Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian dissident freed in the biggest prisoner swap since the cold war, has appealed to Keir Starmer during a meeting in Downing Street to not let hundreds of political prisoners in Russia and Belarus quietly “die off”.

Kara-Murza, who was released last month two years into a 25-year sentence after speaking out against the war in Ukraine, said he had told the prime minister on Friday that organising further such swaps was a matter of “life and death”.

The 43-year-old Russian politician, who has British citizenship after moving to England as a child, was one of 16 westerners and Russians, including five German nationals, exchanged last month for 10 Russian nationals, including two minors.

The deal marked the first time in 40 years that Russian political prisoners had been released by the Kremlin as part of a swap.

The White House said that Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison camp last year, had been due to be part of the exchange.

Kara-Murza, a father of three, who survived two poisoning attempts in 2015 and 2017, said he had made the case for further swaps to Starmer and in all his recent meetings with senior politicians, including the US president, Joe Biden, and the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz.

The deal under which he had been released had been an “unequal” arrangement, he said, involving murderers, spies and hackers being swapped for people who had committed no crimes, but there was no alternative, Kara-Murza insisted.

“There can be nothing more valuable, more important for democracy, than human life,” he said. “I know what it’s like just to wake up every morning in a cell two by three metres, four walls, a small window covered by bars, just essentially walking in a small circle all day, staring at walls. You have no one to speak to, nothing to do, no one to go to and this is how the rest of your life is going to continue … This is not just a question of unjust imprisonment, although that in itself would be unacceptable … it’s a question, very literally, of life or death.”

Among the cases referenced by Kara-Murza were Alexei Gorinov, 63, an elected official of Moscow’s Krasnoselsky district council, who was the first person in Russia to be arrested for his opposition to the war in Ukraine, and Maria Ponomarenko, 46, a journalist from Siberia imprisoned for accusing the Russian air force of bombing a theatre in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, who is on hunger strike.

“We need to be advocating, to be getting them out,” Kara-Murza said, adding that the argument that such deals encouraged Kremlin to take hostages was “fallacious” as Putin was going to lock up his opponents anyway.

Kara-Murza, who had been held in a high security prison in Siberia, said he had also talked to Starmer about the need for a strategic plan for Russia after Vladimir Putin.

Authoritarian regimes appeared stable from the outside but change could happen in an instant, he said, and it was vital not to repeat the mistakes of the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

There would need to be a reckoning with those who committed crimes during Putin’s 25 years in power and a plan to reintegrate Russia into the rules-based order, he said.

“One of the things that has occupied my mind for a long time, but especially these past few weeks that I’ve been out of prison, is that we have no right to miss the next opportunity for change in Russia,” he said.

A new packaging tax to fund recycling will push up the price of many products including soft drinks, beer, kitchenware and small appliances such as kettles and toasters, companies have warned.

Pev Manners, the managing director of the cordial maker Belvoir Farm, said the preliminary cost for glass in the extended producer responsibility (EPR) for packaging was “nuts”. The brand would have to pass on the levy as the fees would wipe out its annual profits, he said.

The EPR, which comes into effect next year, shifts the cost of household recycling from councils back on to the companies using the packaging.

In August, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) published its “first estimate” of the rates to be charged for each tonne of material, giving companies a price range from the lowest to the highest.

The rate for glass was “spectacularly high”, spanning £130 to £330 a tonne, Manners said. Based on the highest cost scenario covering the fees would add 25p – the equivalent of a 10% price increase – to a bottle of its elderflower cordial.

“Last year, we turned over £21m and made £900,000 profit,” he said. “My finance director estimates this tax will cost us £850,000 next year, so 100% of our profits.”

In a statement, Defra said the EPR was a “vital first step in cracking down on waste as we move towards a circular economy, and we have always been clear these fees are our initial estimates … We are continuing to meet with the glass industry to discuss more workable approaches, including for how we calculate the cost of glass.”

Any price increase would result in lost sales “because people are not feeling rich”, Manners said, adding that in the short-term it would benefit rivals that used cans and plastic because the UK’s deposit return scheme (DRS) was not due to start until 2027.

“At retail we think the EPR will put between 18p and 25p on a 750ml bottle because the grocers will just see it as part of the cost, add their profit margin and then put VAT on top,” Manners said.

Others in the drinks industry have also been worriedly doing the maths. In a joint letter the British Beer and Pub Association, Independent Family Brewers of Britain, Campaign for Real Ale, and Society of Independent Brewers and Associates, suggested it would put between 3p and 7p on each of the 3.2bn bottles of beer sold in the UK each year.

When Ian Bray, the chief executive of Fentimans, known for its botanically brewed ginger beer, calculated its bill he feared the “death of Fentimans”. “At the high end of their [glass] cost estimate it was a number which was greater than my profit for the year,” he said, having worked out it would add 50p to a 750ml bottle of its soft drinks.

Glass is hit hard because it is heavy and Defra is using weight as a key metric but as talks with industry continue Bray is more optimistic. “If they base it on volume rather than weight, then that will probably reduce the cost for glass by about a third, which starts to become more reasonable,” he said.

It is not just the drinks industry that is worried. The British Home Enhancement Trade Association, which represents DIY, garden, housewares and small electricals suppliers, said the “EPR tax will lead to price hikes across all manner of consumer goods”.

Will Jones, its chief operating officer, said: “Producers will be unable to absorb these costs and will either have to pass them up the supply chain to retailers and ultimately consumers, adding to pressure on inflation, or implement damaging cost cutting measures in their business potentially leading to job losses.”

At the end of 2023 the government finally set out the details of a new “simpler recycling” regime for England, which included a list of items councils must recycle come 2026. This standardised service (with other home nations expected to align with the legislation) dovetails with the EPR and DRS.

The official analysis is that even if producers do not seek to minimise costs, and pass fees on to consumers, the impact on inflation would be small, potentially increasing CPI inflation by 0.04-0.09%. Other estimates measure the impact on the consumer at less than £1 for each household a week.

From 2026, fees will be “modulated”, meaning that packaging with a lower environmental impact will be cheaper to use.

The policy should help reduce the “environmental burden of used packaging and support increased collection and recycling, so it is positive step forward,” said Lee Marshall, policy and external affairs director at the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management. “The system should mean packaging is designed to be more easily recycled, more of it is collected for recycling and that producers, rather than local authorities, fund all of this.

“The scheme has been a long time in design and that has been frustrating for the resources and waste sector and for producers as well. However, at some point the government will have to have to put something in place. Both the producers and the local authorities are concerned … so, you could argue it’s probably about right if both sides are unhappy.”

Downing Street fears it is to be asked to support the issue of an international criminal court (ICC) arrest warrant for the Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Such support would have to be given at a time when it has not proscribed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the UK. There are concerns among some Foreign Office officials whether the position is politically sustainable.

No 10 is said to have been on alert for more than a week about an imminent statement from the ICC that its pre-trial chamber judges have accepted the request of the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, to issue arrest warrants for war crimes committed in Gaza.

The request for arrest warrants was issued on 20 May against Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the defence minister, as well as three Hamas leaders, including Yawar Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh, the now-deceased head of the Hamas political bureau.

In the short term, No 10 is said to be most concerned by the explosive political fallout if the ICC issues an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, especially at such a moment of extreme tension in the Middle East.

Khan told the ICC pre-trial chamber the issue of the arrest warrant was of the utmost urgency nearly a month ago. The chamber of judges has taken much longer to reach a decision than the three weeks it required to accept Khan’s request for an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, over his role in orchestrating the abduction of children from Ukraine.

The delay has been caused by judges needing to assess numerous amicus curiae observations from states, international organisations, victim representatives and human rights groups.

The Labour government withdrew the filing made by the Conservatives that the ICC prosecutor did not have jurisdiction.

Khan submitted his reply to the submissions on 23 August, saying the case was of “the utmost urgency”, and referred to the catastrophic situation in Gaza. He argued Palestine was a party to the ICC and any crimes committed on its territory are subject to ICC jurisdiction.

The concern in diplomatic circles is that the large anti-Iranian lobby inside parliament will complain that the UK is showing the wrong priorities if it backs seeking the arrest of the leader of a democratic state at a time when the IRGC remains unproscribed.

The UK has said it is reviewing the IRGC’s status in the UK in the context of a wider review of laws governing state-sponsored terrorism. The British domestic intelligence service M15 has also said Iran’s backers have been responsible for as many as 15 attacks on British soil.

The Foreign Office has imposed heavy sanctions on IRGC members, but opposed IRGC proscription partly because it fears Iran might then cut off diplomatic relations with the UK, leaving the UK without an ambassador in Tehran.

In seeking the arrest warrant, Khan accused Gallant and Netanyahu of committing crimes against humanity “as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to state policy”.

Khan carefully sought and won the backing of a large part of the British human rights legal establishment at the time he called for Netanyahu’s arrest, in particular to argue that the Israeli prime minister is answerable for crimes committed by Israel in Palestine.

In a sign of the growing tension, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have been piling pressure on the government to do more about the UK’s obligations to apply international law related to Gaza. One group of 15 NGOs issued a statement expressing their “deep disappointment” that the UK had abstained in a UN general assembly vote that called for the ruling in July of the other big international court, the International Court of Justice, to be enforced by Israel leaving the occupied territories within 12 months.

The resolution was passed on Wednesday at the assembly by 124 to 14, but the UK was among 45 countries that abstained. The NGOs reminded the UK the ICJ ruling placed an obligation on all countries not to aid or assist the situation created by Israel’s presence.

The UK said it supported the ICJ ruling about Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, but did not think the motion would further the cause of peace.

At the same time, two NGOs, Global Legal Action Network and al-Haq, involved in a long-running court battle with the government over arms sales to Israel, have written to the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, warning him of criminal liability over the continued sale of F-35 parts that can be used by Israel.

A third group has written to the trade secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, urging him to suspend the UK’s existing trade deal with Israel and rethink its plans to sign a new one. They say the step is necessary in light of the ICJ order for all states not to aid or assist Israel’s occupation.