Downing Street has defended Britain’s record on freedom of speech – while declining to comment on a White House policy document saying Europe is at risk of “civilisational erasure”.At the No 10 lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson said that he would not comment on the national security strategy published by the White House on Friday because it was as US document.As Jon Henley reports, the document does not just relate to US policy because it says the American government should be “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”.Referring to Europe as a whole, the document says that it does not spend enough on defence and that it suffers from economic stagnation.But it goes on:This economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure.

The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.At the weekend Sarah Rogers, the US under secretary of state for public diplomacy, reinforced this claim with a post on social media claim that the UK and other European countries are suppressing free speech.The UK government has repeatedly chosen to avoid saying almost anything critical of Donald Trump and his administration in public and that continued today at the lobby briefing when the PM’s spokesperson was asked if Keir Starmer agreed that Europe faces civilisational erasure.The spokesperson replied:Obviously that is a strategy devised by the US for the US.It is for them to comment in.

In more broad terms, you’ve seen our action on both legal and illegal migration, and the measures we’re taking to drive that down.Asked if the PM would stick up for Europe, the spokesperson replied:The prime minister always sticks up for both the UK and European interests.You’ve seen that in his close working relationship with the president and he’ll continue to do that.But, when asked about comments from US officials like Rogers saying there is no freedom of speech in the UK, the spokesperson did push back.He said:When it comes to free speech, our position is very clear.

We’re proud of it, we’ve had it in this country for a very long time, we’ll protect it, and the government is committed to open discourse.Volodymyr Zelenskyy has met the leaders of the UK, France and Germany in London amid heavy pressure from the Trump administration for Ukraine to cede territory it holds to bring the war to an end quickly.For the latest updates, do read Matty Edwards and Jakub Krupa on our live blog.A nationwide inquiry into grooming gangs must “consider the role of ethnicity, religion and other cultural factors”, the opposition leader, Kemi Badenoch, has said.Police are looking into allegations Reform UK breached electoral law during its campaign to win Nigel Farage’s Commons seat at last year’s general election.

Downing Street has defended Britain’s record on freedom of speech – while declining to comment on a White House policy document saying Europe is at risk of “civilisational erasure”.(See 2.12pm.)For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.Conservative MPs have turned out in large numbers to criticise the government’s plans for a digital ID scheme.

They are in Westminster Hall, where a debate is being held on a petition submitted to the Commons saying the government should rule out digital ID cards.Almost three million people have signed it.(Minister say it is wrong to talk about a proposed ID card, because they want to introduce a scheme for digital ID that would not even use cards.)Opening the debate as a member of the petitions committee, Robbie Moore, a Tory, said that this is the fourth highest number of people ever to sign an electronic petition to parliament.He said that the plans were “fundamentally un-British” and that they were opposed by MPs from all the main opposition parties.

And even some Labour ministers are on record as criticising the plan in the past, he said,The plan would cost £1,8bn, he said,And it would reverse the principle that that citizens should only hand over their data with consent, he said,As he gave the opening speech in the debate, several Conservative MPs, including Mark Francois, Wendy Morton, Kieran Mullan and Neil Hudson, intervened to say they agreed.

The Labour Jonathan Brash also intervened,He said many constituents had contacted him to say they were worried about the plans,He said one of the problems was that the plan was announced (in a speech by Keir Starmer, just before the Labour conference), but without any of the details being available,Moore ended his speech saying: “I am not a tin of beans and I do not need a barcode,”An inquiry into whether West Midlands police misrepresented the intelligence it used to justify its call for Maccabi Tel Aviv fans to banned from attending a match at Villa Park will report before the end of the year, MPs have been told.

Sarah Jones, the policing minister, disclosed the timetable as she responded to a Commons urgent question from the Tory MP Nick Timothy, who said the WMP chief constable Craig Guildford should quit,Timothy tabled the UQ after the Sunday Times revealed yesterday that an assistant chief constable at WMP has apologised to members of the local Jewish community after wrongly telling the Commons home affairs committee that they had been consulted about the police’s decision to propose that the Maccabi fans should be banned,The decision caused an outcry, with Keir Starmer and others taking it as evidence that the police were not willing to defend Israeli fans from the risk of antisemitic violence,WMP say they proposed a ban primarily because they were worried about hooligan behaviour by the Maccabi supporters themselves,Timothy told MPs that the evidence used by the police to justify their decision had “fallen apart”.

He said the police based their decision on what they were supposedly told by the Dutch police about the behaviour of Maccabi fans at a match in Amsterdam in November.But the Dutch authorities have disputed WMP’s version of the evidence provided.Jones told MPs that HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, which has already been asked to review the way police decide whether or not fans should be banned ahead of a match, has also been asked to provide by the end of the year an update on how intelligence was gathered by WMP ahead of this match.She said that, if turned out that the police was not following the highest standards, that would be a matter of “profound concern”.In response to Timothy’s question about whether ministers still had confidence in the chief constable, Jones said she did not want to jump to conclusions.

She said WMP has done some very good work.But it was important to get to the bottom of this issue, she said.Sarah Sackman, a justice minister, has rejected claims the government has used a misleading statistics to justify its to plan to limit access to jury trials.Yesterday the Sunday Times splashed on a story saying that David Lammy, the justice secretary, was being acccused by senior barristers “of misrepresenting figures about rape cases collapsing in a ‘cynical’ attempt to push through the abolition of half of all jury trials”.Lammy has repeatedly said that 60% of rape victims pull out of rape cases because they are taking so long to go to court.

He claims limiting access to jury trials will help to cut the backlog of cases awaiting trail.The Sunday Times story quoted people arguing that the 60% figure is misleading because most of those victims pull out before anyone has been charged.In a Commons urgent question, Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said that if Lammy wanted to remove a major plank of the constitution, he should be doing so “on the basis of facts, not baseless claims”.Jenrick said the most recent figures showed that only 9% of rape cases are abandoned after charges have been brought.He said that getting rid of jury trials for many cases would plans do “next to nothing to cut backlogs for rape victims” and that Lammy’s claims were undermining faith in the justice system.

But Sackman said that quoting the 60% figure was justified.It was accurate to say that 60% of rape victims pull out of case before they go to trial, she said.She went on:It is unacceptable around 60% of victims who report broke out of the criminal system.And we know after speaking to victims and to campaign organisations for those that represent those victims and support them, that for many fact that that trial may not come to court for several years is a key factor to them deciding to withdraw from the process, or perhaps not to even report the case at all.The system was not designed for scenarios where victims face just delays or justice.

The Labour party has challenged Reform UK to explain why it has not yet registered any cryptocurrency donations – even though Nigel Farage, the leader, said in October that the party has started receiving crypto gifts.In an open letter to Farage, Anna Turley, the Labour chair, challenged him to clarify the situation.She said:It is of course possible that Reform UK did not receive a single cryptocurrency donation above the donation threshold between May, when you first publicised your party’s willingness to receive such donations, and the end of September, which was the end of Q3 for the purposes of declaring donations to the Electoral Commission, and that your efforts in loudly soliciting and facilitating such donations were an entirely fruitless publicity stunt.Reform UK started promoting its willingness to receive donations in the form of cryptocurrency in May, and Farage said this was evidence the party was “ahead of the game”.Reform UK has been asked to comment.

The all-party parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax has welcomed the government’s anti-corruption strategy (see 3.06pm), particularly doubling the funding for the domestic corruption unit, holding a summit on illicit finance next year and getting Margaret Hodge to review asset ownership in the UK.Phil Brickell, the Labour MP who chairs the APPG, said:I welcome Baroness Hodge’s review into who really owns what in the UK.When crooks can hide behind anonymous shell companies, our security and reputation suffer.We should not be allowing the world’s criminals and kleptocrats to hide and stash their dirty cash here in Britain.

Before entering parliament I worked in anti-bribery roles, and I know most professionals do the right thing – but a few bad actors create huge openings for corruption.That’s why the government’s focus on those dodgy accountants, lawyers and bankers who are letting the vast majority of their profession down is long overdue.The Home Office has published the government’s new anti-corruption strategy.Peter Walker covered the main features in his preview story.Transparency International UK, the anti-corruption campaign group, welcomed the initiative.

Its chief executive, Daniel Bruce, said:This is the most comprehensive government commitment to tackling corruption in almost a decade.We welcome the ambition and the honesty – recognising that corruption threatens Britain’s economy, security, and democracy – and its focus on corrupt insiders, professional enablers, and international partnerships.But he said the government should also be “removing the corrupting influence of big money from our politics” by imposing a cap on the amount of money that can be donated to political parties, and by imposing spending limits on them.The latest episode of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly podcast is out.It features Pippa Crerar and Kiran Stacey talking about the Ukraine meeting at Downing Street, Labour’s stance on the EU and how Nigel Farage is handling the scrutiny he’s facing.

Police are looking into allegations Reform UK breached electoral law during its campaign to win Nigel Farage’s Commons seat at last year’s general election, Kevin Rawlinson reports,Downing Street has defended Britain’s record on freedom of speech – while declining to comment on a White House policy document saying Europe is at risk of “civilisational erasure”,At the No 10 lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson said that he would not comment on the national security strategy published by the White House on Friday because it was as US document,As Jon Henley reports, the document does not just relate to US policy because it says the American government should be “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”,Referring to Europe as a whole, the document says that it does not spend enough on defence and that it suffers from economic stagnation.

But it goes on:This economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure,The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence,At the weekend Sarah Rogers, the US under secretary of state for public diplomacy, reinforced this claim with a post on social media claim that the UK and other European countries are suppressing free speech,The UK government has repeatedly chosen to avoid saying almost anything critical of Donald Trump and his administration in public and that continued today at the lobby briefing when the PM’s spokesperson was asked if Keir Starmer agreed that Europe faces civilisational erasure,The spokesperson replied:Obviously that is a strategy devised by the US for the US.

It is for them to comment in,In more broad terms, you’ve seen our action on both legal and illegal migration, and the measures we’re taking to drive that down,Asked if the PM would stick up for Europe, the spokesperson replied:The prime minister always sticks up for both the UK and European interests,You’ve seen that in his close working relationship with the president and he’ll continue to do that,But, when asked about comments from US officials like Rogers saying there is no freedom of speech in the UK, the spokesperson did push back.

He said:When it comes to free speech, our position is very clear.We’re proud of it, we’ve had it in this country for a very long time, we’ll protect it, and the government is committed to open discourse.There will be three urgent questions in the Commons after 3.30pm (all tabled by Tory MPs), followed by a statement.They are (with rough timings):3.

30pm: A defence minister responds to a UQ on problems with the Ajax armoured vehicle.After 4pm: A justice minister responds to a UQ about the Sunday Times splash, which accused David Lammy of misrepresenting the proportion of rape victims who pull out of prosecutions because of court delays.After 4.30pm: A Home Office minister responds to a UQ about another Sunday Times story, saying West Midlands police wrongly told a committee recently that they had consulted the Jewish community in Birmingham about the Maccabi Tel Aviv match ban.After 5pm: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, makes a statement about the government’s child poverty strategy.

Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent.The SNP are making energy the linchpin of their Holyrood election campaign, claiming that independence could cut Scotland’s energy bills by a third in the long term.At what was billed as the first campaign event ahead of the contest next May, John Swinney, the SNP leader and first minister, launched a short film with the tagline ‘It’s Scotland’s energy’, mirroring the party’s famous 1970s slogan ‘It’s Scotland’s oil’ which contributed to their breakthrough at Westminster.Contrasting how the UK and Norway managed their oil wealth – a “missed opportunity” for Scotland compared with Norway’s sovereign wealth fund – Swinney said in his speech the growth in renewables was “a second opportunity to benefit from the huge natural resources of our country and to choose a different path”.But Swinney was light on detail of how independence could be secured even if the SNP wins a majority in May, while the UK Labour government remains opposed to another referendum.

And the accompanying document was thin on how these savings would be achieved, especially after the upheaval of separating from the rest of the UK.Asked whether voters would prefer to see him focusing on their key priorities of public services, Swinney insisted there was progress in NHS waiting times for operations, education and investment in affordable housing.But he added:Part of my challenge is that people have to see that the way to future prosperity is through independence.That’s the argument I will put to people in May.Keir Starmer has joined TikTok, Downing Street has announced