No 10 won’t commit to retaliatory action if US imposes tariffs on metal imports – UK politics live | Politics

The trade body UK Steel has warned that the imposition of US tariffs on UK steel would be “a devastating blow” to the industry. Graeme Wearden has more on his business live blog.

And Chris Stein has more global reaction on his US live blog.

Douglas Alexander, the trade minister, will take charge of union and devolution policy for the government, as well as dealing with the trade portfolio, No 10 has said.

Asked at the lobby briefing why Alexander had been made a Cabinet Office minister, as well as a Department for Business and Trade minister, in today’s mini-reshuffle (see 11.55am), the PM’s spokesperson said Alexander would “cover the union and devolution policy across Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and support cross-government coordination and engagement with the devolved governments, in addition to his existing responsibilities at DBT”.

Alexander, who represents Lothian East, held several cabinet posts in the last Labour government, including being Scottish secretary.

At the lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson claimed the government remains committed to modernising gender recognition laws – despite a report claiming that the plans are being quietly shelved.

Asked about the report, the spokesperson said:

The king’s speech sets out out our legislative programme. But we stand by our commitment to modernise gender recognition rules as set out in the manifesto, and we’ll set out our next steps on this work in due course.

In its manifesto Labour said:

We will also modernise, simplify, and reform the intrusive and outdated gender recognition law to a new process. We will remove indignities for trans people who deserve recognition and acceptance; whilst retaining the need for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria from a specialist doctor, enabling access to the healthcare pathway.

In her Times story, Geradline Scott says that, while the manifesto commitment is not being officially dropped, because that would trigger an activist backlash, multiple sources have said they “expect the plans to quietly ‘go away’”. Scott says:

One insider pointed to a poll this week that put Reform above Labour for the first time, and said it would be “catnip” for Nigel Farage’s party if Labour was to push ahead on gender.

Another warned that going ahead would give more ammunition to Elon Musk in his attacks on the government, at a time when President Trump is acting to bolster single-sex spaces.

A third source referenced the fronts on which the government is already defending its position, such as winter fuel payments, the economy and inheritance tax, and said: “Why would we open that particular can of worms for ourselves at this particular moment?”

Asked about these claims, the PM’s spokesperson said:

I don’t recognise that reporting. The manifesto commitment remains … I can’t get ahead of future king’s speeches and legislative sessions. But, on modernising gender recognition rules, the commitment stands as per the manifesto and we’ll set out those next steps in due course.

Downing Street has refused to say if the UK will retaliate if the US imposes 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, as President Trump says it will.

Asked if the government was worried about the threat, the PM’s spokesperson said the UK and US “work closely together on a range of economic issues, supporting jobs” on both sides of the Atlantic. He went on:

We will obviously continue to have those conversations with counterparts in the US. I haven’t seen any detailed proposals following the reporting overnight, but we will obviously engage as appropriate.

Asked if the UK would retaliate in the event of tariffs being imposed, the spokesperson said that was hypothetical.

But he said it was important to put this “in context”. He said in 2023 the US accounted for just 5% of UK steel exports, and 6% of UK aluminium exports.

In an interview with the Guardian’s Pippa Crerar last week, David Lammy, the foreign secretary, implied the government would not go for retaliatory tariffs. He said:

It’s a cross-party position that we’re an open, free-market society that doesn’t believe in tariffs, in either direction.

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson rejected the suggestion in a Daily Telegraph report that the government could water down parts of the Online Safety Act to protect US tech companies, in the hope of getting President Trump to exempt the UK from tariffs. (See 10.15am.)

Asked about the story, he said:

The Online Safety Act is already law. It’s already being implemented over the coming months. It will introduce strong protections for children, it will tackle illegal content online, it will oblige all social media companies to remove illegal content and content harmful to children here in the UK. Failure to abide by it could lead to significant fines and legal action.

Asked it there would be any change to the pace at which it will be rolled out, or if any aspects of the law might be held back, the spokesperson said everything was being implemented as intended. “The implemention timetable is as it has been set out,” he said.

MPs’ salaries could rise to almost £94,000 per year after the body in charge of their pay recommended a slightly above-inflation increase, PA Media reports. PA says:

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) announced that it is proposing to increase MPs’ pay by 2.8% in April, subject to a consultation.

If approved, the increase would take an MP’s annual salary to £93,904, up from £91,346. At the start of the last parliament, in 2019, MPs were paid £79,468.

The Ipsa proposal is in line with the government’s recommendations on a wider public sector pay increase for this year and slightly above the current inflation rate of 2.5%. The Bank of England has forecast an increase in inflation later this year.

MPs do not determine their own salaries, which have been set by Ipsa since the watchdog was established in 2011 in the wake of the expenses scandal.

Ipsa chairman Richard Lloyd said the body aims to “make fair decisions on pay, both for MPs and the public”. He added: “Our pay proposal for 2025-26 reflects the experience of the wider working public sector population, and recognises both the vital role of MPs and the current economic climate.”

Ipsa will consult on its proposals until mid-March. It is also carrying out a wider review of MPs’ salaries, which it is obliged to do in the first year after an election.

Kemi Badenoch has now been Conservative leader for 100 days. According to polling for YouGov, only 14% of Britons – and 26% of people who voted Tory at the last election – see her as a prime minister in waiting.

The polling also suggests that, while Keir Starmer is seen as more suitable to be PM than Kemi Badenoch, Ed Davey, or Nigel Farage, Davey is seen as a better candidate than either the Tory leader or the Reform UK leader.

Here is a Guardian assessment looking at how Badenoch is seen to have performed in her first 100 days at Tory leader.

And here is an extract.

A common complaint is that Badenoch appears to view media duties as a chore and a challenge, often sending out shadow cabinet colleagues in her place.

“Kemi absolutely hates doing media. She does not see it as an integral part of her job,” one former adviser said. “We could get away with that in government but in opposition you have to turn up to the opening of an envelope. She should be trying to get clips on the news every night. But she is not prepared to do it.”

“In opposition, it’s a one-man or one-woman show,” an MP said. “With the best will in the world, voters don’t know who Chris Philp is, and they don’t care what he says.”

Some senior Conservatives complain that Badenoch neglects other basics of her job, in particular the gruelling circuit of fundraising dinners and constituency events. “She thinks she can do the job differently, but the fact is, 90% of it is graft,” said one Tory MP. “She wants to be an architect, but being leader of the opposition is more like being a bricklayer.”

They added: “The problem is, the job she was applying for was not the one she thought she was applying for. She was running to be leader of the opposition, but she thought she was running to head up a right-of-centre thinktank.”

Downing Street has announced a mini-reshuffle following the sacking of Andrew Gwynne as a health minister over the weekend.

Ashley Dalton is replacing Gwynne as a health minister. Dalton was a backbencher.

Douglas Alexander, the trade minister, is having his portfolio altered, because he will now be a minister in the Cabinet Office as well as a minister in the Department for Business and Trade. He is a minister of state, and his is minister for trade policy and economic security.

And two Labour peers have been appointed whips in the Lords: Claude Moraes, a former MEP, and Phil Wilson, a former MP.

Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, has written an article for the Guardian saying Labour’s crackdown on illegal working, using TV footage of deportations to show what it is doing, suggests it is making the same mistake the Conservatives did when they were in office.

Here is an extract.

Forcing those whose asylum applications have been rejected or who have overstayed their visas on to planes has never been the most effective way to return people and never will be. Being punitive just scares people into hiding. They lose contact with the authorities, living a life on the margins.

Voluntary returns are far more effective, and the government should know this because it was the last Labour administration that commissioned independent agencies to run a voluntary programme that saw numbers increase. Building trust with refugee and migrant communities and treating people with dignity and humanity was far more successful than an enforcement approach.

Today, though, the entire returns operation is run by the Home Office, and officials quietly acknowledge they struggle to make it work because they can’t track people down who are facing destitution, surviving in hiding, fearful of the authorities.

Rather than working to deliver sensible system reforms with partners who have credible solutions, the government appears to be now adopting the similar misdiagnosis that the previous Conservative government was so willing to peddle – that too many people coming across the Channel are either foreign criminals or “economic migrants” we should be rid of.

But we know from our analysis of Channel crossings that the top nationalities who have been making the crossings every year since 2021 include many refugees from Afghanistan, Sudan, Eritrea, Iran and Syria.

And here is the full article.

In Labour circles there is intense debate at the moment about how the the party should respond to the threat posed by Reform UK. One response has been to toughen up the policy, and language, on migration.

But today the TUC is highlighting an alternative approach. As Jessica Elgot reports, it has released polling, jointly commissioned with Hope Note Hate, showing that there is considerable public support for the employment protection measures in the employment rights bill – even from Reform UK and Conservative party voters.

Reform claims to be a party for working people. But the TUC has released a video apparently showing some of Nigel Farage’s constituents shocked at learning he was opposed to legislation that, on the basis of what they had been told, they thought he should be supporting.

Paul Nowak, the TUC general secretary, said:

Reform is defying its own voters and constituents on workers’ rights. Reform MPs voted against the employment rights bill at every stage.

Nigel Farage and Reform aren’t on the side of working people – they’re on the side of bad bosses, zero hours contracts and fire and rehire.

The Home Office is today highlighting figures showing that the number of raids and arrests aimed at people working in the UK illegally is going up. It says:

Throughout January alone, immigration enforcement teams descended on 828 premises, including nail bars, convenience stores, restaurants and car washes, marking a 48% rise compared to the previous January. Arrests also surged to 609, demonstrating a 73% increase from just 352 the previous year.

More broadly, between 5 July last year and 31 January, both illegal working visits and arrests have soared by around 38% compared to the same 12 months prior. During the same period, the Home Office issued a total of 1,090 civil penalty notices. Employers could face a fine of up to £60,000 per worker if found liable.

In an interview on the Today programme, Peter Walsh, a senior reserarcher at the Migration Observatory, a migration policy thinktank based at the University of Oxford, said that enforcement activity was definitely going up, but that fines were still lower than they were before Covid. He explained:

The Labour statistics released today they show visits to businesses and arrests in January are up, but that’s only one month. So I think we should be somewhat cautious about inferring too much from those data.

More instructive, I think, is the number of civil penalty notices which have been issued to employers of illegal workers in the first seven months of the Labour government. That’s over 1,000. Now, that is more in recent years. They were already trending upwards from historic lows after the pandemic, and they’re still below levels seen a decade ago – about a third fewer civil penalty notices issued than in six-months periods in say, 2015.

Walsh said that that raids like the ones being publicised by the Home Office today do lead to more people being removed from the UK, and do deter people from employing illegal workers. But he said they were unlikely to have much impact on the number of people trying to cross the Channel in small boats. He explained:

I think [the raids] have two general impacts.

They do increase the number of people returned. So raids on businesses are one of the ways that people without status go into the removals process – not necessarily biggest one, but they are one route.

And there is also some evidence as well that they deter employers from employing people who don’t have the right to work. It does make them think twice.

The big question, of course, is, well, will it stop people crossing in small boats?

Now that’s very difficult to say, but to the extent that it prevents employers from employing illegal workers, it could deter people crossing the Channel for work reasons, though, of course, it’s unlikely to deter people seeking protection. And the data suggests actually that latter group make up quite large shares of those [people on small boats].

As we report in our story on this today, between 2018 and September 2023 93% of small boat arrivals claimed asylum, with up to three-quarters granted it and more who were initially refused winning their cases on appeal.

Today the Telegraph is running a frontpage story claiming that the government may exempt some US tech companies, like Elon Musk’s X, from aspects of the Online Safety Act to ensure the UK avoids President Trump’s tariffs. It says:

The law, which regulates online speech, is thought to be heavily disliked by the president’s administration because it can levy massive fines on US tech companies.

Downing Street is willing to renegotiate elements of the Act in order to strike a trade deal, should it be raised by the US, The Telegraph understands.

In an interview on ITV’s Good Morning Britain this morning, Angela Eagle, the minister for border security and asylum, said that she had not heard anything that made her believe the story was true and that the government would not want to be watering down the law in this area.

She said:

I certainly, from my perch in government, haven’t seen any corroboration that that’s likely to happen …

We know that, since the act was passed, the tech bros in America have got very close to the administration there and are watering down rather than strengthening some of the rules about content.

But I wouldn’t have thought there would be any justification whatsoever for keeping violent videos available across the globe when they can be taken down, and we are working very closely to ensure that we can get that damaging content off the internet so that it is not seen by people who can be radicalised by it.

I can’t imagine that we would be in a situation where we would want to see a weakening rather than a strengthening of safeguards in that area.

The Labour MP Oliver Ryan is to meet the government chief whip to decide on any sanctions over his membership of a WhatsApp group that featured racist, sexist and other offensive comments, Angela Eagle has said. Peter Walker has the story.

Good morning. Politicians like to claim that they are completely different from their opponents, because to win elections they need dividing line issues, but in truth the similarities can be striking too, because they end up facing the same challenges, and the electorate does not change much either. This Labour government is not the same as the last Conservative one. But at times it has sounded like Rishi Sunak (it adopted his signature anti-smoking legislation wholesale), Liz Truss (ministers constantly stress that growth is the number one priority) and even Boris Johnson (after the negativism of last year’s budget, there is a pivot towards more optimism). And today it it is sounding a bit like Theresa May in her “hostile environment” phase as home secretary.

The Home Office has embarked on a publicity blitz to show that it it beefing up efforts to catch people who are working in the UK illegally and to deport people who should not be in the country. This is not just policy; it involves ‘show not tell’ communications. As Pippa Crerar, Diane Taylor and Peter Walker report:

Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is expected to join an early morning raid this week targeting illegal working, while the government will broadcast footage of deportations, a number of them involving foreign criminals, from detention to removal centres and on to waiting planes …

Downing Street is planning to go beyond simply taking the fight to Reform. “We don’t think it’s enough just to look strong on migration, we actually need to be strong. We’ve done really well on returns but people say they don’t believe it, that if it was true they’d see it on the news,” a source said.

This sort of approach is contentious in liberal circles (which may be part of the appeal in No 10, where Labour figures are worried a lot more at the moment about losing votes to Reform UK than losing votes to the Liberal Democrats and the Greens) and the Refugee Council has criticised the Home Office for the way it is publicising what it is doing. Enver Solomon, its chief executive, told the Independent:

It was not long ago that hate-filled mobs attempted to burn refugees alive in a hotel. Communities are still healing from the appalling violence last summer, so the government should not risk driving up mistrust by using performative tactics that play into negative and dangerous narratives about immigration.

The public want a system that is orderly and controlled but also compassionate. That includes returning people without a right to be in the UK, but doing so in a dignified way instead of melodramatic television footage that will not build trust in government.

Angela Eagle, the minister for border security and asylum, has been doing an interview round this morning and she defended that the government is doing. Asked whether the policy was line with Keir Starmer’s previous pledge in opposition to create an immigration system “based on compassion and dignity”, Eagle replied:

I don’t believe for one minute that enforcing the law and ensuring that people who break the law face the consequences of doing that, up to and including deportation, arrest, is not compassionate. We have to have a system where the rules are respected and enforced.

She also defended the Home Office releasing pictures and footage of immigration raids and deportations:

It’s important that we show what we are doing and it’s important that we send messages to people who may have been sold lies about what will await them in the UK if they get themselves smuggled in.

They are more likely to be living in squalid conditions, being exploited by vicious gangs.

It’s important that we get those realities across and it’s important that that’s done in imagery as well as words.

There will be more on this as the day goes on. Here is the agenda for the day.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

Afternoon: Farmers hold a rally in Westminster to protest about the extension of inheritance tax to cover farms.

2.30pm: John Healey, the defence secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

After 3.30pm: MPs debate the second reading of the border security, asylum and immigration bill.

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