Peter Mandelson has complained about the decision by the police to arrest him yesterday.In a statement issued by his lawyers, he has said that he had already agreed to attend a police interview last month but that he was arrested on the basis of a “baseless suggestion” he was about to flee the country.The statement, issued by the firm Mishcon de Reya, says:double quotation markPeter Mandelson was arrested yesterday despite an agreement with the police that he would attend an interview next month on a voluntary basis.The arrest was prompted by a baseless suggestion that he was planning to leave the country and take up permanent residence abroad.There is absolutely no truth whatsoever in any such suggestion.

We have asked the MPS [Metropolitian Police] for the evidence relied upon to justify the arrest,Peter Mandelson’s overriding priority is to cooperate with the police investigation, as he has done throughout this process, and to clear his name,This blog will be closing shortly,You can keep up to date with all the latest on UK politics here until Andrew Sparrow returns tomorrow morning,Until then, here’s a summary of today’s key developments:Peter Mandelson has complained about the decision by the police to arrest him yesterday, with a statement issued by his lawyers saying he had already agreed to attend a police interview last month.

They claimed he had been arrested on the basis of a “baseless suggestion” he was about to flee the country and take up permanent residence abroad,Several outlets claimed it was lord speaker Michael Forsyth who passed information on to the Met about Mandelson planning to flee the country,A spokesperson for the lord speaker rejected this claim, describing it as “entirely false”,MPs have passed a humble address motion from the Lib Dems that calls for papers relating to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor being made trade envoy to be published, meaning the government must comply with the request,Trade minister Chris Bryant also said the government was working “at pace” on legislation to remove Mountbatten-Windsor from the line of succession, describing him as a “rude, arrogant and entitled man”.

Liam Byrne, the Labour chair of the Commons business committee, has said that his committee may launch an inquiry covering Mountbatten-Windsor’s work as a trade envoy when the police inquiry is over.Speaking at the start of an unrelated committee hearing today, he said the committee would “begin gathering information immediately so that we might stand ready to launch an inquiry into the governance regime for trade envoys at the moment the police and criminal justice system action has concluded”.The Ministry of Justice will ramp up use of artificial intelligence (AI) in courts to cut backlogs, David Lammy, the deputy PM and justice secretary has said.He also said the cap on court sitting days will be lifted.Richard Tice, Reform UK business spokesperson, announced two proposals relating to pensions, incluing pooling funds in the local government pension scheme and using them to fund a new British sovereign wealth fund, which would manage assets of up to £575bn.

He also confirmed that Reform UK wants to end defined benefit pensions for new council staff, replacing them with defined contributions ones, which are considerably less generous,A high court judge has dismissed an attempt by the independent MP Rupert Lowe to block a parliamentary watchdog from investigating a complaint against him,Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, is taking legal action against the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme (ICGS), which investigates complaints of inappropriate behaviour against MPs, after the body’s decision last July to investigate a complaint made about him,Danny Kruger, the Reform UK MP in charge of preparing the party for government, has complained that Britain has a “totally unregulated sexual economy”, in an interview highlighting his parties support for families,Kruger, a social conservative and evangelical Christian who defected to Reform from the Tories last year, made the comment in an interview with Politics Home.

A bid by Conservative backbench peers to block a generational smoking ban, championed by Conservative former prime minister Rishi Sunak, failed on Tuesday,The move, which would instead have raised the age of sale for tobacco products in England and Wales to 21, was heavily defeated in the House of Lords by 246 votes to 78, majority 168,While most of those backing the change to the Tobacco and Vapes Bill were Conservatives, the voting list also showed two Liberal Democrats supported it,Teachers and schools face “a huge ask” implementing the government’s special needs proposals affecting hundreds of thousands of children, according to education leaders and MPs who otherwise gave the plans a cautious welcome,Under the plans unveiled by Bridget Phillipson, mainstream schools in England will assess pupils with special needs and draw up individual support plans (ISPs), creating a potential workload burden before the changes take full effect in 2029-30.

The new plans aim to extend support to many of the 1.3 million children in state schools identified as having special needs but who do not have the education, health and care plans (EHCPs) currently required for individualised support.Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said:double quotation markThe planned Send reforms are certainly necessary and seem sensible but they constitute a huge ask on mainstream schools to expand existing provision and implement training on a massive scale.The government does need to be careful about the workload and mental health impact on leaders and teachers.There is already a wellbeing crisis in the education workforce with sky-high levels of stress and anxiety, and it will be very difficult to implement any reforms successfully if education staff are broken under the weight of too many expectations.

As part of the changes, the Department for Education (DfE) will create a set of national inclusion standards to iron out regional differences in support, and provide schools and colleges £1.6bn over three years to fund extra support.A further £1.8bn will fund local authorities to hire specialists for schools to call on.And another £200m will pay for additional teacher training.

You can read the full story by Kiran Stacey and Richard Adams here: Send plan for England gets cautious welcome amid workload concernsA leading lawyer and Labour peer has said she is “appalled” at allegations a prominent thinktank paid for an investigation into journalists when it was led by a now government minister.Expressing her shock in parliament, global media freedom adviser Lady Kennedy of The Shaws argued the controversy “goes to the heart of our democracy”.It was announced on Monday the prime minister’s ethics watchdog will investigate Cabinet Office minister Josh Simons.Labour Together is accused of paying PR firm Apco Worldwide £36,000 to look into the background of journalists in 2023, when Simons was its director.The journalists had covered the campaign group’s failure to declare more than £700,000 in donations.

Speaking in the House of Lords, Kennedy said:double quotation markI cannot begin to express how appalled I am that attacks should have been made upon independent journalists investigating a matter which was a legitimate matter to be investigated by the media,I should declare immediately that I am on the high-level legal panel that advises the Media Freedom Coalition, a global coalition of 51 countries that are seeking to protect journalists,It is quite shocking that any person holding a leadership position should be attacking journalists, when we know that independent journalism is fundamental to democracy and our security, and absolutely something that this Government and any government should be protecting,Responding, Labour frontbencher Lady Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent said she agreed with many of Kennedy’s concerns, reiterating that an investigation was currently under way on the actions of Simons as a minister,In other Westminster news, the Liberal Democrats have called for “urgent and meaningful action” to protect children from online harms “within weeks”.

Education spokesperson Munira Wilson laid out her party’s proposals, which include a “film-style classification system”, with social media rated at 16 as a default.The motion tabled by Wilson, if supported by MPs, would allocate time for progressing a bill on protecting children from online harms, with the first debate in less than two weeks.She told the Commons on Tuesday:double quotation markCompanies would be required to age-gate their platforms based on the harmfulness of their content, the addictiveness of their platform design and impact this can have on a child’s mental health.Earlier on Tuesday, she introduced a bill to parliament that would restrict access to online services, including social media, by children in certain circumstances, but did not publish the details of the bill for MPs to read.Labour, Conservative and Green Party MPs criticised the fact that the bill had not been published, with Green Party Westminster leader Ellie Chowns accusing the Liberal Democrats of “politicking”.

The Liberal Democrats would also introduce a “doomscroll cap”, which Wilson said would “end the infinite scroll feature on short-from online platforms for young people, limiting the amount of time for which children are pushed TikTok-style video content to two hours”.She suggested that social media companies should introduce health alerts for under 18s.The Liberal Democrats’ motion was defeated 69 votes to 279, majority 210.Michael Forsyth has responded to the claim that he passed information on to the Met about Peter Mandelson planning to flee the country, describing it as “entirely false”.A spokesperson for the lord speaker said:double quotation markAny suggestion at all that the lord speaker received information about Lord Mandelson’s movements or communicated any such information to the Metropolitan police Service, is entirely false and without foundation.

”Sources in the House of Lords are saying the claim that Michael Forsyth, the lord speaker, passed information on to the Met about Peter Mandelson planning to flee is “completely untrue”,Perhaps someone got the title of the informant muddled up,There are a lot of peers in the House of Lords with fancy titles, and some MPs have grand titles too,That is all from me for today,Joe Coughlan is taking over now.

Hannah Al-Othman is the Guardian’s North of England correspondentA Labour MP has said politicians should not expect to face “death threats as standard” after a Reform UK councillor shared a Facebook post which said she “should be shot”,The picture of Natalie Fleet, who has spoken previously about being groomed and raped as a teenager, was accompanied by a fake quote misattributed to her, which read: “I voted against the grooming gang enquiry,”The Facebook post was shared by Simon Evans, the deputy leader of Lancashire council and cabinet member for children and families,He also reshared text accompanying the picture, which said: “You dozy cow, you should be shot,”Fleet, who is MP for Bolsover in Derbyshire, said: “Posts like this are so common I don’t bat an eyelid.

However, they remind me why my husband and children begged me not to stand.“My first thought is always for the loved ones who have to see it, and any women who may be put off of getting into politics in the future.”She added: “The last Labour government helped me so much; I got into politics because I wanted to pay that forward and help others in my community.Whatever party, we should be able to fight for our areas without death threats as standard.”Evans later deleted the post, saying in an apology on Facebook that he had made “a genuine mistake” and “did not notice the accompanying text”, and had removed the post “immediately” once it was brought to his attention.

You can read the full story from Hannah Al-Othman here: Reform UK councillor shared Facebook post saying Labour MP ‘should be shot’This is what Emily Maitlis said about the message from Peter Mandelson about the lord speaker,(See 6,15pm,)double quotation markOvernight I heard from a colleague who sent me Peter Mandelson’s own words,And this is what he told the colleague.

“Despite previous agreements between police and the legal team over a voluntary interview in early March, police arrested me because they claimed the lord speaker received information that I was about to flee to the British Virgin Islands and take up permanent residence abroad, leaving Reinaldo” – his husband – “my family, home and Jock” – his dog – “behind me,“I need hardly say, complete fiction,The police were told only today that they had to improvise an arrest,The question is who or what is behind this?”Now, I understand that this was sent around 4 am, approximately two hours after he’d been released from police custody,And the tenor of that sounds as if he is saying the police arrested him because they had a tip off that he was going to flee.

None of that really makes sense when you pull it apart, because the idea of him fleeing to the British Virgin Islands, which is obviously somewhere within a UK jurisdiction, within an extradition treaty, doesn’t really sound logical.But it is interesting, Peter Mandelson’s own words, “who or what is behind this?” He is doubting the integrity of the arrest itself.He’s doubting the integrity of the police investigation, from the sounds of it, because he doesn’t think that that was what he had previously agreed, which was a voluntary interview sometime next week.Jon Sopel, Maitlis’s co-presenter on the News Agents, said it was “jaw-dropping” that Mandelson could think it a good idea to start briefing against the Met at 4amEmily Maitlis, the broadcaster and co-host of the News Agents podcast, has said that Peter Mandelson is claiming that it was the lord speaker who told the police he had been told that Mandelson was about to flee to the British Virgin Islands to set up permanent residence.Michael Forsyth, a former Tory cabinet minister, has just taken over as lord speaker.

Peter Mandelson has complained about the decision by the police to arrest him yesterday.In a statement issued by his lawyers, he has said that he had already agreed to attend a police interview last month but that he was arrested on the basis of a “baseless suggestion” he was about to flee the country.The statement, issued by the firm Mishcon de Reya, says:double quotation markPeter Mandelson was arrested yesterday despite an agreement with the police that he would attend an interview next month on a voluntary basis.The arrest was prompted by a baseless suggestion that he was planning to leave the country and take up permanent residence abroad.There is absolutely no truth whatsoever in any such suggestion.

We have asked the MPS [Metropolitian Police] for the evidence relied upon to justify the arrest.Peter Mandelson’s overriding priority is to cooperate with the police investigation, as he has done throughout this process, and to clear his name.In his speech in Birmingham today, Richard Tice, Reform UK business spokesperson, announced two proposals relating to pensions that are now attracting much critcism.First, he proposed pooling funds in the local government pension scheme and using them to fund a new British sovereign wealth fund, which would manage assets of up to £575bn.He said:double quotation markI’ve been looking closely at the local government pension scheme that has assets of about £500 billion, covering 98 funds across councils across the whole of the UK, and it’s got some seven, three quarter million members, well intentioned, but being woefully managed in a completely disparate, uncoordinated way, with no vision, no purpose of backing Britain whatsoever, and it’s been massively overcharged over inflated fees to the tune of four or five times, whilst it’s underperforming hugely, never meeting the benchmarks …We can transform this into a British Sovereign Wealth Fund, proudly paying all of the members and pensioners, of course, whilst patriotically backing Britain all of the way.

And, second, he confirms that Reform UK wants to end defined benefit pensions for new council staff, replacing them with defined contributions ones, which are considerably less generous,On the sovereign wealth fund plan, Pensions UK, a group representing fund managers and others in the pensions industry, says Tice’s plans are concering,Zoe Alexander, executive director of policy and advocacy at Pensions UK, said:double quotation markWe simply do not recognise the picture of the local government pension scheme (LGPS) that Reform UK has painted,The LGPS is one of the largest and most successful pension schemes in the world,It is fully funded and undergoing a major reform programme to consolidate its assets into six large investment pools ranging from £25-100bn, with savings to date estimated at £1bn, and with further savings to come.

It is an exemplar of UK investment amongst pension schemes, with an allocation of around 17%.LGPS investment performance for England and Wales has been strong, with the scheme having achieved a return of around 7% pa over the last decade.Reform’s proposals are lacking in detail, but its intentions to place all new staff into a defined contribution scheme and to transform the scheme into a sovereign wealth fund are concerning.The LGPS exists solely to fund the retirements of close to 7 million local government workers, many of whom are low earners.It does not exist to manage a pool of assets to fund government projects.

And the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association was also critical.Its CEO, James Alexander, said:double quotation markProposals to force pension schemes to invest in the UK run the risk of distorting markets and creating asset bubbles.They could also lead to lower returns for savers, at a time when shortfalls in retirement pots have left a whole generation facing a later-life income crisis.This stands to affect workers across the economy, including those now close to leaving employment.And, on ending defined benefit pensions for council staff, the Unison general secretary Andrea Egan said:double quotation markAttacking the pensions of council staff is a disastrous move.

Employees would be denied a secure retirement income and it would worsen the recruitment crisis in local government,Whether it’s targeting low-paid staff or demonising anyone from overseas, Reform has little interest in helping workers or strengthening public services,Parliament’s joint committee on the national security strategy has called for a temporary ban on political parties accepting cryptocurrency donations,In a letter to Steve Reed, who as housing, communities and local government secretary is in charge of electoral law, it suggests the government should legislate for a temporary ban in the representation of the people bill,And, in the meantime, the Electoral Commission should issue tougher guidance for parties that are accepting crypto donations, it says