Top story: Labour party losing thousands of members
Good morning, Warren Murray with today’s briefing.
The Labour party is set to fall below half a million members, with the party leadership worried that it might get worse as tens of thousands of people decline to pay their dues.
There are now about 483,000 paid-up members – last July there were 554,000 – and senior figures have warned more may have cancelled their direct debits without formally notifying an intention to leave.
Some could be Corbynites who rushed to join but then lost their enthusiasm, while others may have quit in disillusionment over the direction of his leadership. Our editorial argues the party under Corbyn is failing to offer a credible vision.
Rafael Behr says it may be time for an election anyway. Theresa May is trying to govern from the remnants of David Cameron’s shattered 2015 platform, and Labour MPs don’t know what they stand for any more. We’ve already had the Rump, Barebone’s, Cavalier, Blessed, Addled, Happy and Useless parliaments, and this might be the Craven Parliament, Behr writes.
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Reluctant Rex – It may be the most truthful statement yet from the Trump administration. Rex Tillerson has revealed he didn’t want to be US secretary of state but his wife made him do it. “I didn’t want this job. I didn’t seek this job,” Tillerson told the Independent Journal Review (IJR). He was approaching retirement when the president-elect called him in to Trump Tower for a chat. “When he asked me at the end of that conversation to be secretary of state, I was stunned,” Tillerson said. “I was going to go to the ranch to be with my grandkids.” But his wife, Renda St Clair, told him “God’s not through with you” and now he thinks “I’m supposed to do this.”
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‘Supersized’ prisons – England and Wales will host four new correctional institutions that will together create more than 5,000 modern prison places. The sites are Full Sutton in east Yorkshire, Hindley in Wigan, Rochester in Kent and Port Talbot in south Wales. The government argues the new jails will complement today’s correctional practices, doing away with “dark corridors and cramped conditions”. But prison reform advocates say the £1.3bn project ignores the need to put fewer people behind bars in the first place.
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Brexit ‘baloney’ – A new rift has opened in the Conservative party as some frontbenchers argue Britain can afford to leave the EU without a trade agreement. Their thinking: the remaining member states would only want to use any deal to exact vengeance. But the Tory MPs supporting this view have been accused of peddling “ideological baloney” in telling colleagues Britain should just fall back on World Trade Organisation rules. “Every credible assessment done says this would be the worst trading arrangement possible for jobs, investment and growth,” says Anna Soubry MP.
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Visa reversal – Happy news from Australia where British war veteran James Bradley, 92, has been granted permanent residency after facing the threat of deportation.
Bradley and his wife Peggie, 91, had been in a perverse situation. They moved to Sydney 10 years ago to be with their daughter, Sharon, and her family under the “aged parent visa” programme. But the visa took so many years to process that James eventually failed a required medical. After the Guardian reported their plight, the immigration ministry intervened and they are now allowed to stay.
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Lovely at the top – Britain’s millionaires think they will only get richer under Brexit, while chief executives at FTSE companies are earning a staggering 386 times more than the annual living wage, according to findings we are publishing this morning. The Swiss bank UBS says 78% of its millionaire clients in the UK think leaving the EU will have a positive effect on their financial plans, and on the economy – but they are still keeping much of their wealth in cash, just in case. The Equality Trust, meanwhile, says firms should be forced to publish the difference in pay between their highest paid employee and average employee to highlight the kinds of gross disparities brought to light in its Pay Tracker report.
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‘Global Laundromat’ – Deutsche Bank, which loaned $300m to Donald Trump, was involved in dirty money leaving Russia under the $20bn criminal scheme that the Guardian has been investigating. Deutsche provided services to a now-defunct Latvian bank, Trasta, used by Russian criminals linked to the Kremlin. Germany’s biggest lender cut ties when Latvian regulators issued a warning about Trasta. Deutsche has previously examined loans to Trump for any Russian links but is understood to have found no evidence. Deutsche’s Private Bank – the division that lends to Trump – is identified in the Global Laundromat investigation as likely to have many rich Russians on its books.
Lunchtime read: Will Donald Trump be impeached?
About 46% of Americans think he should be, according to one poll. And with the scandal of Russian influence, plus claims of various constitutional breaches, calls for his removal from office seem likely to persist throughout Trump’s presidency. But there would be significant hurdles to clear before it could happen. So is it all just a liberal fantasy? Find out with Tom McCarthy.
Sport
Gareth Southgate has told his players their aim must be to win the 2018 World Cup as he prepares for his first match since taking the England job full time against Germany in Dortmund tonight. Meanwhile former England coach Roy Hodgson has described as “purely irrelevant and dishonest” the criticisms of his tactics during his team’s failed Euro 2016 campaign.
Meanwhile, Team Sky and British Cycling must join the sport’s voluntary anti-doping group to have any chance of silencing their doubters, according to the president of the Movement for Credible Cycling; and the leader of the Paris bid for the 2024 Olympics has promised he can “100% guarantee” none of his team will accept or offer bribes for votes in September’s election.
Business
Trump may or may not be impeached one day, but financial markets are already reassessing their optimistic verdict on the president. Shares plunged in Asia on Wednesday following the biggest falls for five months in Wall Street on Tuesday night. Compounding Trump’s woes, the usually supportive Wall Street Journal (prop: Rupert Murdoch) lashed into the president in an editorial, saying he is losing credibility by spreading false claims he was wiretapped by Barack Obama.
Overnight the pound was buying US$1.25 and €1.16.
The papers
The front pages are a mixture of reports/tributes/attacks after Martin McGuinness’s death, and the ban on passengers taking laptops on board some flights to Britain and the US.
The Mail’s front is the standout because of its evident anger and dislike for McGuinness. It has two pictures of IRA atrocities and then McGuinness’s name under them. Inside it continues over multiple pages saying he was an evil man.
The Telegraph says the former deputy first minister in the Northern Ireland assembly took the “secrets of his victims” to his grave. The paper’s splash is the laptop ban on flights into the UK.
The FT goes for “Death of an IRA leader turned peacemaker” while also splashing on the ban on laptops on planes.
The Times has a picture of McGuinness’s coffin being carried through Bogside but splashes on the laptop ban as well.
The Mirror’s main story is that the contraceptive pill can protect women from cancer for 30 years according to a new study. It calls McGuinness “the IRA butcher who laid down his weapons”.
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