Former Scottish Labour leader says she voted SNP in Euro elections because she was ‘mad about Brexit’ – UK politics live | Politics

Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin president, is leader of the opposition in the Irish parliament and it seems likely that after next election she will be taoiseach, leading the government. Today Policy Exchange, a rightwing thinktank with good links to the UK government, has published a report claiming that Ireland’s neutrality, and its very limited spending on defence, poses a security threat to the UK and suggesting that, with Sinn Féin in power in Dublin, this problem could get worse.

It says:

As well as proving a menace in the maritime domain, Russia – alongside China and Iran – seeks to degrade the UK and its allies through unconventional means. Cyber warfare, institutional espionage, and educational and economic infiltration are all subthreshold methods employed by these authoritarian regimes to destabilise the West.

The combination of ROI’s (the Republic of Ireland’s) flimsy security and intelligence apparatus, unwillingness to acknowledge these threats, and soft border with Northern Ireland poses a grave back-door security risk to the UK. Adversaries are certain to target the ROI, due to its close integration into transatlantic economic and digital systems, membership of the EU, and self-imposed exclusion from multilateral security frameworks. There is already strong evidence of a subversive and illegal Russian, Chinese and Iranian presence across Irish society and sensitive institutions …

As it stands, Sinn Féin is expected to win the ROI’s next election in 2025, a party which will be no friend to British interests. Sinn Féin’s long history of Anglophobia, and conflict with the British state and security services – as well as its opposition to Nato, Russian sympathies, and general anti-Western sympathies – will obstruct any meaningful recalibration of security arrangements with the UK. If Sinn Féin wins in 2025, the UK is therefore looking at many more years of an uncooperative, and likely hostile, neighbour in the face of growing external threats.

Asked about the report in an interview with Sky News, Peter Hain, a Labour former Northern Ireland secretary, suggested this was an exaggeration. “The Irish government is going to want to be friends with the British government, whoever is in power, because of our close economic relationship,” he said.

In an interview broadcast on Sunday, Michelle O’Neill, the new first minister, said she expected a referendum on Irish reunification within a decade.

The Good Friday agreement says that, if it appears “likely” that people in Northern Ireland would vote to join a united Ireland, the UK government must hold a referendum.

But the Safeguarding the Union command paper published by the UK government last week said that this was unlikely to happen for decades. It said:

On the basis of all recent polling, the government sees no realistic prospect of a border poll leading to a united Ireland. We believe that, following the restoration of the devolved institutions, Northern Ireland’s future in the UK will be secure for decades to come and as such the conditions for a border poll are unlikely to be objectively met.

In an interview this morning Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the DUP leader, said that he did not agree with O’Neill about a referendum taking place within a decade and that she was wrong to raise the issue. He told Sky News:

I don’t agree with that at all. I think that Michelle O’Neill, instead of focusing on a divisive border poll – she says she wants to be a first minister for all, well that means the unionist community …

Let’s move forward together. Let’s focus on the issues that really matter to people. They’re not interested in a divisive border poll.

Rory Carroll

When the Democratic Unionist party held the first minister post it smirked at Sinn Féin references to Michelle O’Neill, then the deputy first minister, being “joint first minister”.

The posts are indeed joint, with equal authority, but the DUP brandished “first minister” as a talisman and reminder that it was the bigger party. Secure in supremacy, it rejected an offer to rename the posts joint first minister.

With Sinn Fein now revelling in having Northern Ireland’s first nationalist first minister Sir Jeffrey Donaldson performed a smooth, blink-and-you-miss-it U-turn on BBC Radio Ulster on Monday when he referred to his party colleague Emma Little-Pengelly as “joint first minister”.

Let’s see if O’Neill repeats the one-upmanship of Ian Paisley senior who used to refer to Martin McGuinness as “my deputy”.

Labour has much work to do to retain support among Muslim voters, a senior party figure has said as a poll suggested the party had lost a portion of its Muslim voter base over its handling of the Israel-Gaza war. Aletha Adu has the story.

According to PA Media, Rishi Sunak opened his meeting with Michelle O’Neill, the new first minister, and Emma Little-Pengelly, the new deputy first minister, with the words:

It has taken a lot of hard work and indeed courage to get us sitting round this table. Today isn’t the end, it’s the beginning and the real work starts now.

It certainly does. The Safeguarding the Union package announced by the UK government last week included £3.3bn for Northern Ireland. But, in more or less its first decision since being revived as a result of that deal, the new power sharing executive has published an open letter to the PM saying that that sum is not enough.

The letter says the current funding settlement “does not provide the long-term sustainability required”.

The financial package states that it will provide a ‘Welsh-style needs-based factor’ that will see future Barnett consequentials increased by 24% from 2024-25. Whilst in Wales this needs-based factor serves to guarantee that Welsh funding will not fall below its assessed level of need, applied from the wrong starting point, as proposed locally, will trap executive funding below need after the short-term funding is exhausted, potentially for decades. Scotland and Wales are both funded considerably above need, whilst this proposed approach ensures our public services will be consistently funded below need, under a ‘fiscal ceiling’.

Whilst we recognise that the short-term funding provided through the financial package supplements and supports our near-term position, it does not provide the long-term sustainability required.

Specifically, the letter also says the executive needs more money for public sector pay. Under the current settlement, there is a risk of “further damaging cuts”, it says.

There is also a clear public expectation that the financial package will fully address public sector pay pressures. However, the reality is that the current package does not meet this expectation nor provide a sustainable solution. The £584m amount included for pay in the December package falls short of the known pressures of c£690m, which aim to broadly reach pay parity with GB, where industrial disputes are not yet fully resolved, and is for one year only.

It is hoped that flexibility will be provided to use any of the £559m not required for debt repayments towards pay pressures. However, even this may not be sufficient. The recurrent cost of these pay awards will also put significant pressure on the executive’s finances. This means that the executive would be forced to make further damaging cuts to public services of the order of hundreds of millions of pounds next financial year and every financial year, in order to meet growing pay pressures.

In effect, the executive would be required to make decisions on whether to cut services or provide fair pay. As you will be aware these issues are interdependent and given the current deterioration of public services and level of industrial action, either option will be near impossible to implement and will cause further lasting damage to citizens, which will be difficult to reverse.

Rory Carroll

Some may believe football is more important than life or death but the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP) begs to differ. It has suspended an assembly member, Justin McNulty, who vanished from Stormont’s first sitting on Saturday to manage a Gaelic football team.

McNulty, who represents Armagh and Newry, slipped away early to steer County Laois to victory over County Wexford and missed his party leader, Matthew O’Toole, being nominated opposition leader.

“We weren’t informed he was going to leave nor was permission sought,” O’Toole – a former Downing Street civil servant – told the BBC on Monday. “This was a decision we had to make.” Some in the party – and people in County Louth – have backed McNulty.

In an article for the Belfast Telegraph published today, Rishi Sunak has said that, while he “passionately” believes in the union, the UK government will “respect the desire for a united Ireland” felt by nationalists.

He said:

The agreement (announced last week) safeguards the union. Far from being neutral on the Union, I passionately believe in it, consistent with the principles in the Belfast (Good Friday) agreement. Northern Ireland is stronger in the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom is far, far stronger for having Northern Ireland in it. So I was pleased that the House of Commons last week passed legislation to affirm Northern Ireland’s constitutional status as part of the UK. It was right to do so because without those new protections, we would have been unable to restore power-sharing.

Of course, I recognise there are many people in Northern Ireland who do not share these views and have different political aspirations.

The government will always give full and equal respect to constitutional nationalism and the desire for a united Ireland, pursued through peaceful and democratic means — just as we recognise that there are a growing number of people who do not define their aspirations by reference to one tradition or another.

This passage addresses concerns raised by the Irish government, and by the SDLP, a nationalist party in Northern Ireland, about language in the Safeguarding the Union command paper published last week seen as implying the UK government had weakened its commitment to allowing people in Northern Ireland a referendum on reunification if they want one.

Former Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale says she voted SNP in 2019 Euro elections because she was ‘mad about Brexit’

Severin Carrell

Kezia Dugdale, the former Scottish Labour leader, has admitted she voted for the Scottish National party in a protest against Brexit in May 2019, in the last European elections involving the UK.

Dugdale, who was Scottish party leader from 2015 to 2017 and was still a Labour MSP at the time, has long made clear her opposition to the UK leaving the EU. She has told a BBC Radio 4 documentary, Labour’s Scottish Challenge, she was “so mad about Brexit.”

While that election was largely symbolic – the then prime minister Boris Johnson was negotiating the UK’s departure, Labour lost both of its Scottish MEPs, including the country’s longest serving MEP David Martin.

Dugdale’s switch mirrored defections by tens of thousands of Scottish Labour voters in 2019: the party recorded just 9% of the vote, its worst result amid a series of electoral humiliations at the hands of the SNP.

She said:

I voted SNP once in my life and that was in the European Union elections immediately after Brexit, where I was so mad about Brexit.

I felt I could vote for the SNP in that European Union election, because that in no way could be construed as a vote for independence.

Dugdale, who resigned as a Labour member when she quit Holyrood in July 2019 to become head of the John Smith Centre think tank at Glasgow university, insisted she had “voted Labour in every election since then”.

Even so, the defection will harden suspicions amongst her Labour critics about her pro-independence leanings. Married to the SNP’s education secretary, Jenny Gilruth, Dugdale has acknowledged she could vote yes in a future referendum.

She told the Edinburgh international book festival last year:

If you are presented with a binary choice between an independent Scotland in a progressive Europe or Little Boris Brexit Britain, I know where my cards would fall down.

I also know I couldn’t argue with the same strength for the union that I did in 2014 now. That doesn’t mean I’m ready to vote yes; there are big, big questions we need to debate as a country and resolve.

Good morning. Rishi Sunak is in Belfast today, where he is meeting political leaders, including the new first minister, Michelle O’Neill, and deputy first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, and the taoiseach (Irish PM), Leo Varadkar. This is a (rare) good news story because, with his two revisions to the Northern Ireland protocol (the Windsor framework announced last February, and last week’s Safeguarding the Union tweaks and enhancements to the framework), and the DUP finally lifting its two-year boycott of Stormont, Northern Ireland can now move forward with devolved government in place and the Brexit disruption, if not over for good, at least receding.

But Sunak will know that prime ministers never get any credit with British voters for achievements in Belfast, and so there is an equally important story in an interview he gave to Piers Morgan on TalkTV, being broadcast tonight. Sunak admitted that he has failed on his NHS waiting lists target.

The fact that he has failed is not, of course, news. Last January as one of his five pledges, Sunak said: “NHS waiting lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly.” He did not say when, but waiting lists have been going up and so every assessment last month of how Sunak was doing on his pledges, like the Guardian’s, marked this down as failing.

But getting a frontline politician like Sunak to admit a failure on this scale is another matter, and Morgan did make news by forcing the PM into an awkward moment of candour. Last month, in interviews on the pledges, Sunak claimed he was “making progress”. But when Morgan asked him about waiting lists, Sunak said almost the opposite: “We haven’t made enough progress.”

The exchange went on:

Morgan: “You failed on that pledge?”

Sunak: “Yes, we have.”

Morgan: “Because you said, NHS waiting lists will fall. In fact, they are slightly coming down now. But the waiting list is still nearly half a million more than it was at the start of last year. Do you accept that?”

Sunak: “Yes. And we all know the reasons for that and what I would say to people is look we’ve invested record amounts in the NHS, more doctors, more nurses, more scanners. All these things mean that the NHS is doing more today than it ever has been. But industrial action has had an impact.”

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Rishi Sunak is due to meet Michelle O’Neill and Emma Little-Pengelly, Northern Ireland’s new first minister and deputy first minister, at Stormont. He is meeting Leo Varadkar, his Irish counterpart, too.

Morning: Sunak is expected to hold a press conference.

2.30pm: Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

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