From our UK edition
John McDonnell takes centre stage on day two of Labour's conference. The shadow chancellor has recently dismissed reports of a coup against Jeremy Corbyn as 'laughable'. But could his speech today be an audition for the top job when the Labour leader does depart?
From our UK edition
A lot of Labour’s energy at the moment seems to be spent on internal battles over which faction wins power on which committee, and whether it should be easier to deselect sitting MPs. A measure of whether its conference is a success is whether it manages to talk about what it wants to do in government. I understand that the leadership’s aim this week is to try to produce an analysis of where society has gone wrong. This sounds rather ‘Broken Britain’, though unsurprisingly the party won’t be using that line. Instead, the tag is ‘rebuilding Britain’, and Jeremy Corbyn and his colleagues will be talking about the impact of eight years of austerity, and post-industrialisation, particularly on parts of the UK that feel left behind.
From our UK edition
Jeremy Corbyn – Anti-Semitism 'is a scourge in any society' With the Labour party conference now in full swing in Liverpool, Jeremy Corbyn met with Andrew Marr for an interview. Marr was keen to challenge Corbyn about the accusations of anti-Semitism against him and the failure to effectively stamp out the problem within the party. Corbyn attempted to set the record straight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaiqW2z0_Cw AM: Jeremy Corbyn - are you an anti-Semite? JC: No. I've spent my whole life opposing racism in every form and I will die fighting racism in any form... Anti-Semitism is a scourge in any society. I will oppose it all my life...
From our UK edition
Generally, talk of a ‘split’ in the Labour Party focuses on the chasm between Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters and those ‘moderate’ MPs who want to leave. But there’s another, bigger split, which is between the Corbynites and a large chunk of MPs, including Deputy Leader Tom Watson, who disagree with the party’s leader but think Labour can change. Watson did go through a phase of staying rather quiet in the months after the last general election, avoiding both party events and interviews where he might be forced to take a stand against the leadership.
From our UK edition
The most important statement by Jeremy Corbyn in today’s Sunday Mirror interview is not that Labour’s leader will embrace a so-called People’s Vote if that were what Labour’s conference backs this week. It is that Labour is “not happy” with the PM’s Chequers Brexit plan “and we would vote against it”. This is Labour's strongest and least ambiguous attack on Chequers. And – as if that were needed – it underwrites the view of many Tory MPs and ministers that the PM’s attempt to sell Chequers to Brussels is even more fatuous than dead-horse flogging, given that some 50 odd True Brexit Conservative backbenchers are adamant that they would vote against it.
From our UK edition
It's the first day of Labour conference and Jeremy Corbyn has kicked proceedings off with an appearance on the Andrew Marr show. The Labour leader was grilled on a range of topics from anti-Semitism and 'English irony' to his party's Brexit position. Corbyn put in a relaxed performance, insisting that he loved 'every minute' of being Labour leader. However, his sharp intake of breath when he was asked about tricky topics suggest that it isn't all plain-sailing. While his defence of his response to a variety of anti-Semitic incidents was typically evasive (he admitted he was 'perhaps too hasty' in his defence of an anti-Semitic mural), it's Corbyn's Brexit comments that will have the most impact on the upcoming conference.
From our UK edition
Labour return to Liverpool for the party's annual conference. But amid tensions over Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn's leadership and the party's anti-Semitism troubles, the gathering is unlikely to be an entirely happy occasion.
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It is the morning after the statement before. So, what happens now? That’s the question I attempt to answer in my Sun column this morning. Theresa May is trying to shock the EU into engaging with her Chequers plan by saying she really is serious about no deal. Her statement yesterday was meant to be a very public burning of her boats; a message that she won’t sign up to either of the options they’re trying to push her towards. But if we don’t get any sign from the EU in the next fortnight that they are prepared to be flexible, May will come under huge pressure from her Cabinet colleagues to change tack.
From our UK edition
This year's Ukip conference in Birmingham has only just started but already trouble is breaking out. A row that has been bubbling within the party since it was first founded a generation ago is coming to the surface thanks to a clash between the party’s current leader, Gerard Batten, and its most famous one, Nigel Farage. Farage, no stranger to chucking rocks from the sidelines, has criticised the direction in which Ukip is now travelling. The former Ukip leader warned that the party risks 'utter marginalisation' if it cosies up to the far-right. The catalyst for his comments is Batten's bid to recruit former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson.
From our UK edition
I’m afraid Brexit has always been about Ireland. Perhaps Salzburg will finally, brutally, illustrate that point. The Spectator declared its support for Leave in the final week of the 2016 referendum campaign. The editorial arguing in favour of a leave vote hinged not on free trade, but sovereignty: which is a different way of saying control. It did not mention Ireland at all – but very few did. It was of marginal interest. I read that leader in Downing Street, where I then worked. I did not then, and do not now, agree with the sovereignty argument – but I can respect it. Since EU membership necessarily involves compromising on pure national sovereignty, it follows that a vote to leave offers the opportunity to reclaim some sovereignty.
From our UK edition
Is Jeremy Corbyn the victim in Labour’s anti-Semitism scandal? Emily Thornberry seems to think so. The shadow foreign secretary said that the Labour leader was ‘distressed’ by the claims against him and that he found the row ‘very difficult’ to deal with because it went ‘so against his idea of who he is’. In an interview with the Evening Standard, the Corbynite MP said that while the Dear Leader was usually ‘very Zen’ about criticism, ‘calling him an anti-Semite, calling him a racist, that just went straight to the absolute core of him. It really distressed him’. Poor old Jeremy.
From our UK edition
Theresa May has attempted to put the ball back in the EU’s court this afternoon. After the rejection of her Chequers plan at the Salzburg summit, May has told British voters and the EU that she regards no deal as preferable to either the UK being in the EEA and the Customs Union or a customs border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. She said that if the EU wants to reject Chequers, it is incumbent on them to come back with an alternative proposal. The question is whether the EU takes this no deal threat seriously.
From our UK edition
Yesterday, I was in Salzburg for talks with European leaders. I have always said that these negotiations would be tough - and they were always bound to be toughest in the final straight. While both sides want a deal, we have to face up to the fact that - despite the progress we have made - there are two big issues where we remain a long way apart. The first is our economic relationship after we have left. Here, the EU is still only offering us two options. The first option would involve the UK staying in the European Economic Area and a customs union with the EU. In plain English, this would mean we’d still have to abide by all the EU rules, uncontrolled immigration from the EU would continue and we couldn’t do the trade deals we want with other countries.
From our UK edition
Chequers, as the journalist Chris Deerin has pointed out, goes pop. Which wry and funny as it is for those of us of a certain age will not be cheering up Theresa May. Because the EU summit in Salzburg has been a personal catastrophe for her. And worse than that, it was an avoidable catastrophe. Because every EU expert bar those she employs in Whitehall has been saying very loudly for weeks that the trade and commercial proposal in her Chequers Brexit plan would never win favour among the EU 27. So the question is why she waited to have that so publicly and humiliatingly stated by the EU's president Donald Tusk today, rather than quietly acquiring some wriggle room over recent days.
From our UK edition
The government weren’t expecting a dramatic breakthrough in the Brexit talks at Salzburg. But they were hoping for some more positive mood music, for some language that would help Theresa May get through party conference. But Donald Tusk has just issued a broadside against Chequers: ‘The suggested framework for economic co-operation will not work, not least because it is undermining the single market.’ Tusk’s brutal language makes it that much harder for Theresa May to maintain that the EU is engaging with Chequers and her plans for a European Traded Goods Area and a Facilitated Customs Arrangement.
From our UK edition
As so often these days, if you want real political insight, go to Mumsnet. In a web chat there today, John McDonnell has offered extensive proof that – whatever you think of his politics and policies – he is an extremely professional and skilful political communicator. Mumsnet, as Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg and countless others will remember, is about the toughest gig out there: you’re faced with a bombardment of questions ranging from traditional political analysis to deeply personal issues and of course humour, much of it biscuit-related. Striking the right tone is very, very hard. These days, Mumsnet is even harder for politicians because an awful lot of users there are (quite reasonably) very angry with politicians over transgender issues.
From our UK edition
The National Housing Federation isn’t used to Prime Ministers attending its annual conference. In fact, it’s not used to getting to know the same housing minister from year to year, as the job is the subject of so many reshuffles. Today Theresa May proudly told the body that represents housing associations that she was the first Prime Minister in history to speak at this event, adding: ‘To me, that speaks volumes about the way in which social housing has, for too long and under successive governments, been pushed to the edge of the political debate.’ Her speech then went on to say that she had made it her ‘personal mission to fix our broken housing system’ and that she wanted to end the ‘stigma’ around social housing.
From our UK edition
This week's EU summit in Salzburg should settle three important Brexit questions of profound important to this country's future and that of the PM too. Most importantly, the leaders of the EU 27 are being asked by their Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier and the EU president Donald Tusk how specific and prescriptive they want the Political Declaration on Britain's prospective relationship with the EU to be. In a way it is astonishing, with just six months to go before we're out, that Barnier and Tusk do not know something so fundamental about their wishes.
From our UK edition
Theresa May heads to Salzburg tomorrow to try and persuade the leaders of the EU27 of the merits of her Brexit plan. But there’ll be an unwelcome distraction for her in the morning. I understand that the European Commission will issue a reasoned opinion in the Olaf case, where the Commission accuses the UK of failing to prevent customs fraud on shoes and textiles imported from China and is demanding over two billion euros in lost revenue. The UK continues to contest this case, and I understand it has asked the Commission for more information on various points. But the timing of this reasoned opinion has raised eyebrows in government circles. It seems more than a coincidence that it is appearing on the day that May sits down with the leaders of the EU 27.
From our UK edition
Farming out the development of post-Brexit UK migration policy to a professor from the LSE was a political masterstroke by the former Home Secretary Amber Rudd. How much harder it will be for Remainers to condemn the government’s position on migration as some kind of racist, xenophobic exercise knowing that it has been formed in one of the liberal establishment’s favourite seats of learning. Yet there is nothing in Sir Alan Manning’s report which could not have come from the pen of a ‘populist’ politician trying to satisfy public grievance on migration.