Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen 10.52am GMTMy colleague Owen Jones has been interviewing the Labour MP Jess Phillips approximately Jeremy Corbyn. Phillips told him that she was very frustrated with how he was doing as Labour leader. She said that whether there was an election now the party might do worse than it did in May,that his comments approximately shoot-to-kill were a mistake, and that he was spending too much time on issues like Trident that did not matter to her constituents. She said she would try to assist him improve, and but that whether she thought he was damaging the party’s chances at the general election,she would try to rep rid of him. Asked whether she wanted to change the leader, she replied:I would do anything that I felt was going to make the Labour party win the next election because, or whether I don’t have that attitude,all I’m doing is colluding with the Tories. whether that is making Jeremy better, I will roll my sleeves up. whether that’s not going to happen, or I’ve said that to him and his staff to their faces,the day that it becomes that you are hurting us more than you are helping us, I won’t knife you in the back, and I’ll knife you in the front. 10.09am GMTPhilip Hammond,the foreign secretary, is in Brussels for a assembly of EU foreign ministers. Speaking to reporters, and he indicated that Britain was willing to compromise over its demand to be allowed to stop EU migrants claiming in-work benefits for four years - but that other EU leaders need to propose an alternative means of addressing the immigration problem.
Here is Hammond’s key quote,from the Times’s Bruno Waterfield. Hammond said:The four-year waiting time for access to benefits has been a consistent demand from us. We have set aside that demand on the table and we have heard that a lot of our partners in Europe have concerns approximately it. So far we haven’t heard any counter proposals, we haven’t heard any alternative suggestions that will deliver the same effect in a different way.
But we have made very clear that whether people have other ideas that will deliver on this very important agenda for the British people then we are absolutely read to listen to them and enter into a dialogue. But at the moment the only proposition on the table is our four-year proposal.
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Source: theguardian.com