Ed Davey backs calls for UK to suspend arms sales to Israel – UK politics live | Politics

Rishi Sunak has said that arms exports to Israel are kept under “careful” review, but he has resisted calls for them to be halted.

In an interview recorded today with the Sun’s new politics programme, Never Mind the Ballots, when asked if he would supend arms sales to Israel, Sunak replied:

We’ve always had a very careful export licensing regime that we adhere to. There are a set of rules regulations and procedures that we’ll always follow.

And I’ve been consistently clear with Prime Minister Netanyahu since the start of this conflict that whilst of course we defend Israel’s right to defend itself and it’s people against attacks from Hamas, they have to do that in accordance with humanitarian law, protect civilian lives, get more aid into Gaza.

Sunak told the programme that, when he spoke to Netanyahu last night, he told him that the situation in Gaza was “increasingly intolerable”. Sunak said:

I spoke to Prime Minister Netanyahu last night and I was very clear with him that the situation is increasingly intolerable and what we urgently need to see is a thorough, transparent investigation into what happened.

But also a dramatic increase in the amount of aid getting into Gaza, removing the barriers.

Also, closer work with aid agencies so that things like this don’t happen again.

Sunak also described the killing of the three British aid workers in an airstrike in Gaza as “an awful, awful tragedy”.

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, has said the UK should halt arms sales to Israel. In a statement he said:

The deaths of these British aid workers in Gaza is an absolute disgrace. These brave people were trying to help starving families in Gaza.

Clearly, the thought that British-made arms could have been used in strikes such as these is completely unacceptable.

The government must take swift action to suspend arms exports to Israel. We must redouble our efforts to secure an immediate bilateral ceasefire.

The SNP has also called for arms sales to Israel to be halted.

But the government is refusing to publish its legal advice about whether or not Israel is complying with international humanitarian law. Accepting that Israel is in breach of international law would lead to arms sales being halted. And Labour has said that suspending arms sales would have little impact anyway. (See 10.13am.)

In his brief comments to the media at the Nato summit, David Cameron also suggested that the prospect of Donald Trump winning this year’s presidential election in the US made it particularly important for all Nato countries to be spending at least 2% of GDP on defence.

Cameron said it was vital that all countries in the alliance met the 2% defence spending target. He went on:

Many more countries are now doing that, but we need every country to do that.

Frankly, that’s the best thing we can do to make sure the Nato Summit in Washington this summer is a success.

And it’s also the best way to prepare for the American elections in the autumn, whatever the outcome may be.

Cameron was referring to the prospect of the US presidential election being won by Trump, who did little to hide his lack of respect for Nato during his first term as president and who recently suggested that he would encourage Russia to attack any Nato member not paying its fair share of defence spending.

Even if a second Trump presidency did not lead to the US leaving Nato, it is widely assumed that the alliance would be severely weakened by having as leader of its most powerful member someone not fully committed to the principle of collective defence.

As prime minister Cameron hosted a Nato summit in south Wales in 2014 where he made getting Nato members to increase defence spending a priority. But many members are still not reaching the target. Here are figures from 2023.

In another interview this morning Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, brushed off questions about Labour experiencing a sharp fall in membership numbers by claiming that people who joined under Jeremy Corbyn preferred being in a party of protest to being in a party taking the “difficult decisions” needed in government.

The question was prompted by a report in the Observer at the weekend by Toby Helm. Toby said:

In a report to the NEC last week, the party’s general secretary, David Evans, caused surprise when he revealed that membership, which had stood at 390,000 in January, had plummeted to 366,604 at the latest count, with more than 11,700 of these being in arrears. Labour membership reached a peak at the end of 2019 when it hit over 532,000.

One senior Labour figure who was there said: “It is a big fall in just two months. People were surprised, even taken aback.”

Labour insiders believe that the fall has been caused primarily by anger among Muslim and others Labour supporters over Keir Starmer’s position on Gaza and his refusal over several months to call for an immediate ceasefire.

Asked about the figures on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Jones said that “membership numbers of parties go up and down all the time”. He went on:

There was also a huge surge in membership of the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn and many Jeremy Corbyn supporters preferred a party of protest as opposed to a party who have had to make difficult decisions around the trade-offs in its preparation for government in the hope that we get to run this country.

We’ve still got plenty of Labour Party members across the country, I think more than any other party.

Jones is right to say that, overall, Labour has more members than any other UK party. But, in proportional terms, the SNP’s membership is much bigger. Its membership has been falling, but a recent report said it was still 69,235 at the end of December. Given that Scotland’s population is less than a tenth of Britain’s, it has more members per head in the country where it contests elections than Labour does.

There is widespread agreement in the UK and the US that Israel has “gone too far” in its war against Hamas, Darren Jones, a Labour Treasury spokesperson, said this morning.

In an interview with ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Jones said:

I think what we’ve seen from President Biden, from Keir Starmer, and now from Lord Cameron, our own foreign secretary, is that countries that supported Israel’s right to defend itself and to recover its hostages from Hamas terrorists in Gaza, which clearly is their right to have done in the first place, have all said that you’ve gone too far, that we need to bring this war to an end, we need to get around the negotiating table, we need to aid to get to people who desperately need it in Gaza.

This latest situation, not only has it resulted in the death of aid workers, which is unacceptable, but it’s now making it much harder for aid to be made available to people who are in the most desperate situations.

But Jones did not support the call from Lord Ricketts (see 9.50am) for the UK to end arms sales to Israel. Asked if he was in favour of this, Jones replied:

The fact of the matter is if the UK, for example, stopped supplying arms, the war would not end. What we need to do is get the parties to a position where the fighting can stop.

Jones also sidestepped a question about whether he thought Israel was in breach of international law. He said:

As always, on questions of international law, it’s for judges and courts to make that decision, not for politicians.

A Scottish government minister has refused to say if comments by Harry Potter author JK Rowling could have been recorded by police as a non-crime hate incident, PA Media reports.

As Libby Brooks reports, Police Scotland said yesterday that comments by JK Rowling challenging police to arrest her for online misgendering did not amount to a crime.

But it is not clear yet whether or not this is being logged as a hate incident. The Scottish Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser has recently threatened to take legal action against Police Scotland unless they delete a complaint against him now recorded as a hate incident.

As PA Media reports, the Scottish government’s community safety minister Siobhian Brown told the BBC this morning that it was an operational matter for the police to decide if the JK Rowling complaint should be recorded in these terms.

The UK should stop arming Israel, Lord Ricketts, a former national security adviser, has said, after seven international aid workers were killed in Gaza in an Israeli airstrike. Sammy Gecsoyler has the story.

Good morning. Rishi Sunak’s first year in office was blighted by a wave of public sector strikes. Some of those disputes were ultimately resolved, but the problem has not gone away and this morning Daniel Kebede, president of the National Education Union, has been warning about the prospect of a further strike by teachers in England unless pay is improved.

The NEU is holding its conference this week and, an interview with the Today programme, Kebede said recruitment was now such a problem that education was at risk of grinding to a halt.

I would say there is a mood of desperation, if we’re being honest. The profession is very much on its knees. Morale is at an all time low.

And of course, we can see that in the crisis in recruitment and retention; 9% of the teaching profession left the profession last year prior to retirement. The government is continually missing its recruitment targets for new teachers. We missed it by 50% for secondary teachers this year.

Quite simply, if we continue on this direction of travel, education will grind to a halt …

Teacher pay has plummeted by 25% over the last decade. A teacher in England in their fifth year of teaching earns £7,500 a year less than a teacher over the border in Scotland. It’s grossly unfair.

Kebede said the union would debate whether to hold a strike ballot later this week. But it has already held a preliminary ballot (an online ballot that doesn’t have the legal authority of a proper, postal strike ballot), and those results showed 90% support for strike action for an above-inflation pay rise, on a turnout of just over 50%. Kebede said the government should take this seriously.

We’re a union of half a million members. To get over 50% of members voting at a rate of nine in 10 for strike action is incredibly significant.

Last year the government tried to minimise the impact of strikes in the public sector by passing the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, giving employers the right to force some workers to come in on strike days to maintain services at a particular level. But there is fresh evidence today this is not working. In a story for the Daily Mail, David Churchill says rail companies are refusing to use the law to lessen the impact of the Aslef strike taking place this weekend. He reports:

MPs called on train chiefs to resign or have funding pulled for failing to use the powers which would force unions to keep 40% of services running during stoppages this week and next.

The deadline for lodging their intention to use the ‘minimum service levels’ laws passed on Monday.

But industry sources told the Daily Mail that bosses for the 16 train firms affected had failed to meet it.

Drivers from the Aslef union will now inflict travel misery on millions with industrial action on different parts of the network between tomorrow and next Tuesday.

Parliament is in recess and there is not much in the domestic political diary for today. The biggest debate in politics today is about whether or not, in the light of the killing of seven aid workers, including three Britons, in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, it is now time for the UK government to declare Israel in breach of international humanitarian law, but most of our coverage of that story will be on our Israel-Gaza war live blog.

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