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Brexit: No 10 tells businesses to prepare for life outside EU customs regime 'in all circumstances' – live news
Brexit: No 10 tells businesses to prepare for life outside EU customs regime 'in all circumstances' – live news
(32 minutes later)
Rolling coverage of the day’s political developments as they happen, including the cabinet, the House of Commons and the parliamentary Labour party all meeting for the first time since the general election
Rolling coverage of the day’s political developments as they happen, including the cabinet, the House of Commons and the parliamentary Labour party all meeting for the first time since the general election
The Copeland MP Trudy Harrison has been appointed Boris Johnson’s parliamentary private secretary, the BBC’s Richard Moss reports.
MPs have passed the motion by acclamation.
Mairead McGuinness, first vice-president of the European parliament and an MEP for Ireland’s Fine Gael party, told the World at One that EU insiders were “cautious” about whether it would be possible to negotiate the UK-EU future partnership by the end of next year, as Boris Johnson wants. Asked if this timescale was realistic, she said:
Sir Lindsay Hoyle is taking the chair.
She also said that including provisions in the withdrawal agreement bill to rule out an extension to the Brexit transition amounted to going back on the withdrawal agreement Boris Johnson negotiated with the EU, because that did include provisions for a possible extension, but she implied she did not see this as a problem.
There is now a mini-debate on the motion to approve Sir Lindsay Hoyle as Speaker.
An estimated 800,000 EU citizens in the UK have yet to apply to remain in the country after Brexit, new Home Office figures suggest.
Labour’s Lisa Nandy is proposing the motion. She says new MPs will find out out how friendly and supportive he can be. Joking about his taste for Yorkshire tea, she tells an anecdote about how Hoyle (a proud Lancastrian) once said there were only two good things about Yorkshire; its tea, and the M62 leading out of it.
And around 900,000 EU citizens who have already applied to stay will have to apply again because they have been granted temporary leave to remain, known as “pre-settled status”. This is granted to applicants who have been in the country for fewer than five years or those whom Home Office deems not to have sufficient evidence of being in the country for five years or more.
She says in the Speaker’s chair (he was deputy Speaker before his promotion) Hoyle has always been fair and unpartisan.
Today’s Home Office figures (pdf) show 2.6m applications for settled status have been made so far, but the government estimates there are around 3.4 million EU citizens in the UK.
In the Commons MPs have just been to the Lords chamber and back to hear a royal commission instruct them to elect a Speaker.
The Home Office minister Brandon Lewis said:
Sir Peter Bottomley, the father of the Commons, is chairing proceedings and he proposes the election of Sir Lindsay Hoyle as Speaker. (Or re-election - Hoyle was first elected at the end of the last parliament.)
EU citizens have until at least 31 December 2020 to apply to remain in the country post-Brexit.The Home Office said in its statement it had completed the process on 2.2m applications, leaving a backlog of 400,000 applications.It also said it had granted status to 305,600 EU citizens in November, showing how efficiently it can deal with straightforward applications.Of concern to lawyers and academics monitoring the process will be the high proportion granted pre-settled status.Of the 2.2m applications already concluded, 41% (around 900,000) were granted this status.Barristers, including the immigration specialist Colin Yeo, have raised concerns that some EU citizens may be entitled to settled status but accept pre-settled status for convenience even though it limits their rights.
Hoyle says he has served two days as Speaker. It made his election a lot easier, he says. (He represents what was a relatively marginal seat.) He says it will be a privilege to serve as Speaker. He promises to be fair.
These are from Darren McCaffrey from Euronews. He is quoting Philippe Lamberts, a Belgian MEP, co-leader of the Greens-European Free Alliance and a member of the European parliament’s Brexit steering group.
In his speech at dawn on Friday Boris Johnson said he hoped that Steve Bray, the anti-Brexit campaign best known for his costume and for shouting “Stop Brexit” loudly outside the Houses of Parliament on a regular basis, would finally call it a day. Johnson told a Tory audience.
Boris Johnson’s plan to make it illegal for the government to extend the Brexit transition period beyond 11 months has been described as “strange” by Simon Coveney, Ireland’s deputy prime minister, my colleague Daniel Boffey reports.
Bray doesn’t seem to be taking much notice. He is outside parliament today, and he’s been shouting too.
And here are some more lines from the No 10 lobby briefing.
From the Daily Mirror’s Pippa Crerar
The prime minister’s spokesman said that, as well as ruling out an extension to the Brexit transition, the government was also ruling out having a transition after December 2020 to allow time for new UK-EU trading arrangements agreed in the future partnership deal to be implemented. When asked if this could happen, the spokesman replied:
Experts from the Centre for European Reform thinktank have been giving interviews today about the government’s decision to rule out an extension to the Brexit transition period.
The spokesman said businesses should prepare for the fact that the UK will be leaving the customs union and the single market. He said:
Sam Lowe, a trade specialist at the CER, described it as “domestic virtue signalling”.
The spokesman refused to comment on the fall in the pound this morning, in the light of the announcement about an extension to the transition being ruled out (see 9.06am), saying No 10 did not comment on currency fluctuations on principle.
And Charles Grant, the CER’s director, said that if Boris Johnson refuses to be bound by EU regulations, getting a trade deal will become much more complicated.
The spokesman said some new non-cabinet government appointments would be announced this afternoon. These are appointments to fill gaps created by MPs leaving parliament.
From the Daily Mail’s Jason Groves
I’m just back from the Downing Street lobby briefing. The prime minister’s spokesman said Johnson had a conversation this morning with Ursula von der Leyen, the new president of the European commission. The spokesman said:
Back in London MPs are in the Commons chamber for the election of Speaker.
Asked if Von der Leyen expressed any doubts about whether it would be possible to conclude the UK-EU trade deal by the end of next year, the spokesman said both sides had agreed in the political declaration that they should reach an agreement on the future partnership by the end of of next year.
The chamber is more or less packed, although at the back row on the opposition benches there are empty seats.
Von der Leyen has tweeted about the call, but in her tweet she did not say anything about wrapping up the talks by the end of next year.
Sturgeon says this is a watershed moment for Scotland.
A survey of LabourList readers has Rebecca Long-Bailey very narrowly ahead of Sir Keir Starmer as the favourite candidate for next Labour leader. Angela Rayner, who is now not expected to run, is in third place. Almost 20,000 people took part, but this is a self-selecting survey of readers who may not be party members and who may not have a vote in the contest, and so it would be unwise to read too much into its findings.
Later this week she will take the next steps to secure Scotland’s right to choose its future, she says.
Polling companies find it hard to poll members of a particular political party, but YouGov has carried out polls of Labour members and its research in 2016 provided a reasonably good guide to the outcome of that year’s leadership contest. In July this year YouGov did survey more than 1,000 Labour members and ask them who would make a good leader. Starmer, John McDonnell and Emily Thornberry came out top. Here are the figures.
Sturgeon has now finished.
I’m off to the No 10 lobby briefing now. I will post again after 12.30pm.
Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, is making a statement to the Scottish parliament.
At least two bookmakers have sent out press releases today about the odds they are offering on the next Labour leader, with Rebecca Long-Bailey the favourite, followed by Lisa Nandy and then Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary.
She says the SNP comprehensively won the election.
Starmer’s opponents, as well as criticising his stance on Brexit, have been arguing that the next leader should be a woman, as well as an MP from outside London.
The Conservatives have successfully lost 17 elections in Scotland, she says, going back to 1959.
But Jenny Chapman, who worked for Starmer in the shadow Brexit team and who lost her Darlington seat in the election, has been giving interviews today saying saying gender and regional background should be not factors in the contest. She made this argument in an article for the Daily Mirror and she told the Today programme:
She says that 90% of seats in Scotland were won by pro-EU or pro-referendum parties.
Barry Gardiner, the shadow international trade secretary, has been on BBC News this morning. There were two interesting lines in his interview.
She says this situation is “not just undesirable” but “completely and utterly unsustainable”.
Gardiner hinted that Labour would vote against the withdrawal agreement bill if the government holds a second reading vote on Friday. He said that the decision to remove provisions protecting workers’ rights from the bill (see 9.37am) would make it even less attractive than the original version of the bill, that Labour opposed in October. He said:
She says she is pressing ahead with her call for the right to hold a second referendum.
Gardiner did not rule out standing for the Labour deputy leadership. Asked if he would be a candidate, as some reports have suggested, he replied:
Referring to Scottish Labour, she says there are some signs that people opposed to a second independence referendum are changing their minds. But she says she accepts that favouring a second referendum is not the same as favouring independence. And she says that she accepts some SNP voters do not back independence.
