The legislation will be introduced today and the government says it will lift almost 500,000 children out of poverty
At the Downing Street lobby briefing this morning reporters will try to get further details of Keir Starmer’s conversation with Donald Trump last night. Given the usual No 10 reticence when it comes to discussing these calls, they are unlikely to get very far.
Which would be a shame, because it sounds as if it may have been awkward. For the record, here is the official readout from a No 10 spokesperson issued last night.
The prime minister spoke with President Trump this evening.
They discussed the joint operation to intercept the Bella 1 as part of shared efforts to crack down on sanctions busting, recent progress on Ukraine and the US operation in Venezuela.
UK military chiefs had originally proposed sending 10,000 troops as part of a wider 64,000-strong “coalition of the willing” force but this has been deemed unsustainable inside the Ministry of Defence given the current size of the British Army.
The assumption is that fewer than 7,500 British soldiers will be deployed, two military sources disclosed, although that figure is also expected to be a struggle for the UK, which has only around 71,000 trained personnel in the regular army.
I will simply not go into detail on the nature of the activities in the deployment, the numbers of troops that are likely to be deployed to Ukraine or the commitments that other nations have made … We will deploy only if there is a ceasefire and a peace agreement. Disclosing, let alone debating, those sort of details would only make Putin wiser.