Starmer says he wants disruption ‘absolutely minimised’ during transition to Burnham government – UK politics live

Keir Starmer has recorded a pooled TV interview at an event in Milton Keynes this morning. where he was promoting the government’s Great British Summer Savings Scheme.

Asked if he would serve in an Andy Burnham government, he replied:

double quotation mark Let me make my position absolutely clear.

I am stepping down after two years, leaving the country in a better position than when I found it.

I will do that with good grace, and I will do that making sure that there is an orderly transition.

I’m going to be professional. I’m going to have foremost in my mind the sense of service. duty that has driven me as prime minister.

I will continue to faithfully serve my country to make sure that any disruption is absolutely minimised. And that’s why I’m taking steps now to ensure that that can be done in a sensible way.

Starmer also said he wanted to make sure “that whatever comes next is a success”. He went on:

double quotation mark I love this country, I want this country to thrive,. I shall do everything I can to make sure it’s a success and thrives. The first bit of that is making sure that there’s an orderly transition. we go on and build on the good stuff we’ve done in the first two years of this government.

John Crace has ranked the six prime ministers of the last 10 years. And he’s decided that the worst is …

Labour’s national executive committee has agreed the timetable for the new leadership selection process. Nominations will open two weeks today,. if only one candidate gets the required number of nominations from Labour MPs (20% of the PLP, or 81 MPs) they will become leader three weeks tomorrow.

The timetable also includes the relevant dates for getting affiliate (union) nominations, or PLP nominations,. for voting over August – if there is more than one candidate.

If Andy Burnham is the only candidate nominated by 81 MPs. he will still have to get nominations from at least three organisations affiliated to Labour, of which two must be unions, or from 5% of CLPs (constituency Labour parties). He could get both easily. Getting union nominations can happen more quickly,. the timetable has been drawn up on the assumption that he will get the affiliate nominations before 17 July, and there will be no need for CLP nominations.

Unless something wholly unexpected happens within the next fortnight to derail the Burnham candidacy, there won’t be another candidate,. so the August elections parts of the timetable almost certainly won’t be needed.

Here are the dates from the Labour briefing.

In January Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, announced major plans to restructure the police forces in England and Wales. She said this would include some mergers,. Bernard Hogan-Howe, the former Metropolitan police commissioner, was appointed to lead a review making specific recommendations on this issue.

Now Sam Coates at Sky News has been told that an Andy Burnham government may scrap these plans. In his report. Coates says: “We have been told that the likely incoming prime minister is not keen on combining police forces, which is currently the subject of a review by a former head of the Metropolitan police.”

A trans-inclusive conversion therapy ban will not see healthcare workers criminalised for speaking about sexuality. gender with their patients, a minister has said. The Press Association says the government has unveiled its draft conversion practices bill. designed to stop abusive attempts to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. PA says:

double quotation mark Equalities minister Olivia Bailey told the Commons: “This bill does not remove anyone’s rights to freedom of expression or religion or how to parent – this bill simply prevents abuse.

“And to ensure there is no inadvertent chilling effect on important healthcare. there is an exemption for all healthcare professionals on the face of the bill.”

She faced a question from Lisa Smart. the Liberal Democrat MP for Hazel Grove, who asked how the proposal would stop somebody setting up, for example, “a mental health charity in an attempt to circumvent the aims of this Bill”.

Bailey replied: “It is my view that legitimate healthcare would not fall under the remits of this bill in any way, shape or form, because legitimate healthcare would never be abusing somebody to try. change their identity and causing them serious harm.”

She repeated she had heard concerns a conversion therapy ban could have “a chilling effect” on healthcare.

She continued: “We don’t want that because therapy and good therapy and good conversation is really important. That’s why we put this exemption on the face of the bill.”

Here are some comments on the Greater Manchester mayoral election poll covered earlier. (See 11.26am.)

From Luke Tryl, the More in Common pollster

double quotation mark Have to admit I’m surprised how low the Green share is here. Would imply significant loss of momentum since the locals and/or that prospect of Burnham is already reuniting the left. Regardless if first round is anything close to this looks like a solid Labour hold in the second

From Ben Walker, the New Statesman’s elections expert

double quotation mark FocalData poll for the Greater Manchester mayoralty has Labour on 33%, Reform 30.

Compares to Ref 31% in the May council elections and Lab 23%.

Greens on 13%, down from 19.

YouGov has some polling out today. suggests Andy Burnham’s lead over Nigel Farage on who would make the best PM is twice as large as Keir Starmer’s.

Burnham is also ahead of all other main party leaders on this measure – unlike Starmer, who was beaten by Ed Davey,. level with Kemi Badenoch.

double quotation mark Although the outgoing prime minister consistently held a lead over Nigel Farage when it comes to who would do better at Downing Street. the 10-point margin Starmer holds over the Reform UK leader in our most recent figures from May is half the lead held by Burnham today.

Likewise, Burnham performs significantly better in opposition to his fellow progressive leaders. His 27-point lead over Zack Polanski compares to Starmer bettering the Green leader by just five points. while the public’s view that Burnham would be a superior PM to Ed Davey contrasts with them favouring the Lib Dem leader over Starmer by 27% to 23%.

Burnham’s 4-point advantage over Kemi Badenoch. though, represents a much smaller improvement, as Britons were evenly split 33% to 33% over whether she or Starmer would make the better PM in our May figures.

Ben Quinn is a Guardian political correspondent.

A climate activist has disrupted an international summit of rightwing politicians activists. their financial backers by infiltrating the venue and interrupting a speech.

The activist was from a group called Fossil Free London. which had been protesting outside the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference (ARC) in London.

Backers of the event - encompassing social conservatives, libertarians, far right supporters. others - have included fossil companies that have also backed Donald Trump.

Keynote speakers have included Trump’s energy secretary. a former fracking executive who used a speech at ARC this week to accuse successive UK government of making a “tragic mistake” with net zero policies.

Fossil Free London said:

double quotation mark ARC’s mission is to enrich oil barons, tech executives. corrupt politicians, seeding backward-looking, violence-espousing narratives so people fight it out over characteristics like race and gender.

ARC said that an individual had bypassed security. entered the main stage of the conference at the Olympia, disrupting a speech by the CEO of US company Banylon Bee, Seth Dillon. “He was briefly detained while the facts were established and quickly released.”

In response to the claims against it, ARC said: “Too often we have failed to acknowlegde complex trade-offs or the reality that abundant, reliable. affordable energy are the base layer of martial civilization.”

A minister has rejected claims the Foreign Office prioritised its relationship with the United Arab Emirates over preventing “genocidal slaughter” in Sudan. the Press Association reports. PA says:

double quotation mark Chris Elmore said London “acted swiftly” when it learned the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group was likely to attack El Fasher. a city in western Sudan.

An RSF offensive in El Fasher killed more than 6,000 people over a three-day period last year. according to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) at the Yale School of Public Health found in July 2023. a “full-scale attack” by the RSF was likely. According to evidence submitted to the Commons international development committee. HRL briefed UK Foreign Office staff privately “over two dozen times” about the threat.

But according to the HRL’s executive director Nathaniel Raymond, who gave the evidence, the Foreign Office appeared to have “prioritised the government’s economic, security. diplomatic relationships with the UAE above preventing the intentional starvation, forced displacement, and the genocidal slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians living in El Fasher and its surrounding communities”.

Sarah Champion. the Labour MP who chairs the committee, has written a letter about this to the international develoment miniser, Jenny Chapman. Champion said: “This evidence was profoundly shocking and. if accurate, would be some of the most concerning accounts I have heard of Foreign Office failure to take seriously its commitments to atrocity prevention.”

In response to an urgent question in the Commons on the allegations. Elmore said: “I have to tell the house that we completely reject these claims.

“The UK acted swiftly. including on June 13 2024, when the previous government were in office, that we penned the UN security council resolution – we demanded that the RSF halt the siege on the city.”

Iain Duncan Smith. the former Conservative cabinet minister, told MPs: “It seems that whoever comes into government, the Foreign Office’s weak policy with regards to the UAE pertains.

“Surely it is time for a British government to stand up. say, ‘Enough is enough – we are going to sanction all of those individuals responsible for the decision-making in the UAE and in other countries providing arms to the rebels’. If we don’t do that, then all the talk is worthless.”

Kemi Badenoch has declined to apologise for calling Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, a “spiteful class warrior”. (See 10.20am.)

Speaking to reporters today, the Tory leader defended what she said about the education secretary at PMQs. She said:

double quotation mark Yesterday I said that Bridget Phillipson was spiteful and incompetent. It’s interesting that she hasn’t complained about being incompetent, and Keir Starmer didn’t say that she was competent.

Badenoch claimed Phillipson’s imposition of VAT on private schools had “displaced” 40,000 pupils through school closures or. their parents could no longer afford the fees.

And she said Phillipson had failed to deliver the extra 6,500 teachers promised in Labour’s manifesto. saying there were 2,000 fewer teachers than when the party came to power. She said:

double quotation mark We have gone backwards both years she has been education secretary. That is a failure. It is my job as leader of the opposition to hold her to account.

Badenoch also said Phillipson had been “rude” about the shadow justice secretary, Nick Timothy, calling him “a racist” during women. equalities questions in the Commons before PMQs.

Phillipson, who is minister for women. equalities as well as education secrtary, said Timothy had “engaged in appalling racism towards Muslims in our country”. She was referring to the way he condemned a mass prayer event held by Muslims in Trafalgar Square as “an act of domination”. “straight from the Islamist playbook”.

Here are some more pictures from the event in Milton Keynes this morning where Keir Starmer was meeting pupils as he promoted the government’s Great British Summer Savings Scheme.

Speaking at the BCC conference today. Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, was asked if he would consider a coalition with a Labour party led by Andy Burnham. He declined to engage with the question, replying:

double quotation mark I’m very confident about when my party is going to be. It will be, I think, [Kemi] Badenoch who will be worried about questions about coalition.

Tim Shipman features what might be one of the most provocative –. original - claims about an Andy Burnham premiership in his cover story for this week’s Spectator. He says:

double quotation mark If there is pressure to have a woman at the Treasury. that opens the door for [Shabana] Mahmood, who though content to stay at the Home Office would surely not resist the promotion, or Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, who is a trained economist.

Either way, there is a strong sense that a Burnham-led government will be female-dominated. One senior figure in the party even describes Burnham as ‘Labour’s first woman prime minister’. This is not a revelation about his policy on self-ID for trans people, but reflects his interests. ‘The reason Labour have always craved, but also been cautious about, a female leader is because, in a Labour government, she could have an unashamedly female agenda, focused on health, education, family finances. issues like safer streets, social care, online safety for kids, that are disproportionately important to women. [This would be] unlike the Tories’ female leaders, who are under internal pressure –. the weight of history – to show how tough they are on traditionally male issues. Along comes Andy, surrounded by female advisers. backers, but more importantly, genuinely passionate about all those traditionally female-oriented issues, and much less so with the bombs and budgets. So could we finally see what Labour has failed to deliver all these years – a female PM in all. sex?’

According to Kevin Schofield from HuffPost UK, the Burnham team consider this theory “daft”.

In his article. Shipman also says Olly Robbins, who was sacked as permanent secretary at the Foreign Office by Keir Starmer because he had not told Starmer about concerns raised during Peter Mandelson’s vetting process, may be offered a job by the Burnham team. Shipman says:

double quotation mark Allies of Burnham, who regard him as ‘an outstanding operator’, have reached out. he is likely to take a senior job. ‘Olly is incredibly well thought of by both Andy and the people around and influencing Andy’s thinking,’ a source says.

While Robbins probably won’t return to his old post, his background is security. he would be a natural successor to Jonathan Powell, Starmer’s National Security Adviser, who is expected to move on. ‘That looks tailor-made for Olly,’ a senior Whitehall source familiar with the conversations reveals.

Keir Starmer has issued a statement today claiming. he has left the UK in “a better state” in relation to immigration.

double quotation mark In the first two years of this government, we have made really important progress on immigration.

One of the tests of an outgoing prime minister is whether you leave the country in a better state than what you found it,. I am leaving it in a better state.

Migration has long been a cause for concern.

On lawful migration. which when we came in two years ago, net migration was nearly a million, we got that down to about a fifth of that number, so a huge reduction, over 80% reduction.

On the crossings across the channel. which so many people are understandably concerned about, we brought those numbers down as well. The steps we are taking are beginning to pay off, and at the same time, asylum hotels are closing.

Now those are linked. Fewer crossings mean there are less people that need to be housed. Now there is more to do, but in a much better place than we were two years ago.

The ambition is to close those asylum hotels, reduce those channel crossings. Nobody should be making that crossing. And having got it more under control it’s about keeping it under control. not letting it spiral like the last government.

The Tories have argued. the huge fall in the rate of legal migration seen in the recent figures is primarily a result of much tighter visa rules introduced when James Cleverly was home secretary.

As Richard Adams reports. a quarter of UK graduates can expect to be financially worse off after going to university, especially those who take creative or performing arts degrees, according to research carried out by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

The research was funded by the Department for Education,. Jacqui Smith, the skills minister, is urging pupils to consider it before they choose a degree course. In a news release, she says:

double quotation mark Going to university. getting a degree is one of the most transformational things a young person can do. But it is not a universal guarantee of success and not all degrees are equal.

As well as the variation by subject, too many franchised. poor-quality courses do not offer a good deal to young people – selling the dream then leaving students in the lurch.

We’re making the system work better but my message to those thinking about university: choose carefully. Don’t walk into a degree by default.

The IFS report is here. And here is chart showing what earnings have been. by subject, for people who were at university around 20 years ago.

The UK government will halve the amount of tariff-free steel imports allowed in an attempt to counter a global oversupply of cheap Chinese metal. bolster its beleaguered local industry, Lisa O’Carroll and Jasper Jolly report.

Ben Quinn is a Guardian political correspondent.

A senior official in the Trump administration has likened the UK to a totalitarian dystopia. telling a rightwing conference in London that memes making claims such as that British police were “in league with rape gangs” were not necessarily misinformation.

Sarah B Rogers, who has become the public face of the Trump administration’s growing hostility to European liberal democracies, went on to draw on a far-right memes. conspiracy theories while singling out cases such as the death of Henry Nowak and an incident in which a child was recently badly injured after being thrown into a zoo’s crocodile pit. Rogers, who has publicly attacking policies on hate speech. immigration by ostensible US allies and promoted far-right parties abroad, centred her speech around the notion of “Da Yookay” - originally a viral meme heavily associated with the online far fight. “In ‘Da Yookay’ you can be remanded without bail for an inflammatory tweet, while a psychopath who seizes a three-year-old. feeds him to crocodiles walks free,” Rogers told the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) which was addressed this week by Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch.

double quotation mark In ‘Da Yookay’ the moral sense of jurors won’t save you. because jury trials for speech crimes are abolished. In ‘Da Yookay’ a girl can escape from a rape gang, flag down a police constable,. discover the cop is in league with the rapists. In ‘Da Yookay’ you get a free car for pretending to be disabled. In ‘Da Yookay’ cops defer to a murderer who calls his victim racist. Then they handcuff you as you bleed to death if you’re white.

Rogers repeatedly quoted George Orwell, claiming that the censorship envisaged by him is “easily imaginable” in the Britain of today.

In his pooled TV clip Keir Starmer also said that officials have been meeting in the government’s Cobra emergency committee to discuss how schools. other public services deal with the heat wave.

Asked specifically about schools, he said:

double quotation mark It is very hot. obviously schools will have to take the appropriate measures and each school will gauge for itself what the measures are.

But it is important that we as a government coordinate this across the country. with all of the countries within the United Kingdom, which is what we’re doing.

We’re having Cobra meetings at the official level to monitor what’s going on, give the appropriate advice.

But obviously it falls to me and others to say take care, be sensible with precautions.

And schools are going to have to decide, and they are deciding. most of them finishing a little bit early, or many of them. But they will gauge that according to their local conditions.

Cobra is the government’s emergency committee. Cobra meetings led by officials are not as serious as those led by ministers.