‘The Prime Minister will warn that Britain could leave the European Union unless members are prepared to show “political will and imagination” and meet his demands. He will send Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, a letter setting out the four objectives at the heart of his EU renegotiation strategy. They include protecting access to the single market, making the EU more competitive, bolstering the role of Parliament and tackling migrants who “abuse” freedom of movement.’ – Daily Telegraph
>Today: ToryDiary: David Cameron prepares to negotiate. Other Conservatives should prepare to leave.
‘British law should be supreme. Whether you’re on the right or the left, the idea that law made by bureaucrats should take precedence over a democratic parliament is obscene. It should be a fundamental principle that Westminster law holds sway.’ – Mark Wallace, The Guardian
‘Campaigners against Britain’s membership of the European Union have pledged to get “nasty”, after David Cameron’s keynote speech to the annual CBI conference was interrupted by a noisy protest from student protesters. Two students interrupted the Prime Minister’s speech at the 1,000-strong conference in central London, yelling “CBI! Voice of Brussels” and holding up a placard bearing the same message. Mr Cameron tried to reason with them, before they were led away, saying: “Come on guys! If you sit down now you can ask a question rather than making fools of yourselves by protesting.”’ – Daily Telegraph
>Yesterday: WATCH: Cameron heckled by Eurosceptics at CBI
‘Angry MPs want the Chancellor to protect White Van Man by ruling out a hike in diesel duty. Sources claim George Osborne is considering a penny tax rise after the VW diesel emissions scandal. The Chancellor has frozen fuel tax since 2011, after The Sun started our Keep It Down campaign.’ – The Sun (£)
‘The National Health Service could run out of money within two years unless ministers find a ‘workable’ funding solution, the NHS has warned. Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, said the ‘rubber will really hit the road’ by 2018 and cuts to public health and social care would drive up costs for the service more widely.’ – Daily Mail
>Yesterday:
‘In a candid private message to senior Tories, Ms Rudd downplayed the chances of the UK sourcing 15 per cent of energy, including for transport, power and heating, from renewables by 2020. She warned that the “absence of a credible plan” to meet the target could trigger repeated fines from the EU Court of Justice and a judicial review. Ms Rudd also said that while internal forecasts predicted Britain will fall short of the goal, “publically” the government would say the country “continues to make progress” to hit it.’ – Daily Telegraph
>Today: Grant Shapps MP on Comment: British ingenuity is bringing energy to hundreds of millions of Africans
‘The Government has dramatically halted its controversial police funding reforms after the policing minister Mike Penning apologised to Parliament for an “embarrassing” error in its calculations. The mistake, revealed by The Independent, affected grants worth millions of pounds and meant police forces across the country could have potentially ended up with wildly different amounts of money than they had been told they could expect under the reforms.’ – The Independent
>Today: Local Government: Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner candidates selected so far
‘Michael Gove is hoping for a multimillion-pound bonanza from closing inner-city Victorian prisons and selling the sites for housing. The justice secretary is planning to build nine new jails, allowing him to shut overcrowded institutions standing on prime sites near city centres which are more expensive to operate. Five of the new prisons will open by 2020, but he has not disclosed where they are to be built or how they will be paid for. The sale of city prisons will allow for the construction of more than 3,000 homes, under plans announced yesterday. About 10,000 inmates will be moved to the new prisons, which will provide modern workshop and educational facilities.’ – The Times (£)
>Yesterday: ToryDiary: Sell outdated prisons and build new ones – the first step in Gove’s mission to reform the penal system
‘The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has hit out at those involved in boycotts of Israel, describing them as “lefty academics” who were unlikely to have influence in Britain. Johnson, who was speaking at the outset of a three-day trade mission to Israel and the Palestinian territories, added that the boycotters were a “very small minority”.’ – The Guardian
‘”To protect people who use any products, you have to encrypt. You can just look around and see all the data breaches that are going on. These things are becoming more frequent. They can not only result in privacy breaches but also security issues. We believe very strongly in end to end encryption and no back doors,” Cook warns…”Any backdoor is a backdoor for everyone. Everybody wants to crack down on terrorists. Everybody wants to be secure. The question is how. Opening a backdoor can have very dire consequences.”’ – Daily Telegraph
‘Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn have promised to give moderate Labour MPs “nightmares” if they threaten his leadership, The Sun can reveal. The threat came in a menacing letter warning against toppling him. The campaign group Momentum warns: “We will vote for him again in numbers that will give you nightmares.” Key organisers of the controversial group dubbed “a party within a party”, wrote in a vicious online rant: “Labour will be unelectable until the PLP get behind Jeremy, and we don’t mean with a knife in their hand.”’ – The Sun (£)
>Today:
>Yesterday: Left Watch: How much longer can Labour have two defence policies?
‘Four of Mr Carmichael’s Orkney and Shetland constituents have raised the unusual court action, accusing him of lying over a leaked memo which falsely claimed that SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon favoured a David Cameron victory in the UK’s general election. However, in heated exchanges, Tavish Scott, the Lid Dem MSP for Shetland, told the election court that people considered the proceedings “a political event being funded by people, particularly nationalists, who do not want opposition in this country”.’ – The Independent
‘Russia faces being banned from the Olympics in Rio next year after investigators found that it “sabotaged” the London 2012 Games by running a state-sponsored doping programme. The scale of the corruption, which had “an inherited attitude from the old Cold War days”, was laid bare in a report published by the World Anti-Doping Agency yesterday.’ – The Times (£)