“David Cameron was forced to rely on Labour to avoid the first humiliating government defeat of the parliament last night. Some 27 Tory rebels voted to reinstate ‘purdah’, the ban on government taking sides during the run-up to the referendum on whether or not to remain in the European Union…All 56 SNP MPs, UKIP’s single MP and four Labour rebels voted with the 27 Conservative rebels. Some SNP figures were furious at Labour for ‘sitting on their hands’” – The Times (£)
>Yesterday:
“Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras accused Greece’s creditors on Tuesday of trying to ‘humiliate’ Greeks with more cuts as he defied a growing drumbeat of warnings that Europe was preparing for his country to leave the euro. The unrepentant address to lawmakers after the collapse of talks with European and IMF lenders at the weekend was the clearest sign yet that the leftist leader has no intention of making a last-minute U-turn and accepting austerity cuts needed to unlock frozen aid and avoid a debt default within two weeks”- Reuters
“As someone who is going to be arguing very firmly that No, Britain’s future does not lie inside the European Union, I am unashamedly optimistic about the potential that lies ahead of Britain as an independent nation…That is why today I am launching a new pamphlet alongside fellow UKIP MEP William Dartmouth entitled ‘The Truth about Trade: Beyond the EU’. It explains why exiting the EU would open up – quite literally – an entire new world of opportunity for the UK” – Nigel Farage, Daily Telegraph
“The European Union is being asked to make sure men do at least half of the household chores…The comments were submitted as part of the ‘EU Strategy for equality between women and men post 2015’, and drew derision from Tory MP Philip Davies. He told The Huffington Post UK: ‘With Greece and the eurozone reaching crisis point, you would think the EU would have better things to be doing than lecturing families on who should be doing the housework’” – Huffington Post
“George Osborne will meet Britain’s military chiefs today in an attempt to avert a public row over defence spending. The chancellor will try to bind the group, including General Sir Nicholas Houghton, the chief of the defence staff, more closely to his plan to find more savings and push civil servants harder to identify cuts from the military budget before the spending review in autumn. Mr Osborne will sympathise with the need to protect frontline troops but make clear that he believes there are areas to be trimmed” – The Times (£)
“More than a quarter of a billion pounds has been spent on holidays and cars by savers cashing in their pension pots since new rules were introduced two months ago. A further quarter of a billion has been ploughed into the property market or home improvements as the over-55s have reaped a £1 billion pensions bonanza, an analysis of the first official figures suggests. George Osborne hailed the reforms yesterday, saying that 60,000 people had taken advantage of his pensions revolution since April” – The Times (£)
“MPs from all parties will vote on Wednesday in hotly contested elections to chair the Commons departmental select committees…Among the Tory candidates for culture are Jesse Norman, biographer of Edmund Burke, trumpeter and skilled inquisitor on the Treasury select committee; Damian Green, the former Home Office minister; Graham Stuart, former chair of the education select committee; and Damian Collins, an existing culture committee member” – Guardian
“A generation of adults who grew up uncomfortable asserting authority over children has produced teachers who have never learnt to control a classroom, a government adviser says.New teachers often have not been taught basic techniques for managing pupils’ behaviour because they were trained by people who were themselves uncertain how to go about it, he said. Tom Bennett, who spent six years running nightclubs in Soho before becoming a teacher, was appointed yesterday to advise on the training of teachers in classroom management” – The Times (£)
“Emails sent from computers in Downing Street are automatically deleted within three months under a system that makes it harder for the public to obtain answers to ‘freedom of information’ requests, former staff have disclosed. The system, instigated a decade ago but not widely known about, means that messages are only held beyond that period if an individual saves them. It is widely blamed by government advisers for what one former employee called a sometimes ‘dysfunctional’ operation at the heart of Whitehall” – Financial Times
“Of course, it must be extremely distressing for any parent to lose a child into the clutches of ISIS. But I worry that all too often, we are told the same story by the families of those who run off to Syria: that it is always someone else’s fault. While trumpeting their own innocence over their children’s association with extremism, Muslim parents simultaneously protest that the authorities did nothing” – Manzoor Moghal, Chairman of the Muslim Forum, Daily Mail
“Conservative party supporters have mounted a Twitter campaign to elect Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in order to damage the party’s future election chances. According to new rules, anybody can pay £3 to register as a Labour supporter and vote for the new leader…The hashtag #ToriesForCorbyn, first used by the associate director of the Anglican Centre in Rome, Marcus Walker, has been adopted to call for people to vote for the leftwinger” – Guardian
“The body that will soon decide which teachers can work in Scotland’s independent schools is resentful of ‘outsiders’, MSPs have heard amid claims that new SNP rules governing who can be employed appear to be ‘very anti-English’. Rod Grant, the headmaster of Clifton Hall School in Edinburgh, described how the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) refused to register an eminent English academic who had taught at both Oxford and Cambridge universities” – Daily Telegraph