North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll quits Labour and announces bid to run against former party as independent – UK politics live

The Labour party has put out a statement suggesting that Jamie Driscoll was blocked from standing in the contest to be the party’s candidate for north-east mayor because he was not good enough. In a statement on Driscoll’s decision to quit the party, a spokesperson said:

The Labour party is delighted that local party members have selected Kim McGuinness as our candidate for the north-east mayoral election next year.

With Keir Starmer as leader, the Labour party is a changed party, relentlessly focussed on delivering for working people, and we make no apologies that Labour candidates are held to the highest standard.

The Tories have let our region down, and as Labour mayor, Kim will be the strong voice the north-east deserves.

Labour has said Driscoll was blocked because he shared a platform with Ken Loach, the film director who has strongly defended Jeremy Corbyn against the claims that Corbyn tolerated antisemitism in the party. Driscoll has said he was talking to Loach at an arts event, about Loach’s films set in the north-east, and that if that is unacceptable for a Labour figure, the party is in a “dark place”.

Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, has said that Scottish Labour is opposed to the two-child benefit cap (see 9.35am) and will push Keir Starmer to get rid of it if he wins the next general election. Sarwar told the Daily Record:

Scottish Labour policy has not changed. We continue to oppose the two-child limit. We continue to believe that it exacerbates poverty, and we continue to believe that it needs to change.

What we recognise is an incoming Labour government will inherit economic carnage and that means we will not be able to do everything we want, and we won’t be able to do everything as fast as we want.

But we will continue to press any incoming UK Labour government to move as fast as they can within our fiscal rules to remove this heinous policy.

Jamie Driscoll, the North of Tyne mayor, has resigned from the Labour party. He was recently banned from standing in the contest to be the party’s candidate for mayor of the north-east (a new post, including the area covered by the North of Tyne mayoralty, with a wider chunk of the north-east also included), and at the time the decision was seen as one of the most extreme of many recent cases of candidates not wholly aligned with Keir Starmer and his politics being purged from Labour contests on dubious grounds.

In a serious of tweets, Driscoll says that if he can raise £25,000 for a campaign by the end of August, he will stand as an independent against Labour’s candidate for north-east mayor. He says:

I’ve decided to resign from @UKLabour and serve as an Independent Mayor.

People are tired of being controlled by Westminster and Party HQs. They want someone to stand up for them. Let the people decide. £25k by end of Aug & I’ll stand as North East Mayorhttps://gofund.me/98547c6b

The only ‘whip’ should be the people. The North East needs an experienced, independent voice. Even if you don’t live here, this affects you. Our politics is a mess. Millions feel no one speaks for them. Politicians should answer to you, not to party bosses in London HQs.

Since my barring by @UKLabour, I’ve received overwhelming support. The cry for me to run as an independent has come from business leaders, community workers, trade unionists and politicians cross party. People have stopped me in the street asking me to run!

But I won’t have big party machinery behind me, or a national press office. I’ll need £150k to run a full campaign. If I can raise £25k by the end of August, I’ll run. The decision is yours. There’s more info here

This is not a time for faint hearts. It’s a time for bravery. If you back me, I’ll run. If I run, we can win. #ShyBairnsGetNowt. If you want to find out more about me and my vision for the future, you can find out more on my website

And here is a full summary of that was said at the Downing Street lobby briefing about the government’s plan to limit the number of people studying what are deemed low-value courses in England.

• No 10 refused to give examples of what it sees as “rip off” courses. Asked to give examples, the PM’s spokesperson said that under the plans it would be for the Office for Students to decide what courses were not value for money. He said the OfS would focus on particular courses, not entire subjects. He said:

This is not about specific subjects. We are subject-agnostic when it comes to this.

As to how the OfS would decide what courses did not offer value for money, the spokesperson did not give precise details, but he highlighted two criteria that would apply: drop-out rates (“regardless of the subject, you wouldn’t want to see students being signed up to a course where half of the students drop out”, the spokesperson said); and whether the course leads to students getting good jobs.

• The spokesperson would not say whether Rishi Sunak thought too many students were going to university. Asked if he thought too many people were going to university, the spokesperson said Sunak thought “working to an arbitrary number is not the right approach”.

No 10 has said some “rip-off” university courses could be closed down under the plans announced by the government today.

The government says it wants to impose a limit on the number of students in England who can study courses deemed as poor value for money, either because of their drop-out rates or because they don’t help students get good jobs.

But at the No 10 lobby briefing this morning, the PM’s spokesperson said the cap could be as low as zero. He said:

In extremis, recruitment limits could be used to prevent any recruitment to a course.

The OfS [Office for Students] has powers to suspend a provider’s registration or even remove it from their register if they wish, but it’s up to them to decide the scope and nature of any recruitment.

I will post more from the briefing shortly.

In his interview for broadcasters this morning Rishi Sunak also paid tribute to Ben Wallace, following the defence secretary’s announcement that he expects to leave cabinet at the next reshuffle and to stand down as an MP at the next election.

Asked if he was sorry to see Wallace go, Sunak replied:

Of course I am … Ben’s been a great defence secretary. I’ve enjoyed working with him and he’s got a track record he can be very proud of.

Sunak also insisted that Wallace’s decision to leave parliament was understandable. He said:

[Wallace has] been in politics and public service for a very long time, and, as he said, he wants to be able to spend more time with his family, and as a dad myself I completely understand and sympathise with that.

Wallace, who is 53, joins a long list of Conservative MPs, some of whom are quite young, who are standing down at the next election, and this trend is partly explained by the despair they feel about their party’s election prospects. But Wallace has been defence secretary for four years under three prime ministers, making him the longest-serving Conservative in the post since Winston Churchill, and so he has more reason than some of the others for thinking it is time to move on.

In his clip for broadcasters this morning Rishi Sunak was mostly asked about the policy the government is billing as a “crackdown on rip off university degrees” in England. Here are the main points.

For many people university is the right answer and it does brilliantly, but actually there are a range of people who are being let down by the current system.

They’re being taken advantage of with low-quality courses that don’t lead to a job that it makes it worth it, leaves them financially worse-off. That’s what we’re clamping down on today – but, at the same time, making sure that young people have a range of fantastic alternative opportunities, whether that be apprentices or higher technical qualifications, for example.

Sunak is only the latest in a long line of senior politicians, from all main parties, who for years have been saying that success in life should not depend on having a good university degree. But generally their children end up going to university anyway, which may be one reason why the message is not cutting through.

• Sunak brushed aside concerns that the policy would cut revenue for some universities. When this point was put to him, he said what mattered was the “overall financial sustainability” of the university system. He said the policy would make higher education better value for taxpayers. He explained:

I think it’s important that the system is also fair for taxpayers, because ultimately as taxpayers that fund the system – and we’ve got a situation at the moment where around half of people who go to university don’t end up paying back the cost of that degree – that costs the taxpayer money.

So, we need to make sure the system is not just fair for students and they’re getting the right outcome, but it’s also fair for taxpayers.

Part of these reforms clamping down on low-quality courses will improve the overall financial sustainability of the system. And that’s right, right for students, right for the taxpayer.

• He stressed that it would be for the Office for Students, not the government, to decide what might count as ‘rip off courses”. He said:

What the regulator will do is look at a range of different outcomes for courses. So, what kind of jobs are students going on to, do they complete the course, how much do they earn in later life?

On the basis of all of that, they’ll be able to figure out ‘well, hang on, that course actually isn’t delivering value for money. It’s letting people down and we should not put students on it because we’re letting them down’.

With that information, students can make more informed choices and, at the same time, we’re making it easier for them to find things like apprenticeships.

A fresh overtime ban has been announced by train drivers, threatening disruption to services at the height of the summer holidays, PA Media reports. PA says:

Members of Aslef at 15 train operating companies will refuse to work overtime from Monday 31 July to Saturday 5 August in the long-running dispute over pay.

Drivers launched a week-long overtime ban on Monday which the union warned will “seriously” affect services.

Aslef said train companies did not employ enough drivers, which was why they are dependent on rest day working, which the union pointed out was voluntary.

The action will affect Avanti West Coast; Chiltern Railways; Cross Country; East Midlands Railway; Greater Anglia; Great Western Railway; GTR Great Northern Thameslink; Island Line; LNER; Northern Trains; Southeastern; Southern/Gatwick Express; South Western Railway main line; TransPennine Express; and West Midlands Trains.

It will be the fourth week-long ban on overtime since May.

Commenting on the decision, Mick Whelan, Aslef’s general secretary, said:

We don’t want to take this action. We don’t want people to be inconvenienced, but the blame lies with the train companies, and the government which stands behind them, which refuse to sit down and talk to us, and have not made a fair and sensible pay offer to train drivers who have not had one for four years – since 2019 – while prices have soared in that time by more than 12%.

The proposal they made on April 26 of 4% with a further rise dependent, in a naked land grab, on drivers giving up terms and conditions for which we have fought, and negotiated, for years was not designed to be accepted.

We have not heard a word from the employers since then – not a meeting, not a phone call, not a text message, nor an email – for the last 12 weeks, and we haven’t sat down with the government since January 6.

Rishi Sunak has recorded an interview for broadcasters this morning. Among other topics, he was asked about the report from the National Audit Office today saying that the government is not likely to deliver the 40 “new” hospitals promised by Boris Johnson at the time of the last election.

Sunak downplayed the NAO findings, saying the report showed that 40 projects were set to be delivered by the end of the decade. He said:

I think we will deliver 40 hospitals by 2030 as we committed to do …

I think if you look at the report, they do say we actually will deliver 40 hospitals by 2030. But that’s just one of the many things that we’re doing for the health service.

The NAO report explains that the 40 hospital projects now on the government’s list for completion by 2030 are not the same as the original 40 announced. Only 32 of those are still on the list covered by this deadline, and only 11 count as “whole new hospitals”, it says.

Rishi Sunak has written an article for the Daily Telegraph this morning defending the government’s plan to limit the number of places for students in England on what it calls “rip off degree courses”. In it he argues:

Too many of our young people are sold a false dream of going to university only to find they’re enrolled on low-quality courses that don’t offer the skills they need to get a decent job at the end of it.

Contrast that with apprenticeships or other vocational routes. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, one in five graduates in this country, about 70,000 every year, would be better off financially if they had not gone to university. And despite having studied for several years, one in three graduates are in a job that doesn’t require them to be degree-educated.

Put simply: our young people are being ripped off. They’re being saddled with tens of thousands of pounds of debt from bad degrees that just leave them poorer, and dissuaded from pursuing more vocational options because they are led to believe that university is the only route to success. It’s not fair on them – and it’s not fair on you as taxpayers, forced to pick up a big chunk of the bill despite getting nothing back for our economy.

Sunak is referring to this IFS report, published three years ago, saying “one in five students – or about 70,000 every year – would actually have been better off financially had they not gone to university”.

But, in interviews this morning, Robert Halfon, the education minister, was unable to name any of the degree courses that will be affected by the new cap. Under the plan, the Office for Students will implement the policy, which will start to apply from the 2024-25 academic year.

But Halfon did reject claims that this approach amounted to an attack on arts and humanities courses. When this was put to him, he told Times Radio:

That’s absolutely not the case. Because we’re not saying that particular arts courses are going to have limits. It may be that in some universities there are arts courses that are leading to good jobs.

Supermarket bosses will meet Grant Shapps, the energy secretary, today after he pledged to hold “rip-off retailers” to account for charging motorists “sky high” prices for fuel. Kalyeena Makortoff has the story here.

Good morning. MPs have got four more days sitting in the Commons before the summer recess starts, but it is not really the moment for Rishi Sunak to start winding down. There are byelections in three Conservative-held seats on Thursday – Boris Johnson’s Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Nigel Adams’ Selby and Ainsty, and David Warburton’s Somerton and Frome – and Tories fear they will lose them all, even though in the latter two the majorities in 2019 were around 20,000. If this does happen, Sunak will be the first PM to lose three byelections in one day since Harold Wilson in 1968 (12 years before Sunak was even born).

We got a preview of one possible Tory line to take in the event of a triple drubbing from the Conservative MP Steve Brine on the Westminster Hour last night. Asked about the possibility of defeat in Uxbridge, he said: “It’s another bit of what I call ‘long Boris’, isn’t it?” Long Boris might also part-explain a defeat in Selby, where the byelection is only happening because Adams, a Johnson loyalist, resigned in a huff when his nomination for a peerage was blocked. But if Sunak does lose in all three seats, most commentators, and Tories, will conclude that this is symptomatic of a wider malaise, and not purely the fault of Johnson.

With the recess looming, Keir Starmer has his own problems. As Pippa Crerar and Patrick Butler report, the Labour leader is facing criticism because yesterday he said he would keep the two-child benefit cap in place.

A new report out today by academics, who have studied the impact of the policy in detail, says the case for scrapping the two-child cap, and the overall benefit cap, is “overwhelming”. It says both policies are causing “extreme hardship” and failing to incentivise claimant families to find more work or limit the number of children they have – supposedly the whole point in the first place.

On the two-child cap in particular, the report, which is funded by the Nuffield Foundation and produced by researchers from the Larger Families project, says:

Many of the families we interviewed did not know that the two-child limit existed until after their child was born and, in some cases, conception was not a choice, but was the result of failed contraception or an abusive relationship. In other cases, the family was not receiving benefits when the affected child was born, and parents only found out about the restriction when their circumstances later changed as a result of relationship breakdown or job loss. Additionally, while there is an exemption in place for children born as a result of non-consensual conception or within the context of domestic abuse, the majority of the participants eligible for this were not receiving it.

As this analysis by Matthew Weaver explains, getting rid of the two-child benefit cap would cost about £1.3bn. This morning Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, defended Starmer’s decision to say Labour would keep it in place, saying the party could only promise things it could afford. She told Sky News:

We’ve got to be clear about what we can fund and that’s why Keir Starmer’s set out the position. Because we’ve got to make sure that any policy that we propose, anything that we might want to change, anything we might not like that the Tories have done, we’ve still got to say how we’d fund it.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Rishi Sunak is on a visit to a school.

10am: Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, gives a speech on national security.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2.30pm: Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

After 3.30pm: An education minister is expected to make a statement to MPs on the plans to cap the number of students who can enrol for “low value” courses in England.

After 4.30pm: MPs will debate and vote on the latest Lords amendments to the illegal migration bill.

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