Afternoon summary
- Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, has made a last-minute bid to junior doctors to call off tomorrow’s strike. He said that withdrawing labour from emergency cover would amount to “crossing the Rubicon” and he hinted that the government could outlaw strike action of this kind in the future. In a statement to MPs Hunt also said that the new contract for junior doctors offered them more premium pay for working on Saturday than almost anyone else in the private or public sector gets. He said:
I wish to appeal directly to all junior doctors not to withdraw emergency cover which creates particular risks for A&Es, maternity units and intensive care units. I understand the frustration many junior doctors feel that because of pressures on the NHS frontline they are not always able to give patients the highest quality of care that they would like to. I understand that some doctors may disagree with the government over our seven-day NHS plans and particularly the introduction of a new contract. I also understand that doctors work incredibly hard, including at weekends, and that strong feelings exist on the single remaining disagreement of substance, Saturday premium pay. But the new contract offers junior doctors who work frequently at weekends more Saturday premium pay than nurses, paramedics and the assistants who work in their own operating theatres, more than police officers, more than firefighters, and nearly every other worker in the public and private sectors.
The Tory MP Julian Lewis said that junior doctors had not specifically been balloted about withdrawing emergency care. He asked Hunt if he agreed that if patients died as a result, public demand for a law stopping a strike like this happening again could be “irresistible”. Hunt hinted he was open to the idea. In reply to Lewis he said:
[Lewis] is right. The public will be extremely disappointed that professionals are putting patients at risk in this way. I think it is extremely tragic that they are doing that. So I’m afraid I do think this is a crossing of the Rubicon, a crossing of the line, in a way that has not happened before. I think it is totally tragic and I would support his concern on that point.
- The government has suffered a fresh defeat in the Lords over its housing plans as peers pushed for higher energy efficiency standards to cut carbon emissions. As the Press Association reports, voting was 253 to 205 - a majority of 48 - for all new homes in England built from April 2018 to meet the “carbon compliance standard”.
That’s all from me for today.
Thanks for the comments.
Updated
Asked about Dan Poulter, the Conservative former health minister who signed the letter proposing piloting the new junior doctors’ contract as a compromise, Hunt says that Poulter was in favour of a much tougher contract for junior doctors when he was in government.
Hunt says if Nye Bevan had give in to the BMA, there would have been no NHS.
Philip Davies, a Conservative, says Hunt has been “far too generous” to junior doctors. This is an old-fashioned strike about pay and conditions. Most of his constituents do not get extra pay for working on a Saturday, he says.
Hunt criticises the BMA’s junior doctors committee for balloting on strike action before sitting down and talking to him about the new contract. If they had done that, they would have released that they had the same priorities - patient safety.
Richard Burgon, the Labour MP, asks if A&E departments will be open tomorrow.
Hunt says that they will be open, but that there will nevertheless be considerable disruption.
Steven Baker, a Conservative, says the BMA acts in the interests of doctors, not patients. Will he look at introducing the principle of mutuality into these contracts.
Hunt says he is interested in this approach.
He says the new contract will be safer for doctors. When they realise this, they will realise how badly they have been represented by the BMA.
Hunt says the government has had 75 meetings with the BMA over the junior doctors’ contract, and made 74 concessions. But the problem is that it is dealing with a “very intransigent” BMA committee, he says.
This is from Johann Malawana, chair of the BMA’s junior doctors committee.
Did sos just berate @normanlamb for putting things in press first? Isn't that what @Jeremy_Hunt did throughout this dispute? November offer?
— johannmalawana (@johannmalawana) April 25, 2016
Hunt hints strike laws could be tightened if tomorrow’s strike goes ahead
Julian Lewis, a Conservative, says if people die as a result of the strike, the pubic will demand a change to the law to stop this happening again.
Hunt says he thinks Lewis is right. This is a “crossing of the Rubicon”. He agrees with the concerns raised by Lewis.
- Hunt hints strike laws could be tightened if tomorrow’s strike goes ahead.
The Lib Dem former health minister Norman Lamb says that he signed the letter backing the compromise plan for pilot schemes and that, contrary to what Hunt said to Heidi Alexander, he was not motivated by opportunism.
Hunt says Lamb has his mobile phone number. If this was a genuine attempt to find a solution, why did Hunt not know about it until it appeared in the Sunday Times?
This is from the Health Service Journal’s Shaun Lintern - details about the extra doctors coming into the NHS mentioned by Hunt earlier.
For everyone wondering about JH's 11,420 drs increase by 2020 its from HEEs workforce plan. See details here: pic.twitter.com/8HFNKkAxtb
— Shaun Lintern (@ShaunLintern) April 25, 2016
Liam Fox, a doctor and Conservative former defence secretary, says the government should be clearer about it means by a seven-day NHS service.
Hunt says at the heart of his plan is the desire to tackle excess deaths in hospitals at weekends.
Ben Bradshaw, a Labour former health minister, says Hunt’s rejection of the compromise plan for a pilot scheme was “petulant”.
The full text of Hunt’s opening statement is here.
Hunt says junior doctors have not been well represented by the BMA.
Labour’s Dennis Skinner says there is a “smirk and arrogance” about Hunt that suggests he is “delighted” about this. He should wipe the smirk off his face and get down to negotiating, Skinner says. He says Hunt is “almost giving the impression that he is revelling in standing up to the junior doctors”.
Hunt says Skinner has made many notable contributions to the Commons, but that that was unworthy of him.
He says the government has been talking to the BMA for three years. It needs a party it can have sensible discussions with. It does not have that, he says.
Updated
John Redwood, a Conservative, asks how big the gap between both sides is.
Hunt says that earlier this year the two sides were close to a deal.
Sarah Wollaston, the Conservative MP and chair of the Commons health committee, says she appeals to all sides to put patients first.
Hunt says Wollaston recently wrote a Guardian article which he agreed with profoundly. Wollaston said in her piece that the BMA should have accepted the compromise offered by the government on Saturday pay earlier this year.
Hunt is responding to Alexander.
Alexander talks about judgment, he says. He says his judgment has been to stand up for his constituents in the face of a life-threatening strike.
And he quotes John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, saying the Labour party now backs strikes.
He says if the pilot proposal was a genuine cross-party attempt to find a solution, the government would not have had to read about it first in an article in the Sunday Times.
And he says Alexander asked for more studies into the weekend effect. There have been eight already.
Last week Alexander said “no comment” when asked if Labour supports the strike. That is not leadership, he says.
Updated
Heidi Alexander, the shadow health secretary, says tomorrow’s strike is one of the saddest days in the history of the NHS.
And it could have been avoided, she says. She says Hunt is to blame. Yesterday he was presented with a plan that could have averted the strike. But Hunt dismissed it as a Labour plan, she says, referring to these tweets.
Labour "plan" is opportunism - only 11% of junior docs go onto new contracts in August. We're staging implementation to ensure it works 1/2
— Jeremy Hunt (@Jeremy_Hunt) April 24, 2016
As intended. Any further delay just means we will take longer to eliminate weekend effect. 2/2
— Jeremy Hunt (@Jeremy_Hunt) April 24, 2016
Alexander says this was not just a Labour plan. It had broad support.
She says Hunt wants to be remembered as someone who championed patient safety. But safety is not just a matter for this week.
She says people in the NHS will be picking up the results of this dispute for a long time to come.
Even if just 1% of junior doctors decide to leave the NHS, because enough is enough, that will be 1% the NHS cannot afford.
She says safeguards need to be in place to ensure that the new system does not undermine safety.
It would have been sensible to test these with a pilot, she says.
She says she expects Hunt to attack Labour in his reply.
Last week he wrote to her asking if she would be on a picket line.
She won’t, she says. But that is not because she does not sympathise with the junior doctors. She does, she says.
She says it is Hunt, and Hunt alone, who can stop this strike.
If Hunt ploughs on, history will not be kind to him. It will show that, when offered a compromise, he chose to have a fight.
She says his handling of the dispute is “the political equivalent of pouring oil onto a blazing fire”.
There is no trust left between the health secretary and NHS staff. He can barely show his face in a hospital because he ends up getting chased, she says.
Hunt says this year the NHS will get the sixth biggest funding increase in its history.
But this is not just about money, he says. The NHS also needs organisational reform, he says.
Hunt says 110,000 outpatient appointments and 12,000 operations are going to have to be cancelled.
But extensive plans have been put in place to prepare for the strike, he says.
He says GP practices have been asked in some areas to extend their opening hours.
And a strike page has been set up on the NHS website to say what alternatives to hospitals are available.
Hunt says that by the end of this parliament there will be an extra 11,420 doctors available to work in the NHS.
Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, is making his statement now.
He says none of us have any choice over the day we fall ill. That is why the Conservatives committed themselves to a seven-day NHS in their manifesto.
He says no union has the right to veto a manifesto commitment.
He says he will tell MPs about the “extensive” measures being taken to prepare for the strike. It is the first time emergency care has been withdrawn.
But first he appeals to junior doctors not to go on strike.
He says, even under the new contract, they would get more premium pay for working on Saturdays than nurses, paramedics, police officers, firefighters or almost anyone else in the public sector.
Jeremy Hunt's statement on the junior doctors' strike
Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, is due to give a statement in the Commons on tomorrow’s junior doctors’ strike.
As my colleague Denis Campbell reports, the heads of 14 royal colleges of medicine have made an 11th-hour plea to David Cameron to start fresh talks to avoid all-out junior doctors strikes this week.
Here’s an extract from his story.
Bosses of 14 of Britain’s royal colleges of medicine have written to the prime minister, urging him to end the “damaging standoff” between Jeremy Hunt and junior doctors’ representatives in an attempt to ensure the walkouts planned for Tuesday and Wednesday do not happen.
Their unprecedented intervention comes on the eve of the first all-out withdrawals of medical cover in the NHS’s 68-year history. Signatories include leaders of organisations representing the professional interests of GPs, general hospital doctors, anaesthetists, radiologists, paediatricians, obstetricians and gynaecologists.
They tell Cameron that the increasingly bitter dispute over contracts poses “a significant threat to our whole healthcare system” by demoralising junior doctors, who are the workhorses of NHS care in hospitals.
Diane James, the Ukip MEP and justice and home affairs spokeswoman, claims Theresa May was not being honest when she implied the UK could leave the European convention on human rights but remain in the EU. James said:
Theresa May is pulling out this tattered rag of an argument to comfort disgruntled Tories without checking the facts.
The facts are that by EU treaty law we must be signatories of the European convention of human rights and the UK is bound by its judgements. To say otherwise is misleading people or at best not to be aware of the legal truth.
Actually, the situation is not quite that clear-cut. See 1.50pm.
Updated
This is from James McGrory, head of communications for Britain Stronger in Europe.
Blimey. Even the economists who favour leaving EU admit our economy will take a real beating if we do. https://t.co/S6qxufM0li
— James McGrory (@JamesMcGrory) April 25, 2016
He is flagging up this CapX article by Andrew Lilico, chair of Economists for Britain, a Eurosceptic group. Lilico argues that in the medium term leaving the EU would not harm the economy, although he accepts there would be a short-term cost. He says:
I don’t claim that these various economic gains from leaving the EU are decisive as a reason to go. Neither do I claim that they will add up to large increases in GDP. Furthermore, it should not be doubted that firms are currently set up to take maximum advantage of our EU membership, not Brexit, so leaving will be likely to involve some disruption and shifting of investment around. The consequences of that might be 2% or so lost GDP over the first two or three years after we vote to Leave.
But by 2030 there is good reason to believe that GDP should be about the same, whether we Leave or Remain. That is what I believe and what other economists such as Gerard Lyons, Roger Bootle, and Mervyn King believe. We can leave the EU without that materially damaging our economy over the medium-term.
Cameron has 26-point lead over Corbyn as 'capable leader', poll says
Ipsos Mori has published some polling figures on four political leaders: David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Tim Farron and Nigel Farage.
Cameron is ahead, sometimes well ahead, on five of the eight measures. Corbyn is ahead on two, understanding the problems facing Britain (two points ahead of Cameron) and well ahead on being more honest than most politicians (11 points ahead of Farage). And Farage is ahead on having a lot of personality.
And here is an extract from the Ipsos Mori write-up of the poll.
David Cameron is revealed as the most capable party leader in the eyes of the British public in the latest Ipsos Mori political monitor. When asked about various attributes of each of the leaders more than half (53%) say the prime minister is a capable leader compared with 27% who say the same for Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Sixteen percent see Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron as a capable and one in four (24%) say Ukip’s Nigel Farage is capable.
Updated
A few days ago someone BTL was asking if there was any organisation committed to producing impartial factual analysis relating to the EU referendum.
I suggested that Full Fact, the fact-checking organisation, might be a good place to start. They have now produced a 27-page guide (pdf) to the facts behind claims made by the Leave and Remain campaigns. From what I have seen of it, it looks very good.
May has confirmed that UK faces threat from prospect of Turkey joining EU, Duncan Smith says
Iain Duncan Smith, the former work and pensions secretary, has issued a statement on behalf of Vote Leave saying Theresa May’s speech confirmed the threat posed to the UK by the prospect of countries like Turkey joining the EU. He said:
The home secretary is right to warn of the dangers of countries like Albania and Turkey being allowed to join the European Union. If these countries are let into the EU’s open border system it will only increase the pressure on our NHS, schools and housing. It will also vastly increase the risk of crime and terrorism on British streets.
After the home secretary’s powerful intervention, is the prime minister now going to make clear that the UK no longer supports their bid to join the EU? If he does not, will he make clear why he disagrees with his own home secretary?
Updated
In an earlier post the link to the House of Commons briefing note, “Is adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights a condition of European Union membership?”, was not working. Sorry. I’ve fixed it now. You can read it here.
Corbyn suggests government may be deliberately trying to undermine NHS so patients go private
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, has been speaking at the CWU conference in Bournemouth today. As the BBC reports, Corbyn said Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, should “back off” and stop trying to impose a contract on junior doctors. He even suggested the government deliberately wanted to undermine the NHS, to give patients an incentive to go private.
I just sometimes wonder if there isn’t a deeper agenda here – to gradually reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of the National Health Service at the same time as promoting the private medical industry. So the NHS becomes the service of last resort, rather than the universal first port of call for all of us.
Updated
Lunchtime summary
- Owen Paterson, the Conservative former environment secretary and a leading Brexit campaigner, has said the campaign to leave the EU will continue even if Britain votes to stay in. In response to questions after a speech in London he also said a second referendum could not be ruled out if remain won. Explaining why he thought the leave campaign would not go away he said:
Up to now, leaving the EU has been seen to be the preserve of nutcases, cranks and odd members of the right wing of the Tory party. If it is that close – I personally think we are going to win – millions of people from right across the country from every class and occupation will have stated that they want to leave the European Union. You won’t put that genie back in the bottle.
In his speech Paterson said Britain would be left as “a colony of Europe if we vote to remain, with the prime minister reduced to a Roman governor handing down dictats from what Jose Manuel Barroso, former president of the European commission, described as the ‘empire’. He went on:
The prime minister’s second-tier ‘associate membership’ or ‘special status’ is an ill-defined sham. It is classic triangulation politics – presenting this as the safe option – like Goldilocks’ porridge, neither too hot, nor too cold, but just right.
If we remain we are still subsumed into what Barroso has described as the “Empire”. We would not avoid the consequences of this unique construction; Europe’s fate would be our fate. If the dream should end in the same way previous utopian dreams have, whether through currency collapse or mass migration, it would be a problem we shared and had to help pay for.
- Lord Mandelson, a leading remain campaigner, has accused Vote Leave of giving up trying to make the economic case for Brexit and pursuing a “Ukip-lite strategy” focused on warned about the dangers of mass immigration. (See 12.36pm.)
- The Communication Workers Union has come out in favour of Remain. CWU general secretary Dave Ward told the union’s Bournemouth conference:
For all its problems, the reality is that most of the protections workers have in this country have come from Europe. If Brexit succeeds, Cameron and the Tories will attack workers’ rights again in the same way they are attacking the trade union movement now.
- President Obama has said America and the world needs a strong, united Europe. Speaking ahead of the G5 summit in Hanover he said:
If a unified, peaceful, liberal, pluralistic, free-market Europe begins to doubt itself, begins to question the progress that’s been made over the last several decades, then we can’t expect the progress that is just now taking hold in many places around the world will continue.
Instead, we will be empowering those who argue that democracy can’t work, that intolerance and tribalism and organising ourselves along ethnic lines and authoritarianism and restrictions on the press - that those are the things that the challenges of today demand.
I’ve come here today to the heart of Europe to say that the United States and the entire world needs a strong and prosperous and united Europe.
Updated
Northern Ireland’s most outspoken political Eurosceptic has gone one further than Boris Johnson in the Obama insults game.
Democratic Unionist MP and former Northern Ireland finance minister Sammy Wilson has issued a statement calling Obama “President O’Barmy” and accusing him of being David Cameron’s parrot on the EU referendum.
“He might be the president of the most powerful country in the world but during his visit to the UK he behaved more like a parrot on the shoulder of the prime minister,” the East Antrim MP said today.
Updated
Liberty has criticised Theresa May for proposing withdrawal from the European convention on human rights. In a statement Bella Sankey, its policy director, said:
It was only a matter of time before the ECHR got dragged into the EU referendum debate. But the convention doesn’t bind parliament and – despite Theresa May’s best efforts at mud-slinging and myth-spreading over the years – the case for remaining a signatory is unequivocal.
Britain founded it, it is the most successful system for the enforcement of human rights in the history of the world, and every day it helps bring freedom, justice and the rule of law to 820m people.
Theresa May’s speech is getting very positive reviews from the Conservative press.
The Spectator’s James Forsyth says in a Coffee House blog that he is reassessing the chance of May becoming Tory leader.
With this speech, May has carved out for herself her own position in the EU debate. She is an inner, but only reluctantly and is in a very different place to Cameron and Osborne.
If you were to give an in speech that the Tory grassroots could sympathise with, this was it. Those of us – including me – who thought that May’s decision to back in marked the end of her leadership prospects might well have been premature.
And Christopher Hope at the Telegraph says that the speech was “a tour de force” and that it is time to resurrect the #TM4PM hashtag.
Updated
Do countries have to belong to the ECHR to be in the EU?
Lord Falconer says Britain could not remain a member of the EU if it abandoned the European convention on human rights. (See 1pm.) Theresa May did not address this point in her speech, which was a significant weakness in her argument.
But is Falconer right? This House of Commons briefing note specifically addresses this point. It says new states joining the EU have to have ratified the European convention on human rights. For existing member states the situation is less clear (partly because at present they are all ECHR signatories, which means the issue has not arisen) and legal experts are divided.
The European commission says “respect for fundamental rights as guaranteed by the European convention on human rights is an explicit obligation” of EU membership but there seems to be some uncertainty as to whether this means ECHR membership is a formal requirement, or whether a state could prove its commitment to fundamental rights through some alternative mechanism.
Updated
Theresa May's EU speech – summary and analysis
May, the home secretary, reportedly thought long and hard before deciding to come out in favour of backing continued membership of the EU, and today’s speech gives some insight into the process of deliberation she has gone through.
The passage about the European convention on human rights (see 11.33am) was the most striking, but was perhaps the least convincing (possibly because it was swayed by future leadership contest considerations).
What was remarkable about the rest of it was how even-handed it was. May acknowledged that some of the leave camp’s arguments have force, but explained why she had come to the conclusion that the remain case was stronger.
As home secretary, she focused in particular on security issues, but she also had some fresh arguments to make on other issues too. Here are the main points.
- May says Britain should leave the European court of human rights. (See 11.33am.)
- She suggested that she was not in favour of Turkey joining the EU.
Do we really still think it is in our interests to support automatically and unconditionally the EU’s further expansion? The states now negotiating to join the EU include Albania, Serbia and Turkey – countries with poor populations and serious problems with organised crime, corruption, and sometimes even terrorism.
We have to ask ourselves, is it really right that the EU should just continue to expand, conferring upon all new member states all the rights of membership? Do we really think now is the time to contemplate a land border between the EU and countries like Iran, Iraq and Syria? Having agreed the end of the European principle of “ever-closer union”, it is time to question the principle of ever-wider expansion.
The UK government is still officially in favour of Turkey’s eventual accession to the EU, although No 10 has ruled out the prospect of this happening anytime soon.
- She said she had stopped being in a “permanently defensive crouch” on the EU.
- She said Britain was safer in the EU because of various EU programmes enabling security cooperation.
Outside the EU, for example, we would have no access to the European arrest warrant, which has allowed us to extradite more than 5,000 people from Britain to Europe in the last five years, and bring 675 suspected or convicted wanted individuals to Britain to face justice. It has been used to get terror suspects out of the country and bring terrorists back here to face justice.
In 2005, Hussain Osman – who tried to blow up the London Underground on 21/7 – was extradited from Italy using the arrest warrant in just 56 days. Before the arrest warrant existed, it took 10 long years to extradite Rachid Ramda, another terrorist, from Britain to France.
There are other advantages too. Take the passenger name records directive. This will give law enforcement agencies access to information about the movements of terrorists, organised criminals and victims of trafficking on flights between European countries and from all other countries to the EU. When I first became home secretary, I was told there wasn’t a chance of Britain ever getting this deal. But I won agreement in the council of ministers in 2012 and – thanks to Timothy Kirkhope MEP and the hard work of my Home Office team – the final directive has now been agreed by the European parliament and council …
The European criminal records information system, financial intelligence units, the prisoner transfer framework, SIS II, joint investigation teams, Prüm. These are all agreements that enable law enforcement agencies to cooperate and share information with one another in the fight against cross-border crime and terrorism.
- She said that, if Britain left the EU, it would become more protectionist and that this would disadvantage Britain.
Inside the EU, without Britain, the balance of power in the council of ministers and European parliament would change for the worse. The liberal, free-trading countries would find themselves far below the 35% blocking threshold needed in the council, while the countries that tend towards protectionism would have an even greater percentage of votes. There would be a very real danger that the EU heads in a protectionist direction, which would damage wider international trade and affect for the worse Britain’s future trade with the EU.
- She said that Brexit would increase the chances of Scotland voting for independence.
I do not want the people of Scotland to think that English Eurosceptics put their dislike of Brussels ahead of our bond with Edinburgh and Glasgow. I do not want the European Union to cause the destruction of an older and much more precious union, the union between England and Scotland.
- She explained why she thought the European court of human rights (ECHR) was more objectionable than the European court of justice.
I also know that others will say there is little point in leaving the ECHR if we remain members of the EU, with its charter of fundamental rights and its court of justice. And I am no fan of the charter or of many of the rulings made by the court. But there are several problems that do apply to the court of human rights in Strasbourg, yet do not apply to the court of justice in Luxembourg. Strasbourg is in effect a final appeals court; Luxembourg has no such role. Strasbourg can issue orders preventing the deportation of foreign nationals; Luxembourg has no such power. Unlike the European convention on human rights, the European treaties are clear: “national security,” they say, “remains the sole responsibility of each member state.”
- She said “no country or empire in world history has every been totally sovereign”. Countries could benefit by ceding some sovereignty for a greater benefit, she said.
Updated
Falconer says May's 'appalling' stance on ECHR driven by her leadership ambitions
Lord Falconer, the shadow justice secretary, has been speaking to my colleague Anushka Asthana about Theresa May’s call for Britain to leave the ECHR. He told her:
That is so ignorant, so illiberal, so misguided.
Ignorant because you have to be a member of the ECHR to be a member of the EU. The European Union itself agrees to abide to the ECHR.
Illiberal because there has to be a source external to a government determining what human rights are.
And misguided because it will so damage the standing of the UK - the country that above all plays by the rules and that is going around the world saying we should comply as a world with human rights.
This is so so appalling.
She is sacrificing Britain’s 68-year-old commitment to human rights for her own miserable Tory leadership ambitions.
Updated
Mandelson says Vote Leave running 'Ukip-lite strategy' focusing on migrants having lost on economy
Lord Mandelson, the Labour former business secretary, has accused Vote Leave of a running a “Ukip-lite” strategy having “hoisted the white flag” on the economy. In a statement issued by Britain Stronger in Europe Mandelson cited in particular two pieces of evidence for this claim: Michael Gove’s Times article, which highlights the threats posed by mass immigration and does not address the trade issues raised by President Obama on Friday, and Iain Duncan Smith’s Today interview, in which he admitted that no one knew how long it would take to negotiate a UK/US trade deal. Mandelson said:
This was the week when Vote Leave hoisted the white flag on arguments around the economy.
First the Treasury then Barack Obama demolished their flimsy arguments about trade and prosperity and so they have turned instead to their default nationalist territory of immigration.
Vote Leave may have won the designation, but it is Nigel Farage who has won the argument amongst the Leave campaigners, who are now running a Ukip-lite strategy centred on immigration ...
Vote Leave are in chaos on the economy. Why else would you suggest leaving the Single Market in favour of Britain being more like Albania?
The economy is not something that can be opted into or out of in this debate – it is the future of this country that is at stake. It’s peoples’ jobs, prices in the shops and the proper funding of public services that are on the ballot paper in June.
No 10 rejects Gove's claim that NHS at risk from Turkey joining EU
At the Downing Street lobby briefing this morning the prime minister’s spokeswoman rejected the claim made by Michael Gove in his Times article that staying in the EU would be a threat to services such as the NHS because of the possibility of Turkey and other countries joining. (See 9.11am.) She said that any discussions about new countries joining the EU were years away and that the UK had a veto over any future enlargement. She went on:
The prime minister negotiated, as part of the reforms that we secured in February, that for future accessions there will need to be a different set of transitional arrangements. So those out there talking about future countries joining seem to be looking at the past and not looking at the special status in the deal the prime minister has secured.
Updated
The legal commentator David Allen Green has described May’s call for the UK to leave the ECHR as probably unachievable and “simple gesture politics”.
Given that under Good Friday agreement, the ECHR has to have effect in Northern Ireland, Theresa May's call to leave ECHR will go nowhere.
— David Allen Green (@DavidAllenGreen) April 25, 2016
Unless Theresa May/UK government is willing to rewrite Good Friday agreement, UK will remain party to the ECHR.
— David Allen Green (@DavidAllenGreen) April 25, 2016
There are many other barriers to UK leaving ECHR, that is the most stark.
— David Allen Green (@DavidAllenGreen) April 25, 2016
So this is simple gesture politics.
Updated
The full text of Theresa May’s speech is here, on the ConservativeHome website.
Burnham says leaving ECHR would send 'a terrible message to the world'
Andy Burnham, the shadow home secretary, has condemned Theresa May’s call for the UK to leave the ECHR.
What a backward step that would be. What a terrible message to send to the world. Will fight May's plans all the way https://t.co/5VNJXc7W7j
— Andy Burnham (@andyburnhammp) April 25, 2016
Theresa May says UK should leave European court of human rights
In her speech Theresa May says Britain should leave the European convention on human rights. Here is the key passage.
The case for remaining a signatory of the European convention on human rights, which means Britain is subject to the European court of human rights, is not clear. Because, despite what people sometimes think, it was not the European Union that delayed for years the extradition of Abu Hamza, almost stopped the deportation of Abu Qatada and tried to tell parliament that however we voted, we could not deprive prisoners of the vote. It is the European convention on human rights.
The ECHR can bind the hands of parliament, adds nothing to our prosperity, makes us less secure by preventing the deportation of dangerous foreign nationals and does nothing to change the attitudes of governments like Russia’s when it comes to human rights. So, regardless of the EU referendum, my view is this: if we want to reform human rights laws in this country, it isn’t the EU we should leave, but the ECHR and the jurisdiction of its court.
Now, I can already hear certain people saying, Ah, this means I’m against human rights. But human rights were not invented in 1950 when the convention was drafted, or in 1998 when the convention was incorporated into our law through the Human Rights Act. This is Great Britain, the country of Magna Carta, parliamentary democracy and the fairest courts in the world. And we can protect human rights ourselves in a way that doesn’t jeopardise national security or bind the hands of parliament. A true British bill of rights, decided by parliament and amended by parliament, would protect not only the rights set out in the convention, but could include traditional British rights not protected by the ECHR such as the right to trial by jury.
May’s call for a British bill of human rights is squarely in line with Conservative party policy, but in calling for Britain to leave the European convention on human rights, she is going beyond what the government proposes. The Conservative election manifesto (pdf) said the party would “break the formal link between British courts and the European court of human rights” but until now ministers have argued that it would be possible to do this while remaining a member of the ECHR. They have not ruled out leaving the ECHR, but have generally played down the prospect of this happening.
At one point Tories opposed to the EU were hoping May would come out in favour of Brexit. She is backing remain, but her call for “Brexit – from the ECHR” will boost her standing with the Conservative leave crowd. Inevitably this will be seen as, in part, a leadership manoeuvre.
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Theresa May, the home secretary, has just started her speech on the EU.
At the beginning she made it clear that she was not speaking at a rally, and that she would not be criticising those on the Brexit side of the EU campaign. Instead she would be setting out her balanced assessment of what was in Britain’s best interests, she said.
Here’s an extract from a Times story (paywall) with extracts from her speech.
For her part Mrs May will accept that the accessions are a potential problem. “We have to ask ourselves, is it really right that the EU should just continue to expand, conferring upon all new member states all the rights of membership?” she will say. “Do we really think now is the time to contemplate a land border between the EU and countries like Iran, Iraq and Syria?”
The home secretary will also go further than before in calling for Britain to leave the European court of human rights. With Mr Gove in charge of a much-delayed Bill of Rights, she questions his claim that it is the EU’s European court of justice in Luxembourg that poses the main threat to security, saying the bigger culprit is the non-EU Strasbourg court.
I will post a summary of the speech as soon as I’ve seen the text.
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Vote Leave is claiming this morning that the government would have enough money to settle the junior doctors’ dispute if Britain left the EU. It has put out a press release including this claim from Chris Grayling, the leader of the Commons.
Getting to a proper seven-day NHS could make a real difference to this country. It would be so much easier to pay for that change if we took back control of our £350m a week contribution to the EU and spent it on our priorities. For example, the money at the heart of the current doctors’ dispute is just 5% of our overall annual contribution.
We shouldn’t be spending billions on the EU that could make our NHS better and help deal with its current challenges.
Grayling also claims (echoing Michael Gove – see 9.11am) that the NHS may not be able to cope with the levels of migration forecast if Britain remains in the EU.
The remain campaign also need to explain how they would provide enough money and doctors to cope with the 3 million migrants they want to see come to Britain in the next 15 years if we stay in the EU.
The NHS is already running to keep up with the demands placed on it by the huge influx of people into the country and by the ageing population.
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Boris Johnson: Britain should not be 'bullied' by Obama
Boris Johnson, the Conservative MP and mayor of London, was doorstepped by reporters outside his home this morning. He has already responded to President Obama’s comments, in a statement to the Mail on Sunday and in his Telegraph column, but this morning he went marginally further, accusing Obama of bullying the UK.
Here are the key quotes.
- Johnson accused Obama of bullying the UK. Responding to the US president, he said:
So, for us to be bullied in this way – I don’t want to exaggerate – for people to say that we are going to be unable to cope on our own is absolutely wrong.
Johnson used the word “bullied” but then appeared to pull back from that. But Johnson’s spontaneity is often rehearsed, and so it looked very much as if he wanted the claim that the UK was being “bullied” out in the public domain.
- He said it was “ridiculous” to say that the UK would be “at the back of the queue” for a trade deal with the US. But he also implied that he did not think a trade deal was important anyway.
I think it is absolutely ridiculous that the United Kingdom is now being told it has to go to the back of the queue for any free trade deal. The reason we haven’t had a free trade deal in the last 43 years is that we are part of the EU. If we get out, we will have a huge opportunity to intensify our trade, not just with Europe but with the rest of the world. The WTO has changed the way trade works in the world now. Tariff barriers are much less important. Seventy three percent of the non-EU trade we do at the moment is done without any kind of trade deal whatever.
Johnson was also asked about Labour’s claim that his comment about Obama being “part-Kenyan” was “dog-whistle racism”. He sidestepped the question, and instead repeated his point about Obama’s “back of the queue” claim being ridiculous.
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Duncan Smith says almost all forecasts are 'probably wrong'
Earlier I quoted a line from Iain Duncan Smith’s Today programme interview. Here are some more quotes from the former work and pensions secretary’s interview.
- Duncan Smith insisted that Boris Johnson was not being racist when he suggested in a Sun article last week that President Obama’s “part-Kenyan” identity may have made him anti-British. Duncan Smith said:
I think there is nothing worse that demeans politics than when another politician jumps up and down and in losing any kind of argument wants to hurl a kind of name like ‘racist’ at people. I find that absurd ... I think [Johnson] is correct in this regard ... He simply referred to some of the reasons as why [Obama] may have a particular lack of regard for the UK.
- He said EU free movement rules hurt the poor.
I was the work and pensions secretary and I can tell you now what happens is an awful lot of people come here from the European Union and actually compete hugely with lots of British people who are in the job centres trying to do jobs that basically they can do, low-skilled, non-skilled jobs. And they dropped down the salary level ... Even skilled workers like carpenters and plumbers find they couldn’t get jobs on the Olympic Park because they were outbid by people coming in from the European Union. Damaging poorer people, that’s what this amounts to.
- He criticised the Treasury’s report on the long-term economic impact of Brexit, saying longterm forecasts were almost always wrong.
When you look at what the Treasury put out at the beginning of last week, what you find is they have taken absolutely the worst possible outcomes of anything for the next 15 years. They then forecast 15 years ahead. I have to tell you, having sat in government, and this is no trade secret, most governments struggle to be able to forecast six months ahead ... The one thing I have learnt since being in government is that almost every single forecast is probably wrong. You shouldn’t believe any forecast really.
I’ve taken some of the quotes from PoliticsHome.
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Last week seemed to go very well for the remain camp, but today leave are mounting a sustained fightback. Here are the key developments.
- Michael Gove, the justice secretary, has used an article in the Times (paywall) to claim that services such as the NHS and housing will face a “direct and serious threat” if Britain remains in the EU.
In the same vein, the EU response to the migration crisis is a Five Nations free-for-all with an invitation to Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Albania and Turkey to join the Union. Because we cannot control our borders — and because our deal sadly does nothing to change this fact – public services such as the NHS will face an unquantifiable strain as millions more become EU citizens and have the right to move to the UK. We cannot guarantee the same access people currently enjoy to healthcare and housing if these trends continue. There is a direct and serious threat to our public services, standard of living and ability to maintain social solidarity if we accept continued EU membership.
If there is one thing that proves the folly of remaining in the EU – in the hope that we can change things from within – it is the tragic poverty of that deal. The prime minister asked to restore social and employment legislation to national control; for a complete opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental rights; to stop the European court adjudicating on UK criminal law; to ensure that immigrants have a job offer before entering the UK; to revise the Working Time directive to protect the NHS; to reform the Common Agricultural Policy and the structural funds; and full-on treaty change. What did we get? Two thirds of diddly squat.
- Owen Paterson, the Conservative former environment secretary, will give a speech this morning saying Britain will be become a mere “colony of Europe” if it stays in the EU. He will say:
In other words, the prime minister’s ‘special status’ for countries outside of the eurozone, will leave Britain as a colony of Europe if we vote to remain, with the prime minister reduced to a Roman governor handing down dictats from what Jose Manuel Barroso, former president of the European commission, described as the “empire”. Under this scenario the notional head of the UK government would be occasionally obliged to placate the natives with the pretence of independence, while in reality powerless over decisions made hundreds of miles away.
- Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservative former work and pensions secretary, has defended Johnson’s decision to write an article last week floating the idea that President Obama may be anti-British. Duncan Smith told the Today programme in an interview that Johnson was not being racist when he described Obama as “part-Kenyan” but was just referring to “one of the reasons why [Obama] may have a lack of regard for the UK”.
Iain Duncan Smith defends Boris Johnson's Obama comments on @BBCr4today EU Referendum Live: https://t.co/KMNsMOnGbo pic.twitter.com/rPEIEQibvW
— Alex Hunt (@iAlexhunt) April 25, 2016
And there’s lots more to come.
Here is the agenda for the day.
11am: Theresa May, the home secretary, gives a speech on “Great Britain, Europe and our place in the world”.
11.30am: Owen Paterson gives a speech on Europe.
1.30pm: David Cameron attends the G5 summit in Hanover, Germany, with his counterparts from the US, Germany, France and Italy.
2.45pm: Oliver Letwin, the Cabinet Office minister, gives evidence to the international development committee on the sustainable development goals.
3.30pm: MPs begin a debate on the immigration bill, and whether to accept the Lords amendment saying Britain should take in 3,000 lone child refugees who are already in Europe.
I will be largely focusing on EU matters today but, as usual, I will also be covering other breaking political news as it happens, as well as bringing you the best reaction, comment and analysis from the web. I will post a summary at lunchtime and another in the afternoon.
If you want to follow me or contact me on Twitter, I’m @AndrewSparrow.
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