Closing summary
It is 5pm in Westminster. Here is a roundup of the day’s main news stories:
EU officials believe a deal with the British government over the Northern Ireland protocol is close to being done, as talks continue in Brussels. The foreign secretary, James Cleverly, began a meeting with the EU official in charge of Brexit, Maroš Šefčovič, at around 11.30am local time in Brussels, in a sign that talks have entered the final stretch. The EU is understood to have conceded ground on the issue of customs checks on goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.
The Irish taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, has said “we’re not there yet” on a Northern Ireland protocol deal but added that he was “quietly confident” there could be an agreement within a fortnight. “I think a lot of progress has been made. We’re not there yet, but certainly a lot of trust has been built up between the European Commission and Ireland and the British government,” he told reporters in Limerick.
The DUP leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, has said progress has been made across several areas but further work is required before a deal on the Northern Ireland protocol is struck. Speaking after a meeting with the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, he said the negotiations should be led by getting it right and not by timelines.
The Sinn Féin president, Mary Lou McDonald, said that indications of progress on the Northern Ireland protocol was heartening. “It’s clear now that significant progress has been made and we’re very heartened by that,” she said after meeting the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak.
John Swinney, Scotland’s deputy first minister and one of the SNP’s longest-serving senior figures, has called for the party to unite and focus on concerns of mainstream voters as he ruled himself out of the contest to replace Nicola Sturgeon. Swinney, who is widely respected amongst the membership and was SNP leader 20 years ago, said the party needed “a fresh perspective” after Sturgeon’s shock resignation on Wednesday.
Humza Yousaf has become the first possible contender to succeed Nicola Sturgeon, with the current Scottish health secretary saying he is giving “serious consideration” to running. Yousaf paid tribute to the outgoing first minister, saying she had “put Scotland’s interests first”. But he also said you could “see the personal toll it has taken on her”, adding she had “put her life into progressing our movement and putting the country first”.
Humza Yousaf would be “delusional” to run for the SNP leadership, the Scottish Labour deputy leader, Jackie Baillie, has said. Reports have suggested the health secretary is considering a run to succeed Nicola Sturgeon after her shock resignation announcement this week. But Baillie – Labour’s health spokesperson – derided the idea, attacking Yousaf as “without a doubt the worst minister I have ever had the misfortune of shadowing”.
The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, says he wants to show unity with the government on its stance on providing fighter jets to Ukraine. Speaking from Poland after a visit to Kyiv, the Labour leader has told BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine programme the topic of war planes came up during his conversation with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, on Thursday.
Parenting classes would be given to people whose children repeatedly committed crime if Labour won power. The shadow justice secretary, Steve Reed, made the announcement as he gave a speech on the rule of law and crime at Middle Temple in central London, PA Media reported. Reed said Labour will help parents “take responsibility for tackling the behaviour of their own children if they repeatedly commit crime”.
Britain is in danger of a “disastrous” food scandal, owing to lax post-Brexit border controls on agricultural imports, the leader of the UK’s biggest farming organisation has warned. Minette Batters, the president of the National Farmers’ Union, accused ministers of a “dereliction of duty” in failing to ensure food and other agricultural imports were safe. She said the government had failed to learn the lessons of the horsemeat scandal of 2013.
Thousands more ambulance workers have voted to strike in the long-running dispute over pay and staffing. Unison said the growing NHS dispute will now cover ambulance services and other NHS organisations across most parts of England, PA Media reports.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) general secretary, Pat Cullen, has said she has not spoken with the health and social care secretary for more than a month. Cullen told BBC Breakfast there has been “no communication” with Steve Barclay during that time.
England’s £2 cap on bus fares will be extended by three months, the Department for Transport (DfT) has announced. The promotion, launched at the start of the year, was due to expire at the end of March but will now run until 30 June.
Liz Truss has used her first overseas speech since resigning as British prime minister to call on the west to safeguard Taiwan’s security and economy in the face of Chinese aggression “before it is too late”. Speaking in Tokyo at a meeting of mainly conservative lawmakers that included the former Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, Truss said Britain had been naive to court the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in 2015, adding that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should serve as a warning of what happens when democracies fail to stand up to authoritarian regimes.
That’s it from me, Tom Ambrose, and indeed the UK politics live blog for today. Thanks for following along and, for now, goodnight.
Updated
UK risks ‘disastrous’ food scandal due to lax post-Brexit border controls – NFU chief
Britain is in danger of a “disastrous” food scandal, owing to lax post-Brexit border controls on agricultural imports, the leader of the UK’s biggest farming organisation has warned.
Minette Batters, the president of the National Farmers’ Union, accused ministers of a “dereliction of duty” in failing to ensure food and other agricultural imports were safe. She said the government had failed to learn the lessons of the horsemeat scandal of 2013.
“We are seeing little to no checks on imports that are coming in from the EU,” she told the Guardian. “We have the massive risk of African swine fever in Europe, and to not be investing in our defences for keeping our biosecurity and animal and plant health safe, I think is just a dereliction of duty.”
After the horsemeat scandal, in which products such as burgers and lasagne purporting to contain 100% beef were found to show traces of horsemeat, stricter controls were put in place on many food systems.
But Batters said those controls were being eroded, with “so little checks” on imports, and pointed to recent findings that many lorries entering the UK contained fraudulent meat. “If there was a food scare from Europe, it would be very difficult to trace it right now,” she said.
Updated
