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Brexit
Independent
Electric cars will cost British motorists an extra £6,000 if Rishi Sunak fails to strike a post-Brexit deal with the EU on tariffs, industry bosses have told The Independent.
UK manufacturers warned of “devastating price war” on consumers – threatening both the electric vehicle (EV) market and the UK’s climate change commitments – if tariffs are enforced in January 2024.
In the latest major Brexit row, the Sunak government is pushing the European Commission to agree to delay the costly new rules set to come in at the start of next year as part of Boris Johnson’s Brexit trade deal.
But Brussels has shown no sign it is willing to budge – leaving business leaders in despair about the impact of 10 per cent tariffs on exports on Britain’s car industry.
The tariffs would increase the price of a new Tesla Model Y – the UK’s most popular electric vehicle – by £6,000 or more, according new report by the Independent Commission on UK-EU Relations, shared with The Independent.
BBC News
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader said he has had “interesting discussions” with Sir Keir Starmer about Labour’s plans to change the UK’s Brexit deal.
Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said Labour’s ideas would help “ease many of the difficulties moving goods” from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.
The Brexit deal for Northern Ireland means some checks on on goods from Great Britain. This is sometimes referred to as the Irish Sea border.
But what ideas might Labour be looking at when it comes to Northern Ireland?
In July 2022, Sir Keir made a speech which he described as “a plan to make Brexit work” if Labour was to form a government.
He said he would seek a new veterinary agreement for agri-products between the UK and EU.
This sort of deal could ease the checks and controls on food products being traded between both Great Britain and the EU and between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
The Windsor Framework means that compared to the original Brexit deal, controls on food products entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain have already been reduced but not eliminated.
Small boats
Express
Shocking footage has revealed how French police, funded by the UK-taxpayer proceeded to party as migrants took dinghies into deadly waters – with Britain firmly in their sights.
The video, filmed exclusively by Express.co.uk revealed the true extent of the situation in the English Channel – with record numbers of migrants putting their lives in extreme danger to come across to the UK.
The exclusive story caused a storm by detailing for the first time the ways in which extra officers, financed by a half-a-billion-pound agreement signed by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in November 2022, worked for just six hours and lived in high-end accommodation.
Sunak promised “rapid action” while Tory MPs suggested the findings meant Paris alone could not be trusted to stop the boats.
Now a new documentary by the reporting team that went to France shows previously unseen footage of both police excess and migrant boats being launched from the beaches.
It shows officers preparing to party as well as migrant boats departing for UK waters.
The film also shows inside the police officer’s four-star hotel on the outskirts of Calais which is costing around £10,000 a night to Britain.
Conservative Party
Express
Vote Conservative to stop Labour concreting over the countryside, campaigners will say this week in two key by-election battles.
Rishi Sunak will face a big political test on Thursday when voters go to the polls to choose new MPs in traditional Tory strongholds Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth.
The Conservative candidates say Sir Keir Starmer gave people a new reason to vote Tory when he pledged to “bulldoze” through a “restrictive planning system” and “build the next generation of Labour new towns”.
In his landmark conference speech on Tuesday, the Labour leader said while his party was not intent on “tearing up the greenbelt”, these zones to prevent urban sprawl were sometimes nothing more than a “dreary wasteland”.
Sir Keir went further in another interview, saying he would bulldoze through local opposition to new homes. He described himself as a “Yimby” – someone who says Yes to building in his backyard.
Tories fighting to keep the two seats blue believe Sir Keir has handed them vital ammunition in the last stages of the campaign.
Labour Party
Telegraph
If Sir Keir Starmer should become prime minister next year, don’t expect to hear anyone close to him claiming it was his destiny. They will be more likely to admit it happened almost by accident.
Sir Keir was never expected to be Labour’s next prime minister. Instead, he was supposed to be the man who turned the party from the unelectable rabble of Jeremy Corbyn’s days into a political force that could be taken seriously once again as an Opposition.
The assumed timeframe for the transformation was anything up to a decade, meaning Sir Keir would lead Labour to a creditable defeat in 2024, reduce the Tory majority, and hand over to a younger leader like Wes Streeting who would have been prepped and polished for Downing Street.
“He was meant to be our Neil Kinnock or our John Smith,” as one Labour official put it. But then two things happened unexpectedly.
Boris Johnson, a man Labour expected to lead the country into the 2030s, squandered the gift of his 80-seat majority by testing the patience of his MPs beyond breaking point. And while everyone was staring agog at the implosion of the Conservative Party, Sir Keir was quietly proving to be a far more effective reformer than anyone had foreseen.
Independent
We are the builders!” exclaimed Keir Starmer to the applause of Labour Party conference delegates. Well, good luck me old China, although it is not yet quite clear what hard hat, hi-vis jacket, hod-shouldering Starmer wants us to build.
“Britain will get its future back,” he says, and going back to the future – at the wheel of a Morris Minor perhaps – the Labour leader talks of a new wave of “new towns” built by state-backed companies served with an urban side dish of Georgian-style townhouses.
Starmer, we learned this week, is a self-professed “yimby” – yes in my backyard – although, short of commissioning a fashionable skinny New York-style apartment skyscraper in his back garden in Camden, he is unlikely to open the curtains of his bedroom window and be faced by some politically willed new housing development, affordable or not.
As for the big noise about building 1.5 million new homes in the first five years of a new Labour government, this works out at 300,000 a year which is what Winston Churchill’s incoming administration promised in 1951 and 100,000 less than Harold Wilson promised in Labour’s 1966 manifesto. This ambitious target was hit, although quantity triumphed over quality, and few will or should ever forget the fatal collapse of Ronan Point, a shoddy system-built east London tower block in 1968.
Observer
Labour is preparing to omit plans for large-scale reform of social care from its next election manifesto, scale back its plans for House of Lords reform during a first term in office, and recalibrate the way it presents its £28bn-a-year green prosperity plan as it prepares to put a “bombproof” offer to voters before polling day.
After a successful conference in Liverpool last week, which resulted in the party extending its poll lead over the Tories, shadow cabinet ministers are now turning their minds to the precise shape of a manifesto for an election next May or October. Senior figures said the focus would be on producing an offering that was “affordable” in a difficult financial climate, as well as being “credible” and “deliverable”.
The Observer understands that Starmer’s party will avoid laying out a detailed plan for reform of social care, and the politically nightmarish issue of how to fund it, because it fears any proposals would be torpedoed by the Tories in the heat of a campaign.
According to senior party figures, Keir Starmer’s team – while committed to social care reform – do not want to offer the Tories a target that would invite them to attack the plans and make claims about the tax implications. Instead, there would be a general commitment to make changes when in office.
Mail
Deliberately calling someone by the ‘wrong’ gender pronouns could become a hate crime punishable by imprisonment under a Labour government, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Vowing to toughen up the sentencing guidelines for abuse and violence targeted at trans people, Labour would make attacks motivated by hatred of the victim’s gender identity into ‘aggravated offences’. This would bring transphobic abuse into line with assault and harassment motivated by hatred on the grounds of race or religion, which are punishable by up to two years in prison.
Critics warn that the policy could therefore mean jail sentences for someone refusing to use a transgender person’s preferred pronouns, or referring to them by their former name or their birth sex rather than their chosen gender.
Last night, a senior Tory source said: ‘Some police forces have shown themselves overzealous in the pursuit of supposed hate crimes and this reform would send them a signal to go even further.
‘We’ve seen people arrested for misgendering but this isn’t enough for Labour – they want them locked up for two years.’
Civil service
Mail
Downing Street‘s decree that every Government department should fly the Israeli flag in solidarity with the victims of last weekend’s terrorist attacks led to an astonishing revolt by civil servants, The Mail on Sunday has learned.
After Ministers gave the order for the flags to be raised last week, permanent secretaries – the most senior officials in Whitehall – were bombarded with complaints by colleagues on the grounds that the Government was ‘taking sides’.
While some departments, such as Suella Braverman‘s Home Office, had an Israeli flag flying by Monday, it took Health Secretary Steve Barclay until Wednesday to persuade civil servants – often nicknamed ‘the Blob’ – to obey his order.
Whitehall sources say that the flag was then taken down again against Mr Barclay’s wishes.
‘It was removed by officials,’ said a source yesterday. ‘We are trying to get it back up again.’
Mirror
Civil service boss Simon Case appeared to joke that Carrie Johnson was “the real person in charge” during the pandemic according to WhatsApps handed to the Covid Inquiry.
A previously unpublished exchange between the Cabinet Secretary, Boris Johnson’s then-spin chief Lee Cain and Dominic Cummings was shown on screen during today’s hearing. The messages were featured as part of evidence from Mr Cummings, Mr Johnson’s top aide turned nemesis, alongside an email from July 13 2020 complaining about the Cabinet Office.
The WhatsApps, understood to date from October 14, 2020, show Mr Case saying “not sure I can cope today” after being contacted by Matt [Hancock] to discuss “regional circuit breakers for the North”. He adds: “I’m going to scream.”
Mr Cain, who was No10 director of communications, replies: “Sigh. Wtf are we talking about.” The top civil servant responded: “Whatever Carrie wants I guess.”
Another message from Mr Case shows him joking: “I was always told Dom [Cummings] was the secret PM. How wrong they are. I look forward to telling select cttee tomorrow ‘oh f*** no, don’t worry about Dom. The real person in charge is Carrie’. He appears to be referring to an evidence session with the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee in October 2020.
Police
Guardian
Metropolitan police officers are openly defying orders not to wear badges appropriated by the far right and linked to white supremacy.
In July, the force’s chief, Mark Rowley, banned officers from wearing the “thin blue line” badge saying that in the US an equivalent symbol had been used by “hard-right groups”.
However, images have emerged of Met officers wearing the symbol late last month as they policed a stand-off between LGBTQ+ rights supporters and a rightwing group over a drag act’s performance at the Honor Oak pub in Lewisham, south London.
Campaigners said it was “worrying” that officers at the protest organised by Turning Point UK (TPUK) felt they could challenge Rowley’s authority with apparent impunity.
In the US, the police’s use of the thin blue line symbol has proved divisive, with some forces banning it after it was worn on face masks by officers policing Black Lives Matter protests, with the symbol also seen at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 and the insurrection at the US Capitol in 2021.
However, the wearing of it by UK police has been supported by the home secretary, Suella Braverman, who questioned Rowley’s banning of the badge, and in her recent Conservative party conference speech singled out firearms police for praise, describing them as “the thin blue line”.
NHS
Telegraph
Some NHS hospital trusts are calling in exterminators on a near daily basis amid a plague of rats and mice at many ageing sites.
Data obtained by The Telegraph reveal that Barts Health NHS Trust, which has four sites in London, had 277 call-outs for rodent-related issues in 2022.
Barts is one of the capital’s largest trusts and is home to St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the City of London, the oldest hospital in England and founded 900 years ago.
However, the NHS trust’s “eclectic and often aged historical buildings” are leading to ongoing issues with rats and mice, it has emerged.
Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show 2022 was the worst year for rats and mice at Barts in six years. For every year since 2017, there have been more than 100 call-outs to deal with rodents.
Last year’s second-worst affected NHS trust was King’s College Trust, which had 273 call-outs – up from 175 in 2021 and 98 in 2020.
Another London trust, Imperial, was third with 247 call-outs in 2022. That is its lowest number in six years since more than 400 call-outs, more than one a day, were made in 2017.
Israeli war
Mail
Tensions have mounted overnight as the war in Israel and Palestine appears perilously close to spilling over into a wider regional conflict in the Middle East.
Iran told Israel via the United Nations it would intervene if operations in Gaza continued, a report claimed, as Israel readied a ‘wide range of offensive operational plans’ including a ‘joint and coordinated attack [on Gaza] from the air, sea and land.’
Diplomatic sources told Axios that while Iran did not want the conflict to escalate, it was prepared to intervene either directly or indirectly, such as via a military group in Syria or Lebanon.
Schools in Lebanon remain closed amid fears of Israeli missiles targeting Hezbollah militants near the border. While Hezbollah has not formally joined the war, the group has clashed with Israeli forces several times this week.
Reports broke around 1am BST on Sunday that the group had struck Israeli border fences with anti-tank missiles, hours after Israel told Hezbollah to stay out of the conflict with Hamas, warning that intervening could lead to Lebanon’s ‘destruction’.
Telegraph
Israel is preparing an assault on Hamas “from the air, sea and land”, as Benjamin Netanyahu declared that “the next stage is coming”.
The Israeli prime minister signalled that a ground offensive in Gaza was imminent as he visited infantrymen close to the border on Saturday.
A video showed Mr Netanyahu, clad in military body armour, asking Israeli troops: “You ready for the next stage? The next stage is coming.”
Shortly afterwards, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said it was preparing for a “significant ground operation” in the Gaza Strip as part of a “wide range of offensive operational plans”, including a “joint and co-ordinated attack from the air, sea and land”.
Writing in The Telegraph, Oliver Dowden, the Deputy Prime Minister, said Britain’s support for Israel’s right to defend itself “must not dissipate when the reality of fighting an enemy that hides in tunnels and amongst civilian homes, schools and hospitals takes shape”.
He added: “The test is not of our words now but our actions in the weeks to come.”
Sun
ISRAEL’S military has surrounded the Gaza Strip amid plans to launch a “coordinated” attack by land, air and sea.
The move comes amid fears that Hamas is blocking terrified residents from escaping the bomb-blitzed enclave.
The Israeli military said its forces were preparing to implement a wide range of operational offensive plans as expectations grew of an imminent invasion of the Gaza Strip.
The IDF said its forces were deployed across the country, increasing operational readiness for the next stages of the war, “with an emphasis on significant ground operations”.
And Israeli army spokesperson Jonathan Conricus said forces are now “in formation… all around the Gaza Strip, in the south, in the centre and the north.”
ITVX
The longer the wait, the bigger the build-up, the more extensive the operation. Everything points to a no-holds-barred Israeli invasion of Gaza.
They last went in seven years ago and, on that occasion, avoided the urban areas. This time that won’t be possible given Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledge that “every Hamas member is a dead man”.
But the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) will have trouble matching their actions with the prime minister’s words.
Hamas’ defence of Gaza seven years ago was at least proficient. If their defensive capabilities match the offensive ones they showed on Saturday then conquering the Strip will prove immensely difficult.
Hamas have dug a labyrinth of tunnels to enable them to pop up all over the place, making the Israeli flanks and rear extremely vulnerable all the time.
And even if the Israelis do prevail, what then?
As former US secretary of state Colin Powell famously warned president Bush Snr, during the first Gulf War – “You break it, you own it.”
BBC News
British nationals in Gaza have been told to be ready in case the Rafah border crossing into Egypt is opened.
The crossing, which lies in Gaza’s south, is currently the only route out of the territory, with Hamas, Egypt, and Israel all exercising degrees of control over who can pass through.
It comes after a third UK government charter flight departed Israel.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will also host King Abdullah of Jordan on Sunday to discuss the conflict.
The last week has seen the supply of water, food, and energy to Gaza cut off, prompting international concern about the potential for a humanitarian disaster in the Strip.
I give up. Sir Mark Rowley, supposedly Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis is woke as they come. When he first came to the Metropolitan Police from elsewhere about 15 years ago I and many others despaired. He has no idea how to police the streets, and it shows. We need senior officers once again who have progressed through all the ranks including at the very bottom who deal with front line policing at the sharp end , rather than those like him who joined from University on a rapid promotion course. Years ago, senior police officers were respected by those below them and they looked the part as well, and one dared not to cross swords. Nowadays well……Rowley, is part of the problem and not part of the solution. We need to be rid of Police and Crime Commissioners like Khan and clueless Chief Constable’s and Commissioners like Rowley. Policing needs to get back to basics, with policemen looking like policemen. Get shot of open neck polo shirts, trousers tucked into unpolished chunky boots, and get back to shirt and tie, tunic and polished boots and have handcuffs and batons hidden away like they used to be and stop looking like paramilitaries, and start arresting the bad boys and put them before the courts. It really does not need a three year degree course to do this, give me strength………
The 4-day week seems to be growing in popularity, especially amongst local authorities and other public bodies funded by the taxpayer. Time that they received 4 days pay for 4 days work to bring the skivers back to reality….
Re Middle East war.
There’s a high likelyhood that at some point the likes of Saudi Arabia and Qatar will turn off the oil and gas taps.
They’ll do it in Winter when demand is high.
This will result in high prices, rationing or even dearth of all fuels including electricity. You all need to be thinking about what you’d do in this event.
So, candles, keep the car well filled up, alternative heating/cooking (Camping Gaz stove?) maybe even a portable generator for the freezer.
Get in some coal/firewood if appropriate.
Do it now before the rush starts.
HarryFAgain- yes, the Sausi hVW already throttled back production. fancy 300 dollars a bbl? Its coming.
Otherwise, HFA you are right, – sort yourselves out before the coming great reset.
Shame we cut back on the North Sea then, and did not pursue fracking on a war-footing (that’s ironic).
HA……..It would be great if one could buy coal now. Unfortunately the sale of coal for domestic purposes was outlawed from the 1st April 2023. I am surprised you didn’t know this, being a fully paid up member of Boris Johnson’s Net Zero brigade.
Small Boats
What a pathetic nation we’ve become, Our ancestors, who fought and died to prevent invasion and keep ths country free, must be turning in their graves. We are now reduced to paying and begging France to protect our borders, while we allow a never ending invasion of small rubber boats carrying fighting age young men from alien cultures. Thousands of young men and hardly any women, what could possibly go wrong? Not only that, but we pay to ferry them in and transport them to Hotels, the tax-payers then pay for their upkeep and everything else. This must be the softest takeover of a country in history, by the best kept invaders in history. It’s probably too late now but massive remigration is needed.