Labour officially bans Jeremy Corbyn from standing as candidate for party at next general election – UK politics live

Key events

Momentum, the Labour group set up to promote Jeremy Corbyn’s agenda, has described today’s NEC vote as “a dark day for democracy”.

In a statement yesterday Momentum said that, in proposing to block Corbyn, Keir Starmer was being “venal and duplicitous”.

Labour's NEC votes to block Corbyn from running as party candidate at election by 22 votes to 12

Keir Starmer’s move to block Jeremy Corbyn from running to be a Labour MP at the next election has been backed by the party’s national executive committee (NEC), PA Media reports. PA says:

A Labour spokesman said the leader’s motion passed by 22 votes to 12, meaning it is now down to Corbyn to decide whether to run as an independent candidate.

Corbyn, the veteran left-winger who has represented Islington North since 1983, had criticised the move as “undermining the party’s internal democracy” before its approval.

The motion says he “will not be endorsed by the NEC as a candidate on behalf of the Labour party at the next general election”.

Corbyn running as an independent in the north London constituency where he retains significant support could cause a distracting challenge for Starmer at the next election.

According to the i’s Paul Waugh, at today’s meeting of Labour’s national executive committee Shabana Mahmood, the party’s national campaign coordinator, said that Jeremy Corbyn was “a barrier to winning elections”.

Veterans minister Johnny Mercer tells MPs 8,000 Afghan refugees to be moved out of hotel accommodation

In the Commons Johnny Mercer, the veterans minister, is now making a statement about Afghan refugees.

He says 24,500 people have been relocated to the UK from Afghanistan. They have been given help to integrate into British society, he says.

As a temporary solution, people were put in hotel accommodation, he says. But he says this was never meant to be a permanent solution.

More than 9,000 Afghans have been put into settled homes, but about 8,000 remain in hotels. More than half are children, and more then half have been there for more than a year, he says.

He says this is costing more than £1m a day.

He says the government will write to Afghans from the end of April saying they will need to move. They will have three months to relocate, and they will get support to move into other accommodation.

He says extra funding will be made available to councils to house people.

This amounts to a generous offer, he says.

But, he says, if an offer of accommodation is made and refused, another offer will not be made. “It is not right that people could choose to stay in hotels where another perfectly suitable accommodation is available,” he says.

And here are some more lines from the Downing Street lobby briefing this morning.

• The PM’s spokesperson rejected suggestions that the plans for Afghan refugees being announced in the Commons later (soon after 1pm) would mean people being kicked out of hotels. The spokesperson said:

This is about how we’re accelerating support for Afghans who have been forced to remain in hotel accommodation for sometimes more than a year.

We’ve made a large commitment to them to support them in the UK to make a new life here and this will be the next stage of that.

We do think it is right to help them into settled accommodation, there will be a significant package of support that sits behind them to both help them to find accommodation and to help them fully integrate into their new community.

Johnny Mercer, the veterans minister, will give details in a statement to MPs.

• The spokesperson said it would be “hugely disappointing and disruptive” if strike action by teachers disrupted exams in England. (See 9.19am.)

• The spokesperson confirmed that Rishi Sunak will miss PMQs tomorrow because he will be attending the funeral of the former Commons Speaker Betty Boothroyd. Dominic Raab, the deputy PM, will stand in for Sunak.

• The spokesperson said Sunak was likely to speak to Humza Yousaf, the new Scottish first minister, “soon”.

• The spokesperson said Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, will provide an update to MPs later this week on “the latest government work to deal with the challenge of illegal immigration”.

In his speech this morning Ed Miliband, the shadow secretary for climate change and net zero, claimed the UK was already “behind in the global race” for green energy. (See 12pm.) There is particular focus on this issue this week because the government is due to set out its revised net zero plans on Thursday, and at cabinet this morning Grant Shapps, the energy secretary, insisted the government was doing well on renewable energy. It amounted to a rebuttal of the Miliband claim, even if it was not intended as such.

This is from the No 10 cabinet readout.

[Shapps] said the UK was well ahead of many advanced economies in transitioning to renewable energy. He said the UK will soon have all four of the world’s biggest offshore windfarms, with wind power increasing by 25% in 2022.

He said the government’s plan would set out where we can go further, including through the use of more nuclear power, to curb emissions while growing the economy and creating jobs.

The prime minister concluded cabinet by saying that the UK would build on its record of innovation to make the UK the premier location for investment in green technology.

Threat of terrorist attack in Northern Ireland raised from substantial to severe, Heaton-Harris says

The government has announced that the threat of a terrorist attack in Northern Ireland has been raised from substantial (meaning an attack is likely) to severe (meaning an attack is highly likely).

In a written ministerial statement Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, said the decision was taken by MI5. He said:

Over the last 25 years, Northern Ireland has transformed into a peaceful society. The Belfast (Good Friday) agreement demonstrates how peaceful and democratic politics improve society. However, a small number of people remain determined to cause harm to our communities through acts of politically motivated violence.

In recent months, we have seen an increase in levels of activity relating to Northern Ireland related terrorism, which has targeted police officers serving their communities and also put at risk the lives of children and other members of the public. These attacks have no support, as demonstrated by the reaction to the abhorrent attempted murder of DCI Caldwell.

Corbyn ally Jon Lansman accuses Starmer of acting like 'Putin of Labour party' over former leader

Jon Lansman, the leftwing Labour activist who helped to run Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for the party leadership in 2015 and who set up Momentum to promote Corbyn’s agenda, told Matt Chorley from Times Radio this morning that he thought Keir Starmer was behaving like “some kind of Putin” in relation to his predecessor.

Lansman said:

We’ve got to recognise that the radical policies that we had under Jeremy Corbyn ... were not the problem. The party still supports them. I think we should be campaigning still for radical policy ...

We’re a democratic party. This is not an authoritarian party. Keir Starmer unfortunately is behaving as if he was some kind of Putin of the Labour party. That is not the way we do politics.

But Lansman also said that he did not think Corbyn should stand for parliament as an independent at the next election. He said he thought Corbyn would have more influence if he remained a Labour member. And Lansman said he would not campaign for Corbyn if he did run as an independent because he wanted Starmer to win the election.

Nadia Whittome, the leftwing Labour MP, has said this morning that she hopes the party’s national executive committee throws out the motion that would ban Jeremy Corbyn from being a candidate for the party.

Nicola Sturgeon walking down the staircase in Bute House, Edinburgh, the official residence of Scotland’s first minister, after tendering her resignation this morning. Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA

Sturgeon saying goodbye to her staff in at Bute House. Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA

Sturgeon leaving Bute House. Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA

Miliband confirms Labour would not issue more licences for oil and gas fields in North Sea

Labour has now sent out the full text of Ed Miliband’s speech to the Green Alliance this morning. We have already covered the main points (here and at 10.55am), but it was a substantial, serious speech, and here are some futher things he said.

• Miliband confirmed that Labour would issue no more licence for oil and gas fields in the North Sea. This is from my colleague Fiona Harvey.

And this is what Miliband said in his speech.

If every country did what the UK government wants to do and extract every last drop of North Sea oil and gas, we would bust our global carbon budget many times over and end up at three degrees of warming.

I promise you: This will all change under a Labour government.

No more mixed messages, no more inconstant signals.

My North Star will be a zero-carbon power system by 2030, one of the next Labour government’s core missions.

• He summed up the argument of his speech like this:

First, we are at a decisive moment when it comes to the global race for the green jobs of the future.

Second, net zero is a massive economic opportunity for Britain but we are losing the global race.

Third, those who say we can’t be winners in that global race are wrong. We should match the ambition of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and stop moaning about it

• He said the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the US has been a “game-changing event’” for green energy investment decisions. He said:

Talk to any business and they will tell you the same thing: this is a game-changing event in investment decisions.

In everything from electric car manufacture to hydrogen to batteries and heat pumps.

So the winners of this global race will be decided not in the next decade but in this one, but in the coming few years.

We know that with these new industries, the country that hits their stride first in the race will so often be the winner.

• He said the IRA was “a modern green industrial policy at work – an active state deploying public investment to crowd in and catalyse private investment”. He also said the IRA was represented “a departure from the past because it’s a big investment in onshoring manufacturing”. That meant it was “a rejection of the dominant economic model of the last four decades in which advanced economies were generally unconcerned about where manufacturing happened”.

• He said the UK was already “behind in the global race” for green energy. He said:

There are already 23 clean steel demonstration plants across Europe but none in the UK.

Forty gigafactories across Europe now expected to be open and producing batteries by 2030, but only 1 is currently certain here.

Other countries have begun massive subsidies for green hydrogen - but the government’s long-delayed energy bill won’t even deliver a mechanism here until 2025.

And even in areas where we have been strong in generation, like offshore wind, the scale of jobs that should have come with that capacity never arrived.

Denmark shows us what is possible: it has less than a tenth of the UK’s population but many more jobs in its wind sector.

They’re building their own wind turbines and often ours too.

• He said Labour would pass a Green Prosperity Act to give “a clear long term framework to give stability for investors”.

• He said that talks with the US suggested British firms might be able to benefit from some of the subsidies available under the IRA. This is from the i’s Paul Waugh.

Ed Miliband (right) visiting a wind farm off the coast of Scotland with Keir Starmer and Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader (left), on Friday last week.
Photograph: Paul Campbell/PA

Sturgeon tenders resignation to king

Nicola Sturgeon has formally tendered her resignation as Scotland’s first minister to the king. And she has issued a statement in which she says that, as the first woman to hold the post, handing over to the first person from a minority ethnic background to be first minister, a “powerful message” has been sent that the job is open to anyone. She says:

Being first minister of the country I love has been the privilege of a lifetime – an opportunity for which I will always be grateful beyond words to the people of Scotland. As the first woman to hold this office, I am proud to demit it knowing that no girl in our country is in any doubt that a woman can hold the highest office in the land. My congratulations go to Humza Yousaf who, subject to parliamentary process and appointment by his majesty the king, will become the first person from a minority ethnic background to lead our country as its first minister – and in doing so will reiterate the powerful message that it is a role that any young person in Scotland can aspire to.

Nicola Sturgeon signing her resignation letter to the king. Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA

Sturgeon’s resignation letter. Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA

Miliband accused of misrepresenting reason for Labour's decision to ban Corbyn from being candidate

In an interview on the Today programme Ed Miliband, the shadow secretary for climate change and net zero, was asked about Keir Starmer’s decision to get Labour’s national executive committeee to today agree to ban Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a candidate at the next election.

Miliband did not seem hugely keen to answer (he stressed that he was not on the NEC), but he deployed the standard party line, which is that Corbyn made himself ineligible by the statement he issued in 2020 in response to the EHRC report into antisemitism in the party in which he said the problem had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party”. Since then he has refused to apologise.

Miliband told the programme:

I’m not privy to exactly what goes on in the national executive, but I don’t think there is any mystery about the background to today’s discussion at the national executive committee.

It’s about one thing, which is about Jeremy Corbyn’s reaction to the EHRC report on antisemitism and his refusal to apologise for that reaction. That is the background of this. I don’t think there’s any mystery about that.

But the motion being put to the NEC does not mention antisemitism, or the EHRC. Instead it argues that the NEC’s job is to help Labour win elections and that the party’s electoral prospects would be “significantly diminished” if Corbyn were allowed to stand as a candidate. My colleague Pippa Crerar has posted the text of it on Twitter.

This could be taken as a reference to the antisemitism controversy, but it implies the objection to Corbyn goes well beyond that. Keir Starmer has also suggested that Corbyn’s opposition to the west arming Ukraine also makes him unsuitable as a Labour candidate.

Diane Abbott, a prominent Corbyn ally and shadow home secretary when he was leader, accused Miliband of misrepresenting the reason for Corbyn’s exclusion.

Miliband accuses Tories of 'sore loser syndrome' in response to Biden's huge green energy subsidy programme

Ed Miliband, the shadow secretary for climate change and net zero, is speaking at a Green Alliance event this morning. According to an extract from the speech released in advance, he will accuse the government of “sore loser syndrome” because of its scepticism about Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which gives massive subsidies to US companies producing clean energy.

Some British ministers have complained that this is protectionist, and unfair on British competitors.

But Miliband is saying:

What we have seen from the UK government is the actions of a group of people caught in the headlights. Kemi Badenoch dismisses the Inflation Reduction Act as “protectionist”. Our current energy secretary Grant Shapps calls it “dangerous”. The chancellor dismisses it too.

I profoundly disagree with this approach. As the US and Europe speed off into the distance in the global race for green industry, we are sitting back in the changing rooms moaning about the rules. Sore loser syndrome won’t win any jobs for Britain.

We need to stop moaning about the Inflation Reduction Act and start matching its ambition.

Of course, we must remain an open economy, welcoming foreign investment and goods. Not everything in the green economy could or should be produced here. But we are not neutral about where things are built.

Joe Biden wants the future Made in America. We want the future Made in Britain.

Miliband says geography gives Britain a unique advantage in renewable energy.

In the world which is coming, it is no exaggeration to say wind power will be what coal was for previous generations.

Our island status and the North and Celtic Seas give us a unique position therefore.

And he defends Labour’s plan to set up Great British Energy, a state-run renewable energy company. He explains:

Every real leader in zero carbon power has a national champion: EDF in France, Statkfraft in Norway, Orsted in Denmark, Vattenfall in Sweden.

It’s time we had ours.

In years to come, it will seem absurd that Britain had no public clean energy champion to deliver jobs and wealth as so many of our competitors do. A Labour government will and it will have a clear mission: to build clean energy and do it in Britain.

Ed Miliband. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, is giving evidence to the Commons Treasury committee. My colleague Graeme Wearden is covering the hearing here.

The Scottish Greens have confirmed that they will be voting for Humza Yousaf as Scotland’s first minister. The Scottish Greens have a power-sharing agreement with the SNP, and two ministerial posts in the government. If Kate Forbes or Ash Regan had won the SNP leadership, this arrangment would have been in jeopardy, but Yousaf is committed to continuing it.

Lorna Slater, co-leader of the Scottish Greens, told the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland:

We will be supporting Humza Yousaf today so we can carry on with the Bute House agreement [the power-sharing agreement]…

The Scottish Greens are very glad that we are able to continue to work in a progressive agenda within the Scottish government.

Equalities matters are very important to the Scottish Greens. We will always stand up for LGBTQ+ rights, we will always stand up for the environment, for fairness, for tackling inequalities in our society so that everybody can thrive, and I think that the Scottish Greens and the SNP working together, the Greens and the Scottish Government working together is that kind of collaborative, co-operative politics based on discussion and consensus-building and negotiation that people want to see.

The Scottish Greens have seven MSPs.

NEU leader denies her potential successor 'extremist' and accuses BBC presenter of 'outrageous slur'

In her interview on the Today programme this morning (see 9.19am), Mary Bousted, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union, criticised the presenter, Nick Robinson, for suggesting that one of the candidates in the election for the next NEU general secretary is an extremist.

Robinson said that Bousted was not right when she said not teacher wanted to disrupt exams, that some extremists in the union did favour these tactics, and that one of them was the man likely to succeed her as general secretary. Robinson did not name him, but he was referring to Daniel Kebede.

Bousted said that was a “outrageous slur” and she said that she would not describe either of the two candidates (Kebede and Niamh Sweeney, the current deputy general secretary) as extremist. She claimed general secretaries did not decide union policy anyway, because they were answerable to an executive. She then criticised Robinson for raising the issue. She said:

I think this is quite outrageous, actually. You’re you’re bringing what is a really serious issue about the future of teachers, about the current state of teachers in the classroom, down to personalities. I think that is really base and it demeans the programme. I’m really sorry. you’ve done that, Nick.

The NEU currently has joint general secretaries because it was formed by a merger of two unions in 2017. But Bousted and the other joint general secretary, Kevin Courtney, are standing down. Members have been voting in the election to choose their successor, with the ballot closing at the end of this month. Sweeney is seen as the more moderate of the two candidates, while Kebede has the backing of the left

A former NEU president, Kebede is a former national officer for the People’s Assembly Against Austerity. He has been described as a Corbynite. In an election message he said that, although the country needed a change of government, the NEU could not just expect a Labour government to give it what it wanted. He went on:

We need a strong and united union that can make that case, one that fights and wins on the issues that matter to our members, one that boosts pay, reduces workload, wins on funding and one that reclaims education for educators and for our children.

Teaching union says it hopes future strikes won’t disrupt exams but won’t rule it out

Good morning. There are signs that the public sector strikes that have disrupted many services over the last few months, particularly in England, are coming to an end. The Royal College of Nursing is starting to ballot its members in England on whether they should accept a pay off, and RMT members recently voted to accept a pay deal from Network Rail. But last night it emerged that the National Education Union, the biggest teaching union in England, is urging its members to reject the latest pay offer from ministers.

In an interview this morning Mary Bousted, the NEU joint general secretary, would not rule out future strikes disrupting exams. Asked if that could happen, she told Radio 4’s Today programme:

We really hope that that doesn’t take place.

What we hope is that if the members do reject the offer, we want to go back to the government and say: ‘you have to do better’, reopen negotiations, and let’s see if we can get an offer that members will find respectable.

Asked again about whether strikes would disrupt exams, Bousted replied:

We will plan more strike dates. We don’t want to disrupt exams and we will try to ensure that we do reopen negotiations.

Nick Robinson, the presenter, pressed Bousted on this a third time. He invited her, if she did not want to interrupt exams, to say clearly ‘We will have strike dates, they will not interrupt exams’. Bousted replied:

We have conference next week, and conference will decide the plan of action, but no teacher wants to disrupt exam dates at all, so it’s up to the government.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10.30am: Ed Miliband, the shadow secretary for climate change and net zero, speaks at a Green Alliance event. As my colleague Pippa Crerar reports, Miliband will present Labour’s green growth plan as the British version of the US’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Morning: Rishi Sunak chairs cabinet.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

11.30am: David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, speaks at the launch of a pamphlet setting out his plans for Labour’s foreign policy.

12pm: Labour’s national executive committee meets.

After 12.30pm: Johnny Mercer, the veterans ministers, is expected to make a statement to MPs about housing Afghan refugees.

After 1.30pm: MPs will resume their debate on the illegal migration bill.

After 2pm: MSPs vote to elect the new first minister, with Humza Yousaf, the new SNP leader, certain to be chosen. After the vote, party leaders will make short speeches.

3pm: Rishi Sunak gives evidence to the Commons liaison committee.

Afternoon: Peers debate Commons amendments to the public order bill.

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