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Small boats

Express
Former British borders chief Tony Smith has suggested that EU leaders are prolonging the small boats crisis as a form of “punishment” for Brexit.
Sulking EU chiefs are prolonging the migrant boats crisis as a punishment for Brexit, a former British borders chief has suggested.
Tony Smith said their refusal to discuss a deal to take back those who cross the Channel illegally smacked of “punishment” for voting to leave the EU.
He also blasted their “hypocrisy” in blocking efforts to strike a deal which could save lives, stop organised crime and ease the asylum crisis costing taxpayers £6million a day. Mr Smith, who served as director general of the Border Force during a Home Office career of more than 40 years, said the “only sure-fire way” to stop the boats is to make it clear illegal migrants will be sent back.
But he said the EU’s refusal to discuss a new returns pact at a time when desperate people were routinely drowning has left him wondering if “this is some sort of a Brexit punishment”.
In an interview with the Sunday Express, he declared: “People are dying in our common Channel between the EU and the UK. We’ve got international organised crime on our doorsteps. It is causing untold misery.”
Exclusive polling by Omnisis shows strong support for sending back illegal arrivals. When asked if “undocumented immigrants who enter from an EU country be sent back to that country”, 63 percent said yes. Only 19 percent disagreed.
Senior Tories have called on Eurocrats to “stop sulking and get cracking” to stop criminals “running riot” and causing deaths at sea.

Sun
OFFICIALS in Belgium are stopping small boat crossings to Britain thanks to a zero-tolerance approach that shames their French counterparts.
Cops guarding Belgian ports and a nine-mile coastline facing Britain have overseen a 92 per cent reduction in people smuggling in the last five years.
Unlike French Navy ships that escort migrant boats until they reach UK waters, the Belgians have been intercepting the inflatables and arresting all on board.
A sophisticated network of sensors, cameras, barriers and drones — backed by a Frontex surveillance plane and police patrols — have stopped the criminal gangs in their tracks.
Tent cities housing migrants are regularly dismantled on Belgium’s west coast and anyone deemed an illegal immigrant is immediately locked up.
The hard-line approach is overseen by police chief Nico Paelinck, who slammed Dunkirk’s socialist leaders for the failure to stop the migrants.
From police HQ in the seaside town of Koksijde, he said: “The politicians here don’t want the same situation as you have in France and on the island of Lampedusa in Italy.

Observer
Government attempts to make capital out of the issue of Channel crossings in a special “small boats week” appear to have backfired with the public, according to the latest Opinium poll for the Observer.
“Small boats week”, earlier this month, was dogged by a series of disasters, including figures showing record numbers of crossings; the evacuation, due to a health scare, of the Bibby Stockholm barge used to house migrants, and the deaths of at least six people when a small boat capsized and sank in the Channel.
Now, according to Opinium, there is evidence that the effort to turn it into a “wedge issue” had the opposite effect, raising its importance in the public’s mind, and strengthening Labour’s lead on immigration.
Opinium found that after “small boats week”, immigration appeared in the top three concerns for voters for the first time this year, overtaking energy prices.

AI

Telegraph
Rishi Sunak is to spend up to £100m of taxpayer money on thousands of high-powered artificial intelligence chips in an effort to catch up in a global race for computing power.
Government officials have been in discussions with IT giants Nvidia, AMD and Intel about procuring equipment for a national “AI Research Resource” as part of Rishi Sunak’s ambitions to make Britain a global leader in the field.
The effort, led by science funding body UK Research and Innovation, is believed to be in advanced stages of an order of up to 5,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia, whose chips power AI models such as ChatGPT.
£100m has been allocated to the project. However, it is believed that the outlay is seen as insufficient to match the Government’s artificial intelligence ambitions, with civil servants pushing Jeremy Hunt to allocate far more funds in the coming months.

Mirror
An advance in using AI to diagnose skin cancer is set to free up overstretched NHS dermatologists to see thousands more patients.
The new technology, known as DERM, can identify 11 types of lesions, including common skin cancers, within seconds. As well as speeding up cancer diagnoses, the technology is expected to save busy dermatologists hundreds of thousands of hours, allowing them to see patients with other skin complaints, such as psoriasis, vitiligo, eczema and lupus, who get bumped down the list as cancer takes priority.
The AI works by analysing photos of a patient’s skin taken by a nurse, photographer or health care assistant with a special lens, reducing demands on dermatologists’ time. In a trial in a few hospitals in the past year, DERM detected more than 3,500 cancer cases while helping avoid 10,000 unneeded face-to-face appointments.
It is now set to be rolled out across the NHS. Consultant dermatologist Dr Lucy Thomas said: “It is highly unlikely that AI will replace doctors… but if DERM can free up dermatologists’ time, all patients could benefit greatly from faster assessment and access to treatment.”

Education

Observer
Pupils in private schools are more than twice as likely to achieve A or A* grades as those in the state sector, according to official figures that expose a widening attainment gap in education in England after more than 13 years of Conservative government.
The statistics, released by the regulator Ofqual, follow last week’s A-level results and come despite repeated pledges by ministers to close the divide by driving up standards in non-fee paying schools.
In 2019, Michael Gove, the Tory education secretary from 2010 to 2014 who pushed expansion of Labour’s academies programme, insisted it remained his hope that educating children privately would become unnecessary and viewed as unusual. “I would have hoped we would have been able to make sending your children to a private school, as it is in Europe, an increasingly eccentric choice,” Gove said.
The latest A-level results, which saw thousands of students miss out on top marks as the government enforced a reversal of post-pandemic grade inflation, highlight the continuing advantages in terms of grades enjoyed by pupils at private schools.
While 47.4% of pupils in private schools achieved at least one A or A* grade, only 22% did so in secondary comprehensives, 25.4% in academies and just 14.2% in state further education institutions.

NHS

Telegraph
Senior doctors are demanding a crackdown on “unaccountable” NHS managers after hospital bosses were accused of “walking away from life-destroying mistakes” in the case of child serial killer Lucy Letby.
The British Medical Association, which represents doctors, led calls for senior health service administrators to be held accountable to a regulator akin to the General Medical Council (GMC), which can strike off doctors who have harmed patients.
The calls came as victims’ families and MPs warned that the inquiry ordered by Steve Barclay, the Health Secretary, into how Letby was able to attack or kill 13 babies will not have the power to conduct a proper investigation.
A statement from solicitors representing two of the families affected said the inquiry was “inadequate” because “as a non-statutory inquiry, it does not have the power to compel witnesses to provide evidence or production of documents and must rely on the goodwill of those involved to share their testimony. This is not good enough”.
The families were backed by Labour. Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said the inquiry needed “the full force of the law behind it”.
In other developments:
A law to force offenders to attend their sentencing is to be included in the King’s Speech on Nov 7, amid anger over Letby’s refusal to return to court on Monday.

Express
Rishi Sunak cannot meet his goal of bringing down NHS waiting times unless he tackles Britain’s broken bones crisis, he has been warned.
The Prime Minister has made cutting the backlog one of his five top priorities for this year.
But the Royal Osteoporosis Society is warning this will be “impossible” without much-needed action because fractures are the “second highest driver of emergency bed occupancy”.
The charity says 90,000 people are missing out on vital drugs and warns hundreds of patients will die unnecessarily in the coming months as a result of hip fractures.

Mail
One of the first Alzheimer’s drugs capable of slowing the disease’s progression should not be given to the majority of patients due to safety concerns, a study suggests.
Research appears to show that the drug, lecanemab, can slow the degenerative brain condition by a third. And last month, US health regulators approved the twice-monthly injection for patients with mild cognitive impairment or mild dementia – meaning the Alzheimer’s is in its earliest stages.
The NHS spending watchdog is due to begin assessing the drug for use in the UK next month, hoping that it could help the one million Alzheimer’s sufferers in the UK.
But research warns that there is no data to show the drug is safe for nine out of ten early-stage Alzheimer’s patients. This is because the drug has only been tested on patients who are otherwise healthy.

Labour Party

Express
Labour MPs and a key union boss have issued Sir Keir Starmer with a warning after Labour partly rowed back its commitment to workers’ rights and protection of gig economy workers.
The warnings came after it emerged that a 2021 pledge to create a single status of “worker” for all but the genuinely self-employed could be delayed for consultation should Labour enter No.10 in 2024.
The commitment, popular among left-wing Labour MPs, was introduced to protect workers at firms like Uber and Deliveroo and provide them with basic rights.
Angela Rayner, the party’s deputy leader, whose portfolio covers workers’ rights, said on Friday morning that Labour still intended to ban zero-hour contracts, tackle bogus self-employment and end qualifying periods for rights what she described as the “biggest levelling-up of workers’ rights in decades”.
But when it emerged that Labour’s national policy forum (NPF) last month agreed that the plan would not be introduced immediately if the party wins the next election and would instead form part of a consultation on genuinely self-employed workers, the party’s top brass came under fire for what has been seen as another U-turn on policy pledges.

Observer
Labour has opened up a huge lead over the Tories among women voters, many of whom are turning to Keir Starmer’s party because they feel financially insecure after 13 years of Conservative rule, a new report says today.
The analysis by Labour Together, a thinktank whose report is based on extensive polling and academic analysis, finds that the financial worries of huge numbers of women voters – particularly those aged under 50 – are persuading many to back Labour and reject the Conservatives.
According to a poll of more than 5,000 people by YouGov, Labour now has a 28-point lead over the Tories among women, compared with a 21-point advantage among men.
The survey found that 60% of women voters who describe themselves as “very worried” about their finances now say they would vote Labour – six times more than would vote Conservative. The only group where the Tories retain a lead is those with no financial worries at all.

Mail
Tensions broke out within Labour yesterday over claims that Angela Rayner was trying to bounce Sir Keir Starmer into guaranteeing she would be his number two in Government.
The claims came after the party’s deputy leader brushed aside talk of a possible change of role in a reshuffle by declaring: ‘I will be the Deputy Prime Minister.’
An insider told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Sounds like Angela is bouncing – or trying to bounce – Keir into giving her that formal title.’
The party is desperate to avoid looking as if it is complacent about winning the next election and ‘measuring the No10 curtains’, despite a poll lead over the Tories.
Shadow Ministers expect Labour leader Sir Keir to carry out a delayed reshuffle of his top team next month.
Ms Rayner was asked to comment last week on talk that Sir Keir would trim her wide-ranging brief as Shadow First Secretary of State, Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and spokesperson on the future of work.

London

Mail
Sadiq Khan was plunged into a bitter row last night after his official website published a photograph of a young white family with the words: ‘Doesn’t represent real Londoners’.
The Labour London Mayor faced calls to apologise after the extraordinary message appeared in an official guide on how to portray the ‘brand’ of the Mayor and the Greater London Authority.
This was despite the fact that the guide opened with the words: ‘A City For All Londoners’ and a promise to appeal to ‘everyone no matter, their age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, disability or family make up’.
Last night, Mr Khan was forced to disown the caption for the picture, which shows a couple and their two children walking along the Thames, with Parliament in the background.

Telegraph
Sadiq Khan’s office tried to discredit and “silence” scientists who found that his ultra-low emissions zone (Ulez) policy had little impact on pollution, The Telegraph can disclose.
In private emails seen by The Telegraph, Shirley Rodrigues, the London Mayor’s deputy for environment and energy, told Prof Frank Kelly she was “really disappointed” that Imperial College had publicised findings questioning the effectiveness of Ulez.
Prof Kelly, a director of Imperial’s Environmental Research Group, which has been paid more than £800,000 by Mr Khan’s office since 2021, agreed to issue a statement – partly written by Ms Rodrigues – saying Ulez had helped to “dramatically reduce air pollution”.
London Conservatives said the correspondence revealed an “alarmingly cosy relationship” between the Mayor’s office and the scientists it was funding, as well as a desire to “silence scientists who question the effectiveness of Khan’s policies”.
Prof Kelly’s colleagues said they stood by their research “100 per cent”, but The Telegraph understands that the fallout has had a chilling effect, leaving them unwilling to publish further work on the subject.
The study from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters in 2021, found that the introduction of Ulez in 2019 cut nitrogen dioxide by less than three per cent and had insignificant effects on ozone and particulate matter.

Mail
Sadiq Khan‘s office has been accused of trying to ‘silence’ scientists over publishing research that showed his ultra-low emissions zone (Ulez) policy had ‘insignificant’ effect on pollution, as protestors brought traffic to a standstill on Saturday to fight against expansion of the scheme.
The claims were made following a series of emails between Shirley Rodrigues, the London Mayor’s deputy for environment and energy and Professor Frank Kelly, director of Imperial’s Environmental Research Group, which has received £800,000 of funding from the London Mayor’s office since 2021.
In the emails, seen by The Telegraph, Ms Rodrigues said she was disappointed that Imperial College had  published a study by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering that showed Ulez cut nitrogen dioxide by less than three per cent and had achieved an insignificant impact on ozone and particulate matter.
Such research undermined the London Mayor’s policy, argued Ms Rodrigues.

Wales

Express
Support for Welsh independence has seen a significant rise in recent months – with Welsh independence group YesCymru calling the results ‘stunning’.
Support for Welsh independence has seen a significant rise in recent months according to a “stunning” new poll.
The figures put support for Wales leaving the UK at 29% which is close to the levels it was seeing during the pandemic.
Welsh independence group YesCymru have called it a “stunning” poll – and say it’s evidence Wales is losing faith in Westminster, reports WalesOnline.
The survey comes from Redfield and Wilton Strategies and was conducted with 1,068 eligible voters living in Wales.
YesCymru board member Geraint Thomas said: “This latest opinion poll is stunning, and it is further evidence that people in Wales are rapidly losing faith in Westminster.”

Lionesses

Mail
King Charles last night urged the Lionesses to ‘roar to victory’ as the England women’s football team stood on the brink of history.
An expectant nation will today cheer on manager Sarina Wiegman and her players as they strive to become the first England football team to triumph in a World Cup Final since 1966.
In a dramatic rallying cry ahead of today’s clash against Spain in Sydney, King Charles declared: ‘Good luck today Lionesses, and may you roar to victory!’ His stirring message on social media was signed Charles R.
With the country gripped with excitement, Football Association president Prince William apologised for not travelling to Australia.
Both he and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak have come under fire for opting to stay at home, while Queen Letizia of Spain and her 16-year-old daughter Infanta Sofia have jetted out to Sydney to cheer on the team.
Appearing in a video alongside his eight-year-old daughter Charlotte, Prince William said he was sorry he could not watch today’s match ‘in person’, but wanted to send ‘huge good luck’ to the Lionesses. Clutching an apparently well-used football in her lap, an excited Princess Charlotte added: ‘Good luck, Lionesses!’

Mail
Pubs up and down the country will be full to the brim tomorrow as the nation prepares to cheer on the Lionesses.
But Northerners may discover themselves forced to toast the team with a soft drink, as it appears that no councils in the North of England have promised to ‘turn a blind eye’ towards pubs serving alcohol early.
In an apparent North-South divide, a handful of councils in the South of the country had by this afternoon taken the brave step of telling landlords they would not be punished for serving alcohol before tomorrow’s 11am kick off.
Cornwall led the charge on Friday by stating that ‘no enforcement action’ would be taken by police towards pubs opening at 10am, with Buckinghamshire, Southend, Wandsworth, Richmond and other southern councils soon following suit.