Closing summary
Home secretary Shabana Mahmood said she rejects that dealing with illegal migration is engaging with far-right talking points and said the issue is “tearing this country apart”. “This is a moral mission for me because I can see that illegal migration is tearing our country apart,” she says. “It is dividing communities, people can see huge pressure in their communities and they can also see a system that is broken and where people are able to flout the rules, abuse the system and get away with it.”
Mahmood said she has the “misfortune” of looking at the way people smugglers are advertising and selling the “generosity” of Britain and that is driving people to get on small boats. “It is important that we send a signal,” she said, adding that she was been working with other European countries.
The government is going to make refugee status temporary and up for review every two-and-a-half years, Mahmood told Sky News. “That is changing the way that we look at refugee status,” she said.
The home secretary said that the government will create more “safe routes” for people to seek asylum in the UK as a way of stopping small boats. Asked about her own heritage, Mahmood said her parents came to Britain legally in the late 1960s and that is is “a moral mission” for her.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said 10,000 people have crossed the channel illegally in the 75 days since Mahmood became home secretary. He said Labour made a “huge mistake” in cancelling the Rwanda scheme with no alternative and says the UK must leave the ECHR.
Philp said the Tories will “support sensible steps” to deal with the asylum crisis but says Labour’s approach consists of “small steps in the right direction” and “gimmicks”. Speaking to Trevor Phillips on Sky News, he said people who arrive illegally should not ever be granted asylum and ought to be removed within a week of arrival.
Wes Streeting has been accused of taking a “chaotic and incoherent approach” to reforming the NHS, which makes it unlikely the government will hit its own targets, according to a damning report by the Institute for Government (IfG). The report praises elements of how the health secretary has managed the health service in his first year in office, including improving performance and staff retention in hospitals.
Former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has refused to rule out a return to frontline politics and called for party unity, condemning recent Labour infighting as “arrogant tittle tattle”. Speaking to the Daily Mirror during a constituency visit to a care centre, Rayner said recent reports of anonymous briefings and speculation over possible leadership manoeuvring was detached from the issues affecting everyday people.
Nature is not a blocker to housing growth, an inquiry by MPs has found, in direct conflict with claims made by ministers. Toby Perkins, the Labour chair of the environmental audit committee, said nature was being scapegoated, and that rather than being a block to growth, it was necessary for building resilient towns and neighbourhoods.
Britain’s budget watchdog is in danger of strangling growth and should be modernised to ditch its “hardwired” support for austerity economics, the TUC has warned. Less than two weeks before Rachel Reeves’s autumn budget, the trade union umbrella group said that the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) was at risk of being a “straitjacket” on growth in living standards.
The business secretary, Peter Kyle, has backed a shift to cleaner electric arc technology at the state-controlled British Steel plant, raising questions about the future of the UK’s last remaining blast furnaces. Kyle said the government was “keen to see that transition happen”, as he works on a new steel strategy, which is expected to be published in December.
“I know whenever I come back here next,” Nigel Farage told a jubilant crowd of hundreds in a leisure centre in Redruth, “Reform UK will become a dominant force, not just in Cornwall politics, but in British politics.”
That was in February and when the local elections arrived three months later it appeared Farage’s prophecy was in part coming true – Reform took 28 seats on Cornwall council, the highest number of any party.
But during his speech at Carn Brea leisure centre, Farage also warned his rapturous supporters “we have to convert theory into reality” – and reality in Cornwall is now biting.
Six months on from the local elections – after which Reform was unable to form an administration, leaving the Liberal Democrats and independents to set up a ruling coalition – the party’s presence in the county is in disarray following weeks of resignations, suspensions and infighting that mean Reform UK no longer holds the highest number of seats in the authority.
Critics say that along with the chaos in the Reform-led council of Kent, the farcical scenes in Cornwall, where Reform act as the official opposition are further evidence that the party is not capable of delivering beyond a protest vote.
