Government loses two House of Lords votes on EU withdrawal bill – as it happened

The government has lost by a mile. Peers passed the Kerr amendment by 348 votes to 225 - a majority of 123.

18 Apr 201812.18 EDT

Severin Carrell

A spokesperson for Alex Salmond’s TV production company, Slàinte Media, has denied ever claiming the tweets on his RT chat show which Ofcom said were wrongly described as “audience tweets” were actually from viewers. (See 2.34pm.)

Ofcom said earlier it had reached a preliminary decision in its investigation whether the Alex Salmond Show had broken “due accuracy” rules by claiming to show tweets from viewers, and had decided those tweets he broadcast last November were not from audience members. Slàinte Media said:

Ofcom are still in the process of investigating a single complaint about ‘viewers’ tweets in the very first edition of The Alex Salmond show from last November.

However, it has never been Slainte Media’s contention that the tweets, emails or messages from the first show were from viewers or audience members of that first show given, by definition, the very first edition of a pre-recorded show (unlike every single Alex Salmond Show since that time) could not possibly present any messages or reaction from those viewers. This point is not in dispute.

There have been no complaints about the content of any show since. Until Ofcom complete their procedures their rules prevent us from disclosing further details.

However, that statement directly contradicts what Salmond said in that inaugural show, screened on 17 November, when he said to viewers “your tweets and emails” would be read out.

Within three minutes of the programme starting, Salmond stated:

But first, to a really important part of the show, where I get to hear from you. Over the past week, and even before the show has started, we received an avalanche of tweets and emails. Can I just say to the media, thanks folks for all the publicity. Let’s just look at a few of them …

He first quoted a tweet from @ellalorenR asking “so why RT?”. One Twitter user said the day afterward they couldn’t find any account of that name. No account of that name currently appears on Twitter.

The fourth tweet he quoted from belonged to @lastjohn. That account then appeared to be from Luisa St John, listed in the show’s credits and whose LinkedIn profile said she was series director of The Alex Salmond Show. That handle now belongs to a Twitter account set up in January 2018, which has not yet tweeted.

This is from Sky’s Faisal Islam.

Peers are now voting.

Lord Kerr is now winding up.

Responding to what Lord Lawson, the former Tory chancellor and one-time Vote Leave chair, said in the debate, he says Lawson may well have said during the campaign that the UK was going to leave the customs union. But the nation was not listening.

He says Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary and another Vote Leave campaigner, said that no one was talking about leaving the single market.

Callanan says, if the government were to accept the amendment, it would send a signal to EU partners that it would not be serious about negotiating a new customs deal.

He says he does not want peers to have “false hope” that they will back down on this point.

Callanan is now summarising the government’s two proposals for customs arrangements after Brexit - the new customs partnership, and the highly-streamlined customs arrangement.

There are summarised in this DExEU paper (pdf).

Lord Callanan, the Brexit minister, is now winding up for the government.

He says the government takes amendments to the bill seriously. It wants to find consensus wherever possible.

But it cannot accept these amendments, he says.

He says a customs union has a single external order. That would mean trade policy being the authority of the EU.

Hayter says this amendment is not about unscrambling Brexit. It is about how we leave the EU, she says.

Lady Hayter is now winding up for Labour.

She says the Kerr amendment gives the government the chance to reconsider its customs union red line.

She says David Davis, the Brexit secretary, effectively admitted on election night that Theresa May’s failure to win a majority meant the government did not have a mandate for taking the UK out of the customs union. She says Davis said that the election result would show whether the government had a mandate for this.