Politics
Jimmy Lai release is a priority for the UK, says Keir Starmer
Securing the release of pro-democracy activist and British citizen Jimmy Lai from a Hong Kong prison is a “priority” for the government, Sir Keir Starmer has said.
During Prime Minister’s Questions, Conservative leader Rishi Sunak asked if Lai’s imprisonment was a breach of the 1984 treaty transferring power over Hong Kong from the UK to China.
The prime minister agreed it was a breach and said the government would “continue” to raise the case with China.
Lai was arrested in 2020 for fraud and involvement in protests and, following delays, is now facing trial for sedition and collusion with foreign forces.
The 76-year-old has pleaded not guilty but would face life in prison if convicted.
Lai founded the now-defunct newspaper Apple Daily and was involved in pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
Under the 1984 Joint Sino-British Declaration, China agreed Hong Kong would enjoy a “high degree of autonomy” and retain certain rights including freedom of assembly and speech.
However, over time China has increased its control over the former British colony and in 2020 it passed the National Security Law, making it easier to clamp down on protests.
Lai’s lawyer has been critical of the UK government’s involvement in the case.
“We are told Jimmy Lai’s case is a priority for the government. So why has the foreign secretary still failed to meet with us and Sebastien, his son, despite repeated requests?” she told The Times on Tuesday.
Caolifhionn Gallagher said of the past five foreign secretaries, only David Cameron had met Lai’s legal team.
She said: “This is a disappointing and flawed approach that stymies crucial efforts to free Jimmy Lai and fundamentally undermines the government’s official position that he must be released.”
Pressed on the case by Sunak, Sir Keir said: “We do call on the Hong Kong authorities to release immediately our British national.
“The foreign secretary raised this case, in his first meeting with China’s foreign minister, and we will continue to do so,” he added.
Sunak also used Prime Minister’s Questions to ask Sir Keir about the implementation of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme.
In 2023, the Conservative government established plans for a scheme that would force those working for a foreign power or body to declare their lobbying activities.
It was triggered partly by growing concern about China’s clandestine activities in the UK.
The scheme had been due to come into force this year, but the Home Office has confirmed that is “no longer expected”.
Sunak said the scheme had been described as “essential” by MI5 and asked why the prime minister had “halted” its implementation.
Sir Keir simply replied: “That isn’t correct.”
“That is very clearly what the government has said,” Sunak replied adding: “I would urge him to get up to speed on this issue and, therefore, implement the scheme.”
Sunak also criticised the government for stopping the implementation of the Freedom of Speech Act, which he said would help “defend universities” from Chinese political influence.
The prime minister said he knew “first-hand” the work done by the security and intelligence services and that the government “supports them in everything they do”.
Politics
The Many Links Between Project 2025 and Trump’s World
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Pie ‘n’ Mash should be protected, says Basildon and Billericay MP
It is as Cockney as a Pearly Queen in a three-wheeler Del Boy van.
Now an Essex MP is to lead a parliamentary debate calling for traditional pie ‘n’ mash with liquor to get protected status, like champagne and Cornish Pasties.
Richard Holden, the Conservative MP for Basildon and Billericay, said the dish was “part of that Cockney diaspora”, describing it as “the original fast food”.
Andy Green, who founded the Modern Cockney Festival, said obtaining the status “may kickstart a fresh look from government agencies and public bodies to recognise the tradition and culture that pie ‘n’ mash represents”.
Campaigners want the dish – mashed potato with minced beef pie and lashings of parsley sauce known as liquor – to be given Traditional Speciality Guaranteed (TSG) status by the government.
Mr Holden will lead the debate in Westminster Hall at 16:00 BST on Tuesday to stop producers claiming it – but with a different recipe.
Mr Holden said: “With British staples like Cornish Pasties, Bramley Apple Pies and Melton Mowbray Pork Pies already enjoying protection, it’s now time we protect this important dish to be recognised and celebrated, as it is enjoyed by families for decades to come.”
‘Alive and thriving’
The TSG status is defined by the specificity and traditional element of the dish and decision makers will need to see a recipe agreed.
Almost 30 years ago there were 60 pie ‘n’ mash shops across London, but there was barely a third of that total left by 2020.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4, Mr Green said there was “a narrative that pie ‘n’ mash shops are closing and maybe pie ‘n’ mash is dying” but, he added, “the reality is it’s evolving”.
“Listed traditional food status would give a mark, a statement that despite rumours of its death, pie ‘n’ mash is very much alive and thriving,” he said.
Mr Green said its Cockney identity had spread further than the traditional areas of east and south London, marked by the spread of pie ‘n’ and mash shops, from Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire to Tunbridge Wells in Kent.
He said some shops were “evolving” with the times by offering vegetarian options and delivery services.
The history of pie ‘n’ mash
The iconic dish which has become synonymous with Cockney culture is thought to date back to the 1840s.
Traditionally, it consisted of a savoury pie filled with minced beef, served with mashed potatoes and a parsley liquor.
But for anyone feeling adventurous, pie ‘n’ mash can also be served with stewed jellied eels – another Cockney favourite.
Those who love it, like the Cockney Modern Festival organisers, say it is an artisan food with recipes handed down throughout generations “like precious family heirlooms”.
Mr Holden said he has written to more than 40 MPs who have a pie ‘n’ mash shop in their constituency, adding: “It’s part of a campaign to celebrate and really promote pie and mash, which has spread out from its beginnings in central and east London, down the Thames Gateway and out into the world.”
He told PA Media: “We’re wanting to celebrate it and I’ve got a couple of pie and mash shops in my part of the Basildon new town.
“I’ve got Stacey’s Pie and Mash and Robins Pie and Mash. Robins is part of a small chain run by a family right across Essex and east London.”
Famous fans of the hearty meal include David Beckham, actor Danny Dyer, and comedians Arthur Smith and Rob Beckett.
The dish has also been immortalised in EastEnders, with Beale’s Eels Pie & Mash House.
Mr Holden said the dish had been enjoyed by families for nearly 200 years.
He said: “It’s part of that Cockney diaspora – particularly for places like Basildon, where you’ve seen all that new build town… people moving out there from the East End and taking some of those traditions with them.
“It’s great to promote a high quality product… it’s the original fast food.”
Daniel Zeichner, Labour’s environment minister, said officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) had been involved in discussions.
“They are clear that an application for TSG status requires agreement on the recipe that producers would need to follow to use the name in future,” he said.
“They also understand that all those wishing to use the name would need periodic verification of their practices.”
He said once a formal application had been submitted, a full assessment could then be made.
Politics
David Gauke calls for end to ‘bidding war’ between parties as he is appointed to sentencing review – UK politics live | Politics
David Gauke calls for end to ‘sentencing bidding war’ between parties as he is appointed to lead MoJ prison policy review
Good morning. Michael Howard was Conservative leader at one point, and was instrumental in ensuring that David Cameron succeeded him in that job, but perhaps he will be best remembered for his time as home secretary in the 1990s, when he gave a speech that summed up criminal justice policy for the next three decades. He told the Tory conference:
Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists – and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice … This may mean that more people will go to prison. I do not flinch from that. We shall no longer judge the success of our system of justice by a fall in our prison population.
And, around that time, the prison population in England and Wales started to soar. The election of a Labour government did not make any difference to this trend; Howardism prevailed.
Today, is that all going to change? As Rajeev Syal reports in our overnight story, to coincide with the 1,100 more criminals being let out as part of the early release policy introduced by Labour to deal with the jail overcrowding crisis, Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is announcing a review of sentencing policy, which will be carried out by David Gauke, the former Conservative justice secretary. It will consider alternatives to sending people to jail.
The Ministry of Justice’s press release about the review is here. And the terms of refererence are here.
Mahmood has been giving interviews this morning and it has been notable that she has not been declaring war on the Michael Howard approach. The Ministry of Justice says that one of the principles behind the sentencing review is to “make sure prison sentences punish serious offenders and protect the public” and it says the government is committed to creating 14,000 more prison places. Although the review will consider “tougher punishments outside of prison”, the terms of reference also imply sentences should go up for offences against women and girls.
On the Today programme this morning Nick Robinson asked Mahmood to clarify how radical she was being. Did she just want to curb the rate at which the prison population was going up? Or did she want fewer people to be jailed, and Britain to stop being “the European leader in locking people up”? In her reply, Mahmood rather fudged it, implying she wanted both. She said:
Well, the problem is that the rate of increase is such that nobody can keep up with demand, and you risk running out of prison places … We reach critical capacity again by next summer. We cannot build our way out of this crisis.
To put it in context, I have HMP Birmingham in my constituency. That’s a very large, older Victorian prison. It has a capacity of over 1,000. We need to build nearly five of those every single year to keep up with demand. So we do have to manage demand into the prison system.
But for a period it’s obvious that demand is going to go up, because we are going to have to build those 14,000 places. If we don’t, we run out of prison places earlier than we would expect.
The crisis is so acute that all of these things, building more supply, dealing with demand, have to be part of the solution.
But in the end, the sentencing review is our best opportunity to set a new trajectory where we can manage that demand, where I can make sure we never run out of prison places again, where there is a prison place for everyone who needs to be locked up, and where we expand the range of punishments outside of prison.
But Gauke himself has been a bit more willing to denounce Howardism. He has written an article for the New Statesman about the sentencing review and he says he wants to use it to end the “sentencing bidding war” between political parties. He says:
For the last 30 years, there has been a sentencing bidding war between the political parties seeking to compete to be seen as the toughest on crime by promising ever-longer prison sentences. Rightly, the public expects criminality to be punished and prison is often viewed as the only effective means of punishment. But the capacity crisis in our prisons has meant that – at the very least – we have no choice but to pause the increase in the prison population. It is also sensible that we now look more broadly at the evidence and ask whether sentencing policy should be more fundamentally reformed. By next spring, we should have the answer.
There will be a lot more on this as the day goes on.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
After 12.30pm: Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, makes a statement to MPs about the sentencing review.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line (BTL) or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
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Key events
Shabana Mahmood says errors that affected first round of early prison releases in September now ‘ironed out’
Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, has said that mistakes that affected the first set of early prisoner releases under Labour should have been “ironed out” ahead of the second round take place today.
In an interview with Times Radio, she said that 37 prisoners were released by mistake when around 1,700 inmates were released early in September. She went on:
All 37 were returned to custody, and that operational part of the system actually ended up working exactly as it should.
But those mistakes have now been ironed out, and I’m confident that the releases taking place will now be exactly as we need them to be, and victims who are required to be notified will be notified.
Mahmood also said that the rates of recall for prisoners released early were “broadly in line” with usual prison releases.
Speaking on LBC, she said:
We’ll do a statistics release in due course, as we normally would, on rates of recall and on reoffending in our prison estate.
What I can tell you is our early assessment is that the rates of recall and potential reoffending in the cohort that has been released as a result of the emergency release measures is broadly in line with what we would expect.
Paul Brand from ITV says, if the government thinks that, by getting David Gauke to carry out the sentencing review, they will get the Conservatives support for it, they will probably be disappointed. He has posted this on social media.
Govt hopes by appointing Gauke – a former Tory Justice Sec (tho admittedly a centrist in today’s party) – they can get cross-party agreement on sentencing reform. But it’s likely Tory leadership candidates will say Labour being soft on criminals, and on the political debate goes.
David Gauke calls for end to ‘sentencing bidding war’ between parties as he is appointed to lead MoJ prison policy review
Good morning. Michael Howard was Conservative leader at one point, and was instrumental in ensuring that David Cameron succeeded him in that job, but perhaps he will be best remembered for his time as home secretary in the 1990s, when he gave a speech that summed up criminal justice policy for the next three decades. He told the Tory conference:
Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists – and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice … This may mean that more people will go to prison. I do not flinch from that. We shall no longer judge the success of our system of justice by a fall in our prison population.
And, around that time, the prison population in England and Wales started to soar. The election of a Labour government did not make any difference to this trend; Howardism prevailed.
Today, is that all going to change? As Rajeev Syal reports in our overnight story, to coincide with the 1,100 more criminals being let out as part of the early release policy introduced by Labour to deal with the jail overcrowding crisis, Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is announcing a review of sentencing policy, which will be carried out by David Gauke, the former Conservative justice secretary. It will consider alternatives to sending people to jail.
The Ministry of Justice’s press release about the review is here. And the terms of refererence are here.
Mahmood has been giving interviews this morning and it has been notable that she has not been declaring war on the Michael Howard approach. The Ministry of Justice says that one of the principles behind the sentencing review is to “make sure prison sentences punish serious offenders and protect the public” and it says the government is committed to creating 14,000 more prison places. Although the review will consider “tougher punishments outside of prison”, the terms of reference also imply sentences should go up for offences against women and girls.
On the Today programme this morning Nick Robinson asked Mahmood to clarify how radical she was being. Did she just want to curb the rate at which the prison population was going up? Or did she want fewer people to be jailed, and Britain to stop being “the European leader in locking people up”? In her reply, Mahmood rather fudged it, implying she wanted both. She said:
Well, the problem is that the rate of increase is such that nobody can keep up with demand, and you risk running out of prison places … We reach critical capacity again by next summer. We cannot build our way out of this crisis.
To put it in context, I have HMP Birmingham in my constituency. That’s a very large, older Victorian prison. It has a capacity of over 1,000. We need to build nearly five of those every single year to keep up with demand. So we do have to manage demand into the prison system.
But for a period it’s obvious that demand is going to go up, because we are going to have to build those 14,000 places. If we don’t, we run out of prison places earlier than we would expect.
The crisis is so acute that all of these things, building more supply, dealing with demand, have to be part of the solution.
But in the end, the sentencing review is our best opportunity to set a new trajectory where we can manage that demand, where I can make sure we never run out of prison places again, where there is a prison place for everyone who needs to be locked up, and where we expand the range of punishments outside of prison.
But Gauke himself has been a bit more willing to denounce Howardism. He has written an article for the New Statesman about the sentencing review and he says he wants to use it to end the “sentencing bidding war” between political parties. He says:
For the last 30 years, there has been a sentencing bidding war between the political parties seeking to compete to be seen as the toughest on crime by promising ever-longer prison sentences. Rightly, the public expects criminality to be punished and prison is often viewed as the only effective means of punishment. But the capacity crisis in our prisons has meant that – at the very least – we have no choice but to pause the increase in the prison population. It is also sensible that we now look more broadly at the evidence and ask whether sentencing policy should be more fundamentally reformed. By next spring, we should have the answer.
There will be a lot more on this as the day goes on.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
After 12.30pm: Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, makes a statement to MPs about the sentencing review.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line (BTL) or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. I’m still using X and I’ll see something addressed to @AndrewSparrow very quickly. I’m also trying Bluesky (@andrewsparrowgdn) and Threads (@andrewsparrowtheguardian).
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos (no error is too small to correct). And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Politics
UK to boost Ukraine funding using £2bn from seized Russian assets
The UK government will give an extra £2.26bn ($2.93bn) to Ukraine, using the profits from seized Russian assets held in Europe.
It forms Britain’s contribution to a £38bn ($50bn) fund announced in June by members of the G7 group of leading economies.
Defence Secretary John Healey said the new money will help Ukraine bolster its frontline military equipment. He described it as “turning the proceeds of Putin’s own corrupt regime against him, by putting it into the hands of Ukraine”.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves said the aim was to release the money as quickly as possible.
The funds will be made in the form of a loan – with the UK recouping the cost from profits of seized Russian assets – “within the correct legal framework”.
Reeves made it clear that the UK was not confiscating sovereign Russian assets in Europe, but using the profits and interest accrued from them.
Other G7 countries have pledged to do the same and are expected to finalise their contributions in the coming weeks.
The payments to Ukraine are expected to be made in tranches, rather than all at once. Some nations expect some of the money to go towards Ukraine’s reconstruction.
But the UK government has said it is up to Kyiv on how it spends the UK’s contribution.
Healey said the money announced would allow Ukraine to purchase crucial military equipment, such as air defences and ammunition.
The £2.26bn is a one off payment. But it is an addition to £3bn already pledged by the government to fund Ukraine’s war effort.
So far, the UK has given more than £12bn in military aid and has promised to match that level of support in the future.
The chancellor and defence secretary briefed reporters on the announcement sitting side by side. Reeves said it showed the UK’s support for Ukraine was “unwavering and will remain for as long as it takes”.
Their appearance together might also signal a positive relationship ahead of next week’s Budget, when the government will outline its spending plans on public services such as health, schools and police.
Reeves was asked about defence spending and repeated that the government had committed to spending 2.5% of GDP – though without a timetable. The chancellor said she was not going to discuss details of the forthcoming budget.
Politics
Free school meals trial feeds 20,000 more children
Thousands more children from England’s poorest households are eating a free school meal because of a new trial scheme.
The pilot project, run by the Fix Our Food research programme and involving dozens of councils, is identifying previously unregistered eligible children and automatically enrolling them.
Families who qualify for free school meals usually have to register their children to get a meal, even if they meet the criteria.
The Department for Education has encouraged all eligible families who are not automatically enrolled to register.
The total number of children registered for free school meals in England is about 2.1 million, or 24.6% of the total pupil population.
Some families do not sign up for free school meals they are entitled to because of language barriers, not understanding the eligibility criteria or because of a stigma around sharing financial information.
In England, families are eligible to apply for free school meals if they are on universal credit and have a household income below £7,400 per year, after tax.
One estimate, by thinktank Policy in Practice, suggests there could be an additional 470,000 families who meet the free school meal criteria but are not registered.
Sixth former Mirzan, from north London, has been registered for free school meals since he started Year 7.
Having previously missed meals himself, he says he worries about what unregistered children are eating at school.
“Someone I knew in school, the only meal they’d receive that day would be their free school meal. So I know what impact it has,” he says.
“Instead of sitting there looking at the board trying to solve the algebra problem, you’re sitting thinking, ‘when I get home, what am I going to eat?’.”
Researchers from Fix Our Food, a programme based in York, say they want the government to automatically enrol families who are missing out nationwide, by allowing them to opt out instead of having to opt in.
They say it saves families £500 per year in lunch costs.
Fix Our Food has helped about 20 local authorities implement the trial scheme so far.
About 20,000 eligible children who were previously missing out have been enrolled, according to surveys looking at the scheme’s impact, says Myles Bremner from the project.
An additional 40 councils are working with Fix Our Food to look at whether they could also implement the scheme, he says.
Councils already taking part include:
- County Durham, registering an additional 1,700 children
- Wakefield, registering an additional 1,200 children
- Lambeth, registering an additional 900 children
- North Yorkshire, registering an additional 700 children
- Middlesbrough, registering an additional 600 children
The additional registrations have also brought in millions of pounds in vital extra funding for schools via pupil premium grants, according to Fix Our Food.
Schools get £1,455 per primary pupil on free school meals or £1,035 per secondary pupil on free school meals, per year, for at least six years.
Marvin Charles, head teacher at City Heights E-Act Secondary Academy in Lambeth, south London, says he uses the additional funding for residential trips or extra tuition and mentoring.
More than half of his pupils were already registered for free school meals – more than double the national average – but the automatic enrolment scheme found 15 more who met the criteria but had not been receiving them.
But the scheme requires a lot of paperwork and digging through data for the councils who implement it to establish which families are eligible.
Fix Our Food says it wants the government to bring together datasets from different government departments to make the process quicker and easier.
MPs could soon be debating the issue in parliament, after it was introduced via a private members’ bill on 16 October.
The government says it is looking at long-term solutions to child poverty but has not committed to rolling out the scheme nationwide.
A spokesperson said one of the first priorities was providing free breakfast clubs in primary schools, which is expected to roll out to the first 750 schools in April 2025.
All children in England get a free school meal up to Year 2.
In Wales and in London, all primary school children automatically get a free school meal but eligible secondary pupils still have to apply.
In Scotland, all pupils up to P5, the equivalent of England’s Year 4, get a free school meal.
Families are eligible for free school meals after that point if they are on universal credit and earn less than £796 per month, or around £9,500 per year.
In Northern Ireland, the threshold is £15,000 per year, after tax.
Politics
Suella Braverman sent government documents to private email 127 times
Suella Braverman forwarded government documents to her private email accounts at least 127 times while she was attorney general in a potential breach of the ministerial code, it has emerged.
The revelation came after a Freedom of Information campaign by the Times newspaper.
The Conservative, who was in the Cabinet role under Boris Johnson, and the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) did not respond to requests for comment.
For security reasons, ministers are banned from sending sensitive emails and documents to their private accounts.
As attorney general, the chief legal adviser to the government, Braverman dealt with highly sensitive matters of state.
But between 2021 and 2022, she forwarded 127 emails to her private accounts, with the emails containing at least 290 documents.
The contents of the emails are not yet publicly known.
The information was revealed after an 18-month transparency battle by the Times and a ruling by a tribunal judge.
The AGO had refused to answer the Times’ Freedom of Information request about Braverman’s emails, saying it would be too costly to search her ministerial inbox.
In a ruling, Judge Simon Heald said “it appears to us that the AGO initially went about finding private email account details in a convoluted way”, which was “not a sensible way to start”.
He said the AGO could, “using the tools available in Outlook, answer the request with relative ease”.
During the period in question, Ms Braverman took the BBC to the High Court in a bid to stop the publication of a story about an abusive MI5 agent.
She was one of those formally investigated by a leak inquiry when secret details of the court case were passed to the Daily Telegraph in January 2022.
She was later appointed home secretary, but had to resign when it emerged she had sent an official document to a parliamentary colleague using her personal email.
She later admitted sending official correspondence to her private email account on six more occasions.
After becoming home secretary once again, she was sacked last year by then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for comments in a newspaper article accusing the Metropolitan Police of bias in the policing of protests.
She said police applied a “double standard” by being tougher with right-wing demonstrations than pro-Palestinian ones.
Ms Braverman remains an MP and influential figure in sections of the Conservative Party.
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