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Keir Starmer will offer a ‘Youth Mobility Scheme’ with the EU as part of ongoing attempts to ‘reset’ relations with the EU, according to reports. The scheme would see a return to free movement for young people, one of the least popular aspects of Britain’s membership of the EU before Brexit. At a time when the government appears to be doing little to reduce immigration (legal or illegal), it is a bold strategy to make such a public return to unpopular immigration policies.
President Zelensky has said that he would be willing to step down as the head of government in Ukraine if it brought about an end to the war and Ukraine’s accession to NATO. The Trump administration has been increasingly critical of the Ukrainian premiere, with Trump himself calling Zelensky a ‘dictator’. Meanwhile, Russian and US officials will meet for a second time this week to discuss a potential peace deal in Ukraine.
With friends like these…
The Prime Minister and the President of France will hold separate meetings with President Trump this week to discuss potential security guarantees for Ukraine. After Macron’s emergency summit last week, Starmer announced that he would be willing to station British troops in Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping mission. It is difficult to see how the UK and Europe’s depleted armed forces could provide anything of a security guarantee without US support, be it direct or indirect.
German voters will return representatives to the Bundestag in an election that seems doomed to produce uncertainty and instability. The CDU and the AfD look set to win a majority of seats, but the CDU has sworn not to cooperate with the AfD in government. This will leave them at the mercy of the centre-left SDP or other more radical left-wing parties to form a government. It is a terrible indictment of German politics that, when the electorate reveal a clear preference for right-wing and centre-right policies, the government can be held hostage by fringe socialist parties.
Time for a change in Germany?
The Procurement Act 2023 will come into effect this week. It replaces overly complex EU rules on public procurement which put SMEs at a disadvantage with simpler, more flexible procedures, giving new innovative companies a chance to win public contracts. Were it not for Brexit, the UK government would not have the freedom to simplify public procurement.
Media
Ian Williams on China’s deceptive approach to environmentalism
Thomas Fazi on Friedrich Merz, the likely next Chancellor of Germany.
Key Points
After promising to clean up politics after a years of “Tory sleaze”, Keir Starmer has had to respond to accusations that several senior cabinet members have been less than fully honest about their CVs. The dishonesty is, in most cases, petty, but it says something about Starmer’s Labour Party that those who rise to the top feel they need to embellish their career history with carefully-chosen falsehoods.
Rachel Reeves has had perhaps the most embarrassing time of it. Having claimed that she was an ‘economist’ by occupation, it transpires that the bulk of her career before politics was spent in a complaints role at a retail bank, and left her job after an investigation into her expenses. She also exaggerated the amount of time she had worked at the Bank of England and has been accused of plagiarising portions of her book on female economists. As she fails to deliver the transformational economic growth she promised during the election campaign, these small untruths start to build up a picture of someone who has found themselves slightly out of their depth.
The Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, is now under investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority after it emerged that he had claimed (including on campaign material) to have worked as a solicitor despite never qualifying. The allegations are serious — it is a criminal offence to lie about being a qualified solicitor — but for now opposition calls for a resignation are falling on deaf ears.
Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, is now facing questions over her career as a ‘home help’ carer. She has given different inconsistent accounts of her work history before entering politics as she moved between roles as a Union representative and as a carer and is now hiding behind some deceptive union jargon — a union officer’s “substantive role” is apparently the role they would be doing were they not seconded to union activities.
It is perhaps hard to muster any strong feelings about these small instances of dishonesty and it is perhaps tempting to dismiss them as the sort of thing we all might be prone to from time to time. But it is depressing that the most senior members of government lack the self-confidence to be completely honest about their careers before politics. Cabinet ministers ought not to need to embellish their CVs to impress the electorate. Do they suspect, deep down, that they aren’t really up for the job?
