutional, economic and political uncertainty, that is where the trouble starts.

View image in fullscreen

Michael Fuchs, a senior figure in Angela Merkel’s CDU party, told the Today programme this morning that if the UK wanted to retain access to the single market once it left the EU, that would be possible, “but not for free”. According to the BBC, he went on:

You have to see with Norway, with Switzerland, you have to pay a certain fee. And the per capita fee of Norway is exactly the same as what Britain is now paying into the EU. So there won’t be any savings.

And here is the letter from Steve Reed announcing his resignation as a shadow local government minister.

And here is the letter from Toby Perkins announcing his resignation as a shadow defence minister.

Here is some Twitter comment on the latest shadow cabinet appointments and resignations.

From the Telegraph’s Ben Riley-Smith

From BuzzFeed’s Jim Waterson

From the Sunday Times’s James Lyons

From the Financial Times’s Robert Shrimsley

From Huffington Post’s Owen Bennett

Here is the letter from Yvonne Fovargue resigning as shadow consumer affairs minister.

27 Jun 201604.08 EDT

Angelique Chrisafis

Could international allegiances between cities be an answer to the current chaos?

Following the referendum result, London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, and Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, this morning issued a joint pledge for the two cities to work more closely together as a counterweight to nationalism. They said Paris and London were part of “just a handful of truly global cities” and argued that cities “can act as a powerful counterweight to the lethargy of nation states and to the influence of industrial lobbies”.

Paris’s Socialist mayor Hidalgo personally pushed for a gesture of solidarity and increased ties with London, which voted remain. This stands in contrast to Valérie Pécresse, the rightwing head of the wider Paris region, Île de France, who has said Paris could profit from London’s woes post-Brexit and vowed that the French capital would fight to win over financial firms and businesses fleeing London post-Brexit.

The Labour party’s leaders in the House of Lords are set to refuse to attend meetings of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, the Press Association reports.

Lady Smith of Basildon, the Labour leader in the Lords, and Lord Bassam, the chief whip, are both in post because of elections within the ranks of the party’s peers – rather than being appointed by Corbyn.

A source said that they had taken “soundings” from the party’s peers and it was likely they would boycott shadow cabinet meetings while Corbyn remains as leader.