Labour calls for ‘immediate humanitarian ceasefire’ in Gaza as alternative to SNP motion for ‘immediate ceasefire’ – UK politics live | Politics

At the NFU conference Rishi Sunak described the government’s efforts to reduce trade barriers between the UK and the EU as “a work in progress”.

Asked what the government was doing about the barriers farmers have to deal with when trading with EU countries, Sunak replied:

What we’re doing is working very hard with individual countries to ease all those areas where there are differences.

I’ll be totally honest, it’s a work in progress. But we are making progress.

As PA Media reports, Sunak said ministers were also in dialogue with the EU on electronic authorisations.

Labour has been preparing for the byelection in Blackpool South since before Christmas, and has a candidate installed – Chris Webb, who until recently worked in the constituency office of the late Rochdale MP, Tony Lloyd.

When the byelection takes place depends on whether Scott Benton digs his heels in and refuses to resign. If he won’t step down, Labour will organise a recall petition, and will need at least 10% of the local electorate to sign it within a six week period. If the 10% threshold is reached, the petition officer informs the speaker of the House of Commons. On the giving of that notice the seat becomes vacant and a byelection is called.

“If Scott doesn’t resign and it causes a recall, it lands right on local election day,” said a local campaign source. “If he does resign we are not sure.”

Labour says Scott Benton should resign immediately to allow a byelection to be held, instead of forcing constituents to wait for the recall petition process to conclude. Benton could be suspended from the Commons within days. After that a recall petition opens. But the petition remains open for six weeks and, unless Benton resigns, the byelection cannot be called until the petition closes and the 10% threshold has been achieved.

Jonathan Ashworth, a shadow Cabinet Office minister, said:

Scott Benton should do the decent thing and resign, saving the people of Blackpool South a lengthy recall petition that would leave them without the representation they deserve.

This is yet another byelection caused by Tory scandal. Britain deserves better than this carousel of Conservative Chaos.

Labour’s Chris Webb is Blackpool born and bred, and ready to deliver a fresh start for Blackpool South.

Rishi Sunak faces another likely byelection defeat. The Commons independent expert panel, which deals with appeals from MPs accused of misconduct, has rejected an appeal from Scott Benton against a standards committee recommendation saying he should be suspended from the Commons for 35 days for offering to lobby on behalf of the gambling industry.

The 35-day suspension will have to be approved by the Commons as a whole, but that will be a formality. And once that has been agreed, because the suspension is longer than 10 days, the Recall Act kicks in, which means that if 10% of voters in the constituency sign a petition calling for a byelection, there will be one. In all recent cases, that 10% threshold has been achieved comfortably.

Benton is MP for Blackpool South and he had a majority for the Conservatives of 3,690 at the last election over Labour. Given the current state of polling, this looks like an inevitable Labour win.

Rishi Sunak is addressing the NFU conference now.

He starts with a tribute to Minette Batters, saying it will be her last conference as NFU president. He says she has been a forceful voice for farming.

Rishi Sunak will be addressing the NFU conference in Birmingham shortly. As Helena Horton reports, he will promise farmers the “largest ever” grant scheme, as well as the creation of a food security index, after criticism that Brexit trade deals and poor responses to flooding and rising costs have put England’s ability to feed itself at risk.

Nick Boles was elected as a Conservative MP in 2010 and he served as a minister under David Cameron. In 2019 he resigned the Tory whip complaining that hardline colleagues were unwilling to accept a compromise over Brexit, and he left the Commons after the subsequent election.

Now, as PoliticsHome revealed, he is informally advising Labour. He told the Daily Telegraph:

I hope Keir Starmer is able to form a government after the next election. I want to do whatever I can to help a Labour administration succeed.

Stephen Flynn, the SNP leader at Westminster, has said that a UN security council resolution proposed by the US calling for a temporary ceasefire in Gaza does not go far enough.

As Julian Borger reports, the draft UN text “marks the first time the US has explicitly backed a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict, though it adds that the temporary truce should be begun ‘as soon as practicable’, leaving some room for manoeuvre by the Israeli military.”

Asked his view on the draft resolution, Flynn told the BBC this morning:

The problem is that ceasefire is included but the word before it is also important and the word we need to hear before it is immediate because we cannot continue to see civilians being killed, some 30,000 people have been killed since the outbreak of this conflict, 70,000 injured, there’s about 1.4 million people sheltering in Rafah which is normally home to about 170,000 people, those people are under constant bombardment from the Israeli defence force who have stated that they intend to launch a ground offensive on that area in the not too distant future.

The death toll could rise exponentially. Enough is enough. We need an immediate ceasefire and that’s what the SNP will continue to champion.

Tomorrow MPs are due to vote on an SNP motion calling for “an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Israel”. The debate is creating a problem for Labour because many of its MPs support the SNP position, but Keir Starmer has been unwilling to call for an “immediate” ceasefire without an assurance that Hamas would comply.

Starmer is also keen as acting like a prime minister in waiting, acting in concert with diplomatic allies, and not just adopting the language of protest movements. In this respect, the shift in US position might give him some cover.

At the weekend Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, said there had been discussions between SNP and Labour party whips about the vote on Wednesday, but Flynn said this morning that this was not true. He said:

I have had no communication nor has my chief whip with the Labour party, it’s deeply disappointing, and I’m not entirely sure why Anas Sarwar sought to espouse that mistruth, perhaps he was spun a line by Keir Starmer to try and calm him down a little bit, because of course Anas is in support of my position in relation to an immediate ceasefire as I believe most of Scottish Labour are.

Ultimately the key thing for me is making sure that we can protect civilian lives and that is what are going to seek to do in the House of Commons tomorrow night.

Although the SNP says its primary concern is saving lives in Gaza, in Scotland it faces its biggest electoral challenge from Labour and tabling a vote on a ceasefire motion allows it to highlight the bitter divisions in the Labour party on this issue.

Good morning. Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, probably left the Commons chamber yesterday afternoon feeling she had done rather well in terms of quashing the allegations made about the government’s handling of the Post Office Horizon scandal. In response to serious claims made by Henry Staunton, the Post Office chair she sacked, she retaliated with blanket, unequivocal denials, scorn and invective, and damning allegations about Staunton’s competence and integrity. Some of these came as a surprise to opposition MPs and, without hard evidence to challenge what Badenoch was saying, their criticisms of her were as a result more muted than they otherwise would have been.

But this morning Badenoch’s “win” does not look quite so convincing, and three developments have occured that pose further problems for her and the government.

1) Staunton has hit back, with a lengthy statement in which he says he had not even been told about the bullying allegation against him that Badenoch implied, in her statement to MPs, was a major reason for his dimissal. A spokesperson for Staunton said:

This is the first time the existence of such allegations have been mentioned and Mr Staunton is not aware of any aspect of his conduct which could give rise to such allegations.

They were certainly not raised by the Secretary of State at any stage and certainly not during the conversation which led to Mr Staunton’s dismissal. Such behaviour would in any case be totally out of character.

The full Staunton statement is here.

2) The BBC has published the results of an investigation showing that “David Cameron’s government knew the Post Office had ditched a secret investigation that might have helped wrongly accused postmasters prove their innocence”. In its story the BBC quotes Paul Marshall, a barrister who acted on behalf of some of the post office operators, saying:

The important feature of all of this is that in 2014, it appears that the Post Office board was alive to the true position – that remote access by Fujitsu was possible.

And yet the Post Office board was responsible for maintaining and advancing the Post Office’s defence to the sub-postmasters’ claim in 2019 – that it was impossible. That was false – and, it would appear, known to be so …

On the face of it, it discloses a conspiracy by the Post Office to pervert the course of justice.

3) Liam Byrne, the Labour chair of the Commons business committee, has said that his committee will be demanding evidence from the business department to establish which version of events – Badenoch’s or Staunton’s – is true. Yesterday the committee invited Staunton to give evidence to it next week. And this morning, in an interview on the Today programme, Byrne said the committee would be requesting papers relating to the row, including the email that Staunton said he wrote, and that he believes is still retained on the Post Office’s system, recording the conversation in which he claims he was told by a government official to “stall” Horizon compensation payments.

In his interview, Byrne also described the BBC story about the Cameron government knowing that the Post Office realised there was a risk of Horizon terminals being access remotely at a time when it was still defending the prosecution of post office operators who were convicted on the basis of Post Office evidence asserting categorically this was not possible. Byrne said the report seemed to be “the first evidence that we’ve got from quite an early stage that ministers were sighted on just what it was that was going on”.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10am: Alex Salmond, the former Scottish first minister, gives evidence to the Commons Scottish affairs committee.

10.15am: Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, gives evidence to the Commons Treasury committee.

10.45am: Rishi Sunak gives a speech to the NFU conference.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby conference.

11.30am: Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, gives evidence to the Commons Northern Ireland affairs committee.

Morning: David Cameron, the foreign secretary, carries out further visits on the Falklands Islands.

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