Farage"s amplification of fake news "deeply irresponsible and dangerous" - Tugendhat Tom Tugendhat has said Nigel Farage has been “deeply irresponsible and dangerous” in trying to amplify “false information”. He also hit out at Farage for condemning the breakdown of law and order before the riots “but not the riots themselves”. He went on to criticise Jess Phillips’ response to scenes of journalists being threatened, calling it “a failure of leadership”. He says “it is not the only failure of leadership by Keir Starmer government over these last two weeks.” Summary of the day … Conservative leadership hopeful Tom Tugendhat has said Keir Starmer failed the country during the recent violent disorder in England and Northern Ireland. He has also criticised Nigel Farage for amplifying false information, and said he had been “deeply irresponsible and dangerous” in trying to amplify “false information”. He also hit out at Farage for condemning the breakdown of law and order before the riots “but not the riots themselves”. Elon Musk was also a target for Tugendhat, who said the unelected billionaire’s claim that civil war was inevitable amid the disorder in parts of the UK was “delusional” and “simply false” Tugendhat also accused the prime minister of “pretending” that he inherited full prisons and had to introduce an early release scheme. The early release scheme had actually begun under Rishi Sunak’s government. Tugendhat also said that Starmer should have sacked Jess Phillips over her reaction to footage of journalists being menaced on camera Former justice minister David Gauke has cautioned that the current contest for the Conservative party leadership is failing to learn the lesson of why the party suffered such a huge defeat in the general election, and the crop of candidates are “too frightened of the party membership” Health secretary Wes Streeting has said he “totally understands” why the families of Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates have accused the NHS of having “blood on its hands”. Speaking to viewers on Sky News, Streeting said: “The hard truth here is that had the NHS done its job, had there not been multiple fundamental failures, three innocent people might still be alive” A group of 120 police officers from Scotland is to receive orientation training in Belfast on Tuesday before a week-long deployment to bolster the over-stretched Police Service of Northern Ireland. Police in Northern Ireland announced they had arrested a second man over an attack on a mosque at the weekend Former Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell has called for an inquiry into the process of migrating people on to universal credit after the DWP has published a set of figures which he suggests is “extremely worrying” and “could mean many of the poorest are losing all support”. The numbers appear to suggest that a third of claimants sent notices to migrate to the universal credit system have not responded to them, and their legacy benefit claims have been closed The UK jobs market bucked predictions of a further weakening in June after official figures showed unemployment fell – but wages growth slowed to its lowest for two years Conservative leadership candidate James Cleverly seized on today’s economic news to suggest that things were going well for the economy under Rishi Sunak’s government. “Inflation down. Employment up. Fastest growth in the G7. That was Labour’s real economic inheritance, but Rachel Reeves still wants to raise your taxes,” he said. Priti Patel commented “We must continue to hold Labour to account over their falsehoods on the economy. Today’s positive news on employment figures shows the Conservatives left an economy moving in the right direction” Labour market statistics have shown Scotland’s GDP grew by 0.3% in May, and by 0.9% in the three months leading up to May. The Scottish government says the latest figures represent the highest number of payrolled employees in Scotland since July 2014, with median monthly pay the highest recorded yet The number of people waiting more than 12 hours at A&E in Scotland has dropped below 1,000 in a single week for the first time since December That is your lot from me, Martin Belam, for today. Thank you for reading. I will be back with you tomorrow. Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor Anas Sarwar has suggested Scotland has so far escaped the violent riots which have hit England and Northern Ireland in part because the media and Tories in Scotland did not whip up resentment over immigration and race. The Scottish Labour leader told the Matt Forde’s podcast The Political Party he thought it essential that Scotland avoided thinking there was “a DNA difference” between someone in Scotland and someone in England. But he added: “Do I think our demographics are different? Yes. Do I think our political discourse is different in Scotland? Yes. Do I think our chattering class and our media is different in Scotland? Yes. Do I think we have less of a thriving right wing or right of centre media bubble in Scotland? Yes. “I think all of that has helped contribute to us not having the same problems as you have seen in other parts of the UK. I think there are certain things the UK Conservative party and UK Conservative politicians would say that thankfully up until now a Scottish Conservative politician would not say, and I think that something to be welcomed.” But he said there was still “engrained prejudice” in every community in Scotland, while the far right tried to mobilise, particularly in Glasgow. But the country’s closeness and a very well organised community resistance to the far right had helped “repel them”, he said. Sarwar’s remarks point to different Scottish editions of UK papers blamed for stirring up prejudice, such as the Daily Mail. The Mail in Scotland routinely runs different lead stories to editions in England. The Scottish Tories are habitually closer to the centre than at UK level, and avoid the Tory rhetoric and attack lines on migration and multi-culturalism adopted since Theresa May’s departure as prime minister. Something a little lighter here from the Guardian’s Scotland editor Severin Carrell: Anas Sarwar has revealed that Keir Starmer has a unique place in the Sarwar family home in Glasgow. There the prime minister is a pro-wrestler who fights Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un on the PlayStation. The Scottish Labour leader told a fringe festival audience in Edinburgh that he came home a few days ago to hear Starmer’s name being shouted out by his eight-year-old son; he peeped around the door to find Starmer fighting a bout alongside Joe Biden. Sarwar told Matt Forde’s Political Party his oldest son was heavily into football, while his 14-year-old was keen on American pool, “and I have got an eight-year-old who has an obsession with wrestling, and we watch WWE together, which is great fun. “And I came home last week and I heard him playing his WWE 2K24 on his PlayStation [and] all I could hear was him going ‘SIR KEIR STAAARMER’, and I thought what was he doing, and he was playing his wrestling game. “He’s downloaded Keir Starmer as a wrestler and I was watching him, and he was doing a wrestling match with Keir Starmer and Joe Biden versus Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un and Rishi Sunak. He’s downloaded those characters to his wrestling. I’ve not told Keir yet. “He of course wants Starmer to win, but he’s now threatening to create a character for me and make it available for public download.” The PSNI has said in a statement that a second man has been arrested in connection with an attack on a mosque at the weekend in Newtownards. It said “The man, aged 46, was arrested on suspicion of a number of offences, including attempted arson with intent to endanger life, making a petrol bomb and criminal damage. He has since been released on police bail.” With apposite timing, while Tom Tugendhat was giving that talk blaming all and sundry for the recent violent disorder in England and Northern Ireland, Maya Goodfellow, author of Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats, has this opinion column for us today: Westminster must take a long, hard look at itself: what many politicians now condemn, they also had a hand in manufacturing. The political “centre” usually reacts to the far right by denouncing its methods and distancing themselves from its coarse, racist rhetoric – but ultimately conceding to its underlying argument. In the days after the general election, Tony Blair advised Keir Starmer that to ward off the far right, he should celebrate what is good about immigration but be sure to “control” it. No matter how respectable and sensible such advice may seem to some within our political classes, the sentiment that “controlling” immigration is a way to appease socially conservative voters is one cause of the corrosiveness. Why? Because it implies that a fear of immigration is a legitimate concern, and that reducing immigration is the appropriate method to assuage that fear. It is this sentiment that could shape what comes next. One Conservative commentator has already suggested that reducing immigration is at least part of the picture in responding to the violence. In an acutely uncomfortable TV interview about the riots with the independent MP Zarah Sultana, Ed Balls maintained that “if you fail to control and manage immigration properly then things go wrong”. Are concerns about immigration “legitimate”? Demonstrably, no. People who arrive in the UK aren’t to blame for an economy designed to benefit the richest while exploiting and abandoning the poorest – immigration is not a significant causal factor of low wages and it’s not why people have insecure jobs. Anti-immigrant feeling isn’t a natural, inevitable reaction to change either. One study found areas with low levels of immigration had some of the highest proportion of leave voters in them – a vote that was at least partly motivated by anti-immigrant concerns. No: it is mainstream politicians and certain sections of the media that summon these feelings. They characterise certain groups of people, usually those who aren’t white (or not-quite-white), as a cultural threat – often targeting Muslims, no matter where they were born. Conservative leadership candidate Tom Tugendhat has criticised the reporting of some court cases involving the use of social media, saying that in some cases it has “stretched the truth quite markedly”. After criticism of sentences handed out to people who were found guilty of incitement online, Tugendhat said “It isn’t just that somebody said something, it’s that they also recommended how to attack, how to do harm, how to bring violence to individuals. That’s not the same.” He said “Freedom of speech is not unqualified. Freedom of speech and freedom of expression is the ability to associate and share ideas, and we need to be very careful that when we say various freedoms are limited, that it’s not just being wrong that’s limited, it’s not just being mistaken that’s limited, it’s when you are actively doing harm. That’s where we have got to balance these rights.” A couple of more things from the Q&A afterwards with Tom Tugendhat which PA Media have picked up on. He ruled out making a deal with Reform UK if he became Conservative leader. He said Elon Musk’s claim that civil war was inevitable amid the disorder in parts of the UK was “delusional” and “simply false”. He also said on social media that “I refuse to be on TikTok because the algorithm is set by a foreign dictatorship” I should just add, by the way, that I use Otter AI to transcribe speeches like that, which is way more reliable than my shorthand, but does mean as I try to put it into the King’s English and/or Guardian style for the blog as I go along I sometimes miss homophones, US spellings, or the fact it simply refuses to learn how to spell Keir Starmer correctly, so apologies if you spotted any of that in the last few blocks. I didn’t quite catch who it was, I think it was Christian Calgie of the Daily Express, who given the opportunity to ask a question of Tom Tugendhat, said: Mass immigration. Segregated communities. Lack of prison places. Weak justice for criminals. Importing identity politics from abroad. Looking at cracking down on freedom of speech. Collapsing social trust. This is just a shocking list of Tory failures, isn’t it? Tugendhat replied that “this is a list of areas that we must improve on. And it’s not Tory or Labour. It is a list of areas that this country must get better at.” The Tory leadership hopeful continued “You can import division. You can import ideas of separateness. Or you can remember who you are. “One of the great things about this country, one of the things I love about this country, is we don’t qualify Britishness. We’re not like some countries where you’re a hyphenated nation, you’re just British. And we should be deeply proud of that.” “You’re just British” is going to come as surprising news to the considerable number of people within the UK who identify more closely with one of its constituent parts than with the whole. In this speech as part of his leadership bid for the Conservative party, shadow security minister Tom Tugendhat has made this pitch, saying: This is not a counsel of despair. If we are honest with ourselves, the solutions will follow. The reform of our police and criminal justice system, the renewal and in some cases, replacement of our national institutions. The restoration of pride in our community and our country, its history and its culture, the rejection of militant identity politics in all its forms, the construction of a new economic model and the promise of a new social contract in which we understand our obligations as well as our rights and we all have the respect and the self-respect that comes with fending for ourselves, providing for our families and contributing to our common life together. It will take honesty, and it will take courage, and it will take leadership. But of course, it can be done, because what needs to be done in the national interest must be done. After a lengthy passage listing everything he thinks is wrong with the modern UK, Tom Tugendhat finishes by describing it as “the greatest country on Earth”. He said: Too many people live in communities shorn of civic pride and social capital, too many have lost their sense of self as they are denied opportunity and purpose in their lives. Many people are told, in effect, that they are not needed, that they have too little to contribute. They are parked on benefits and forgotten and social trust is collapsing. We’ve seen equality of opportunity give way to critical race theory, while the root causes of inequalities go ignored. Activist groups warp the language of inclusion to get what they want, universities indulge in ideologies of grievance instead of transmitting knowledge. Schools, museums and galleries apologise for our country’s history instead of objectively explaining it, and yes, celebrating it. Ministers are promising a legal definition of Islamophobia, creating a blasphemy law for one faith when anti-Muslim hatred is already a crime. This will undermine free speech, afford special protections uniquely to the beliefs of one religion, and protect extremists from scrutiny and investigation. And we can already see that activists on the left are trying to use the riots to silence those with mainstream concerns about immigration. We need patriotism and purpose, the patriotism that sees us all part of one nation and the purpose of seeing the goal of our shared prosperity and security, and we need to end the culture of denying the tendency to move hurriedly on from acts of extreme violence, to obfuscate about the identities and motives of the perpetrators. It is worth noting that latter part in particular, as earlier in the speech he criticised Nigel Farage for expressing his idea that “the truth is being hidden” by authorities about stabbings in Southport and Kent.