Watch: Furious Lindsay Hoyle scolds Keir Starmer over defence review ‘leaks'
The Speaker took exception to details of the strategic defence review (SDR) being briefed out over the weekend and Sir Keir Starmer holding a media event several hours before the document was published in Parliament.
Making it clear that the House of Commons, rather than the media, should be informed first, Sir Lindsay said of Labour: 'This shows complete disregard for the House and for the honourable members.'
"The government appears to have breached the principle set out in paragraph 9.1 of the ministerial code – that when Parliament is in session, the most important announcements of government policy should be made in the first instance in Parliament.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
South Wales Guardian
12 minutes ago
- South Wales Guardian
Truss ‘carries quite a lot of blame' for Tory record, Badenoch claims
The current Tory leader said she was 'very focused on what the Conservatives are going to do now', after former prime minister Ms Truss accused her of 'repeating spurious narratives'. Speaking on a farm near Saffron Walden in her constituency, Mrs Badenoch also described herself as an 'Essex girl', and added that people from the county 'are grafters; they work hard'. The Leader of the Opposition faced questions about Ms Truss's claim that under the Conservatives, 'the economy was wrecked with profligate Covid spending by (Rishi) Sunak' and that 'the huge increase in immigration has been a disaster'. Mrs Badenoch told ITV Anglia: 'I know that, as a former prime minister and a former foreign secretary, (Ms Truss) carries quite a lot of that blame. 'The party's now under new leadership. 'I wasn't in charge during those 14 years; she was. 'That's a criticism she's probably levelling at herself.' The Tory leader also said she was 'telling the truth' about her party's record. 'I'm telling the truth that immigration was too high – that's why we have much tougher policies to fix immigration,' she continued. 'I am telling the truth that taxes were too high, that we were putting a lot of regulation on businesses, and what we're seeing is Labour making every single thing worse. 'They're doing that because they haven't learned many of the lessons that we learned. They haven't learned from our mistakes. They're making worse mistakes.' The Labour Government's mistakes include making 'no cut in spending at all – the books were not balanced', Mrs Badenoch claimed. 'We're spending more on welfare than we are on defence – that cannot continue,' she said. Mrs Badenoch had previously told The Telegraph that 'for all their mocking of Liz Truss, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have not learnt the lessons of the mini-budget and are making even bigger mistakes'. Ms Truss, who spent 49 days in Number 10, hit back when she said that 'instead of serious thinking', Mrs Badenoch was 'repeating spurious narratives'. She continued: 'I suspect she is doing this to divert from the real failures of 14 years of Conservative government in which her supporters are particularly implicated. 'It was a fatal mistake not to repeal Labour legislation like the Human Rights Act because the modernisers wanted to be the 'heirs to Blair'. 'Huge damage was done to our liberties through draconian lockdowns and enforcement championed by Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings. 'The economy was wrecked with profligate Covid spending by Sunak. The huge increase in immigration has been a disaster.' Mrs Badenoch also took questions about her identity, after she told the Rosebud podcast: 'I have not renewed my Nigerian passport, I think, not since the early 2000s. 'I don't identify with it any more, most of my life has been in the UK and I've just never felt the need to.' The North West Essex MP told ITV Anglia: 'I am definitely an Essex girl, that is a fact.' A London Assembly member before she took her Commons seat in 2017, Mrs Badenoch said: 'I represent an Essex constituency, these are my people. 'I was a Londoner, but Essex people asked me to be their MP, and I want to make sure that I do them proud. And I love this part of the world. 'It's fantastic being here. It's a rural community, and I've been talking to the farmers here. I talked about how my grandfather was a farmer, it's very hard work. 'The people of Essex and East Anglia – they are grafters. 'They work hard, and I want to make sure that we do right by them.' Mrs Badenoch spent Tuesday morning at a farm in Little Walden, where she tried her hand at harvesting wheat using a Claas Lexion combine harvester. She told farmers: 'A lot of farming just feels like constant interference. 'Everything is interfered from the minute you wake up.' Examples of interference included 'chemicals and insecticide, people you're hiring, how much you've got to pay them', plus changes to 'employers' NI (national insurance), then somebody wants to put pylons on, there's compulsory purchase, it's impacting the cost of the land, if you want to add a new farm building, there's planning applications', she said. 'It's just endless constant Government saying, 'You can't do this, you can't do that, you can't move forwards'. 'And the burden in my view has now crossed the threshold.'
Telegraph
13 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Our complicit elite is to blame for every sexual assault by an illegal migrant
I was having coffee in the garden with John, the lovely man who comes to help me with all the jobs I can't manage (a temperamental pond pump and rampant blanket weed among them), when conversation turned to John's concern for his daughter. Kirstie's journey to college takes her past a former RAF base now occupied by illegal migrants who crossed the Channel in small boats. Their ranks have swollen recently to several hundred as the Government struggles to fulfil its promise to empty asylum hotels by the end of this Parliament. Not by deporting the legions of undocumented young males from Africa and the Middle East – of course not, silly! – but by secretly redistributing a majority of those migrants from hotels into HMOs (houses in multiple occupation) and military facilities, presumably in the hope that the public will be less likely to notice and kick off. But girls like Kirstie cannot fail to notice. Not when the foreign males who leer and hiss at them, as if they were living in Egypt not Essex, now outnumber the population of their village. Not when it is girls who were born here who are advised to change their behaviour to accommodate the culture of the new arrivals by being less provocative, and walking a different way to school. Lately John, like a lot of fathers I suspect, has started fearing the worst. 'We were talking in the pub the other night and we decided that, in the end, it's men like us who will have to go down and defend our southern border,' he said to me that day in the garden. The bees went about their buzzy business in the hollyhocks, there was a gentle trickle of water in the pond, its pump just mended by this good and reliable man. It was a quintessential English summer's day, temperate and benign as the people of these islands tend to be until roused, yet there we were, drinking our coffee and picturing thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of Johns, the backbone of our country, the sturdy yeomen who have always come to the rescue in centuries past, marching to the beaches of Kent to protect us against invasion. To protect their women and children. That may sound alarmist, apocalyptic even, but is it really? When men like John are discussing in Wetherspoons what normal people can clearly see is a national emergency, no online Starmer-Stasi snoopers can stop them much, though a panic-stricken, authoritarian government would like to shut down free speech. Things that we would once have thought unimaginable, indeed completely bonkers, now feel like weekly, almost hourly, occurrences. Over 25,000 migrants, mostly young males, have already broken into Britain this year (49 per cent more than at the same point last year), and the nation that launched the D-Day landings against a mighty foe is now reliant on a spell of bad weather to keep the numbers down. Or on the latest doomed government 'one-in-one-out' scheme, beginning today, in which France generously allows herself to be bribed at British taxpayers' expense to take back maybe one of the 700 migrants who make the crossing in a single day, only to send the UK a substitute asylum seeker. Probably not a brain surgeon, to take a wild guess. Not only will such a tiny chance of being deported fail to act as a deterrent, it allows Labour to slyly open up a legal route into the UK while pretending it's a benefit to us. What would those who gave their lives in 1944 think of us – from Operation Overlord to Operation Over-Run in 80 years? Since the 2015-2016 New Years's Eve celebrations in Cologne, when around 1,200 women were raped or sexually assaulted by gangs of foreign men, I have warned repeatedly of the consequences of admitting young males from backward, misogynist cultures into a liberal, Western society. Naturally, telling the truth got me called 'racist' and I earned a coveted place on an Islamophobia list. But the pretence that a farmer from Afghanistan suddenly turns into Hugh Grant the minute his trainers hit the shingle at Dover was always a progressive fantasy. Sex-starved lads raised to regard women as livestock (Afghan women are no longer allowed to speak outside the home let alone go to school) are poor candidates for integration. They were always going to take gross liberties with our liberty. And so here we are. In leafy Nuneaton, a 12-year-old girl was allegedly raped by two Afghan asylum seekers. Despite Warwickshire Police's best (make that worst) attempts to conceal their identity, Ahmad Mulakhil, 23, was charged last week with rape, while Mohammad Kabir, 23, was charged with kidnap, strangulation and aiding and abetting rape. The police explained they did not wish to reveal the suspects' immigration status for fear of exacerbating our old friend 'community tensions'. In this case, community tensions is code for furious parents who strangely don't want their daughters abducted, their innocence torn from them by barbarians who shouldn't be here in the first place. In another incident on July 13, a Sudanese man who was living in a three-star asylum hotel in the upmarket Cheshire suburb of Wilmslow allegedly tried to lure away a girl aged 10 while she was with her father. Epping, meanwhile, has seen fierce protests after an Ethiopian, who had only come ashore eight days earlier and was being put up at the Bell Hotel, was charged with the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl. These alleged attacks are not an aberration; they are exactly what you would expect if you were to drop a gang of marauding vikings into a high-school prom at an all-girls' school. That has, effectively, been the policy of successive British governments. Our political class prefers to burnish their reputation among 'our international partners' by remaining in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), making deportations almost impossible, while young girls – catcalled, groped, raped, strangled, abducted – are just thought of as unfortunate collateral damage. If they think about them at all. When it was disclosed recently that a superinjunction had been taken out by the last Conservative government to cover up importing thousands of Afghans into the UK, following a leak of names, I was berated on X by former defence minister Ben Wallace for daring to suggest that that underhand humanitarian mission could raise the level of risk for British women and girls. Mr Wallace thought the noble purpose of extricating men who may (or may not) have aided our armed forces was what mattered. I disagreed, foreseeing ever more rapes and cultural disintegration. A fate also predicted with some urgency, I notice, by US vice president JD Vance who last week accused Europe of 'engaging in civilisational suicide'. Coincidentally, a reader in Wiltshire got in touch to report how all those Afghans resettled in a local army camp are getting on. 'It's horrific, Allison,' she said. 'The behaviour of the Afghans in Larkhill – loitering around children's playgrounds, lads 'messing' with girls on school buses, human faeces regularly found on dog walks in camp. The GP practice is closed to soldiers one day a week to allow the migrants exclusive access. The reception staff have been handed crib sheets on how to greet Afghans in their own language. They are incensed. 'Why aren't the immigrants given crib sheets on how to address us in our own language?' ' My source says the Afghan families have been allocated most of the large houses, while soldiers who are entitled to bigger quarters are told 'there isn't a three-bed house in the whole of Wiltshire'. It's no surprise to learn that 'resentment is massive. The Afghans get free food – the truck goes round at least twice a day. 'If you drive through the camp you'd think you were in Kabul – groups of several men walking ahead of the women all covered in head-to-toe niqabs. Since the news of the superinjunction broke, they've been put under curfew. All the lads were warned that if they spoke out they'd be put on a charge.' See how the state acts to cover up its crimes against the British people. Whether it's silencing squaddies deprived of their rightful quarters or threatening with arrest those marvellous mums and grandmothers in raucously defiant pink who performed the Hokey-Cokey before staging a sit-in outside the Britannia Hotel asylum centre in Canary Wharf. It is politicians and senior civil servants who should be arrested, I reckon. They waste stupefying amounts of our money on people unlikely to ever make a net contribution to Britain and call it compassion. For whom? The National Audit Office has just predicted that, within 10 years, the cost of asylum accommodation will reach £15.3bn. It is intolerable. Imagine all the good such a sum could do to help struggling businesses and boost employment for our young people. Even when the popular sense of anger is palpable, as it is right now, the ability of our ruling class and much of the media to deny any adverse consequences of immigration is astonishing. I listened with mounting anger to Radio 4's PM programme on Monday (Sorry, mea culpa. I know you've told me to ditch the BBC!) where a reporter was trying to discredit data which showed that 40 per cent of sexual crimes in London were committed by foreign nationals. That, he explained, was only because migrants tend to be younger, and young men are most likely to commit those offences. I'm sure that will be a huge comfort to the traumatised women. All credit to Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick for causing consternation among the Open Borders fanatics by making the link between out-of-control migration and soaring rape figures. Compare the response of our woefully weak Prime Minister who wants to 'put pressure' on police chiefs to be 'as transparent as possible' about the ethnic background and immigration status of those charged with crimes such as rape and sexual assault. Even though it is the Crown Prosecution Service, which Sir Keir Starmer once ran, that refuses to keep track of the number of sexual offences by asylum seekers. We know why, don't we? Government sources said they hoped greater transparency would 'help rebuild the public trust'. As if. That's the same government which is mounting unprecedented and sinister surveillance to keep track of 'anti-migrant' opinion. Fifty million people will shortly be helping the police with their enquiries. 'If you come here illegally on a small boat you will face return,' Sir Keir Starmer warbled at migrants yesterday. Not, 'You will be deported immediately' but 'you will face return.' Or, let's face it and far more likely, 'You will be handed a free phone and free accommodation which we will pinch from a soldier's family if we have to.' Compare with Greece, which has set up secure camps to detain all illegal migrants for three months, all of them denied the ability to claim asylum. Emergency legislation is allowing Greeks to circumvent the ECHR. Denmark, another ECHR member, has practically closed the borders and is using gated detention camps, some housing up to 2,000 migrants who are allowed out for just two hours a day and cannot work. If a government wants to put its citizens first, it can. Ours doesn't. From now on, I suggest we put the blame for every rape, abduction and strangling by an illegal migrant squarely where it belongs – on the Government, Home Office civil servants and complicit media class. We don't want a one-in-one-out scheme, thanks all the same. We want a 50,000-in-50,000-out scheme. We want Kirstie and every girl like her to be able to walk unmolested to school, not to be hissed at by men who lack all respect for our values and our women. If our leaders are too weak to act, lovely John and the yeomen of Britain will go to the border, and they will do what needs to be done.
BBC News
13 minutes ago
- BBC News
Litter-picking 'obsessed' labrador brings plastic out of sea
A litter-picking "obsessed" labrador spends his daily walks helping to clear the sea of Logie has been trained by his owners to collect bottles, drinks cans and other pieces of waste around Plymouth. The environmentally-minded dog "actively searches for litter" on land and in the James Westgate, who is an ecologist, said he and Logie were "a match made in heaven" and it was "hugely satisfying" being able to help keep the area clean. Mr Westgate said Logie began picking up litter as a puppy, and he realised the behaviour could be nurtured after the dog retrieved a plastic bottle from the sea."Logie picks up anything you ask him to - anything from a Pringles can to a traffic cone he's retrieved from the sea," he said. "We're down by the water every single day and seeing the litter really breaks my heart - knowing the plastic pollution is going to end up in the deep sea, it's going to sink to the bottom of the ocean and turn into microplastics over time. "Retrieving one bit of litter is a hugely satisfying thing but getting Logie to just go around the entire quay and sweep the whole place for litter is fabulous, we can finish our walk with bundles of trash which we then put into recycling or in the bin," he said. Mr Westgate added Logie was "incredibly loyal and intelligent"."He's obsessed with picking up litter and I really care about the environment, so it's a win-win really," he said. Known as Litter Logie, his owners shares his daily achievements on an Instagram Louise Henry, who is also an ecologist. said: "I think it's good to spread the message of the environment being an important thing to protect."We live in Plymouth and it's one of the most amazing environments. "He's a symbol for good deeds and hope, and it's just quite inspiring."
