Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has defended the government’s new asylum policy – while admitting that he would not be “comfortable” about seeing families with small children deported,One feature of the plan is to increase the number of removals involving children,The Home Office says there has been too much “hesitancy” in this regard in the past,In an interview with LBC, asked if he would be happy to see families with young children forcibly removed from the country, Streeting said that the plan also involved encouraging people to leave voluntarily, and so the number of forced removals should be “low”,Streeting said that he supported forced removals because there was no point having a policy that was not enforced.

What I can’t do is sit here and say that, if there’s a new immigration policy, it won’t be enforced because – to be honest – that is a big part of the reason why the country’s in the mess that it’s in on asylum and immigration.Asked if he was comfortable with that, he replied:Honestly? Comfortable? No.But is it the right thing to do for the country? Yes.Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has defended the government’s new asylum policy – while admitting that he would not be “comfortable” about seeing families with small children deported.(See 4.

16pm,)Shabana Mahmood has been accused of “ethnic stereotyping” and “indecent demagoguery” by Albania’s prime minister after the home secretary singled out Albanian families and children for refusing to return to their homeland,A Russian spy ship has entered British waters and shone lasers at military pilots, the defence secretary has said, as he warned the UK was facing a “new era of threat” from hostile countries,Keir Starmer has called on Nigel Farage to urgently explain himself after the Reform leader wholesale denied numerous detailed allegations of racist behaviour during his teenage years,A Reform UK councillor has been suspended for participating in a WhatsApp group where members allegedly called for a “mass Islam genocide”.

The UK has sanctioned a Russian crime syndicate behind cyber-attacks on British businesses.As PA Media says, the crackdown targets Media Land, which operates hosting services that enable cybercriminals to conduct ransomware and phishing attacks.The Foreign Office has more details here.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.John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, has said that he thinks Keir Starmer will stand down if the SNP wins an overall majority at next year’s Holyrood election.

Holyrood uses a PR system that makes it hard for a single party to win an overall majority, and it has only happened once, in 2011, when Alex Salmond was leading the SNP.At the last election, in 2021, the SNP was one seat short of a majority.Speaking to the Institute for Government thintank in London, Swinney said that his target in May next year was to win outright majority again.He went on:If that was to happen in May of next year, then I have no doubt that the prime minister would not survive in office.Swinney also said, with an outright majority, it would be easier for the SNP to demand another independence referendum.

Asked why that would be better than just having a majority of pro-independence MSPs in the parliament (as there are now), he explained:The difference is that the SNP-only majority [after 2011] was not ignored.That’s the big difference, and that’s what sets the precedence.Recent polling suggests that the SNP will easily be the biggest party at Holyrood after the next election, but that Swinney will be a few seats short of a majority.Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, may have been thinking about people like Wes Streeting (see 4.16pm) when he wrote this piece for Huffpost UK saying his party would target Labour MPs who have defended the asylum policy.

He said:Out of more than 400 Labour MPs, barely 20 are standing up against these grotesque asylum proposals.Twenty.That’s not courage, that’s capitulation.Those Labour MPs who are silent should be ashamed.Truly ashamed.

The suggestion of confiscating jewellery, to drag children into detention centres, this is indecent, immoral, and indefensible,And let me say this clearly: we will challenge every single Labour MP who,goes along with this,It’s not enough to just say you regret it or you’re sad about it,Voters still have a moral compass, even if Labour have smashed theirs to pieces.

In his LBC interview, Wes Streeting, the health secretary, gently mocked his Labour colleague Clive Lewis for saying he would be willing to give up his seat to allow Andy Burnham to return to the Commons.(See 3pm.)Asked about the offer, Streeting said:I’ve got a lot of time for Andy and I think we need our best players on the pitch.And whether he’s doing that as mayor of Greater Manchester or whether he wants to come back into parliament in the next general election, that is an issue for Andy.I think it’s a bit of a peculiar thing for Clive to have said to his own constituents, ‘Oh, well, I’m not interested in being your MP, I’m happy to do a deal with someone.

’ I would just say from personal experience, don’t take your voters for granted.Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has defended the government’s new asylum policy – while admitting that he would not be “comfortable” about seeing families with small children deported.One feature of the plan is to increase the number of removals involving children.The Home Office says there has been too much “hesitancy” in this regard in the past.In an interview with LBC, asked if he would be happy to see families with young children forcibly removed from the country, Streeting said that the plan also involved encouraging people to leave voluntarily, and so the number of forced removals should be “low”.

Streeting said that he supported forced removals because there was no point having a policy that was not enforced.What I can’t do is sit here and say that, if there’s a new immigration policy, it won’t be enforced because – to be honest – that is a big part of the reason why the country’s in the mess that it’s in on asylum and immigration.Asked if he was comfortable with that, he replied:Honestly? Comfortable? No.But is it the right thing to do for the country? Yes.YouGov has released some new polling on what people think about the economy.

There is a lot of bad polling for Labour around at the moment, but these figures should be particularly worrying, given how important perceived economic competence is in electoral politics,Labour’s argument – repeated by Keir Starmer again today, and at every PMQs since the election – is that the government inherited an economy that was in a mess, but that it is clearing it up,YouGov says most people do think the government’s economic inheritance was poor,But, unfortunately for Labour, only 9% of people think Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is making the situation better,At one point people were more willing to believe that the Tories were more to blame than Labour for the state of the economy.

But that is no longer the case now.And more than three quarters of people think the government is handling the economy either fairly badly (38%) or very badly (39%).Earlier I quoted from the letter that Keir Starmer has written to his son to mark International Men’s Day.(See 10.10am.

) The video of him reading it out is now on YouTube, and here it is,It’s personal and moving,One of the Labour MPs who have signed Richard Burgon’s EDM on a wealth tax (see 2,43pm) is Clive Lewis, MP for Norwich South,He is one of the Labour MPs most critical of Keir Starmer (last week he called for Starmer to stand down) and today, on the BBC’s Politics Live, he said he would be willing to give up his seat to allow Andy Burnham to return to the Commons to take over as Labour leader and prime minister,Lewis confirmed that he had spoken to Burnham about the Labour situation.

Asked if he would be willing to give up his seat for Burnham, he replied:It’s a question I’ve asked myself, and I’d have to obviously consult with my wife as well and family.But, do you know what? If I’m going to sit here and say country before party, party before personal ambition, then yes, I have to say yes, don’t I?There has been a lot of speculation about Burnham, who is currently mayor of Greater Manchester, returning to the Commons in a byelection.Burnham has played down the prospect, without ruling it out as an option.But all the speculation has focused on the possibility of Burnham standing for a seat in the Greater Manchester area.It is much harder to imagine the so-called “king of the north” decamping to a seat in the east of England – even one with a Labour majority of more than 13,000 at the last election.

Thirty Labour MPs have now signed a Commons early day motion tabled by Richard Burgon calling for a wealth tax.It proposes an annual wealth tax of 2% on individual assets over £10m, which it says could raise an estimated £24bn each year.Burgon said:The budget must be the moment when the chancellor finally grasps the nettle and introduces a tax on the very wealthiest in our society.A wealth tax would be a fairer and more popular alternative to any stealth taxes on ordinary people already being pushed to the brink by the cost-of-living crisis.The way policing is organised in England and Wales is “irrational”, Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, has said.

Speaking at a conference organised by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, Mahmood said that having 43 separate police forces meant that policing had become “a postcode lottery”.Ahead of the publication of a white paper on police reform, which is due in the next few weeks, Mahmood said that critical functions like the air service and vetting have been loaded on to the 43 geographical forces, diverting their attention from neighbourhood policing.She said:The structure of our police forces is, if we are honest, irrational.We have loaded critical functions like the national police air service and vetting on to local forces, drawing attention away from neighbourhood policing.We have 43 forces tackling criminal gangs who cross borders, and the disparities in performance in forces across the country have grown far too wide, giving truth to the old store that policing in this country is a postcode lottery.

She said the adoption of new technology is “piecemeal”, and that many forces are dependent on the same systems that have been used for decades.And she also said the police should not be policing “legal” tweets.Referring to social media, she said:The public rightly expect that we police our streets.There is most certainly criminality online.Some things cannot be legally tweeted just as they cannot be legally said, but we should not be policing perfectly legal language in any individual’s tweets.

Shabana Mahmood and David Lammy have been found to have breached a prohibition on inhuman or degrading treatment with respect to a prisoner who spent months segregated from other inmates, in what is believed to be a legal first,Haroon Siddique has the story,Peter Walker is the Guardian’s senior political correspondent,For the first time, Reform UK held a post-PMQs briefing today,It featured a Nigel Farage spokesperson reiterating Nigel Farage’s denial of the allegations in the Guardian, saying the events took place too long ago for people to remember properly, and also questioning why some had not made the claims before.

The spokesperson said:Our statement was very clear that these allegations date back 45 years.And I think that at any point in time, when Nigel was leader of Ukip, when he stood in the 2010 general election, the 2015 general election, during Brexit, maybe in the 2019 general election, you would have to ask yourself, why didn’t this come up before?Asked if Farage thus believed those who made the allegations were inventing them, the spokesperson said:I’m saying there is no primary evidence.It’s one person’s word against another …If things like this happened a very, very long time ago, you can’t necessarily recollect what happened.Asked if someone would be blocked from standing as a candidate if they had made similar comments, a Reform spokesperson said they would if there was “some hard evidence”.In another briefing, Kemi Badenoch’s spokesperson said he did not know if the Conservative leader had seen reports about Farage’s comments, but added: “I think it’s an issue for Nigel and the Guardian.

”Peter Walker is the Guardian’s senior political correspondent.At the post-PMQs lobby briefing the PM’s press secretary went a bit further than Keir Starmer did in the chamber in criticising the new allegations about Nigel Farage’s racism when he was at school.(See 1.15pm.) She said:These are disturbing allegations and it’s vital that Nigel Farage urgently explains himself.

You’ve heard the prime minister speak just this week about Farage’s weakness in the face of divisive politics in Reform’s ranks.He’s still not condemned the language or taken action against one of his MPs racist comments, refused to condemn them when asked last week.Reform is dragging our politics into a dark place.This Labour government stands for our patriotic British values of decency, tolerance and importantly unity.So, it’s for Nigel Farage to explain.

Reform UK has denied the allegations in full,During PMQs Kit Malthouse, a Tory MP who supports the assisted dying bill, asked if Keir Starmer would intervene to stop the House of Lords blocking the legislation,Peers started debating amendments to the bill at committee stage on Friday last week, but over the course of the whole day they only covered two amendments, and there are another 940 on the order paper,There is no formal process for timetabling debates in the House of Lords, and some peers strongly opposed to the bill seemed determined to talk it out (ie, filibuster) so that it has no chance of becoming law,Starmer did not make an explicit commitment.

He said the government was neutral, and parliament would have to decide.It sounded as if he was not giving Malthouse the assurance he wanted.Originally there was a headline on the post at 12.05pm reflecting that.But I’m afraid I missed, or did not hear, three words (in bold) that change the significance of what Starmer said