Andrew Sparrow 

Vince Cable becomes latest pro-European to come out against free movement – as it happened

Rolling coverage of the day’s political developments as they happen
  
  

Sir Vince Cable has come out against free movement.
Sir Vince Cable has come out against free movement. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA

Afternoon summary

  • Sir Vince Cable, the Lib Dem former business secretary, has become the latest prominent pro-European to come out against EU free movement. The party as a whole has always been strongly committed to free movement, although Theresa May has made to clear that the UK will no longer allow EU workers free movement to the UK after Brexit. But, in an article in the New Statesman, Cable says there is a liberal case for opposing free movement. Many senior Labour figures, including Ed Miliband (here), Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham, Sir Keir Starmer (here), and Emma Reynolds have also said they now believe that controls on immigration are required. In his article Cable says:

I have serious doubts that EU free movement is tenable or even desirable. First, the freedom is not a universal right, but selective. It does not apply to Indians, Jamaicans, Americans or Australians. They face complex and often harsh visa restrictions. One uncomfortable feature of the referendum was the large Brexit vote among British Asians, many of whom resented the contrast between the restrictions they face and the welcome mat laid out for Poles and Romanians ...

The economics are ambiguous. Seen globally, more migration is undeniably a positive. People moving from high unemployment, low productivity countries to areas of labour scarcity and higher productivity produce economic gains. But the benefits accrue mainly to migrants themselves (and business owners) ...

There is no great argument of liberal principle for free EU movement; the economics is debatable; and the politics is conclusively hostile ...

I do not see much upside in Brexit, but one is the opportunity for a more rational immigration policy.

But Cable says there is one argument for free movement: that accepting it could keep the UK in the single market.

The argument for free movement has become tactical: it is part of a package that also contains the wider economic benefits of the single market. Those benefits are real, which is why the government must prioritise single market access and shared regulation. Yet that may not be possible to reconcile with restrictions on movement. The second-best option is customs union status, essential for supply chain industries.

  • The Institute for Fiscal Studies has called for inheritance tax loopholes to be closed. (See 4.44pm.)
  • The Economist has used its front page to brand the “indecisive” premier “Theresa Maybe”. (See 2.41pm and 3.50pm.)

That’s all from me for today.

Thanks for the comments.

My colleague Polly Toynbee has been writing a good article about the IFS report. Here is an extract.

My generation bought cheap homes, and saw them rocket in value, in boom times earning more in a day than we earned going out to work. This unearned, unmerited, untaxed wealth needs to be captured in one way or another, at some time in people’s lives or deaths.

That soaring bricks-and-mortar wealth damages the economy and still fails to encourage more homes to be built. Property wealth needs to be collected and redirected to struggling young families with no chance of owning their own home. Start with a council tax that genuinely reflects the value of homes: currently, with no revaluation of tax bands since 1991, it’s capped very low for valuable properties, while squeezing money out of those with nothing. US states levy property taxes and so should we, to chill the market and raise funds for housing. Time too to look at other ways to tax the elderly wealthy to pay for their own social and medical care, so the burden doesn’t fall on a poorer younger generation.

This report is yet another brutal reminder that Britain is going backwards. The IFS concludes: “Today’s young adults will find it harder to accumulate wealth of their own than previous generations did, due to the sharp fall in home ownership, the dramatic decline in defined benefit pensions in the private sector, and the stagnation in household income.”

And here is here full article.

IFS urges government to close inheritance tax loopholes

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has called for inheritance tax loopholes to be closed. Paul Johnson, the IFS director, said this in an interview early this morning on the Today programme.

Johnson was on the programme talking about a report the IFS has published on inheritance and inequality. The Guardian’s story about it is here and the IFS summary is here. The report does not make policy proposals but on the Today programme Johnson argued that inheritance tax loopholes should be closed.

The problem with inheritance tax is that it is very hard to make it work for the really wealthy. It is the middlingly wealthy who end up paying it because it is pretty easy, if you can give money away during your life, or use trusts and so on, for people who have got serious money not to pay the full 40% ...

I think there is a case for looking at inheritance tax. There are some really absurdly obvious loopholes in it that one might want to sort out.

But he also argued that, if the government wanted to promote equality, although increasing inheritance tax might be one option, other options might be preferable.

As ever with these things, it does depend on what you want to achieve. If you want to do more to ensure that people have a more equal start in life, or more equal inheritance, then you need more inheritance tax. But you may well then find that a more effective set of policies are policies that support younger people, particularly in the housing market. Policies for example that you increase council tax and reduce stamp duty, or increase the amount of houses that are built, so that the importance of this inheritance becomes less significant ...

The more constructive thing in the long run is, part of the real big problem here is that the younger generation is doing very badly in terms of pensions, very badly in terms of housing, not very well in terms of earnings. If you can sort those things out, then inheritance becomes less important proportionately.

Johnson did not say in the interview what inheritance tax loopholes should be closed, but this is what the IFS said on the subject in its green budget in 2015.

At present, agricultural land and unquoted business assets are exempt from inheritance tax, at a cost to the exchequer of £440m and £590m per year respectively. While there might conceivably be a case for allowing tax payments to be spread over time where assets received are illiquid and are to be retained by the recipient, it is hard to see any justification for the wholesale exemption of these assets. These reliefs create just the sort of non-neutrality the tax system ought to try to avoid, pushing up the price of agricultural land and of certain offerings on the AIM market, and providing a large incentive to keep businesses going and in the family even if there are good financial reasons for disposing of them sooner – as well as providing an open invitation for people to buy what might otherwise be wholly inappropriate assets purely as a way to avoid inheritance tax (albeit with a minimum holding period of the assets to qualify for relief).

The principal reason that inheritance tax is forecast to raise only £4.2bn in 2015–16 is that it can be circumvented by the simple expedient of passing on wealth during one’s lifetime. Transfers in the seven years before death are taxed on a sliding scale (from zero for transfers more than seven years before death to the full 40% rate for transfers less than three years before death), but gifts made before that are not taxed at all. Those who are able – often the wealthiest – are encouraged to pass on their wealth at a time dictated by the tax system.

A simple option would be to lengthen the seven-year window before death during which lifetime transfers are taxable. For example, in 2007, the Liberal Democrats proposed that only transfers made more than 15 years before death should be exempt, though this was not ultimately adopted for their 2010 general election manifesto. Since there are no data on wealth transfers occurring more than seven years before death, we cannot know how much this would raise.

Updated

The Economist brands May 'Britain's indecisive premier'

The Economist has published a leader on Theresa May, and a long briefing about her first six months in power. They both come to a similar conclusion; that, while it is too early for a final assessment, May’s record so far has been disappointing and her failings are starting to resemble Gordon Brown’s.

Here’s an extract from the editorial. It is headlined “Theresa Maybe, Britain’s indecisive premier”.

Yet caution has started to look like indecision. Her most senior official in Brussels has just resigned, saying that the government does not have a clear Brexit plan. After six months it is hard to name a single signature policy, and easy to cite U-turns. Some are welcome: a silly promise to put workers on company boards, for instance, was abandoned; a dreadful plan to make firms list their foreign employees lasted less than a week; and hints at curbing the Bank of England’s independence were quietly forgotten. Selective “grammar” schools will be resurrected—but only on a small scale, and perhaps not at all, given how many Tory MPs oppose the idea. Other reversals smack of dithering. The construction of a new nuclear plant at Hinkley Point was put in doubt, then given the go-ahead; a new runway at Heathrow airport was all but agreed on, then deferred until a parliamentary vote next year. “Just-about-managing” households were the prime minister’s lodestar for a week or so, then dropped. So were suggestions that Britain would seek a transitional deal with the EU after Brexit—until they were recirculated a few weeks later when Mrs May apparently changed her mind once again.

The cause of this disarray could be that Mayism itself is muddled. While vowing to make Britain “the strongest global advocate for free markets”, the prime minister has also talked of reviving a “proper industrial strategy”. This is not about “propping up failing industries or picking winners”, she insists. Yet unspecified “support and assurances” to Nissan to persuade the carmaker to stay in Sunderland after Brexit amount to more or less that. Her enthusiasm for trade often sits uncomfortably with her scepticism of migration. Consider the recent trip to India, where her unwillingness to give way on immigration blocked progress on a free-trade agreement.

And here’s an extract from the briefing.

Like Mrs Merkel, Mrs May has seen off rivals through canny manoeuvring; she bides her time, knowing when to speak up and when (as in the referendum campaign) to stay quiet. Like Mr Brown, she is prone to overblown rhetoric, irritability and indecisiveness. The biggest worry, though, is that she may also share his inability to adapt—the key difference between Mr Brown and Mrs Merkel.

Mrs May shows few signs of the ability to assimilate the new that has made Mrs Merkel so successful. Her vision of leadership, it seems, is focused on giving statements, installing processes, gathering up information and control—and little else. This makes it worryingly easy to imagine the Britain of 2018 or 2019 in disarray: her party in revolt, her ministers and partners alienated, her government sclerotic, Brexit talks breaking down, the economy tanking and Number 10 in bunker mode.

For there is more to leadership than Mrs May’s procedures. There is also what Peter Hennessy, a contemporary historian, calls “the emotional geography” of power. This means adapting to events and institutions, building networks and—yes—being judiciously informal sometimes: a dose of instinct, a snap decision, a deal cut, a risk taken on a wing and a prayer. It means sharing information, accepting dissent, seeking alternative opinions, staking out a position and persuading people of it. It is this emotional landscape that Britain’s geographer prime minister must master, if she can.

Here’s the author and former political columnist Robert Harris on that Economist cover.

When Charlie Whelan was working as Gordon Brown’s spin doctor, he once summed up his approach to media management with something to the effect of: “Who cares about the Economist? We’ve got the Sun.”

I hope that’s what they still think in Downing Street. Today the Sun has an editorial lavishing praise on the prime minister. But Britain’s pre-eminent news magazine (which perversely calls itself a newspaper) is less impressed.

UPDATE: Charlie Whelan tells me that he never said the quote I attributed to him. Good to see he hasn’t lost the art of rebuttal.

FURTHER UPDATE: Though Whelen now remembers he might have said something similar ...

Updated

Lunchtime summary

  • Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, has said that the economics profession is “in crisis”. He was speaking at at Institute for Government event where he admitted that the Bank did not anticipate how resilient the economy would be after Britain voted to leave the EU. But he said that he thought the Bank was wrong about timing, not about the fundamentals, and that it still expected Brexit to lead to weakened growth. (See 1.40pm and 2.07pm.)
  • Theresa Villiers, the former Northern Ireland secretary and a prominent leave campaigner, has launched a damning attack on Sir Ivan Rogers following his resignation as Britain’s ambassador to the EU. Speaking on Sky News she said:

I thought Sir Ivan’s resignation email was, I don’t know, rambling, a bit emotionally needy, not something you would expect from a civil servant of that calibre.

Villiers was speaking a day after her Vote Leave colleague Iain Duncan Smith accused Rogers of being untrustworthy.

  • Brexit will trigger a major reduction in net migration, a Cambridge University study has predicted. As the Press Association reports, If immigration controls on EU nationals were imposed in mid-2019, there would be zero net migration between the UK and the continent as inflows and outflows would balance each other out, the university’s Centre for Business Research forecast in a report (pdf). The report said this would reduce overall annual net migration to Britain to 165,000 from 2020, about half the current figure. However, this would still be above the Government target of reducing net migration to the tens of thousands level per annum.
  • Union leaders representing thousands of nuclear workers are to discuss calling a strike ballot in a row over pensions. As the Press Association reports, the unions said 16,000 workers at 19 sites face cuts under plans by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority to make savings of £660m. The workers are based at Sellafield (Cumbria), Magnox (Anglesey), Ayrshire, Dorset, Dumfriesshire, Essex, Gloucestershire, Gwynedd, Kent, Oxfordshire, Somerset, Suffolk, Direct Rail Services (Cumbria), Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd (Caithness), Low Level Waste Repository (Cumbria) and International Nuclear Services (Cumbria, Warrington).

Bank of England still expects Brexit to weaken growth, says Haldane

Earlier in the Q&A Andy Haldane was asked if the Bank of England was now more positive about the prospects for Britain post-Brexit than it was before the referendum.

Haldane admitted that the economy had done better than expected in the second half of last year. But he said, over the longer term, the Bank of England still expected Brexit to harm growth.

Here is his reply in full.

I think near-term the data, the evidence we’ve been accumulating since the referendum, has surprised to the upside. [There’s been] greater resilience, in particular among consumers and among the housing market, than we had expected. Has that led us to fundamentally led us to change our view on the fortunes of the economy looking forward over the next several years? Not really.

This is more a question, I think, of timing than of a fundamental reassessment of the fortunes of the economy. So back in November we published a forecast for inflation which was the highest we’ve ever published. And the forecast for growth in the UK economy that was the lowest we have ever published.

So we are still expecting this rather difficult balancing act for monetary policy with a slowing, not a huge slowing, but nonetheless a material slowing, during the course of next year as the effects of higher prices in the shops begin to chew away a little at the spending power of consumers and causes them to rein back a little in their spending. That remains our central view, with huge amounts of uncertainty around it.

Haldane is taking questions now.

Q: What scope do you see for more assertive policies to alter the distribution of wealth?

Haldane says he would look at the level of the company, not the household. There is a lot that could be done to lift the performance of under-performing companies, he says.

As one example, he says it is easy to borrow against physical property, but much harder to borrow against intellectual property.

Economics profession 'is in crisis', says Bank of England's chief economist

Andy Haldane, the chief economist at the Bank of England, is speaking at the Institute for Government now. You can watch a live stream here.

The BBC’s Kamal Ahmed has been tweeting from it. Here are some of his tweets.

  • Haldane says economics profession is “in crisis”.

Chris Giles makes this point in the FT today. See 12.23pm.

Updated

You can read all today’s Guardian politics stories here.

As for the rest of the papers, here is the PoliticsHome list of top 10 must-reads, and here is the ConservativeHome round-up of today’s politics stories.

And here are four articles worth reading.

Liam Fox and David Davis’s alleged failure to understand briefings in the weeks after their appointment left Sir Ivan Rogers in despair, friends have said. Britain’s top diplomat in Brussels, who resigned on Tuesday, considered quitting on more than one occasion after the referendum.

Sources said that he was frustrated by his attempts to induct the two Brexit cabinet ministers in the details of the single market and customs union ...

Sir Ivan is understood to believe that Mrs May understands the dangers this poses. However, he expressed frustration about the fact that Dr Fox, the international trade secretary, Mr Davis, the Brexit secretary, and Boris Johnson, foreign secretary, did not take the chance or consequences of a chaotic outcome seriously enough.

Less than three months away from the government’s self-imposed deadline for triggering Article 50, we still do not have a delivery plan, negotiating strategy or clear understanding of the resources required to achieve a successful Brexit. To say this is neither to be “pessimistic” or “political”, nor in denial of the referendum result, but simply make an honest statement about the reality of our situation.

Too much of the debate about Brexit starts from a naive view of how we would like to world — and Europe in particular — to be rather than how it actually is. Nowhere is this more evident than in our insistence that despite all the evidence to the contrary, we can have free trade in goods and services with Europe but not free movement of labour.

In fact, we know the predominant source of error. It stemmed from underestimating the strength of household consumption after the vote for Brexit. Economists expected a vote to leave would increase household savings in the short term, both as precautionary insurance against uncertainty and to begin an adjustment to a less prosperous future.

These were reasonable guesses, based on recent household behaviour — for example, at the time of huge banking uncertainty early in 2008. But rather than rising, household savings fell throughout 2016. The savings ratio dropped to an exceptionally low level in the third quarter as consumers went on a borrowing and spending binge not seen since before the financial crisis.

The interesting question is why households acted in this way. There are three plausible reasons. First, households correctly thought Brexit would improve their personal finances and borrowed and spent accordingly. Second, they were deceived into expecting economic gains from Brexit and still went out to spend. And, third, households watched sterling tumble, understood the likely effect on prices and brought forward their consumption, so they were spending in the knowledge their money would buy less in future.

Economic analysis allows us to set out these possibilities; it tells us only the last of the three options is sustainable; but it does not yet inform us which is correct.

By the end of 2017, we will know whether historically low levels of saving have persisted through the year, and this will provide a pretty good answer to the question of why spending held up so well after the EU referendum. If spending was merely brought forward, there will be a nasty jolt in the economy.

Earlier (see 10.48am) I flagged up this Politco Europe article and said it was by Mats Persson. That’s my mistake. It’s by Daniel Korski, who also worked as an adviser to David Cameron on Europe and on other matters. I’m sorry. But it’s still a good read.

Updated

The Financial Times (subscription) has published a good article by Alex Barker this morning relating to Sir Ivan Rogers’ resignation. Barker says Rogers’ colleagues say he had his “hair on fire” worrying about the prospects of Britain getting a transitional deal as it leaves the EU.

Sir Ivan Rogers’ warning to Downing Street, leaked in December, that the EU expects a full UK trade deal to take until the early to mid-2020s seemed stark. By Brussels standards, however, it was one of the more uncontroversial aspects of his advice.

More significant was his assessment that British political imperatives to control borders and leave the jurisdiction of European courts required the UK to go for a “hard Brexit” deal, leaving the UK outside the customs union and the single market. Given this reality, the most valuable outcome of Article 50 talks would be co-ordinated, orderly transition terms that would allow Britain to adjust.

Such a transition would also, in his view, quite well be impossible to agree.

Barker explains the problems around negotiating a transitional deal in some detail. But one key difficulty is that the political priorities for the UK and for the EU could turn out to be incompatible, he argues.

For the EU-27, any transition must be simpler than a final EU-UK trade deal. That means fashioning a transition from existing EU systems: the European Court of Justice, EU laws, EU budget contributions and core EU rights such as the free movement of people. But any bespoke transition cannot be allowed to look better than actual membership.

By contrast, Theresa May, the UK prime minister, is preparing for an election in 2020. That would probably be after Britain leaves — likely to be in 2019 — so potentially in the middle of any transitional period. Yet she will have to reconcile the terms of any deal with two promises she has made to British voters: to leave the jurisdiction of EU courts and to repatriate controls over immigration.

A transition deal would need to be sellable during a British election campaign, yet it will involve rights and obligations on which the EU side will be least willing to compromise. Here is the rub for both parties.

Services sector activity jumped to a 17-month high in December as the British economy continues to exhibit signs of resilience in the face of Brexit uncertainty, the Press Association reports.

The closely watched Markit/CIPS services purchasing managers’ index (PMI) reached 56.2 in December, up from 55.2 in November and above economists’ forecasts of 54.7.

A reading above 50 indicates growth.

The PMI report said the sharp expansion in December rounded off the strongest quarter of the year, driven by new business.

Sentiment towards the outlook for the next 12 months also strengthened, despite ongoing uncertainty regarding Brexit and European elections, it added.

However, data also signalled that inflationary pressures in the sector remained substantial, with prices rising at the strongest rate since April 2011.

Chris Williamson, chief business economist at IHS Markit, said: “A buoyant service sector adds to signs that the UK economy continues to defy widely-held expectations of a Brexit-driven slowdown. The faster growth of services activity follows similar news of improvements in the manufacturing and construction sectors at the end of 2016.

“At face value, this improvement suggests that the next move by the Bank of England is more likely to be a rate hike than a cut, but policymakers are clearly concerned about the extent to which Brexit-related uncertainty could slow growth this year.”

Kezia Dugdale, the Labour leader in Scotland, has used a new year interview with the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland to renew her call for the UK to adopt a federal structure, with Scotland getting more powers. She told the programme:

For me, the big question in 2017 is how we save the Union. I think the United Kingdom is in terrible peril because of a gamble the Tories have forced with Brexit and the SNP’s obsession with independence. So, 2017 has got to be about protecting the Union.

Our country is divided. The way to bring that country back together is by an Act of Union to save the Union. Let’s have a federal solution for the United Kingdom that offers the solution that we need.

But Dugdale would not say whether this would be a policy adopted by the UK Labour party. When pressed on this, she said:

I am arguing for a federal solution for the whole of the United Kingdom ... Jeremy Corbyn has already put his support behind a constitutional convention for the United Kingdom.

Updated

Lord Marland, the Conservative former trade envoy, told the Today programme this morning that he did not think Whitehall had the skills set to conduct a good Brexit negotiation. (See 9.20am.) Later Mats Persson, who worked as David Cameron’s EU adviser in Number 10, told the same programme he disagreed.

My experience is Britain has some of the best civil servants in the world. Whitehall does have the skill set to deliver it. I think the UK government is actually quite far advanced in its plans, there’s been a bit of unfair headlines recently.

I think that of course this is complex, and I’m on the outside now, but there certainly are other civil servants in Whitehall on top of their game. This is about identifying a deal which involves benefits on both sides, both sides have to have something to gain. Britain has some leverage, it’s a massive market.

Persson also said that he thought Cameron could have got more from his EU renegotiation if he had given it more time.

It was a deal that was far from meaningless, but could we have got more? Maybe. I think played differently, over a longer period of time, we could have achieved more reforms, yes.

UPDATE: Earlier I flagged up this Politco Europe article and said it was by Persson. That’s my mistake. It’s by Daniel Korski, who also worked as an adviser to David Cameron on Europe and on other matters. I’m sorry. But it’s still a good read.

Updated

The Today programme also interviewed Tom Fletcher, a former UK ambassador to Lebanon and a former Number 10 foreign policy adviser, about Sir Tim Barrow. Fletcher said Barrow was “bulletproof”.

It’s the toughest negotiation in our life times and I think [Barrow] is up to it. I have seen him in Brussels. He knows the corridors, he knows the characters.

But actually more importantly I saw him in Moscow where he was incredibly resilient as ambassador there, dealing with [Vladimir] Putin in a very testing time in our relationship and Tim had a reputation of being bulletproof out there.

Fletcher also said that he thought it was unreasonable for people to criticise the government for not disclosing its Brexit plan.

I think people feel that the scale of the challenge is enormous. But we’ve got a lot of our best people on it. I think people get a bit fed up of some of the coverage that says why aren’t we being more public with the plans. Muhammad Ali didn’t brief everyone in advance on the Rumble in the Jungle [his boxing victory over George Foreman].

My colleague Jessica Elgot wasn’t impressed by Fletcher’s analogy.

On the Today programme Sir Robert Cooper, a former Foreign Office diplomat who has also worked for the EU, welcomed Sir Tim Barrow’s appointment. Asked about him, Cooper said:

He’s honest, he’s tough, he’s someone how knows Europe very well, although not so much the community part. He’s done lots of foreign policy in Europe ... At least we’ve got somebody, he may not know all the technical stuff, but he knows how Europe works in terms of dealing with people.

But Cooper also said that diplomats were currently hampered by a lack of direction over Brexit.

I think at the moment there is a policy vacuum. It’s not surprising. This is a gigantic enterprise that’s been taken on and needs a lot of thought. I think at the moment probably the atmosphere is difficult because people don’t know where they are going. You need to have a sense of direction.

Lord Livingston, the former chief executive of BT and a trade minister in David Cameron’s government, was on the Today programme talking about Brexit. He said that negotiating a trade deal with the EU would take time.

First of all of course we have to actually sort out what’s broadly going to be our relationship with the EU. Are we going to be in the single market? Probably not. Are we going to be in the customs union?

Then you can turn your attention to other countries but the trade deal for instance with Canada still isn’t fully implemented and that’s about seven years on.

You can do quick trade deals, you can do good trade deals, you can do wide-ranging trade deals - you just can’t do all three of them at the same time.

Theresa May and her ministers are currently saying that they think Britain should be able to negotiate new trade arrangements with the EU within the two-year exit process. But many people are saying that is unrealistic and the European commission has indicated that it wants to negotiate Britain’s withdrawal from the EU first, before going on to then negotiate a new trade deal afterwards.

Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader, has got a new job.

As the Times’ Matt Chorley points, this is not quite the career break that some were forecasting for the man dubbed “Mr Brexit” in America.

Whitehall lacks skills for 'hard-nosed' Brexit negotiation, says former trade envoy

Yesterday Theresa May acted swiftly to fill the vacancy created by the surprise resignation of Britain’s ambassador to the EU. Here’s the Guardian’s version of the story.

And here is how it starts.

Theresa May has moved swiftly to calm tensions over the resignation of Sir Ivan Rogers as Britain’s ambassador to the EU by appointing career diplomat Sir Tim Barrow as his replacement.

The decision means the prime minister has ignored calls to appoint a wholehearted Brexiter, in a move that will reassure those in the civil service who feared the role would be politicised.

Of course, one of the glories of the British press is that readers never had to make do with just one version of reality. Their story on this has a headline in the paper saying “Theresa crushes Brexit dissenters” and it says May “quashed a civil service revolt over her Brexit strategy by appointing a senior diplomat who faced down the Russians to be the UK’s new man in Brussels”. The Mail, of course, is very much in favour of May, but not “Brexit dissenters”.

There is quite a lot of reaction around to Barrow’s appointment this morning and I will be covering it here. On the Today programme Lord Marland, a former trade envoy to David Cameron who now chairs the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council, said he did not think Whitehall had the skill set to conduct a successful Brexit negotiation. He told the programme:

My fear is that Whitehall as a whole has really not got the skill set to deliver a really hard-nosed negotiation and I think we have really got to up skill in that area to do it.

There is only one item in the diary for today.

10.30am: Chuka Umunna launches the report from the all-party group on social integration. As my colleague Anushka Asthana reports, it proposes a regional immigration policy after Brexit under which some parts of Britain would be able to clamp down on the numbers of foreign workers while others could maintain an open-door policy.

As usual, I will be covering breaking political news as it happens, as well as bringing you the best reaction, comment and analysis from the web. I plan to post a summary at lunchtime and another in the afternoon.

You can read all today’s Guardian politics stories here.

If you want to follow me or contact me on Twitter, I’m on @AndrewSparrow.

I try to monitor the comments BTL but normally I find it impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer direct questions, although sometimes I miss them or don’t have time. Alternatively you could post a question to me on Twitter.

Updated

 

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