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PMQs live: Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer clash over prisons as MoJ delays court cases due to overcrowding | Politics
Key events
Mary Glindon (Lab) asks about schools with structural problems in her North Tyneside constituency. Will they get help from central government?
Sunak says the goverment helped schools with Raac (crumbly concrete). He says the Department for Education will have heard Glindon’s point.
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Derek Thomas (Con) asks about community pharmacies.
Sunak says he cares deeeply about pharmacies. (His mum ran one.) The government has given them new prescribing powers, he says.
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Rebecca Long-Bailey (Lab) asks about the ombudsman’s report saying the Waspi women (Women Against State Pension Injustice – women saying they lost out because they were not properly warned about the rise in their pension age) should get compensation. When will that happen?
Sunak says the government is still considering this. And he says he will take into account what is said in the debate tomorrow.
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Rosena Allin-Khan (Lab) asks Sunak why he is allowing Israel to get away with trampling over humanitarian law.
Sunak says he supports Israel’s right to defend itself. And he says he has repeatedly urged Israel to allow more aid into Gaza.
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Alberto Costa (Con) says the chld killer Colin Pitchfork is making another attempt to get parole. He says the rules allow convicts to make repeated attempts to get parole. That should stop, he says.
Sunak commends Costa for his campaigning on this and says he will arrange for him to have a meeting with ministers to discuss this.
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Updated at 12.27 BST
Wendy Chamberlain (Lib Dem) asks about the closure of a TSB branch in her North East Fife constituency. What will the government do to tackle banking deserts?
Sunak says the government legislated to protect access to banking services.
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Richard Burden (Lab) asks what needs to happen for the UK to end arms sales to Israel, as other countries are doing.
Sunak says the UK government does not directly sell arms to Israel. And it has a strict arms control regime, he says.
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What Sunak says about Scottish nationalists in his speech on Monday
For the record, here is the passage in Sunak’s speech on Monday that the SNP claim amounts to equating Scottish nationalists with extremists and autocrats.
Iranian proxies are firing on British ships in the Red Sea, disrupting goods destined for our high streets. Here at home, China has conducted cyber targeting of our democratically elected MPs. Russia has poisoned people with chemical weapons. And when Putin cut off the gas supplies it had a devastating impact on people’s lives and threatened our energy security.
And in this world of greater conflict and danger, 100 million people are now displaced globally. Countries like Russia are weaponising immigration for their own ends, and criminal gangs keep finding new routes across European borders. Illegal migration is placing an intolerable strain on our security and our sense of fairness, and unless we act now and act boldly this problem is only going to grow.
Extremists are also exploiting these global conflicts to divide us. People are abusing our liberal democratic values – the freedom of speech and right of protest – to intimidate, threaten and assault others, to sing antisemitic chants on our streets and our university campuses, and to weaponise the evils of anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim hatred in a divisive, ideological attempt to set Briton against Briton.
And from gender activists hijacking children’s sex education to cancel culture, vocal and aggressive fringe groups are trying to impose their views on the rest of us. They’re trying to make it morally unacceptable to believe something different and undermine people’s confidence and pride in our own history and identity. Scottish nationalists are even trying to tear our United Kingdom apart.
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Stephen Flynn, the SNP leader at Westminster, says Sunak compared North Korea, Iran and Russia to supporters of Scottish independence in his speech on Monday. Will he apologise for those puerile remarks?
Sunak says that is not what he said. But he says the SNP are a threat to the unity of the UK. That is their purpose, he says.
Flynn says Sunak did not just equate the SNP to despots across the world; he proactively compared half of Scots to Putin. Sunak represents Scots on the world stage. Is this really how Sunak wants to be remembered?
Sunak says the SNP’s obsession with independence means Scottish pupils are being let down. And Scotland is the only place where NHS spending is falling.
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Starmer says the only answer to the question, should domestic abusers being stopped from being released early, is yes. He says the most ridiculous part of Sunak’s speech was where he said the Tories should not be blamed for what has happened over the last 14 years. He says, instead of confiscating lanywards “like some jumped-up milk monitor”, Sunak should be stopping domestic abuser being released early.
Sunak says Starmer has no plan, and he says Starmer did not acknowledge the growth figures out last week. The ONS said the economy was going “gangbusters”, he said.
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Starmer says the Lewes report shows domestic abusers are being released early. Will the PM back Labour’s calls to stop this.
Sunak says, when Labour was in power, thousands of violent offenders were let out early. He claims one Labour frontbencher said prison did not stop crime.
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Read the full story on www.theguardian.com
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