Yesterday Keir Starmer criticised the Tory government for not implementing the recommendations from the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse when Kemi Badenoch pressed for a new inquiry at PMQs. Labour says it wants to implement the recommendations in the report published two years ago, but it has not said how it will do this in every case.

There are 20 recommendations in the report. One of them is for a tiered compensation scheme, open to anyone who “experienced child sexual abuse and exploitation where there is a clear connection to state or non-state institutions in England and Wales”.

According to a report in the Financial Times, the current government, and the last one, estimate this could cost around £7bn. The report says:

One former Tory official and a Labour figure both said they had been made aware of an initial estimate of close to £7bn for the compensation.

Another person who worked at the Home Office during [Rishi] Sunak’s government said there had been broader estimates of £5bn to £10bn for the cost. “We were pushing for it, but Rishi didn’t want to do it,” they said. “It was blocked.

The government says it wants to deliver “meaningful change” in response to the report’s recommendations, but that it is still working out potential costs.

Mick Lynch has said he will retire as general secretary of the RMT union after four years during which he became perhaps the most recognisable presence on picket lines amid the biggest rail and tube worker strikes for decades. Jasper Jolly has the story.

Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, has said he thinks there is a case for a “limited national inquiry” in child abuse by gangs.

Keir Starmer has not ruled out an inquiry, but he told MPs yesterday that survivors thought it was more important to press on with implementing the recommendations of the previous national inquiry and that he agreed. The Tories tried to turn a vote on the children’s wellbeing and schools bill last night into a vote in favour of a new inquiry, but they lost as Labour voted for the bill to proceed.

In an interview with the BBC, Burnham said:

In my view the government was right to reject that form of opportunism [the Tory amendment that was voted down].

But I did hear last night coming out of that debate ministers saying they are open to discussing issues now with survivors.

I will add my voice into this and say I do think there is the case for a limited national inquiry that draws on reviews like the one that I commissioned, and the one we have seen in Rotherham, the one we have seen in Telford, to draw out some of these national issues and compel people to give evidence who then may have charges to answer and be held to account.

The PM’s spokesperson told journalists at the lobby briefing that it was wrong to suggest the government was about to change its mind on an inquiry. He explained:

We’ve had a national inquiry, it … engaged 7,000 victims, and what victims are telling us is that they want to see action, and that’s where the government is focused, and that’s why we’re not going ahead with another national inquiry.

As Patrick Wintour wrote in his preview, David Lammy, the foreign secretary, used his speech today to say the post-cold war peace was “well and truly over”. Here is the full quote.

The post-cold war peace is well and truly over. This is a changed strategic environment.

The number of conflicts higher than at any time since 1945. The spectre of famine from Gaza to Sudan. And the most refugees and displaced people on record.

I am occasionally asked on my travels, here and of course on the doorstep around the country, when will the Kremlin threat, this upheaval that we’re experiencing, end? When will things get back to normal? My answer is that they will not. Europe’s future security is on a knife-edge.

Bevin warned in 1948 that we would only preserve peace by mobilising such force and I quote, “As will create confidence and energy on the one side and inspire respect and caution on the other.” And this is exactly what we need now.

That’s why our foreign policy has had to change. Inspired by Bevin, I call our new approach Progressive Realism. Taking the world as it is not as we wish it to be. Advancing progressive ends by realist means.

Schools in England face possible strikes later this year after the National Education Union announced it will hold an indicative ballot of members for industrial action over the Department for Education’s proposed 2.8% pay rise next year.

The NEU, the largest teachers’ union, will open the preliminary vote from the start of March on whether to proceed with a formal ballot. If carried, the union will then hold a formal strike ballot.

Daniel Kebede, the NEU’s general secretary, said the union objected both to the 2.8% award as proposed by the government to the independent School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB), and to the lack of additional funding for schools to meet the pay rise.

Kebede said:

Government must face up to the fact that the problems in teacher pay are far from resolved. Since 2010 pay for teachers in England has declined by a fifth. The profession no longer attracts enough graduates to keep up with the soaring vacancies.

The current proposal of 2.8% is not sufficient to even start to address the crisis in recruitment and retention.

Thousands of teachers voted for the change that Labour promised for education. They promised to invest in education, to recruit 6,500 teachers and to value education and to secure the life chances of our children. We need to see their commitment in deeds as well as words.

Sentiment alone will not fill the excessive teacher vacancies nor will deliver the world class education our children deserve.

The DfE’s evidence to the STRB submitted last month was that a 2.8% pay rise “would maintain the competitiveness of teachers’ pay” despite the challenging financial backdrop facing the government.

The shadow women’s minister, Mims Davies, has condemned Elon Musk’s abuse directed at Jess Phillips and others, in comments which went notably further than those of her leader, Kemi Badenoch.

Speaking in a Commons debate on violence against women and girls, one scheduled by coincidence a day after furious exchanges about whether there should be a new national inquiry into so-called grooming gangs, Davies said she backed Badenoch’s call for the inquiry.

However, she strongly condemned Musk, who has called Phillips, the safeguarding minister, a “rape genocide apologist” and a “witch”. Davies also warned that such language could make it less likely that women and girls who are abused and raped would want to come forward.

There was a good turnout for the debate, but no one attended from Reform UK, some of whose MPs had spoken out very robustly on Wednesday about grooming gangs and the need to better protect women and girls.

As Phillips sat opposite on the Labour benches, Davies said:

Let’s all agree in this chamber this afternoon, and say quite clearly: we do not accept, or see any way that we should accept, any abuse directed to us as members of parliament, as ministers, and people speaking up for women and girls, that we have seen in recent days.

She warned against what she called “a leap from rhetoric to intimidation, and then potentially to violence when it comes to the political arena”, saying:

We need to make sure that that doesn’t seep down into what victims feel might happen to them if they come forward and speak out.

Speaking after Davies, Sarah Owen, the Labour MP who chairs the Commons women and equalities committee, said studies showing that around one in three women say they had been sexually assaulted meant misogyny was a far wider problem than often billed.

In referring to Phillips as a “witch”, Musk had been “really digging deep into historic misogyny”, she added.

Elon Musk relentless social media attacks on Labour over recent days and weeks have been so extreme, and frequently false and absurd, that people have found it hard to work out to what extent he’s serious, and to what extent this is just some behavioural abnormality.

According to the Financial Times, he’s serious. Anna Gross and Joe Miller report that Musk has “privately discussed with allies how Sir Keir Starmer could be removed as UK prime minister before the next general election, according to people briefed on the matter”. In their story, Gross and Miller say:

Musk, the world’s richest man and key confidant of US president-elect Donald Trump, is probing how he and his rightwing allies can destabilise the UK Labour government beyond the aggressive posts he has issued on his social media platform X, the people said.

“His view is that western civilisation itself is threatened,” one of the people added.

Musk has sought information about whether it might be possible to build support for alternative British political movements — notably the rightwing populist Reform UK party — to force a change of prime minister before the next election, according to associates.

Labour’s proposal to loosen planning regulations for farmers will deluge rivers with chicken faeces, environmental campaigners have warned. As Helena Horton reports, the environment secretary, Steve Reed, promised farmers today they would be able to build larger chicken sheds, but experts have said this would create “megafarms” and contribute to river pollution.

The Conservative party is saying that Rachel Reeves should cancel her trip to China because of the turmoil in the bond market. (See 12.10pm.)

But Philip Hammond, who was chancellor when Theresa May was PM and who is now a Tory peer, told the World at One that Reeves should press on with the visit. He said:

I wouldn’t personally recommend the chancellor to cancel her trip to China. I think the trip to China is important, and I think this can wait until she gets back next week.

But I do think she will need to reassure parliament about what is going on when she does get back next week.

Asked who worried the chancellor should be, he said:

I think it’s right that we don’t get obsessed with single day movements in the markets, because there are a lot of short-term drivers in the markets as well.

But it’s clear that, on a medium term trajectory, the markets are concerned about the sustainability of the fiscal position in the UK and about the robustness of the UK economy.

If he was still chancellor, he would be “worried about the trend of what is happening”, he said.

Hammond said some of what was happening was due to trends in the global economy. But he says businesses in Britain were also expecting the government to take measures that would “provide a visible and clear boost to economic growth”, and they had not happened. As a result business was “confused, angry, disrupted in terms of what the direction of travel is”, he said. He went on:

I think we now need a message from the chancellor that she understands the concerns of business and that she is going to put business investment and economic growth at the very front of her agenda.

Graeme Wearden has more on the bond market story in his business live blog.

An academic who’s an expert in media law has been in touch to give me his assessment of Liz Truss’s cease and desist letter. (See 11.58am.) He does not want to publish his name, but he says that if Truss ever did try to sue Keir Starmer for libel, she would not stand a chance.

He also describes the letter as a classic example of a Slapp.

He says:

The letter sent by Truss’s lawyers to Starmer does not explicitly threaten to sue for libel, but the language in which it is couched makes such a threat implicit. However, a libel claim in these circumstances would certainly fail.

Under section 4 of the Defamation Act 2013 - enacted, of course, under a Tory-led coalition government - there is a defence for statements made with a reasonable belief that making them is in the public interest. Political debate is a classic example of public interest speech, and the courts will steer clear of evaluating its content. It does not matter whether, on a technical economic analysis, Truss did in fact ‘crash the economy’. What matters is the fact that there is a legitimate, robust political debate around whether she did that. Starmer has weighed in on one side of that debate, and she has been free to put the other side (which she has, vigorously).

All the court needs to find is that: (a) Starmer’s comments were on a matter of public interest, and (b) Starmer, in making his comments, reasonably believed that communicating them to the public at large was in the public interest.

‘Public interest’ has never been defined at law, but in the context of the cut and thrust of general election debate, and political debate more generally, a court would undoubtedly find in Starmer’s favour on this, because it would not endorse setting a precedent that risked shutting down debate on the economy between leading politicians.

Incidentally, since there has been much debate around so-called Slapps (strategic lawsuits against public participation), much of the ostensible concern about which has been raised by Conservative politicians in recent years (as well as outlets such as the Guardian), it is perhaps worth pointing out that Truss’s letter is a textbook example of a Slapp. It implicitly threatens a totally unmeritorious legal claim in a bid to cause the prime minister to stop making statements on a matter of public debate. It is a strategic attempt to silence political criticism - something that is, quite nakedly, a Slapp. At this point, there is no specific anti-Slapp law in the UK, although existing civil procedure mechanisms would in all likelihood prevent such a claim reaching trial.

During his interview round this mornig David Lammy, the foreign secretary, rejected claims that the government is applying a definition of Islamophobia that says people should not talk about Muslim grooming gangs.

Kemi Badenoch raised this issued at PMQs yesterday. She told Keir Starmer:

The Labour party has adopted the APPG [all-party parliamentay group] definition of “Islamophobia”. The same APPG report said that talking about sex groomers was an example of Islamophobia. This is exactly why people are scared to tell the truth.

And today the Times is running a story saying the APPG definition that Badenoch was talking about “put ‘grooming gangs’ in inverted commas and suggested that using the term in relation to Muslims was racist”.

Badenoch was referring to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslim, which put out a statement yesterday saying Badenoch misrepresented what it was saying.

The APPG summarises Islamophobia as “rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. In a report published in 2018, it does not say all references to grooming gangs are Islamophobic. But it says it would be Islamophobic to talk about Muslim grooming gangs in circumstances where, if the perpetrators were Christian, that would not be mentioned.

And, as an example of Islamphobia, it says:

Using the symbols and images associated with classic Islamophobia (e.g. Muhammed being a paedophile, claims of Muslims spreading Islam by the sword or subjugating minority groups under their rule) to characterise Muslims as being ‘sex groomers’, inherently violent or incapable of living harmoniously in plural societies.

Asked about this in interviews this morning, Lammy said the Labour party had accepted the APPG’s definition of Islamophobia. But he said the government had not adopted that definition, and the government’s definition was “still being determined”.

And he told Times Radio:

That’s a process that’s underway and we’ve got to wait to see where that comes out.

But I’m quite sure that that process will not lead to anything that is an impediment in going after paedophiles, whatever their background, religious background, ethnicity, or the colour of their skin. Very, very clear on that.

Downing Street has signalled that Keir Starmer plans to ignore Liz Truss’s legal letter saying he should stop saying she crashed the economy because that, she claims, is untrue and libellous. (See 11.58am.)

Asked about the letter at the morning lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson said:

I am not sure I have seen the detail of the letter, but from what I can my gather, I don’t think the prime minister is the only person in the country who shares the view in relation to the previous government’s handling of the economy.

I guess the question is whether she will be writing to millions of people up and down the country as well, who felt her economic record which pushed their mortgage bills up.

Here is Eleni Courea’s story about the letter.

UPDATE: The PM’s spokesperson also said:

You’ve got the prime minister’s language, which he absolutely stands by in relation to the previous government’s record.

And you don’t have to hear it from the prime minister. I think you could ask people up and down the country of the impact of previous economic management on mortgages, on inflation.

Asked whether Starmer had any plans to moderate his language about Truss, the spokesperson replied: “No.”

During the urgent question on borrowing, the Lib Dem MP Max Wilkinson asked Darren Jones, chief secretary to the Treasury, about Liz Truss’s “cease and desist” letter (see 11.58am) and joked that Jones “might want to take advantage of parliamentary privilege” if he wanted to talk about the mini-budget.

Jones replied:

It was a direct connection between the hubris and the ego and the lack of focus on working people that Conservative ministers took when they were in government last time that ruined the lives of people across this country.

I say that today, I’ll say every single day because the British people must never forget the recklessness of the Conservative party.

The Conservatives are now saying Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, should cancel her trip to China because of the rise in government borrowing costs. In a statement Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, said:

Today Labour has been forced to make a panicked attempt to reassure the markets on the economic mess of their own making.

But Rachel Reeves is missing in action - instead wheeling out her deputy to defend her loss of control of the public finances.

The chancellor should now cancel her travel and focus on this country instead.

Graeme Wearden has more from what Darren Jones said on this in response to the UQ on the business live blog.

Given what Darren Jones was saying during the UQ on borrowing costs (see 10.51am), Liz Truss’s lawyers might be writing another letter. As the Telegraph reports, the former Tory PM has “sent a cease and desist letter to Keir Starmer demanding that he stops claiming she crashed the economy”.

Truss says that the claim is untrue and defamatory. She does not explicitly threaten to sue Starmer for libel (perhaps because she realises that such an action would have very little chance of success). But she does ask him to stop making the claim.

In their story Ben Riley-Smith and Tim Wallace explain:

The lawyers even suggest that the assertions from Sir Keir before the July general election [that Truss did crash the economy] contributed towards Ms Truss losing her battle to be re-elected as the MP for South West Norfolk.

At the core of the row are the weeks after Ms Truss’s so-called mini-Budget in September 2022, when financial markets reacted negatively to its major tax cuts funded by borrowing.

The legal letter argues that the financial movements did not amount to an economic crash, since there was no fall in economic output or rise in unemployment – the usual signifiers of such an event.

The lawyers back up their claim by quote a report from Andrew Lilico, a rightwing economist who advised Truss when she was running for the Tory leadership. The report says the “financial volatility” of 2022 did not amount to the economy crashing, and that the mini-budget was only one component of that volatility anyway.

The Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson, who has interviewed Lilico on a podcast, has posted the letter on X.

NHS England has published its monthly performance figures. Here are the main points, from PA Media.

• The waiting list for routine hospital treatment in England has fallen to its lowest level for 18 months. PA says:

An estimated 7.48m treatments were waiting to be carried out at the end of November, relating to 6.28m patients – down from 7.54m treatments and 6.34m patients at the end of October. These are the lowest figures since May 2023. The list hit a record high in September 2023, with 7.77m treatments and 6.50m patients.

• A total of 221,889 people in England had been waiting more than 52 weeks to start routine hospital treatment at the end of November, down from 234,885 at the end of October and the lowest number since November 2020. PA says the previous government and NHS England set the ambition of eliminating all waits of more than a year by March 2025.

• The NHS situation report also shows that 42.2% of patients arriving by ambulance at hospitals in England last week waited at least 30 minutes to be handed over to A&E teams – the highest figure so far this winter. PA says this is up from 32.1% the previous week, and higher than in the equivalent week last winter, when the proportion stood at 30.9%.

• Some 21.3% of ambulance handovers last week, or 19,554 patients, were delayed by more than an hour, again, the highest figure so far this winter, up week-on-week from 12.9% and higher than this point a year ago (13.4%), PA says.

• The number of people waiting more than 12 hours in A&E departments in England from a decision to admit to actually being admitted stood at 54,207 in December, up from 45,791 in November. PA says the record high for a calendar month is 54,573, which occurred in December 2022. Some 71.1% of patients in England were seen within four hours in A&Es last month, down from 72.1% in November.

Half of the county councils due to have elections in England this spring could ask to have them postponed, Eleni Courea and Jessica Murray report.

Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, said that Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, should have been replying to the UQ herself.

He said government borrowing costs had hit a 27-year high in the past 48 hours.

He said Labour promised before the election it would get debt down, not raise taxes and grow the economy. But that is not happening, he said.

As a result of the budget, business confidence “simply evaporated”, he said.

Higher debt and lower growth are understandably now causing real concerns among the public, amongst businesses and in the markets. And despite what [Darren Jones] says about international factors, the premium on our borrowing costs compared to German bonds recently hit its highest level since 1990.

With these rising costs, regrettably, the government may now be on course to breach their fiscal rules.

Stride said there were media reports saying Reeves would have to make an “emergency intervention” to sooth the markets. If that did happen, it should happen in the Commons, he said. And he asked what the impact would be on people’s mortgages.

He ended:

The government’s decision to let rip on borrowing means that their own tax rises will end up being swallowed up by the higher borrowing costs, so that no benefit to the British people.

Far from this government laying the foundations for a stronger economy, the chancellor is squandering the endeavours of millions of hard working people up and down our country who are now having to pay the price for yet another socialist government, taxing and spending their way into trouble.

Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, is responding to the UQ about borrowing costs.

He says there is a long-standing convention that the government does not comment on movements in the financial markets, and that will not change today, he says.

He says there are a range of factors explaining changes in bond or gilt yields. It is normal for them to vary, he says.

The gilt markets continue to function “in an orderly way”, he says. And there is still “strong” demand for UK debt, he says.

The Debt Management Office’s gilt sales operations continue to see strong demand, with the latest auction held yesterday receiving three times as many bids as the amount on offer.

There will be an update from the Office for Budget Responsibility on 26 March, he says.

He goes on:

There should be no doubt of the government’s commitment to economic stability and sound public finances. This is why meeting the fiscal rules is non negotiable.

And he ends with an attack on the Tories, saying they “crashed the economy with unfunded tax cuts, unrealistic public spending cuts and clear disregard for the consequences for family finances”.

Here are some more foreign policy lines from David Lammy’s interviews this morning.

• Lammy, the foreign secretary, welcomed signs that Donald Trump is backing away from claims that he would be able to negotiate peace in Ukraine within a day of taking office. This was something he said when he was campaigning, but not a claim he has repeated recently. Lammy told the Today programme:

Donald Trump is not yet in power. I think the indications are, from what I’ve seen over the last few days, a slight pushback on this sense that somehow a deal will be achieved on January 21, I think that’s now unlikely. And we’re hearing this actually the timetable’s moved down somewhat … towards Easter.

• He said the UK government agreed with Trump about the need for Nato members to spend more on defence. But he refused to commit to the target of getting defence spending to 5% of GDP, which Trump says should be a goal for Nato members. The UK is currently at 2.3%, but Lammy said the government would set out the roadmap to 2.5% in the spring. Asked about the 5% goal set by Trump, Lammy said the US is only at 3.38%. “So [Trump] would have to set out his own rhetoric of how they were going to get to 5%”, he said.

• He sidestepped questions about whether Elon Musk’s description of Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, as a “rape genocide apologist” was an incitement to violence. Asked on the Today programme if he thought this went beyond legal free speech, and amounted to incited to violence, Lammy said he disagreed with Musk and thought Phillips had done as much as any MP to protect women from violent men. But, despite Amol Rajan, the presenter, putting it to Lammy that he was a laywer by training, Lammy continued to sidestep the question. He said there was “a fine line between free speech and hate speech”. But he did not say wherer or not Musk had crossed that.

The pound has fallen to a 14-month low against the US dollar as the sell-off in the bond market fuelled investors’ anxiety over UK assets and piled further pressure on the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, Julia Kollewe and Graeme Wearden report.

At the Oxford Farming Conference Steve Reed, the environment secretary, has just finished his speech. He is now taking questions.

Q: It is hard to express the anger, disappointment and despair felt by farmers about the inheritance tax changes. How will you restore confidence?

Reed says it is important for the government to “keep listening”.

Referring to the first question, he says he has spoken to protesters. He was struck by how many of them said this was the final straw. There was a sense “these straws had been piling up for far too long”.

The anger was not “just over that one issue”, he says.

He says he wants to help farmers make a profit.

On the inheritance tax rise, he says he knows this is very unwelcome. It is not something the government wanted to do.

For most farmers, the first £3m will be exempt. And after that they will pay inheritance tax at half the normal rate.

He repeats the point about how the problems facing farmers go beyond this one issue.

In response to a further question, Reed makes the same point, saying:

The problems in farming have mounted up over many, many years.

In his interviews this morning David Lammy, the foreign secretary, defended the proposals he is formally announcing in a speech later to use economic sanctions to target the gangs organising people smuggling.

On the Today programme, when it was put to him that these sanctions would not affect assets held outside the EU, or people operating outside the banking system, Lammy accepted that there was “an informality” to the cash networks they were using. But he said there were companies behind the people smugglers. We know who those companies are. We can go after those value chains and those supply chains,” he said.

In an interview with Sky News he said that, while this was not the whole solution, it could be a significant part of the solution.

You can freeze their bank accounts, you can deploy travel bans, you combine with other partners, particularly European allies, the United States and others. This is the first set of designations using migration specifically.

Of course it’s not the whole solution, but I think it can be a significant part of the solution particularly for the value and supply chains that people are using as a means to get people across borders.

Farmer have been protesting in Oxford outside the Oxford Farming Conference where Steve Reed, the environment secretary, is giving a speech. They are campaign against the government’s plans to impose inheritance tax on farms. Mo Metcalf-Fisher, a spokesperson for the Countryside Alliance, said:

Until Labour are serious about … rethinking this policy, most people aren’t really willing to listen to any other plans they have for the countryside. A pre-rehearsed speech that barely touches on inheritance tax is not going to be enough to calm us down.

The Times has splashed this morning on an interview with Sebastian Gorka, who is going to be director of counter-terrorism in Donald Trump’s new administration. Gorka told the paper that Trump would expect the UK to take back British members of Islamic State who are currently in camps in north-east Syria.

Gorka said there was a commitment for countries like the UK to repatriate their extremists. He implied this would cover Shamima Begum, who went to Syria as a 15-year-old schoolgirl and who has had her citizenship revoked on national security grounds, preventing her return. Gorka said:

Any nation which wishes to be seen as a serious ally and friend of the most powerful nation in the world should act in a fashion that reflects that serious commitment. That is doubly so for the UK, which has a very special place in President Trump’s heart, and we would all wish to see the ‘special relationship’ fully re-established.

In an interview with ITV’s Good Morning Britain this morning, David Lammy, the foreign secretary, said Begum would not be allowed to return to the UK. Asked about the Times story, he said:

Shamima Begum will not be coming back to the UK. It’s gone right through the courts. She’s not a UK national.

We will not be bringing her back to the UK. We’re really clear about that.

We will act in our security interests. And many of those in those camps are dangerous, are radicals.

If some of them were to return, they would “have to be, frankly, jailed as soon as they arrived,” Lammy said.

This is what Dan Sabbagh and Eleni Courea wrote about the situation facing Begum and the dozens of other Islamic State-linked Britons in Syria last month, following the fall of the Assad regime.

Good morning. For the first time in six months, David Lammy, the foreign secretary, was put up by No 10 to do the morning broadcast interview round – ahead of a speech he is giving later. At PMQs yesterday, perhaps surprisingly, Keir Starmer was not asked about Donald Trump’s suggestion that he might invade Greenland, an autonomous territory that belongs to Denmark. The French and German governments have both condemned Trump’s comments. But, in an interview with the Today programme, Lammy was rather more diplomatic.

• Lammy said that, although Trump’s language could be “destabilising”, he did not always do what he threatened. Asked about Trump’s comments, Lammy said:

I think that we know from Donald Trump’s first term that the intensity of his rhetoric, and the unpredictability sometimes of what he says, can be destabilising. He did it with Nato. But in fact, in practice, he sent more troops to Europe under his administration. He sent the first Javelins [anti-tank weapons] and weapons to Ukraine under his administration.

• Lammy said that Trump would not use military force to seize Greenland – despite suggesting he might. Asked if the UK should be following France and Germany in saying this would be unacceptable, Lammy replied:

Let’s be serious … It’s not going to happen because no Nato allies have gone to war since the birth of Nato which Ernest Bevin, my great predecessor, was part of.

• Lammy said Trump’s comments should be understood as reflection of his concerns about Arctic security. He explained:

Here, I suspect on Greenland, what he’s targeting is his concerns about Russia and China in the Arctic, his concerns about national economic security. He recognises, I’m sure, that in the end, Greenland today is a Kingdom of Denmark. There is a debate in Greenland about their own self determination. But behind it, I think, are his concerns about the Arctic. Of course, the US has troops and a base on Greenland. So it has got a stake in that Arctic region.

There is a lot more from the Lammy interviews. I will post the highlights shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.25am: Steve Reed, the environment secretary, speaks at the Oxford Farming Conference.

Morning: Keir Starmer is visiting a police station in London.

9.30am: NHS England publishes its monthly performance figures.

9.30am: Heidi Alexander, the transport secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

After 10.30am: Lucy Powell, the leader of the Commons, takes questions in the house on next week’s business.

11.30am: David Lammy, the foreign secretary, gives a speech on using sanctions to target people smugglers.

Morning: Kemi Badenoch is visiting a school in London.

After 11.30am: Alex Davies-Jones, the victims minister, opens a general Commons debate on violence against women and girls.

Morning: Angela Rayner, the deputy PM, is doing visits in Glasgow where she will be talking about employment rights.

Noon: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, takes questions at Holyrood.

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