Under pressure from the success of Reform, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced new measures designed to reduce net migration. The government will consider deporting any foreign criminals, and introduce new restrictions on visas for low-skilled jobs, including scrapping the care worker visa. On the BBC this morning, Laura Kuenssberg asked the home secretary how care homes would recruit enough staff. Cooper said that care companies should recruit from a ‘pool of people’ who are already here on care worker visas, but did not get jobs. The home secretary resisted giving a target number for immigration, but did say she expected these new measures to ‘lead to a reduction of up to 50,000 fewer lower-skilled visas over the course of the next year.’
Chris Philp: ‘For Keir Starmer to claim [US trade deal] is some kind of huge success is absurd’
On Sky News, Trevor Phillips asked Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp why Kemi Badenoch was ‘grumbling’ about the new US trade deal when she had failed to reach any agreement with the White House. Philp argued that the Conservatives had been trying to negotiate a ‘proper, comprehensive trade deal’, and that Starmer’s new deal is ‘very narrow… talking mainly about tariffs.’ He said that although ‘terrible, punitive tariffs… have been eased’, tariffs on UK exports to the US are ‘higher under this deal… than they were at the beginning of the year’, and accused Starmer of ‘obscene obsequiousness’ in his dealings with Trump. Phillips asked whether the Conservatives were simply ‘cross’ that Labour were achieving things they were unable to. Philp claimed that his party had left the economy in a good place, and that Labour’s ‘appalling’ budget meant the country was ‘stagnating’.
Economist Joseph Stiglitz: ‘Any agreement with Trump isn’t worth the paper it’s written on’
Speaking to Trevor Phillips, Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz pointed out that Trump had signed a trade agreement with Canada and Mexico in his first term, but had ‘ripped it up’ and imposed tariffs on both countries after returning to power. Stiglitz suggested that Starmer’s deal with the US was no ‘great achievement’, and was ‘playing into Trump’s strategy’, which is to divide and conquer. Phillips asked if Starmer’s policy with Trump looked like ‘appeasement’, and Stiglitz agreed that it did, saying that ‘in the way that Trump evaluates things’, it looks like the US ‘won’. He then clarified that he believes the trade war is causing the US to lose ‘global respect… soft power’ and that the uncertainty in global markets is impacting the US in a ‘very negative way’.
Richard Tice: ‘Maybe a bit of discipline… is good for all of us’
As Reform prepare legal challenges against asylum hotels in local areas they now control, deputy leader Richard Tice was asked on GB News whether he would be in favour of asylum seekers being housed in tents. Tice told Camilla Tominey, ‘if smart, organised tents are suitable for the British army… why aren’t they good enough for people who come here illegally?’ Tominey asked Tice if he was saying asylum seekers would be put through ‘some kind of military camp’. Tice said his ‘real point’ was that the country should ‘process people quickly, and remove them’, and that the British people were ‘raging furious’ about the numbers of people crossing the channel.
Jo White: Connection between Westminster and constituents of the North ‘completely broken’
Camilla Tominey also interviewed Jo White, who is the Labour MP for Bassetlaw, an area where Reform had great success in the local elections. Tominey asked White what her constituents thought about Keir Starmer. White argued that people had voted for Brexit ‘hoping for change’, and had done so also when voting for Labour, but that hope had been ‘broken’ by the winter fuel payments cuts. White said that people ‘don’t listen anymore’ to the government, and urged Starmer to come out to places like Bassetlaw and talk to voters.
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