Robert Jenrick on Sky News, reacting to the latest statistics on net migration:
“I secured the very changes that are making this, announced them, and then resigned because they weren’t enough. I want the numbers to come down much more.”
“We don’t want hundreds of thousands of people coming into the country. We want net emigration. That means more people leaving every year than are coming in. Why? So that we can reduce pressure on housing, people getting a doctor or a dentist, and stop this constant pressure where British workers wages are being hammered because there’s an easy lever of foreign labour.”
“So it’s got to keep coming down. Reform have a very clear policy, net emigration. We’re going to get it right down and have a long period, maybe a decade or more, which would give the country breathing space.”
Darren Jones doesn’t know when the UK’s new sanctions on Russia will come into force. On Sky News this morning:
“I think there was some confusion around this policy during the week. because what’s actually happened is that sanctions have increased, not decreased.”
When asked for a date, Don’t Know Darren said:
“I don’t know the precise date. You have to forgive me, but it is normal, as the prime minister said, to transition from A to B.”
Is it a month? A year? Darren doesn’t know:
“As I said, I don’t know the dates… but we have to be clear about what the new sanctions package is about. The new sanctions package is saying that where Russian oil is sent to a third country for refining and then comes into the UK… Under the previous regime that was allowed. Under the new regime, it won’t be.
“Therefore it is tougher sanctions on Russian oil. You can’t get through the back door coming into the UK.”
D’oh…
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You’re either in front of Guido, or you are behind…
Controversial pro-assisted suicide pressure group Dignity in Dying has admitted it is applying heavy pressure on MPs successful in yesterday’s Private Members Bill ballot to bring back assisted suicide legislation in this session. A fundraising pitch says “we must do everything we can to make sure one of them chooses the assisted dying Bill” and “our team is working urgently… to convince the selected MPs”…
A spokesperson for a small charity who lobbied MPs to bring a PMB on an unrelated issue in the past told Guido:
“MPs near the top of the ballot have a choice: give in to the pressure of a controversial but powerful multi-million pound lobbying machine and hand over their Bill to them, or allow a small, perhaps local, cause who have no voice and who’d normally have no chance to change the law to bring forward a proposal that everyone can get behind.”
Labour MPs Lauren Edwards & Lib Dem MP Andrew George are the names rumoured to be coming under most pressure to bring back Kim Leadbeater’s Bill. Tories selected in the ballot have already set their face against another crack at it, will Labour and Lib Dems cave to wealthy lobbyists?
Last month Guido related how yet another Foreign Office mission to Mauritius – seeking to revive the dead Starmer giveaway – was forced on the British taxpayer. Officials lived it up in sunny Port Louis, lovely work if you can get it…
Now exactly four weeks on from the beginning of those in-person negotiations Guido is told by well-placed sources that the process remains in a “total stalemate” – and crucially, the White House remains resolute in its opposition. The Mauritius government is furious that the deal was frustrated, the Deputy Prime Minister since resigned, and the bilateral dialogue has become nothing more than a “talking shop”…
With the Diego Garcia Bill left out of the King’s Speech there is no prospect of a concerted effort to revive the deal in this session, as it stands. The summer we saved Chagos is finally here…
Per senior US sources, the Americans see no benefit in reopening their own position while the Labour leadership is in flux at the very least. Starmer positioned himself as a master international dealmaker, Guido had other plans…
Paula Barker, Liverpool Wavertree MP backing Andy Burnham, told Times Radio there wouldn’t be trouble from the markets under Burnham:
“The markets will have to fall in line.”
