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

9.26am GMT

There has been some confusion over the Labour party’s stance on whether it will vote in favour of triggering article 50, the process that starts the EU withdrawal process. Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, has been giving interviews this morning to try to clear up the party’s position, although he has not managed to eliminate all amiguity.

The problem started when Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, gave an interview to the Sunday Mirror setting out Labour’s four demands for Brexit. The article was headlined “Jeremy Corbyn gives Theresa May ultimatum: Agree to Labour’s Brexit terms or I’ll force election in spring”, although Corbyn’s own quotes did not put it as starkly as that.

Of course we must have discussions about [the terms of Brexit]. We can’t have a vote in a vacuum. And we can’t proceed with this approach where the prime minister says I hold all the cards for the future of the UK in Europe, and its relationship with Europe, and indeed the world, and I’m not going to disclose even the basic terms to parliament. So of course we need that discussion.

We want to have the plan before parliament. That needs to be subject to scrutiny … This is the future of all of us, and the future of our children. We should be proceeding on the basis of a consensus across parliament, not forced divisions.

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Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen, including the high court ruling on whether parliament should get a vote on triggering article 50

8.53am GMT

According to the YouGov, a majority of voters support the government’s position and think the prime minister, not parliament, should have the final say over triggering article 50.

High Court will today rule on who has the final say on Article 50 – majority of the public think it should be the PM https://t.co/VzpQdKVkcn http://pic.twitter.com/pLMf6aA6AA

8.49am GMT

Power in a democratic state like Britain is conventionally accredited to three bodies: the executives, which rules and proposes laws; the legislature, which passes laws; and the judiciary, which determines whether laws are being obeyed. Today we’re going to get a landmark ruling in which powerbase 3 (the judiciary) has to decide whether the most important foreign policy decision for more than 40 years gets decided by powerbase 1 or 2. For anyone interested in this sort of thing, it should be fascinating.

This is the case about whether the government has the right to trigger article 50 (the process that will start the two-year EU withdrawal process) without consulting parliament. The judgement will be delivered at 10am. Here is my colleague Owen Bowcott’s preview story.

Related: High court to declare verdict on whether UK government has right to trigger Brexit

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While there was no clear winner, the exchanges on benefits did credit to both Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May

Today’s exchange was almost wholly around benefits. Jeremy Corbyn recommended that the prime minister should “support British cinema” by going to see Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake during a series of questions about benefit sanctions, universal credit cuts and cuts to the employment support allowance for disabled people. He accused Theresa May of “imposing poverty on people” under the guise of helping them find work. In response, May said Labour was in favour of no sanctions and no obligation on claimants to prove they were unfit for work, and that the benefits system needed to also be fair to the people who pay for it. She said Labour had lost touch with its working-class support and the Tories were now the true party of the working classes.

Related: May and Corbyn at PMQs – Politics live

It’s time we ended this institutional barbarity against the most vulnerable people in the system.

The Labour party is drifting away from the views of working-class people. It is this party that knows how to support them.

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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

Three weeks today Philip Hammond, the chancellor, will deliver his autumn statement. It will be his first big financial statement as chancellor and his first proper chance to reset economic policy in the light of the Brexit vote. And, according to today’s Financial Times splash, he will announce a “modest” financial stimulus, but also a new “flexible fiscal framework”.

After the Brexit vote the government abandoned George Osborne’s target of getting the budget into surplus by 2019-20. Hammond has yet to say what his replacement target will be, but the FT story makes it clear that his new rules will be more lax than Osborne’s. Chancellors used to pride themselves on their “iron” discipline. Given the uncertainty caused by our departure from the EU, Hammond seems to see being a “rubber” chancellor as more pragmatic.

FT: Hammond seeks ‘headroom’ to let deficit rise if Brexit hits growth #tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers http://pic.twitter.com/b5HPAvobqx

Mr Hammond told cabinet colleagues on Tuesday to expect only a modest fiscal stimulus, with a programme of new infrastructure spending expected to run to the low billions of pounds a year.

But his new fiscal plan, while aimed at achieving a balanced budget in the next parliament, would allow a greater stimulus package to be unleashed if the current robust rate of economic growth starts to falter.

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

9.16am GMT

With the next general election potentially three and a half years years away, it is unwise to get too excited about opinion polls. But equally it would be a mistake to ignore them completely. They are like the backdrop to a stage: not the focus of attention, easy to overlook, but providing the context that explains what’s going on up front.

In that spirit I bring you the results from the latest regular Guardian/ICM poll. The Tories have a 16-point lead – one point down from our last poll. Here are the figures.

ALERT: The first UKIP Leadership Debate. @LBC Radio, 5-6pm, Tuesday 1 November with @SuzanneEvans1, @RaheemKassam & @paulnuttallukip. Pls RT http://pic.twitter.com/axDRug8Apz

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

9.12am GMT

Autumn and winter are always the seasons when the state of the NHS becomes a growing concern and, right on cue, a day after the clocks went back, health funding is on the front pages. The Guardian has splashed with the news that five MPs, including Sarah Wollaston, the Conservative who chairs the Commons health committee, have written to the Treasury saying it should stop claiming that it has put an extra £10bn into the NHS because that’s not true. Here’s our story.

Related: Theresa May’s claim on NHS funding not true, say MPs

TELEGRAPH: Hospital beds and A&E Units face axe #tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers http://pic.twitter.com/PUFXYwqAtj

Well, it’s only technically correct if you’re looking at spending on NHS England and you add an extra year to the spending review and you also take account of the switch from other budgets that we would normally think of as health spending. So, for example, you can only arrive at the £10bn by shifting money from public health budgets and from health education and training, and also by changing the date at which you calculate real terms increases. So, yes, you can see how they have arrived at the figure. But the real figure we feel should be quoted at £4.5bn which is considerably less … That’s over the period of the spending review and that’s the period that we usually talk about increases in spending. We wouldn’t normally, say for other government departments, just add an extra year.

[Stevens] was very clear when he came before our committee during our inquiry that if you look at the middle years, next year and the year after, we are going to be seeing a far more constrained situation, and certainly not what he asked for. So, certainly, for 2018-19 we will be seeing a per capita fall in funding for the NHS at a time when our demographics [are changing], the increase in older people, a 21% increase in the number of people over 65 in the last decade up to 2015.

‘Government wrong on NHS spending’ – @sarahwollaston says actual figure £4.5bn rather than £10bn they have claimed https://t.co/BfALjw4bMg http://pic.twitter.com/BVT6qNe3F2

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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

8.23am BST

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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After putting EU leaders in their place over the weekend the prime minister revealed her Brexit masterplan: we are going to make it up as we go along

What a difference a few days can make. On Friday, Theresa May had looked rattled at the indifference with which she had been treated. A “pff” here and a “bof” there had been the only tangible evidence of anyone having taken any notice of her presence in Brussels at the European council summit. But now she’d had time to reflect on her performance it had been nothing less than a total triumph.

Far from being a graveyard slot, the five minutes she had been given – “if you must, Theresa” – long after dinner had finished and everyone had gone to bed was absolute primetime. Didn’t everyone always leave the most important item on the agenda till after “Any Other Business”? And those noises her insecurity had allowed her to think of as snores were, now she came to think of it, purrs of approval.

Related: UK will need interim EU deal before Brexit, says ex-Foreign Office chief

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• Nicola Sturgeon, Carwyn Jones and Arlene Foster meet for talks on EU negotiations
• PM will offer leaders regular meetings with David Davis and promises negotiations will not be ‘binary choice’
• May calls for new era of ‘grown-up’ relationships in the union

8.43am BST

Good morning, it’s Jessica Elgot here with Andrew Sparrow off for the week.

The main story today is the leaders of the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments arriving at Downing Street for a Brexit summit this morning, the first meeting of the Joint Ministerial committee in two years.

The country is facing a negotiation of tremendous importance and it is imperative that the devolved administrations play their part in making it work.

The new forum I am offering will be the chance for them all to put forward their proposals on how to seize the opportunities presented by Brexit and deliver the democratic decision expressed by the people of the UK.

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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

8.51am BST

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…

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