Afternoon summary
David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, has said that he hopes the government will back a Labour amendment calling for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” in Gaza. He was speaking on Radio 4’s PM programme, where he said that if that were to happen, the Commons would be “speaking with one voice”. The SNP has welcomed the wording of the amendment, saying Keir Starmer performed a U-turn under pressure from the Scottish nationalists. But the government is reportedly planning to table its own amendment to the SNP motion being debated tomorrow. This would prolong the difficulty for Starmer on this issue if the speaker ends up choosing the government’s amendment, not Labour’s. (See 5.01pm.)
The Home Office has just announced that David Neal has been sacked as independent chief inspector of borders and immigration. He was due to leave near the end of March, but a Home Office spokesperson said:
We have terminated the appointment of David Neal, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, after he breached the terms of appointment and lost the confidence of the home secretary.
In an interview in the Times published yesterday, Neal revealed that a quarter of foreign care workers are abusing UK visa rules by working illegally. In his story Matt Dathan said:
David Neal has disclosed a series of findings from his inspection into the Home Office’s handling of the social care visa route since it was introduced two years ago to help plug chronic labour shortages in the industry.
He found that the Home Office had issued 275 visas to a care home that did not exist and 1,234 to a company that stated it had only four staff when given a license to operate.
These two examples had led to more than 1,500 migrants being allowed to move to the UK under the guise of having a job in the social care sector.
Neal submitted his report earlier this month but it is one of 13 reports that he has submitted in the past year that remain unpublished by the Home Office. Despite being independent, the department has discretion over when to publish his reports …
As part of his findings, Neal said that his inspectors encountered migrants with care visas working illegally in two out of eight enforcement visits between August and October last year.
He said it was representative of the proportion of migrants on care visas working in the UK more broadly, meaning that about 25,000 of the 101,316 people granted a social care visa in the year to September last year would have been working in other sectors illegally.
And, in a separate interview with the Daily Mail, Neal said high-risk private jets were landing in the UK without their passengers being subject to security checks.
Peter Mandelson, the former cabinet minister and one of the leading figures in New Labour, has criticised the party for championing citizens’ assemblies, and proposing to tighten the hunting ban. In an interview with Times Radio, he said the party should be focusing on the issues that matter most to voters. He said:
I mean, I’m sure there’s a lot to be said for citizens’ assemblies, but is that really the voters priority in this election year?
Or the Labour announcement that we’re suddenly going to reopen the issue of foxhunting, not to scrap the ban, but to tighten it up and to relitigate the whole issue? I mean, these are third or fourth order issues for the public. They’ve got to remain focussed on their strategy and on the key issues which are important to voters.
He said Labour should campaign primarily on the economy, the NHS and crime.
Updated
This is from my colleague Patrick Wintour, the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, on Labour’s Gaza amendment.
Labour's shift to an "immediate humanitarian ceasefire", is substantive, but looking at all the sub-clauses, critics will ask whether this ceasefire is conditional on Israelis having "the right to the assurance that the horror of 7th October cannot happen again". If so, what is… https://t.co/m76aiRkhqb
— Patrick Wintour (@patrickwintour) February 20, 2024
Labour’s shift to an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire”, is substantive, but looking at all the sub-clauses, critics will ask whether this ceasefire is conditional on Israelis having “the right to the assurance that the horror of 7th October cannot happen again”. If so, what is required for that assurance to be given, and who determines it has been provided? More generally the way in which Labour has recently reached some decisions does not bode well for government. It’s full-on in power.
