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8.39am GMT

I’m not writing my usual Politics Live blog today so, as an alternative, here’s Politics Live: readers’ edition. It is intended to be a place where you can catch up with the latest news and find links to good politics blogs and articles on the web.

Please feel free to use this as somewhere you can comment on any of the day’s political stories – just as you do during the daily blog. It would be particularly useful for readers to flag up new material in the comments – breaking news or blogposts or tweets that are worth passing on because someone is going to find them interesting.

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Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen

9.15am GMT

You can tell it’s a relatively quiet news day when the Today programme leads with a story about the powers of the House of Lords in relation to secondary legislation. A year ago David Cameron (remember him?) published a report from Lord Strathclyde, a former Conservative leader of the Lords, saying the Lords should lose the right to veto secondary legislation. Cameron commissioned the report after the Lords blocked a proposed £4bn tax credit cut.

For obvious reasons the Lords were not very keen on the Strathclyde proposals and, since then, we have heard almost nothing about them. Today the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg is reporting that they have been dropped. She has been told that ministers want a more constructive relationship with the Lords, which is not surprising because Theresa May is going to need every ounce of goodwill she can squeeze out of the upper house as it begins the marathon task of passing Brexit legislation.

The government would be making a big mistake to drop plans to curb the power House of Lords, one former minister has said, following reports that the prime minister is to abandon plans to ban peers from overturning legislation.

Digby Jones, the crossbench peer who was minister for trade and investment under Gordon Brown, said the government would “live to regret” backing down on reforming the Lords, which he said had overreached itself in blocking key legislation.

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Politics blog | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2f3dDtH

Sustained series of questions on Brexit hits the mark for the Labour leader as PM resorts to personal attacks in response

In a series of sharp exchanges on the government’s policies (or alleged lack of) on Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn repeatedly pressured the prime minister to confirm her policy on single market access for the UK; how many extra civil service employees would be required to cope with the workload; and whether the lord chancellor would defend the independence of the judiciary should the forthcoming supreme court appeal on article 50 go against the government.

Related: Corbyn puts May under pressure over Brexit at PMQs – Politics live

We have an international development secretary who is opposed to overseas aid, a health secretary running down the National Health Service, a chancellor with no fiscal strategy, a lord chancellor who won’t defend the judiciary, a Brexit team with no plan for Brexit and a prime minister who is not prepared to answer questions on Brexit strategy. We need better answers than she’s given us.

What we certainly have got is a leader of the opposition who is incapable of leading

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Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen, including Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs

9.16am GMT

During the EU referendum campaign Michael Gove, the leading Vote Leave campaigner, scored a good hit during a Sky News “debate” when he said that the EU was led by five presidents and that hardly anyone knew who they all are. He had a point. Most politically-aware people know that Jean-Claude Juncker is president of the European commission, and Donald Tusk is president of the European council, but the presidents of the European parliament (Martin Shulz) and the European Central Bank (Mario Draghi) are harder to name. And the one that flummoxed even the editor of the FT is the president of the Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem.

Britons may not know much about Dijsselbloem, but he knows quite a lot about us and he was on Newsnight last night criticising the government’s stance on Brexit. In particular, he attacked Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, saying he was offering a vision of life outside the European Union that is “intellectually impossible” and “politically unavailable”.

I think he is offering to the British people options that are really not available. To say ‘we could be inside the internal market, keep full access to the internal market, but be outside the customs union’ – this is just impossible, it doesn’t exist.

The opposite does exist. We have a customs union with Turkey but Turkey is not part of the internal market. So he is saying things that are intellectually impossible, politically unavailable, so I think he is not offering the fair approach that gives the British people a fair view of what is ahead.

In the best case – if we set aside all emotions and try to work out an agreement which is least damaging to the both of us – we can minimise the damages for the UK economy and for the European economy.

Britain and British companies and international companies in the UK have full access to the European markets without any hindrance or customs duties, etc. So some of that will disappear.

Wednesday’s Telegraph front page:
Merkel signals key concession on Brexit#tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers http://pic.twitter.com/MF9a5xaVdc

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Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen, including John McDonnell’s economy speech

9.12am GMT

John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, is giving a big speech on the economy this morning, ahead of the autumn statement a week tomorrow. As Phillip Inman reports in our preview story, he is urging the government not to extend austerity beyond 2020.

Related: Labour to call on chancellor not to extend austerity beyond 2020

We are hoping that next week Philip Hammond will put behind him the fiscal framework that he and George Osborne designed when they were in opposition and implemented when in government and enable … investment to take place. I’m hoping that Philip Hammond will steal some of our ideas on that.

Also, we’ve got to say now, if we want a fair economy, we’ve got to end the austerity measures that were introduced by George Osborne. We saw a period of time in which tax cuts were given to the rich and corporations while some of the most deprived in our communities, particularly disabled people, were hit with cuts in benefits. So we are looking to see how the government now lays out its plan, rewrites the rules of its fiscal framework and then looks to long-term investment.

Related: German economy slows as Brexit vote hits exports – business live

Related: Leaked Brexit memo: no single plan and Whitehall is struggling to cope

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Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen

9.09am GMT

Westminster is still trying to come to terms with the election of Donald Trump as American president. Theresa May will set out some of her thinking in her Mansion House speech this evening, previewed here, but the Times and the Daily Telegraph are both splashing on reports saying some Tories are unhappy about May’s decision to rule out using the Ukip leader Nigel Farage as an intermediary. Both papers quote what Lord Marland, a Tory peer and former minister and former government trade envoy, told Radio 5 Live yesterday.

Anything we can do at any level to rebuild that relationship [with the US] will be to Britain’s advantage, and if Mr Farage happens to be one of the people who encourages that relationship then so be it. Any manufacturer would use its best salesman to try and help get a market for them and if No 10 decides that that’s the person, then fine.

Monday’s Times front page:
Tories split over Farage role in deal with Trump#tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers http://pic.twitter.com/vJUD4txTN5

Monday’s Telegraph front page:
May under fire for dismissing Farage’s alliance with Trump#tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers http://pic.twitter.com/vDMtxQEXGz

We talked to all of the key players in Trump’s team and it’s perfectly clear that to a man and woman they are anglophiles. We talked about the prospect of the United Kingdom being at the front of the queue, all of which was met positively.

The only slight negative I picked up was the sense that so many senior Conservative figures and indeed important staff figures who now work in No 10 had been so unrelentingly negative about The Donald. Clearly, there are fences to be mended.

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Share breaking news, leave links to interesting articles online and chat about the week’s political events in our open thread

8.49am GMT

I’m not writing my usual Politics Live blog today so, as an alternative, here’s Politics Live: readers’ edition. It is intended to be a place where you can catch up with the latest news and find links to good politics blogs and articles on the web.

Please feel free to use this as somewhere you can comment on any of the day’s political stories – just as you do during the daily blog. It would be particularly useful for readers to flag up new material in the comments – breaking news or blogposts or tweets that are worth passing on because someone is going to find them interesting.

Continue reading…

Politics blog | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2eIGNOz

Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen

9.14am GMT

Parliament is in recess, there is very little UK politics in the diary, and most MPs are probably spending the day trying to work out what the election of Donald Trump as president means for America, for Britain and for the entire world. Their best starting point may well be the Guardian’s US elections 2016 live blog.

Related: US election 2016: protests against Trump break out across major cities – live

Theresa May has reaffirmed her commitment to maintaining the “golden era” in Britain’s relations with China as the government hosts talks aimed at boosting Beijing’s investment in the UK’s infrastructure.

Chancellor Philip Hammond is meeting a Chinese delegation headed by vice premier Ma Kai in London for the eighth UK-China Economic and Financial Dialogue as ministers seek to underline that Britain remains “open for business” following the vote for Brexit.

I’m determined that as we leave the European Union, we build a truly global Britain that is open for business.

As we take the next step in this golden era of relations between the UK and China, I am excited about the opportunities for expanding trade and investment between our two countries.

The golden era in UK China relations continue to deepen. With our complementary bilateral trade ties, China and the UK remain natural partners and building on this relationship will form the cornerstone of this year’s dialogue.

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Politics blog | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2016/nov/10/may-hails-golden-era-in-relations-with-china-politics-live

Rolling coverage of political reaction in Britain to the election of Trump as US president

9.27am GMT

In retrospect it is probably a good thing that, when MPs debated a proposal to ban Donald Trump from the UK in January this year, they did not end up voting to keep out the man who has just been elected president of the United States.

It is worth reading the debate again (I covered it at length on the live blog here) to be reminded just what a shock to conventional politics today’s result is. It will have a profound impact on Britain, perhaps – if it signals a long-term shift in the character of Western democracy – even as great as Brexit.

Related: US election 2016: Donald Trump says ‘it’s time to come together’ – live

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Politics blog | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2016/nov/09/britain-reacts-to-shock-us-result-politics-live

Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen

10.33am GMT

No, we didn’t cancel today’s blog because all the interesting politics is happening in the US, although it is, and you can read about it here. I’m late starting because I got held up this morning for various reasons. Sorry.

Related: US election 2016: voters head to polls as Trump and Clinton aim to make history – live

Related: £25bn hole will limit Philip Hammond’s options in autumn statement, says IFS

Another reason for the chancellor to wait before implementing any further fiscal tightening is that there is even more economic uncertainty than usual. But building a plan for further austerity in the next parliament would be prudent. Indeed even if a balanced headline budget was delivered in 2020–21 and then maintained thereafter public sector net debt would not be on course to reach its pre-crisis level of 40% of national income until around the mid-2040s. Unfortunately if anything the £25 billion estimated deterioration in the public finances in 2019–20 is likely to understate the increase in the longer-term challenge that has occurred since the March Budget. The OBR’s previous long-run projections were based on an optimistic assumption about NHS productivity growth which they have recently said is likely to be revised down in their future projections. More fundamentally any reduction in future immigration, any reduction in longer-term growth or any increase in future interest rates would make the fiscal arithmetic harder still.

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