Ahead of Keir Starmer’s meeting with European leaders tomorrow, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper joined Sky News and reiterated Labour’s ‘red lines’: no return to the customs union, the single market or to free movement. Cooper told Trevor Phillips that Labour wanted to get rid of some of the bureaucracy around customs arrangements, and said that the deal the Conservatives had with the EU ‘was not a good one’. Phillips asked if the government was still negotiating a youth mobility scheme. Cooper said net migration had to come down, and that a youth mobility scheme was ‘not the right starting point… at all’. Phillips also suggested that the government might consider joining the ‘Pan European Mediterranean Convention’ to take away trade frictions. Cooper said the government would indeed try to reduce frictions, but emphasised there would be no return to a customs union.
Ed Davey: ‘We believe we should be back at the heart of Europe’
Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg, Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said he didn’t think ‘anyone would be surprised’ that the Liberal Democrats supported a return to the EU, but suggested the possibility was ‘a long way off’. Davey claimed the UK’s relationship with Europe has ‘been so damaged by the Conservatives… that our European colleagues don’t trust us’, but he argued Starmer could ‘turbocharge’ the relationship if he opened negotiations for a UK-EU customs union.
Cooper: Employers should train Britons before hiring overseas workers
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told Trevor Phillips that overseas recruitment was driving high levels of immigration, saying, ‘for far too long we’ve been recruiting from abroad and failing to train in the UK’. Cooper said that the government had removed the 20 per cent wage discount for non-EU foreign workers that the Conservatives introduced in 2019, and would keep the increased migrant worker salary threshold. The home secretary added that Labour would introduce further measures to target specific industries like IT, construction and engineering, where the numbers of overseas workers are particularly high.
Yvette Cooper: ‘AI is now putting online child abuse on steroids’
The Home Office has announced new legislation that will make it illegal to distribute and possess AI tools used to create child sexual abuse material. Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said that artificial intelligence is ‘escalating and industrialising’ the scale of online child abuse. She said AI is being used to aid the grooming of children, as well as creating images, and added that the National Crime Agency estimated there are up to 800,000 people in the UK viewing child abuse material online. Cooper also suggested that online abuse can become a ‘gateway’ that increases the prevalence of child abuse offline.
Andrew Griffith: ‘The ability to make one’s own laws is never a failure’
Trevor Phillips also spoke to Shadow Business Secretary Andrew Griffith, showing him a new poll which suggests that 55 per cent of people would rejoin the EU, and 62 per cent believe Brexit has been a failure. Griffith claimed that Brexit had not been a failure because the freedom to make one’s own laws was ‘part of democracy’, and said we ‘have already seen real benefits from Brexit’, referencing 73 new trade deals. Phillips argued that many of them were pre-existing deals that had been ‘rolled over’, but Griffith said many others were new, including ‘a whole set of improvements’ to the competitiveness of the UK’s financial services industry, which Griffith accomplished because of ‘those Brexit freedoms’.
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