No 10 says Hamas won’t have ‘veto’ over UK recognition of Palestine, implying it won’t require further hostage releases
Keir Starmer is now all-but-certain to recognise Palestine as a state in September. Last week he said this would happen unless Israel complied with certain conditions, including committing to a two-state solution. Given that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli PM, said last week this would involve Israel having to accept a “jihadist state”, it seems fair to assume that Israel will not comply (unless the Netanyahu government is replaced with a very different one in the next few weeks, which is also not plausible).
Starmer also set out requirements for Hamas. But the government has confirmed that these are not formal conditions, implying Palestinian state recognition will go ahead even if all the hostages have not been released.
But the government has not admitted this explicitly and, at the Downing Street lobby briefing this morning, asked if the UK might recognise the state of Palestine if hostages were still being held, the No 10 spokesperson just said “we’ll make an assessment ahead of Unga [the United Nations general assembly in September] on how far the parties have met the steps that we’ve set out.”
Asked whether a Palestinian state could be recognised with Hamas still in government, the spokesman also said that Hamas would not get a “veto” over UK recognition of Palestine. He said:
We’ve been very clear that Hamas can have no role in the future governments of Gaza … We’ve also been clear that they must disarm, must release all the hostages.
We’ve also been clear that Hamas are not the Palestinian people, and it is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to have recognition along the lines and the steps that we’ve previously set out.
We’ve also been very clear it cannot be in the hands of Hamas, a terrorist group, to have a veto over recognition of Palestine.
Key events
Farage is wrong, I’m not scared to walk in London after 9pm wearing jewellery, says reporter
Mhari Aurora from Sky News was the reporter who asked Nigel Farage at his press conference this morning the question that prompted him to reply with the claim that she would not dare to walk through London after 9pm wearing jewellery. (See 11.49m.)
In an article for Sky’s website, she says that he is wrong.
I am not afraid to walk in the West End of London after 9pm wearing jewellery.
I have done it many times before and will continue to do so … but perhaps that is because I do not own a Rolex.
But she says that does not mean she is not concerned about the risk of being a victim of crime, and she says that Farage is “tapping into” concerns that voters have.
According to police reports, thefts from a person in London are almost five times the national average, and they’ve been going up since the pandemic.
And the Office for National Statistics (ONS) also notes that thefts outside of the home, eg phone snatching, has increased.
However, possession of weapons has fallen in London by 29% over the last three years.
And according to the ONS, crime in England and Wales is 30% lower than in 2015, and 76% lower than 1995 …
In short, am I right to be more worried that snatch theft and knife crime in London is increasing? Yes, and no.
But Nigel Farage is tapping into voters’ emotions – their feelings that the country is broken …
And the more politicians of all colours tell voters that “the system is broken”, the more voters might start to believe them.
Badenoch criticises Farage for not backing ban on trans women being placed in women’s prisons
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, does not take a strong interest in transgender isssues but in its manifesto at the election the party attacked “transgender indoctrination” and “baseless transgender ideology”, leaving it fairly clear where the party stands on these issues.
That’s why, in its report this morning about Vanessa Frake joining the party as an adviser, the Times pointed out that Frake, a former prison governor, did not support a banket ban on trans women being placed in women’s prisons.
At his press conference this morning Farage was asked if he agreed. Whereas with most of his answers Farage was keen to lean into rightwing opinion (and then some), on this, perhaps mindful of the need not to embarrass his new recruit, Farage backed her up.
He said one problem with government is that ministers often have no experience of the issues for which they are responsible. He went on: “I personally have never worked in a prison, so I can’t answer it.” But he said Frake had worked in prisons at the highest level, and that she thought it was all about risk assessment.
Frake, who was at the press conference, agreed. She said everyone in prison “deserves to be treated with humanity and decency, and that includes female prisoners and it includes trans prisoners”. Prisons were used to dealing with issues like this by carrying out risk assessments, she said.
In response Kemi Badenoch, who unlike Farage does have a close interest in this issue, posted a clip of the Farage answer on social media with a message saying:
A reminder that @Conservatives are the ONLY party standing up for women-only spaces.
After the Supreme Court judgment, we shouldn’t be hearing anymore about men being put in women’s prisons. Yet here we are. As usual, Reform have not done their homework and will make a big mess.
Ex-prison governor advising Reform UK says she does not agree with Farage/Pochin comments disparaging female officers
Vanessa Frake, the former prison govenor who is now a Reform UK adviser, has also disagreed with some of her new colleagues about male police officers being more reassuring than female ones.
At a press conference two weeks ago Nigel Farage, the party leader, said he would like people to feel a bit intimidated by police officers. Following up on this, Sarah Pochin, the Reform MP and justice spokesperson for the party, told the BBC:
I never feel comfortable actually seeing two female officers together. I’d much rather see a great big strapping male police officer with a female.
Today, asked if she agreed with these comments, Frake told Times Radio agree:
I disagree. I’ve seen police officers and I’ve seen prison officers, females. And, you know, that’s Nigel’s opinion. As I said, I’m not going to agree with him all the time. And I’m sure he’s not going to agree with me all the time.
How Reform UK’s new adviser said Starmer making James Timpson Labour’s prisons minister was ‘stroke of genius’
Vanessa Frake, the former prison govenor who announced today she is joining Reform UK as an adviser, was critical of the government when she appeared alongside Nigel Farage at their press conference this morning. (See 11.29am.) But she was a bit more positive last year. After the election, when Keir Starmer appointed James Timpson as prisons minister, Frake described that as a “stroke of genius” because of Timpson’s record working with ex-offenders.
In the same interview last year, Frake also she would like to see more non-violent offenders serving sentences in the community, and not in jail – something Labour is pursuing through its sentencing review.
Frake will be contributing to the Reform’s law and order taskforce.
No 10 says Hamas won’t have ‘veto’ over UK recognition of Palestine, implying it won’t require further hostage releases
Keir Starmer is now all-but-certain to recognise Palestine as a state in September. Last week he said this would happen unless Israel complied with certain conditions, including committing to a two-state solution. Given that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli PM, said last week this would involve Israel having to accept a “jihadist state”, it seems fair to assume that Israel will not comply (unless the Netanyahu government is replaced with a very different one in the next few weeks, which is also not plausible).
Starmer also set out requirements for Hamas. But the government has confirmed that these are not formal conditions, implying Palestinian state recognition will go ahead even if all the hostages have not been released.
But the government has not admitted this explicitly and, at the Downing Street lobby briefing this morning, asked if the UK might recognise the state of Palestine if hostages were still being held, the No 10 spokesperson just said “we’ll make an assessment ahead of Unga [the United Nations general assembly in September] on how far the parties have met the steps that we’ve set out.”
Asked whether a Palestinian state could be recognised with Hamas still in government, the spokesman also said that Hamas would not get a “veto” over UK recognition of Palestine. He said:
We’ve been very clear that Hamas can have no role in the future governments of Gaza … We’ve also been clear that they must disarm, must release all the hostages.
We’ve also been clear that Hamas are not the Palestinian people, and it is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to have recognition along the lines and the steps that we’ve previously set out.
We’ve also been very clear it cannot be in the hands of Hamas, a terrorist group, to have a veto over recognition of Palestine.
Scottish Labour says SNP’s former rising stars are ‘abandoning the stage’ as MSPs pay tribute to Kate Forbes
John Swinney, the SNP leader and Scottish first minister, has paid tribute to Kate Forbes following her announcement that she will leave Holyrood at the elections next year. (See 10.56am.)
In an open letter to her, Swinney said:
I have deeply valued the contribution you have made to the work of the Scottish National party and the Scottish government and am pleased we will continue to benefit from that in the approach to the May 2026 elections.
You have made a huge contribution to public life in Scotland and have been instrumental in making progress on economic issues for my government. You have much to be proud of in all of the work you have undertaken but I am especially heartened by the effect of your leadership on advancing support for the Gaelic language.
We all wrestle with the inevitable conflicts between family and public life and I sympathise with the dilemmas you have faced. I wish you, Ali and your family well and much happiness in the years ahead.
In her own tribute, Jackie Baillie, Scottish Labour’s deputy leader, thanks Forbes for her service as an MSP. She went on:
Of course, as much as being an MSP is a privilege, it is also a demanding job which can make for a difficult balance between our working and personal lives. In that spirit, I wish Kate all the very best in her future endeavours and hope that she can enjoy spending time with her family.
But it cannot have escaped the notice of voters that many of the SNP’s former rising stars are abandoning the stage, often to be replaced by defeated names of yesteryears and anonymous party apparatchiks.
Kate Forbes was the future once – but now, like many of her counterparts in the SNP, she can see the writing on the wall. The truth is this is a tired government with no vision and no ideas.
And Alex Cole-Hamilton, the Scottish Lib Dem leader, said his party would be fighting hard to win Forbes’s constituency, Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch. He said:
Kate and I were both elected to the Scottish parliament in 2016 and there have been several occasions when we’ve worked well together on shared interests since. I wish her family well for everything that comes next.
This is a top target seat for the Scottish Liberal Democrats, having won the equivalent seat at Westminster last year. We’re campaigning hard to fix the care crisis, to cut your energy bills, and for better local healthcare having recently secured the replacement for the Belford Hospital in the Scottish budget.
In their response to the Nigel Farage press conference, the Liberal Democrats focused on the defection of a Tory police and crime commissioner. (See 11.15am.) A Lib Dem source said:
Elected Conservatives are becoming more and more like UFOs themselves – they’re rarely if ever seen, and most people don’t believe in them. Never mind life on Mars, it’s unclear if there’s life in the Conservative Party. Time for Kemi Badenoch to admit that her plan to mimic Nigel Farage and drag the Conservatives further to the right isn’t working.
This is a reference to the fact that Rupert Matthews, the police and crime commissioner for Leicestershire and Rutland who has defected from the Tories to Reform UK, has written books about UFOs and the paranormal.
In a post on Bluesky Sunder Katwala, director of the British Future thinktank, points out that, with his press conference answer about sending Afghan asylum seekers back to Afghanistan (see 11.53am), Nigel Farage seemed to forget his own party’s policy.
Nigel Farage would simply send Afghan asylum seekers back to Afghanistan. Has he now forgotten that his current policy (bluff) is that he can simply return asylum seekers in boats to France, without permission
Labour and Tories criticise Farage for not being able to say how he would fund his prisons policy
Labour and the Conservatives have both criticised Nigel Farage this morning for not being able to give details of Reform UK policies. In particularly, they focused on what he said when asked how Reform would pay for new prisons. (See 11.57am.)
In a statement, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said:
Reform are doodling fantasy prisons on the back of a pub napkin.
Once again Nigel Farage has made wild promises to the British public but completely failed to set out how he intends to pay for any of them. Empty words, zero plan, and not a shred of credibility.
And Labour issued a statement from a party spokesperson saying:
Nigel Farage offers anger, but no answers.
It’s farcical that Farage can’t say what his policies are, how much they would cost, or how they would even work. Reform aren’t serious and don’t have a clue as to how they would address the challenges facing working people.
This is what Farage said during the press conference when it was put to him that the supermax prisions his new prisons adviser seemed to be proposing would be particularly expensive. He said:
This is week three of the campaign. We laid out very clearly a plan. I was asked [at a previous press conference] about the cost of that plan, to which I said, how can we afford not to do this?
Now the supermax prisons – have we costed it, have we thought it through? It’s a debate. The point about this taskforce is we’re starting a debate, and we’d rather like it to become a full public debate too.
Vanessa Frake, the former prison governor who is now advising the party, said she was not calling for new US-style supermax prisons in her opening remarks. She said she was calling for the use of supermax regimes, which she said could be implemented “relatively easily”. (See 11.17am.)
George Osborne says UK has been left behind in cryptocurrency boom
The UK has been left behind in the cryptocurrency boom and is in danger of missing a second wave of demand, according to George Osborne, the former chancellor. Dan Milmo has the story.
What Kate Forbes’ departure from Holyrood would mean for future SNP leadership contest
Severin Carrell
Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.
Kate Forbes’s surprise decision to quit frontline Scottish politics next May inevitably raises questions about what this means for the next Scottish National party leadership contest and for the pro-independence movement.
John Swinney, the incumbent first minister and party leader, has insisted he plans to stay in post long after next year’s Holyrood election, quashing speculation his goal is solely to save the SNP from imploding and to secure a fifth term in power.
That promise presupposes the SNP will win next May’s election and that he wins handsomely; Scottish Labour’s collapsing poll ratings suggests for now that that is likely. But whether Swinney would stay on for a full five year term is another question. And if Forbes is no longer in the running, who might the contenders be?
Swinney faces a potential challenger in the shape of Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s hyper-ambitious Westminster leader, who is standing for election to Holyrood in May, and ousted the former SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford in a coup.
However, many see Swinney’s housing secretary Màiri McAllan, who recently returned to the cabinet after taking maternity leave, as his heir apparent. A very able minister, she has the conspicuous advantage of having a powerful coterie of allies in cabinet – mostly women ministers close to Nicola Sturgeon.
Swinney was openly dismissive of Flynn’s potential challenge when he was asked about it after he unveiled the SNP’s slate of Holyrood candidates some months ago – an event where McAllan was prominent and Flynn absent.
However, Flynn, an Aberdeen MP closely allied to Alex Salmond’s former aides, who trades in what he sees as a robustly realist defence of North Sea oil and gas jobs, has a power base too in the wider party.
If he becomes prominent in a post-election SNP government, Swinney will face pressure to give him a ministerial role, and that will then put serious strains on any putative partnership with the pro-independence Scottish Greens at Holyrood.
Like their sister party in England and Wales, the Scottish Greens are embroiled in a live leadership contest. Depending on the result in May, Swinney’s fortunes could well hinge on Green cooperation, and they, for now, are his best bet to hold onto power.
Q: Are you worried that some of the comments made by George Finch earlier might prejudice a future trial, putting a conviction at risk?
(This is a reference to comments that I did not report here, when covering Finch at 11.36am, because some of what said did seem to pose a contempt of court risk.)
Farage said he was not concerned about this. He claimed that Finch was just expressing the concerns felt by Warwickshire residents. “If that means he was slightly emotional, well, you know what, good,” Farage said.
