Why Trump WILL get his State Visit... but a stay with Charles at Balmoral is off the cards: REBECCA ENGLISH
The King, it is fair to say, has found himself at the centre of a rather unenviable conundrum.
How to woo one fellow head of state, renowned for his prickly nature and quickness to take offence, while carrying out his own duties as monarch of two countries, each with very different approaches to the problem in hand.
Fortunately Charles is better placed than most to navigate this particularly tricky diplomatic tightrope as a result of his own lifelong experience on the coalface of international relations - and a couple of very special, well, 'trump cards' of his own.
The latest twist in the saga of the US President's much talked about forthcoming trip(s) to the UK came in the Times yesterday, which reported that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer had 'gone against the wishes of the King' in bringing his historic second State Visit forward to September.
This means scrapping His Majesty's earlier invitation to President Trump to come and stay with him in Scotland this summer - an unprecedented honour, particularly given invitations to the private Highland estate of Balmoral as a rare (and jealously-guarded) as hen's teeth - which was presented so very publicly to the president by Sir Keir in February.
According to the newspaper this has privately irritated Buckingham Palace, who were not keen to rush the honour of a 'full bells and whistles' welcome while Trump was sabre-rattling over Canada, suggesting it become America's 51st state.
A somewhat awkward suggestion since its monarch is none other than the President's 'good friend' King Charles, whom he describes as 'a beautiful man, a wonderful man'.
According to my own enquiries at least part of this true: there will be a US State Visit in September and plans for a private visit have been scrapped.
A 'Manu Regis', a signed formal invitation from the King to the President was hand-delivered by the British Embassy in Washington DC to the White House last week, formally kick-starting the process.
But, I am assured, there is 'no discord' between the palace and Number 10 (indeed I would actually say from my bird's-eye view of proceedings there has been something of a 'love-in' between the two camps since last year).
There's no doubt that the monarch's role at the heart of such a delicate piece of negotiation hasn't been helped by Prime Minister's 'eye-watering gaucheness' in waving around a private letter from the monarch to President Trump as if it were the winning raffle ticket at a community fundraiser, as one Whitehall source remarked at the time.
But I am also told that, after preliminary discussions, it became clear the private visit just wasn't logistically possible: the only window in President's Trump's diary this summer clashing with a rare piece of down-time for the King who is, of course, still undergoing regular treatment for cancer.
While I can't go into further details for security reasons, it's worth explaining that the King, like his mother before him, has always historically decamped to Scotland at the end of July for a mixture of 'summer court' and private family time, returning to London by mid October.
This year the King's Scottish sojourn will be regularly interrupted as it is with a number of significant public occasions, including the 80th anniversary of VJ Day (Victory in Japan) in August, as well as private trips back to London for his ongoing cancer treatment.
Palace aides have, therefore, 'ring-fenced' a short period of 'downtime' when they have vowed the King will be left alone in peace after such a challenging year.
Furthermore, my sources insist, this is 'understood' by all concerned and now all three teams (the palace, Downing Street and White House) are 'in alignment', working to pull off the magnificent 'fest' (to quote the president himself) that Trump made no secret he always desired.
In any case, this still means 'foreshortening' the King's holiday, requiring him to travel down to Windsor Castle (Buckingham Palace is out of action due to ongoing building works) from Scotland to host the visit.
And even potentially curtailing the summer holidays of his hard-working staff, who are already working round-the-clock preparing for next month's State Visit by President Macron of France under the unflappable Master of the Household, Vice Admiral Sir Tony Johnstone-Burt.
All know how much these huge set-pieces mean to this country.
One of the many positives about the new arrangements will, one assumes, be that President Trump - who has never made any secret of his admiration for the British royals - is finally likely to be offered the 'dine and sleep' he has so long craved.
He had to bed down with the US ambassador in London when he came to Buckingham Palace for his first State Visit in 2019 as a result of the palace scaffolding.
Windsor, however, is very much open for business - making it the poshest B&B in town.
The last state banquet held there was in 2015 and, says one who was present, was absolutely spectacular - possibly even more so than those held in London, given the history of the 1,000-year-old castle which is crammed with suits of armour and displays of halberds and pikes.
'St George's Hall is a particularly stunning location for the banquet - Trump will love it,' they say.
But why does the State Visit need to be held in such a rush? Could President Trump not come over for his private visit in September, with a State visit to follow in 2026?
The reason is both simple - and genius.
Next year marks the 250th anniversary of America's independence from Great Britain.
And there is nothing that the Foreign Office loves more (in its rather perverse but diplomatically effective way) than to graciously celebrate the departure of former colonies.
While no formal invitation has yet been offered by the US, the current thinking is that the UK would happily agree to an 'outwards' royal visit to mark the occasion.
Potentially this could involve the King and Queen, but another scenario being discussed is whether this trip could be made by the Prince and Princess of Wales.
It would be their first joint royal tour for two years following Catherine's own cancer diagnosis, and would be nothing short of royal box office dynamite.
It must be stressed that nothing is on or off the table until an invitation to the bicentennial celebrations has been officially issued, and much can change between now and then.
But what we can take from this is hugely positive: royal planning steaming ahead apace.
This time last year, of course, the King was in the thick of his cancer treatment, having being diagnosed with an undisclosed form of the disease just four months previously.
While he has barely stopped working throughout, there is no doubt that Charles is in an increasingly good place.
Indeed, I understand that palace aides are even, very tentatively, starting to plan events around his 80th birthday celebrations in 2028.
Certainly when I saw the King on Tuesday as I covered a star-studded reception to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his Royal Drawing School at St James' Palace he was positively glowing - energised and in great humour.
While not even his own, highly-qualified doctors are in a position to accurately predict the twists and turns of this unpredictable disease, I am told that it is 'eminently manageable and treatable' and the King's recovery continues to head 'in a positive direction'.
Cancer is not, in the words of one insider, a 'binary' outcome any more.
Moreover, says another, doctors would not be giving him permission to undertake the punishing schedule he is currently pursuing if there was any risk to his health.
Including, it seems, two high profile State Visits in the space just two months - one of which will require all his tact and skill as the country's most highly-prized diplomat.
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80 best books to take on holiday this summer — chosen by the experts
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Melon ballers, milk jugs and vegetable corers all have something to tell us. A fascinating and heartwarming read.4th Estate £18.99 pp320Buy a copy of The Heart-Shaped Tin Hares are too often dismissed as big ugly rabbits, but with her gentle yet remarkably detached memoir, telling how she found an abandoned leveret during lockdown and raised the little beast inside her home, Chloe Dalton sets the record straight in her unexpected bestseller. The supposedly untameable creature gets so comfortable in human company that Dalton even installs a hare-flap in her back door. It reads like a love letter to the natural world. Canongate £10.99 pp304Buy a copy of Raising Hare • Chloe Dalton: My father read Joseph Conrad to us at the kitchen table Few motherhood memoirs start with coke dealers and edibles, but Sarah Hoover's curious contribution to the canon is different. It opens with a candid admission that 'the last line of my baby shower invitation said no gifts unless it's drugs', and proceeds to repeatedly flip the bird at a society that expects women to be natural mothers and believe their children are the most precious things that exist. When Hoover's son arrived in October 2017, she admits with refreshing candour, she just thought he was ugly. A frank, often funny account of a reluctant & Schuster £20 pp352Buy a copy of The Motherload In this eccentric mash-up of biography, history and memoir, Philip Hoare reveals how the Romantic visionary William Blake made the world a more strange and beautiful place. If you're after a straight-up account of the poet-artist's life, this isn't for you. But if you want an account that pinballs from his influence on Oscar Wilde, to David Bowie's pop videos, then on to the author getting drunk with Peter Ackroyd, then onwards to an account of looking at the world through Blake's spectacles, then this is the book for you. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in his review described it 'as one of the most original and uncategorisable works I've read for a long time … Get ready to see it on some important prize shortlists this year.'4th Estate £22 pp464Buy a copy of William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love Between 1964 and 1973, the psychiatrist William Sargant was in charge of the in-patient psychiatric unit in St Thomas's Hospital, London. The unit came to be known as 'The Sleep Room', because Sargant drugged his female patients so they would be unconscious for up to 20 hours a day, waking them up only to administer electroconvulsive therapy. In this shocking yet thorough investigation, Jon Stock speaks to some of the women who were admitted to the ward, uncovering the truth about this abuse of power. Bridge Street £25 pp432Buy a copy of The Sleep Room By all accounts, Eric Tucker's life didn't amount to much. Born in Warrington, Lancashire, he left school at 14 and spent his life drifting between jobs, including labouring, sign painting and, for a little while, grave digging. It was only after he died that his nephew Joe discovered a treasure trove of impressive paintings, which Tucker had completed across many years. In this loving memoir, Joe paints a portrait of his uncle, who would later be labelled as 'the secret Lowry'.Canongate £18.99 pp224Buy a copy of The Secret Painter Except for their literary prowess, what do Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann have in common? Each moved to rural England after personal tragedy. In this charming, vivid portrait of the three 20th-century figures, which won this year's Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, Harriet Baker explains how the countryside was, more than just an escape, a means of carrying out 'new experiments in form, and feeling'. Penguin £10.99 pp384Buy a copy of Rural Hours Worldwide, nearly twice as many adolescents reported loneliness in 2018 compared with 2012. In England, NHS records show that more than 10,000 girls under 18 were treated in hospital for self-harm in 2010 and that by 2016 it was nearly 15,000. In The Anxious Generation, the American psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes the almost unanswerable case that the root of such tragic trends is the spread (and constant use) of smartphones. Rather than hanging out with friends, the youth of today are isolated in their bedrooms, scrolling through social media content that frequently includes toxic information. This is a dispiriting but essential read about a large and looming social £10.99 pp464Buy a copy of The Anxious Generation • Jonathan Haidt: How we can save our children from smartphones In her jaw-dropping memoir, the self-confessed sociopath Patric Gagne explains what it's like to experience emotions differently to the average person, piecing together the events from her early life that first made her think that she might be immune to the pangs of guilt, remorse and affection that guide most ordinary people's actions. Cat-strangling, carjacking, lock picking and a party at Hugh Hefner's Playboy mansion feature in this eye-opening cocktail of pop psychology and shocking personal £10.99 pp368Buy a copy of Sociopath The author best known for The Buddha of Suburbia had his life changed by an unlikely accident in 2022, when he passed out, slumped off his sofa and snapped his spinal cord. It left him paralysed, unable to walk or even to wash himself. In just a few weeks, however, his writing impulse returned. This memoir combines the notes he took in hospital, dictated to family members, and post-accident reflections on becoming a 'near vegetable'. It makes for uncomfortable reading, but is full of wisdom about freedom and self-renewal. Penguin, £10.99 pp336Buy a copy of Shattered • Hanif Kureishi: The accident left me 'like a turtle on its back' In 2011 Sarah Wynn-Williams joined Facebook as an optimistic young New Zealander. She left seven years later, disillusioned by what she sees as the tech company's moral corruption. In Careless People she turns whistleblower, alleging that Facebook has crept up to dictatorships and manipulated algorithms to prey on the insecurities of its users in its ruthless pursuit of money and power. 'It started as a hopeful comedy and ended up in darkness and regret,' she writes. The book, our reviewer said, is at once 'compelling and depressing'.Macmillan £22 pp400Buy a copy of Careless People The world's oceans contain 97 per cent of all water on the planet, and yet us landlubberly humans only glimpse the top of them. Except for the marine biologist Drew Harvell, that is, who has spent a lifetime donning scuba gear and risking the unseen dangers beneath the surface to get up close and personal with the creatures that live there. In this enchanting book she uses the complex histories of eight underwater creatures to showcase the mind-boggling variety of marine life, from nine-brained octopuses to phosphorescent sea gooseberries and gunge-busting sponges. Bodley Head £20 pp288Buy a copy of The Ocean's Menagerie New York jazz, London punk, hip-hop: Neneh Cherry has moved through enough music scenes to have material for a dozen books. But in this, her first memoir, the 61-year-old Swedish singer offers a brilliant insight into the joys — and the perils — of a creative life. The influences of her mother, the bohemian artist Moki, and her stepfather, the jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, are key — and explain why, as a child, she was given a Toblerone by Miles Davis — but she proves with gusto that she has her own tales to £10.99 pp336Buy a copy of A Thousand Threads This quirky biography tells the story of Louis Wain, the troubled artist who carved out a career as a cat cartoonist for the illustrated press, before ending up in a lunatic asylum where he drew bright, kaleidoscopic kittens decades before they became popular (Sixties pop artists loved them). Alongside this, Kathryn Hughes gives us a social history of the cat, how it went from unloved mouse catcher to the most pampered of pets. One thing we learnt: there is a long tradition of giving felines lamentable names — Thomas Hardy, who really ought to have known better, had one called Kiddlewinkpoops-Trot. 4th Estate £10.99 pp416Buy a copy of Catland Many books about the world wars are depressingly inelegant, but Jonathan Dimbleby's works are in a different league. This titanic account of the Eastern Front in 1944 covers an enormous canvas from the Baltic to the Black Sea, but it's the human details that linger in the mind, from the panic of German soldiers driven back through the snow to the doomed heroism of Warsaw's resistance fighters. Despite the harrowing subject matter, Dimbleby handles his material with such skill and wisdom that his book is a pleasure to £10.99 pp640Buy a copy of Endgame The paperback of this Baillie Gifford-shortlisted book comes out on July 3. It's timely. It's a non-fiction, tick-tocking thriller that imagines how a nuclear war might start and then unfold. Well, at least the end will be quick: it could take as little as 26 minutes and 40 seconds before the Earth becomes uninhabitable once the rockets start flying. Annie Jacobsen's account isn't based on fancy; she has interviewed dozens of military experts to make her various scenarios as plausible as possible. Mark Urban described it as an 'undeniably gripping narrative', which perhaps explains why Denis Villeneuve, the Dune director, is adapting it for the screen. Penguin £10.99 pp400Buy a copy of Nuclear War Why did the French Revolution happen? One could examine bread prices or the manoeuverings in conventions and assemblies — or maybe it would be more fruitful to get a sense of the national mood. The distinguished historian Robert Darnton does just that — he casts his eye over poems, gossip, scandal sheets, the bonnets that women wore and the songs that were sung to get a sense of the 'revolutionary temper'. He juxtaposes highfalutin philosophy with low rumour, showing how one blended into the other, to explain how revolution erupted in 1789. 'This book is, quite simply, a feast, but one that, thanks to superb storytelling, is easy to digest,' Gerard DeGroot £16.99 pp576Buy a copy of The Revolutionary Temper For sheer entertainment, this rollicking account of Britain before the Great War is hard to beat, brimming as it is with swindlers, murderers and charlatans, imperialist fantasies and saucy innuendos. The scope is vast, covering everything from the suffragettes to The Wind in the Willows, and the social historian Alwyn Turner proves a wonderfully enthusiastic narrator. Profile £11.99 pp400Buy a copy of Little Englanders The comedian Al Murray is a serious history buff and the battle of Arnhem has been an obsession since childhood, 'present in my imagination for as long as I can remember, a peculiar and powerful singularity'. He has read everything there is to read, walked the streets of the old town and stood on the bridge across the Rhine — that bridge too far. He does a terrific job of evoking the chaos of one day — Tuesday, September 19, 1944 — as the men of 1st Airborne tried to secure that bridge against fierce German opposition. It was bloody chaos. 'Everything was happening everywhere, all at once.'Penguin £10.99 pp432Buy a copy of Arnhem Britain had waited centuries for a landscape artist of genius and suddenly in the early 19th century two came along at once — John Constable and JMW Turner. Little wonder, that in art history they tend to be stereotyped as rivals, as polar opposites. Nicola Moorby in this dual biography counsels against seeing them as such. Both men had a bigger problem — that most English of themes, the countryside, was not seen as a fitting subject for artists. To Constable's despair, the aristocracy — the source of patronage — preferred 'the shaggy posteriors of a Satyr to the moral feeling of landscape'. Yale £25 pp352Buy a copy of Turner and Constable Homo sapiens is on the edge of extinction — we'll probably die off within the next ten millennia; a blink of an eye in the deep time of the Earth. Henry Gee, a palaeontologist, takes the long view. He looks at what might kill us off — famine, war, climate change, pandemics and so on — but the most fascinating parts of the book look at our distant past, when Homo sapiens was one of a number of different hominids before we drove our competitors into oblivion (bye bye Neanderthals, Denisovans and so on). In his description, 100,000 years ago we lived in a real Middle-earth alongside giants, troglodytes, hobbits and so on. Gee has a knack for making science come alive with a vivid image and witty £18.99 pp288Buy a copy of The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire James I had serious affairs with at least six men. 'He loves indiscreetly and obstinately,' a contemporary observer remarked, 'despite the disapprobation of his subjects.' These favourites he showered with favours, land, titles and slobbering kisses. In Queen James, the historian Gareth Russell foregrounds the intimate side of the king. It's seriously researched history, though, rather than salacious speculation. The man that emerges is clever, educated, filthy-tongued with a talent for languages, unpleasant, a lover of dirty jokes and luxury. It's good to know that he had a pet otter, which he would take for walks on a jewel-encrusted leash. William Collins £25 pp496Buy a copy of Queen James Two bright young journalists on this paper give us the inside story of how Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff and the most interesting character in this account, fought the battle to win Labour back from the Corbynistas. Starmer emerges as a ruthless, deeply pragmatic and strangely apolitical politician, a man 'forever uninterested in the politics of politics itself'. Bodley Head £25 pp480Buy a copy of Get In Thomas More, like Henry VIII's other chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, has always divided historians. Was he a heresy-hunting Catholic zealot, a torturer and murderer of Protestants? Or a martyr of saintly, spotless conscience, the cultivated author of Utopia? Joanne Paul in this biography errs towards the more sympathetic camp. Our reviewer Alice Hunt wrote: 'Paul is brilliant at bringing the swirl of Catholic England to life: its candlelit rituals, Latin prayers and saints' days, punctuated by tinkling royal processions.' Michael Joseph £30 pp644Buy a copy of Thomas More In December 2011 a young male wolf left his territory in Slovenia and began an arduous journey of several thousand miles across the Alps. He was wearing a GPS collar, so we know which rivers he swam, motorways he crossed and Alpine passes he loped along, on his travels across Austria and down into Italy. The nature writer Adam Weymouth follows in his pawprints, describing what he sees, as well as musing on our changing attitudes to the wolf. Hutchinson Heinemann £18.99 pp384Buy a copy of Lone Wolf Barbara Demick won the Baillie Gifford prize for her book Nothing to Envy, an extraordinary piece of reportage about ordinary lives in the totalitarian state of North Korea. Daughters of the Bamboo Grove is a similarly impressive journalistic exercise, an investigation into how corrupt officials in China, especially the goons who enforced the brutal one-child policy, started stealing children and passing them off as orphans who could be adopted, for a fee (of course), by western couples. She focuses on the story of twins, separated as toddlers, and remarkably reunited 20 years later thanks to her sleuthing. Granta £20 pp336Buy a copy of Daughters of the Bamboo Grove The subtitle gives a clue to the large cast of characters involved in this lively, vivid history of Budapest during the Second World War. We meet glamorous actresses working for the anti-Nazi resistance, a Jewish teenage draughtsman who became a brilliant forger of passports, a Polish aristocrat who turned out, perhaps to her surprise, to be rather skilled at blowing things up … But, of course, this is a horrible story. The cosmopolitan city of Budapest descended into barbarism — and as the Red Army neared its walls, the fascist Arrow Cross government started to deport and murder the surviving Jews. Head of Zeus £27.99 pp512Buy a copy of The Last Days of Budapest If you're bored of history books that entomb you in dates, extraneous details and footnotes, then The Golden Throne might be the answer. This account of the middle years of the reign of the Ottoman sultan Suleyman the Magnificent reads like a novel (the early years are recounted in The Lion House). The world of the 16th century — of eunuchs, diplomats, pirates and princes, of sea battles, stranglings and perfumed goings-on in harems — pops to life. Christopher de Bellaigue's writing is confident and playful. If only more historians wrote with such verve. Bodley Head £22 pp272Buy a copy of The Golden Throne Suzanne O'Sullivan, an NHS neurologist, is a humane and thoughtful observer of the oddities of the human mind, especially psychosomatic conditions. Her 2015 book It's All in Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness and the 2021 follow-up The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness are full of intriguing case studies and wise observations. The Age of Diagnosis ranges widely, taking in the drawbacks of mass screening for illnesses as well as the perils of overextending mental health categories so that what was once simply unusual behaviour earns itself a medical label of ADHD or autism. We make people sicker by the simple act of diagnosing them with a medical problem, she says. A fascinating & Stoughton £22 pp320Buy a copy of The Age of Diagnosis • ADHD, autism, cancer: this doctor says overdiagnosis is the issue The eerie tale of how in the early 20th century, Dr Hawley Crippen fell in love with his typist, murdered his second wife and then fled across the Atlantic, triggering one of the most celebrated pursuits in modern history, is well known. But the historian Hallie Rubenhold thinks we have been telling it all wrong. Too often the wicked doctor is put at the heart of the story, while the women whose lives he touched are ignored or caricatured. She puts the victims centre stage. 'Even though we know where the story is leading,' Dominic Sandbrook wrote in his review, 'Rubenhold makes it tremendously exciting.'Doubleday £25 pp512Buy a copy of Story of a Murder The rising young historian Tim Bouverie made a name for himself with Appeasing Hitler (2019), a compelling study of the disastrous British diplomacy of the 1930s. This ambitious follow-up dissects the 'improbable and incongruous Alliance' that defeated Hitler. Well-trodden ground, you might think, but it goes far beyond the British-Soviet-American troika, so we learn about Britain's relationship with France (before and after its fall in 1940), nationalist China, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece. It's full of fascinating nuggets, character sketches and peppery judgments. Saul David called the book 'a fine reassessment of Allied politics and diplomacy during the Second World War: impeccably researched, elegantly written and compellingly argued.'Bodley Head £25 pp688Buy a copy of Allies at War In 1919 four teams of aviators battled to become the first to cross the Atlantic — and win a £10,000 prize (about £660,000 in today's money) posted by the Daily Mail. These men were driven by the purest form of heroic adventure — what one journalist called 'sublime insanity'. The Big Hop is a glorious romp through an overlooked part of aviation history, stuffed full of intriguing characters and white-knuckle & Windus £22 pp320Buy a copy of The Big Hop Edmund White died this year aged 85 — but the grand old man of gay literature was writing up until the end. This 'sex memoir' has all the unfiltered candour you'd expect of an octogenarian who was too old to care what anyone else thought. We learn everything — penis size, favoured positions — as well as meeting dozens of the thousands of men he fell in love with, ever so briefly and untenderly. It's the rather touching last hurrah of a writer who never believed in something being 'too much information'.Bloomsbury £20 pp256Buy a copy of The Loves of My Life Vasili Mitrokhin didn't fit the Hollywood image of a secret agent. He was a scruffy oddball who had been demoted from fieldwork to the dreary backwater of the KGB's archives. But the information he gleaned from burrowing in the shelves and boxes — and then passed on to the West — was described as 'the biggest counterintelligence bonanza of the postwar period'. Gordon Corera, formerly the BBC's security correspondent and now a co-presenter of the intelligence podcast The Rest Is Classified, tells the story of this irascible, unlikely spy and his trove of Collins £25 pp336Buy a copy of The Spy in the Archive
The National
40 minutes ago
- The National
SNP MPs join Labour rebels in bid to kill off benefit cuts
The party has given its backing to a backbench amendment that would thwart proposals in the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill. The bill seeks to cut back disability benefit payments by around £5 billion per year. The amendment opposing the cuts has been signed by more than 120 Labour MPs in what marks the biggest rebellion Keir Starmer has faced since he came to power. Twelve Scottish Labour MPs are among those to have signed the amendment, which notes that the UK Government's 'own impact assessment estimates that 250,000 people will be pushed into poverty as a result of [the bill], including 50,000 children'. READ MORE: Labour's welfare cuts 'to cost 300,000 Scots £500 per year' – Trussell Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner confirmed to the House of Commons on Wednesday Labour are planning to press ahead with a vote despite mounting opposition to the reforms. Stephen Flynn, SNP Westminster leader, said all SNP MPs have signed the amendment. He called on all parties to unite to 'stop Keir Starmer's attack on disabled people'. Flynn asked, in particular, Scottish Labour MPs who are yet to sign the amendment to 'do the right thing'. 'The best way to kill this bill and stop Labour's attack on disabled people is to ensure this amendment is taken and voted on next Tuesday and the best way to ensure that happens is if this amendment is cross-party,' he said. 'That's why all SNP MPs have now signed this amendment. It is essential that parties and MPs across the parliament now unite to stop Keir Starmer's attack on disabled people. READ MORE: Here's what we learned from John Curtice's new polling report 'The SNP is clear that these cuts to disability can't just be delayed, they need to be stopped altogether. We will continue to use every parliamentary tactic to make sure that happens. 'I would urge more MPs and parties to follow our lead – in particular the two thirds of Scottish Labour MPs who have yet to sign this amendment. If they refuse to do the right thing, it falls on Anas Sarwar to instruct every one of his MPs to vote against Labour's attack on disabled people.' On Wednesday, the Trussell Trust warned that 300,000 disabled and sick Scots are set to lose £500 a year if the Labour Government's plan are pushed through – with new claimants hit by as much as £3000. Under the proposals in the bill, eligibility for the Personal Independence Payment (Pip) will be limited, along with the health-related element of Universal Credit. Prime Minister Starmer said on Wednesday morning from The Hague: 'We're pressing on with a vote on this because we need to bring about reform.' Defending the plans while at a Nato summit, Starmer said the current system 'traps people in a position where they can't get into work'. 'In fact, it's counterproductive, it works against them getting into work,' he said. 'So we have to reform it, and that is a Labour argument, it's a progressive argument.'
The National
40 minutes ago
- The National
UK nations unite over Labour's 'inadequate' devolution approach
The Labour administration in Westminster has received a letter signed by the Scottish Parliament's Social Justice and Social Security Committee, the Northern Ireland Assembly's Committee for Communities, and the Equality and Social Justice Committee at Senedd Cymru raising concerns about its handling of planned welfare cuts. Keir Starmer's Government is aiming to cut back disability and sickness benefits to the tune of £5 billion per year, primarily through cuts to Personal Independence Payments (Pip) and changes to the health element of Universal Credit. READ MORE: Seamus Logan: Using an election as plebiscite referendum is just not going to fly Despite a major rebellion among Labour MPs which could derail the proposals, Starmer has insisted he will try to plough ahead with plans which UK Government's assessments say will push 250,000 people – including 50,000 children – into poverty. In their letter to the UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which is leading the plans, the three devolved parliament committees raised serious concerns about the 'lack of robust data and jurisdiction-specific impact assessments'. The letter said: 'Set against an economic backdrop that is already extremely challenging for disabled people and/or people with health conditions, the anticipated changes have led to significant concerns. 'Those affected and other stakeholders in each of our jurisdictions fear that the challenges faced entering or returning to the workplace will only worsen in the coming months and years. Labour's DWP Secretary Liz Kendall has spearheaded the cuts'For many, the benefits they receive are not symptomatic of a 'broken' system but make a significant contribution to their health and well-being and enable them to actively participate in the workplace.' They went on: 'The committees are agreed that inadequate consultation and engagement by the UK Government with stakeholders and the devolved institutions has contributed to this sense of concern. 'Limited in-person consultation at just nine events, and only in major cities, is also restricting further the opportunity to hear from the many people who fear their ability to enter or return to the workplace will be adversely affected by the UK Government's approach to reform. 'In addition, the lack of robust data and jurisdiction-specific impact assessments presents significant challenges for our three committees to effectively scrutinise potential impacts. READ MORE: Tommy Sheppard: SNP must woo voters to turn our indy hopes into reality "As the elected members who make up the three committees, we are well placed to assess demographic and historical contexts and to ensure dialogue is constructive and reform is meaningful and positive. However, we remain constrained by the lack of quality information.' It concluded: 'Our committees fully support the stated ambition that 'no one should be consigned to a life on benefits just because they have a health condition or a disability, especially when they're able to and want to work with the right support in place'. 'However, in order to contribute meaningfully to the reform process, committees and citizens must be fully informed and offered every opportunity for meaningful engagement.' The letter was signed by committee chairs Jenny Rathbone, from Welsh Labour, Collette Stevenson, from the SNP, and Colm Gildernew, from Sinn Fein. READ MORE: Scottish Labour MPs set to rebel on UK welfare reform – see the full list Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham has added his voice to the senior figures calling on the Government to reconsider the welfare cuts, as has his London counterpart, Sadiq Khan, and Labour's First Minister of Wales Eluned Morgan. The joint letter echoes a similar joint intervention by the three devolved nations' first ministers in 2021, when the Tory-led UK government was looking to cut Universal Credit. At the time, Scotland's first minister Nicola Sturgeon, together with Welsh first minister Mark Drakeford, Northern Ireland first minister and deputy first minister Paul Givan and Michelle O'Neill, urged the UK government to stop the 'morally indefensible' benefit cuts. Since then, Labour have entered power at Westminster on a pledge to "reset" devolved relationships. The DWP was approached for comment. SNP MSP Stevenson, the convener of Holyrood's Social Justice and Social Security Committee, said: 'The Labour Party is balancing the books on the backs of the most vulnerable, and the effect will be devastating. Nowhere is that more stark than the UK Government's own warnings that they will push 50,000 more children into poverty. 'This does not reflect Scotland's values and must not happen. That's why the SNP opposes these cuts, and now the devolved legislatures have joined us.'
