Rishi Sunak chairs cabinet ahead of release of plan to fast-track removal of some asylum seekers – UK politics live | Politics

Rishi Sunak has been warned by the migration advisory committee to avoid focusing on reducing the numbers of people coming into the UK amid a national staffing shortage in key industries, my colleague Rajeev Syal reports.

Rishi Sunak will give a statement to MPs today about tackling illegal immigration, sources are telling journalists. This will be the announcement previewed in the Times. (See 9.28am.)

Here are the main lines from Mick Lynch’s morning interview round.

• Lynch, the RMT general secretary, insisted his union was not opposed to reform of working practices on the rail network. “We’re not opposed to change, we deal with it all of the time,” he told BBC Breakfast. But he said there had to be “negotiated change, not imposition”.

The government is prepared to take so far a loss of maybe 320 million quid so that they can subsidise this dispute, so the incentive is not with the train-operating companies to settle this because they’ve been instructed not to settle by the government.

The RMT frequently complains that the rail companies have no incentive to settle the dispute under their current financing structure. Ed Conway, Sky’s economics editor, explained this well in a Sunday Times column at the weekend.

The RMT union is supposedly negotiating pay and conditions with the Rail Delivery Group, which represents the train operating companies. It might have made sense to have these two parties facing each other over the table a couple of years ago, when the franchise operators had a say in these things. Back then, it was up to them to absorb the cost of raising pay, and any days lost to strikes would take a slice out of their profits.

These days, however, the franchise system has been replaced with “passenger operating contracts”, which is a slightly long-winded way of saying “nationalisation”, since Whitehall ultimately decides on almost everything and takes the financial hit. “We can’t fart without permission,” as one senior rail operator put it.

The upshot is that the companies running the trains have less incentive to improve their service, and little punishment when things go wrong. They don’t really suffer when there is a strike, so why are they doing the negotiation?

We don’t like disrupting the public and we apologise for the disruption that’s being caused. I believe we could have worked towards a settlement a couple of weeks ago until that was undermined by the stance that certain people have taken.

• He refused to accept that the result of the ballot of RMT members in Network Rail, who yesterday rejected the pay offer by 64%, was disappointing. A previous majority against settling was higher. But Lynch said:

Two-thirds were not willing to accept it in a very straightforward democratic vote on a very high turnout.

And the company Network Rail put on a big effort. They sent all their managers out into the depots and stations, they made special films, they put a lot of comms together to try and get our members to accept it, and our members have resisted that very strongly.

There’s always going to be a constituency of people that want to settle at the first go, but they’ve also shown through a strike mandate ballot that we had a couple of weeks ago, or three or four weeks ago and this latest referendum, that they’re prepared to stick behind the dispute to get a settlement that they can support.

We’ve still got plenty of time before the Christmas Eve strikes if [Network Rail chief executive] Andrew Haines and the train operating companies, Huw Merriman the rail minister, and Mark Harper the secretary of state, want to come to me with a set of serious proposals to improve their offer so that we can get a settlement to the dispute, we’ll come over and see them as soon as possible.

They’ve already invited me to a set of talks and we’ll attend those to try and get a settlement to this dispute. And when our members decide that they want to accept it, that’s when the dispute will be finished.

• Lynch accused the Today presenter, Mishal Husain, of repeating rightwing propaganda when she asked him how much his members were losing in pay from the strike action. In response, he told her:

That depends on what shifts they were working, what rate of pay they earn and how many occasions they have to go out.

What I do find annoying though, Mishal, is that you put these lines that are directly taken from the propaganda of the other side. You never show any admiration for the fight that working people are putting up in this country for the rebalancing of our society.

You never criticise the super-rich for what they’re doing to nurses, what they’re doing to postal workers, and you never seem to take an impartial view on the way this society is balanced at the moment with the complete lack of distribution of wealth in our society.

You always just seem to punt out anything you receive from the employers and from the government, and that’s what I’m hearing directly through the filter of the BBC this morning.

On ITV’s Good Morning Britain Lynch also had a spat with the presenter Richard Madeley. He told Madeley:

We’re not targeting Christmas, it isn’t Christmas yet, Richard, I don’t know when your Christmas starts but mine starts on Christmas Eve.

When Madeley told him commercial Christmas starts in December, Lynch replied: “Richard, why don’t you just interview yourself?”

This morning Mark Harper, the transport secretary, and Mick Lynch, the RMT general secretary, have both been giving interviews. Their claims have been well rehearsed – this is a dispute that has been running for months, after all – but as it reaches the point where passengers are going to be inconvenienced more than ever before, the competition for public support becomes more intense.

In an interview with Times Radio, Harper claimed public opinion was turning against the RMT. Referring to the outcome of a ballot of its Network Rail members announced yesterday, Harper claimed:

[The RMT] have had a fair and reasonable offer, which has been accepted by Unite staff at Network Rail, the TSSA are recommending acceptance of that offer, it’s just the RMT that are recommending that it be refused. But even with them recommending refusal, almost 40% of their staff actually voted in favour of it. So I think the tide is turning on public opinion.

But the evidence for Harper’s claim is limited. Recently YouGov published polling suggesting a plurarity of voters are opposed to the strikes.

In the summer a separate Ipsos poll found the public split 50/50 (or 35% to 35%, to be precise) on whether they supported the rail strikes, and the difference between the two sets of results might back Harper’s case. But, even on the latest YouGov numbers, support for the RMT is high by historical standards, and support for rail workers being allowed to strike has actually gone up over the last three years, a YouGov tracker says.

In his interviews this morning Lynch said his union still did have public support.

Good morning. The first of four 48-hour national RMT rail strikes, set to paralyse the network of the holiday period, has started. Given the impact that these strikes will have on non-strike days, and other closures planned over Christmas, one estimate says rail services won’t return to normal for a month.

Here is my colleague Julia Kollewe’s story about the situation travellers this morning.

And here is Jasper Jolly’s business blog, which is covering this in more detail.

Cabinet is meeting this morning. Politics is dominated by the strikes, but the Times is reporting that Rishi Sunak could announce his latest plan to reduce the number of small boat crossings as early as today. In their story Matt Dathan and Stephen Swinford say:

The prime minister is expected to announce the first tranche of his strategy to deal with illegal immigration on Tuesday amid warnings from Tory backbenchers that the party will face defeat at the next election if it fails to resolve the issue. The announcement is expected to include a fast-track process for assessing claims from a list of “safe” countries such as Albania.

Sunak is set to announce that all asylum claims from countries on a Home Office “white list” will be automatically rejected unless the individual can provide evidence that their claim has merit, proposals that were first revealed by The Times earlier this month.

Government sources said there were plans to merge the assessment process for asylum and modern slavery claims, as part of efforts to stop failed asylum seekers “gaming” the system by claiming to be victims of modern slavery at the last minute to avoid deportation.

Sunak desperately needs something that will win his government some credit with the voters, given all the other problems he faces, although whether this will do the trick remains to be seen. Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, has already her announced her own plans to fast-track asylum applications from countries like Albania, and that will make it harder for Sunak to argue the Tories are doing something distinctive.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Rishi Sunak chairs cabinet.

10am: Ofsted publishes its annual report.

11.30am: James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

After 12.30pm: MPs debate the remaining stages of the levelling up bill.

12.45pm: Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, gives a speech to the Policy Exchange thinktank on defending democracy. The annual report from parliament’s intelligence and security committee is also due to be published at some point today.

2pm: Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, does a phone-in on LBC.

2.30pm: Grant Shapps, the business secretary, gives evidence to the Commons business committee.

Afternoon: Peers vote on a Lib Dem motion that would block regulations introducing voter ID for elections.

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