From 19m ago
Starmer insists there ‘no case’ for rejoining EU, saying working with Brussels on small boats doesn’t make Labour soft on Brexit
Keir Starmer has said there is “no case” for rejoining the EU. He made the point in an interview with ITV’s Good Morning Britain in which he insisted that his call for closer cooperation with the EU on small boats did not mean he was weakening his stance on Brexit.
He told the programme:
There is no return to freedom of movement. We have left the EU.
There’s no case for going back to the EU, no case for going into the single market or customs union and no freedom of movement. I’ve been really clear that that’s the parameter.
I do not accept that that prevents us working with other police units here, with prosecutors here, to smash the gangs in this vile trade.
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With immigration a key battleground for the coming general election, there’s a fascinating study from the charity Migration Policy Scotland which finds that Scots are becoming more welcoming to migrants.
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The first representative study of Scottish attitudes to migration since the independence and Brexit referendums, the research found that more people want immigration to go up than go down, with nearly four in 10 people wanting more immigration and less than a third thinking there should be a decrease.
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This is more positive than a similar survey of Scottish attitudes in 2014 when nearly 60% said they wanted immigration to go down.
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The research also found that nearly 60% of respondents thought immigration was positive for Scotland, with almost half reporting that immigration had a positive impact in their local area.
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This compares with research from Migration Observatory in June which sampled people across Britain, and found that 52% favour a reduction in immigration.
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Keir Starmer has said there is “no case” for rejoining the EU. He made the point in an interview with ITV’s Good Morning Britain in which he insisted that his call for closer cooperation with the EU on small boats did not mean he was weakening his stance on Brexit.
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He told the programme:
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\n
There is no return to freedom of movement. We have left the EU.
\n
There’s no case for going back to the EU, no case for going into the single market or customs union and no freedom of movement. I’ve been really clear that that’s the parameter.
\n
I do not accept that that prevents us working with other police units here, with prosecutors here, to smash the gangs in this vile trade.
\n
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Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, says the latest NHS waiting list figure show that Keir Starmer was right to label Rishi Sunak “inaction man” at PMQs yesterday. In a response he says:
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\n
Record numbers of patients are waiting for healthcare and they are left waiting unacceptably long, whether it’s for an operation, ambulance, or in A&E. For millions of patients across England, the NHS is no longer there for them when they need it.
\n
On the NHS, Rishi Sunak is inaction man, refusing to meet with doctors to end NHS strikes and adding to the Conservatives’ NHS backlog, leaving patients waiting for months on end in pain and agony.
\n
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Here is our story about the figures.
","elementId":"24a69649-b75e-4d2f-867e-5a6477d3ef86"},{"_type":"model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.RichLinkBlockElement","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/14/record-number-people-waiting-start-routine-nhs-hospital-treatment-england","text":"Record 7.68m people waiting to start routine hospital treatment in England","prefix":"Related: ","role":"thumbnail","elementId":"a97c4403-9912-4c24-8d4b-7c8b21a84a18"}],"attributes":{"pinned":false,"keyEvent":true,"summary":false},"blockCreatedOn":1694684092000,"blockCreatedOnDisplay":"10.34 BST","blockLastUpdated":1694684328000,"blockLastUpdatedDisplay":"10.38 BST","blockFirstPublished":1694684328000,"blockFirstPublishedDisplay":"10.38 BST","blockFirstPublishedDisplayNoTimezone":"10.38","title":"Record hospital waiting times show Sunak really is ‘inaction man’ on NHS, claims Streeting","contributors":[],"primaryDateLine":"Thu 14 Sep 2023 10.53 BST","secondaryDateLine":"First published on Thu 14 Sep 2023 09.50 BST"},{"id":"6502cbca8f0873945374f4c9","elements":[{"_type":"model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement","html":"
Steve Barclay, the health secretary, has rejected suggestions that Rishi Sunak downplayed the risk played by Raac (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete) in hospitals when he was a chancellor.
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Barclay was responding to a Guardian story saying Sunak blocked plans to rebuild five hospitals riddled with crumbling concrete three years ago. Barclay, who was Sunak’s deputy at the Treasury at the time, did not deny the facts as reported in the story, but he said it was wrong to suggest Sunak ignore the Raac problem.
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Barclay told Sky News that Sunak was “on this issue early”. He said:
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What Rishi Sunak as chancellor put in place was a £700m fund for replacement – that was put in place from 2021.
\n
In fact, we were on this issue early, we were surveying hospitals from 2019 and we’ve been following the Institute for Structural Engineers’ advice, which is that not all Raac has to be replaced.
\n
What we need to do is monitor it, assess it, and where there is a concern with deterioration then it does need to be replaced.
\n
And that’s why a £700m fund was put in place – two schemes for full replacement of those hospitals were agreed – but further work was then commissioned and a study from [Mott MacDonald, an engineering consultancy] was then commissioned to assess the other five hospitals.
\n
Once we got that information, those schemes have then come into the programme – so a significant investment, specifically in Raac.
\n
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Thursday’s GUARDIAN: “Sunak blocked rebuild of hospitals riddled with crumbling concrete” #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/vgbLyA8f12
— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) September 13, 2023
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The number of people in England waiting to start routine hospital treatment has risen to a new record high, PA Media reports. PA says:
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An estimated 7.68 million people were waiting to start treatment at the end of July, up from 7.57 million in June, NHS England said.
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It is the highest number since records began in August 2007.
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Rishi Sunak has made cutting waiting lists one of his priorities for 2023, pledging in January that “lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly”.
\n
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Good morning. Keir Starmer is in The Hague this morning, talking to Europol, but more importantly perhaps he has also been talking to the Sun and the Times in a move to quash any Tory attempts to use the small boats issue as an issue against Labour at the election.
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Rishi Sunak has made “stopping the boats” a priority, but the government has failed to implement its Rwanda policy, small boat crossings continue and the plan to house asylum seekers on a barge collapsed when it had to be evacuated for health issues. Labour is already ahead as the party seen as best able to tackle immigration.
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That has not stopped the Tories trying to weaponise the issue. The thinking within No 10 seems to be that eventually (If flights to Rwanda take off? If the Illegal Immigration Act starts to work? If they threaten to leave the ECHR?) they will reach a point where policy aligns with public opinion, but the Labour party (whose activists hate punitive migration policies) has to say no.
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In response, Starmer is launching a small boats blitz. He has written an article for the Sun, and given an interview to the paper, and spoken to the Times as well. We are likely to hear more from him today.
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In policy terms, what is being announced today is limited. Labour already had a five-point plan to tackle small boats, and Starmer is not announcing a radical departure from it. But he is being a bit more explicit about something that was always implicit. He has implied that, under Labour, the UK would agree to take in some asylum seekers as part of a returns agreement with the EU that would allow small boat migrants to be returned. Labour has been calling for a returns agreement for some time, and this was always the obvious implication of the policy. (Why else would the EU agree to take back migrants?) But until now Starmer has been reluctant to say so.
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But in rhetorical terms, today marks a major escalation. Starmer is sounding a lot, lot tougher on small boats than he has before. He said people smuggling posed a threat on a par with climate change, war and terrorism. He said:
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The government’s failure to tackle the criminal smuggling gangs orchestrating boat crossings is now so profound that I believe it needs to be considered on a par with the other three big security threats we face: climate change, hostile foreign powers and terrorism.
\n
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This is not particularly credible (most analysts would conclude that the threat from climate breakdown is far, far more serious than the threat posed by small boats), but it is the sort of thing that goes down well with people who are concerned about irregular migration, and with the newspapers they read.
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Ben Quinn has more on this here.
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Rishi Sunak is due to give a broadcast interview later today, and we will get his response then. But we got a flavour of what he will say in the response from the Conservative party issued overnight. A party spokesperson said:
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\n
Keir Starmer’s Labour party have been doing everything to undermine our plans to stop the boats – and now he’s opening the door to voluntarily taking even more illegal migrants from the EU.
\n
Sir Keir belongs to the same failed politics that won’t take the necessary long-term decisions to tackle this issue. He clearly doesn’t care about illegal immigration and is trying to take the easy way out. Fundamentally his ideas would do nothing but weaken our tough measures.
\n
Only the Conservatives are taking the tough, but necessary decisions to stop the boats. Crossings are down by 20 per cent this year and our deal with Albania has seen illegal Albanian crossings fall by 90 per cent – and proves that delivering on our Rwanda plan, which Labour oppose, is essential to finally ending the small boats altogether.
\n
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Here is the agenda for the day.
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Morning: Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, have a meeting at Europol in The Hague.
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Morning: Rishi Sunak is due to speak to broadcasters during a visit to a hospital in Devon.
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9.30am: NHS England publishes hospital waiting time figures.
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Noon: Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, takes questions at Holyrood.
","elementId":"f52b69dd-87eb-437c-8db7-faf9051cc0d2"},{"_type":"model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement","html":"
Around lunchtime: The government is due to publish its response to the intelligence and security committee’s report on China.
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If you want to contact me, do try the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a laptop or a desktop. This is for people who want to message me directly. I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting, too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line, privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate), or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.
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Key events
Filters BETA
More Scots want immigration to rise than to fall, research shows
Libby Brooks
With immigration a key battleground for the coming general election, there’s a fascinating study from the charity Migration Policy Scotland which finds that Scots are becoming more welcoming to migrants.
The first representative study of Scottish attitudes to migration since the independence and Brexit referendums, the research found that more people want immigration to go up than go down, with nearly four in 10 people wanting more immigration and less than a third thinking there should be a decrease.
This is more positive than a similar survey of Scottish attitudes in 2014 when nearly 60% said they wanted immigration to go down.
The research also found that nearly 60% of respondents thought immigration was positive for Scotland, with almost half reporting that immigration had a positive impact in their local area.
This compares with research from Migration Observatory in June which sampled people across Britain, and found that 52% favour a reduction in immigration.
Starmer insists there ‘no case’ for rejoining EU, saying working with Brussels on small boats doesn’t make Labour soft on Brexit
Keir Starmer has said there is “no case” for rejoining the EU. He made the point in an interview with ITV’s Good Morning Britain in which he insisted that his call for closer cooperation with the EU on small boats did not mean he was weakening his stance on Brexit.
He told the programme:
There is no return to freedom of movement. We have left the EU.
There’s no case for going back to the EU, no case for going into the single market or customs union and no freedom of movement. I’ve been really clear that that’s the parameter.
I do not accept that that prevents us working with other police units here, with prosecutors here, to smash the gangs in this vile trade.
Record hospital waiting times show Sunak really is ‘inaction man’ on NHS, claims Streeting
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, says the latest NHS waiting list figure show that Keir Starmer was right to label Rishi Sunak “inaction man” at PMQs yesterday. In a response he says:
Record numbers of patients are waiting for healthcare and they are left waiting unacceptably long, whether it’s for an operation, ambulance, or in A&E. For millions of patients across England, the NHS is no longer there for them when they need it.
On the NHS, Rishi Sunak is inaction man, refusing to meet with doctors to end NHS strikes and adding to the Conservatives’ NHS backlog, leaving patients waiting for months on end in pain and agony.
Here is our story about the figures.
Barclay rejects suggestions Sunak ignored hospital Raac problem as chancellor, saying he was ‘on issue early’
Steve Barclay, the health secretary, has rejected suggestions that Rishi Sunak downplayed the risk played by Raac (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete) in hospitals when he was a chancellor.
Barclay was responding to a Guardian story saying Sunak blocked plans to rebuild five hospitals riddled with crumbling concrete three years ago. Barclay, who was Sunak’s deputy at the Treasury at the time, did not deny the facts as reported in the story, but he said it was wrong to suggest Sunak ignore the Raac problem.
Barclay told Sky News that Sunak was “on this issue early”. He said:
What Rishi Sunak as chancellor put in place was a £700m fund for replacement – that was put in place from 2021.
In fact, we were on this issue early, we were surveying hospitals from 2019 and we’ve been following the Institute for Structural Engineers’ advice, which is that not all Raac has to be replaced.
What we need to do is monitor it, assess it, and where there is a concern with deterioration then it does need to be replaced.
And that’s why a £700m fund was put in place – two schemes for full replacement of those hospitals were agreed – but further work was then commissioned and a study from [Mott MacDonald, an engineering consultancy] was then commissioned to assess the other five hospitals.
Once we got that information, those schemes have then come into the programme – so a significant investment, specifically in Raac.
Thursday’s GUARDIAN: “Sunak blocked rebuild of hospitals riddled with crumbling concrete” #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/vgbLyA8f12
— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) September 13, 2023
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Waiting list for hospital treament in England hits new record at almost 7.7m
The number of people in England waiting to start routine hospital treatment has risen to a new record high, PA Media reports. PA says:
An estimated 7.68 million people were waiting to start treatment at the end of July, up from 7.57 million in June, NHS England said.
It is the highest number since records began in August 2007.
Rishi Sunak has made cutting waiting lists one of his priorities for 2023, pledging in January that “lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly”.
Tories claim Starmer would take ‘more illegal migrants from EU’ as Labour sets out plan to tackle people smuggling
Good morning. Keir Starmer is in The Hague this morning, talking to Europol, but more importantly perhaps he has also been talking to the Sun and the Times in a move to quash any Tory attempts to use the small boats issue as an issue against Labour at the election.
Rishi Sunak has made “stopping the boats” a priority, but the government has failed to implement its Rwanda policy, small boat crossings continue and the plan to house asylum seekers on a barge collapsed when it had to be evacuated for health issues. Labour is already ahead as the party seen as best able to tackle immigration.
That has not stopped the Tories trying to weaponise the issue. The thinking within No 10 seems to be that eventually (If flights to Rwanda take off? If the Illegal Immigration Act starts to work? If they threaten to leave the ECHR?) they will reach a point where policy aligns with public opinion, but the Labour party (whose activists hate punitive migration policies) has to say no.
In response, Starmer is launching a small boats blitz. He has written an article for the Sun, and given an interview to the paper, and spoken to the Times as well. We are likely to hear more from him today.
In policy terms, what is being announced today is limited. Labour already had a five-point plan to tackle small boats, and Starmer is not announcing a radical departure from it. But he is being a bit more explicit about something that was always implicit. He has implied that, under Labour, the UK would agree to take in some asylum seekers as part of a returns agreement with the EU that would allow small boat migrants to be returned. Labour has been calling for a returns agreement for some time, and this was always the obvious implication of the policy. (Why else would the EU agree to take back migrants?) But until now Starmer has been reluctant to say so.
But in rhetorical terms, today marks a major escalation. Starmer is sounding a lot, lot tougher on small boats than he has before. He said people smuggling posed a threat on a par with climate change, war and terrorism. He said:
The government’s failure to tackle the criminal smuggling gangs orchestrating boat crossings is now so profound that I believe it needs to be considered on a par with the other three big security threats we face: climate change, hostile foreign powers and terrorism.
This is not particularly credible (most analysts would conclude that the threat from climate breakdown is far, far more serious than the threat posed by small boats), but it is the sort of thing that goes down well with people who are concerned about irregular migration, and with the newspapers they read.
Ben Quinn has more on this here.
Rishi Sunak is due to give a broadcast interview later today, and we will get his response then. But we got a flavour of what he will say in the response from the Conservative party issued overnight. A party spokesperson said:
Keir Starmer’s Labour party have been doing everything to undermine our plans to stop the boats – and now he’s opening the door to voluntarily taking even more illegal migrants from the EU.
Sir Keir belongs to the same failed politics that won’t take the necessary long-term decisions to tackle this issue. He clearly doesn’t care about illegal immigration and is trying to take the easy way out. Fundamentally his ideas would do nothing but weaken our tough measures.
Only the Conservatives are taking the tough, but necessary decisions to stop the boats. Crossings are down by 20 per cent this year and our deal with Albania has seen illegal Albanian crossings fall by 90 per cent – and proves that delivering on our Rwanda plan, which Labour oppose, is essential to finally ending the small boats altogether.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, have a meeting at Europol in The Hague.
Morning: Rishi Sunak is due to speak to broadcasters during a visit to a hospital in Devon.
9.30am: NHS England publishes hospital waiting time figures.
Noon: Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, takes questions at Holyrood.
Around lunchtime: The government is due to publish its response to the intelligence and security committee’s report on China.
If you want to contact me, do try the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a laptop or a desktop. This is for people who want to message me directly. I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting, too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line, privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate), or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.