Robert Jenrick follows Braverman in criticising PM after local election results – UK politics live | Politics

Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister (and potential future leadership candidate), has been giving interviews this morning to promote his new report on immigration. (See 9.42am.) In an interview with LBC, he said the Conservative party needed to show more “honesty” about its mistakes if it wanted to win back voters. He explained:

What I’ve tried to set out are a series of policies that could be implemented before the general election, such as what I’m saying today on legal migration, which would convince some of those Conservative voters – who are essentially on strike – to come back and support the party at the general election.

And also to persuade some of those voters who are considering voting Reform that we do care about the issues that they do, which are principally immigration, but also on crime, on extremism and on lower taxes.

And if we can do that, I think we can persuade more of those former Conservative voters to come back and to support us.

But that will require honesty, it requires levelling with the public about the mistakes of the past and using every last minute we have in office before the general election to actually deliver positive change for the public.

John Swinney has been sworn in as Scotland’s new first minister at the Court of Session in Edinburgh, PA Media reports. PA says:

Scotland’s most senior judge, the Lord President Lord Carloway, presided over the ceremony.

The Perthshire North MSP made his statutory declarations and was granted his official title of First Minister and Keeper of the Scottish Seal.

Swinney’s family, including his wife Elizabeth, thirteen-year-old son Matthew and brother David, accompanied him to court.

An early release scheme for prisoners in England and Wales is being extended, with some inmates now set to be released up to 70 days early, the Times has revealed.

In his story, Matt Dathan reports:

An email sent to probation and prison staff, obtained by The Times, said measures introduced less than two months ago had failed to ease pressure in men’s prisons in England and Wales.

It said that a scheme that allows prisoners to be set free before their release date will be extended from 35 days to 70 days from May 23.

In the email, labelled “operationally critical,” officials accept that the changes will “create additional work for many people at a time when we know we have our own resource challenges”.

The new policy has not yet been formally announced, and Dathan says Rishi Sunak is under pressure from Tory rightwingers to cancel the early release programme. Shabana Mahmood, the shadow justice secretary, told the Times that ministers should be open about what was happening. She said:

The Tories have once again used a cloak of secrecy to hide their early release of violent criminals. It’s completely unacceptable and the public has a right to know the truth.

After 14 years of Conservative chaos and the utter mismanagement of the prison estate, the government cannot keep extending the early release of prisoners without facing public scrutiny.

A Green party councillor at the centre of an antisemitism row has apologised “for the upset caused” by his remarks but hit back at “Islamophobic” attacks against him, Eleni Courea reports.

Good morning. We’re a few days on from the local elections, and the party has got a new leader. But that’s the SNP, not the Conservative party, where the much-anticipated, post-locals leadership challenge aimed at Rishi Sunak never materialised. Today he will take PMQs for the first time since the plotters called off the dogs, and accepted that Sunak will lead the party into the next election.

But that does not mean the feuding has stopped, and this morning Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister, is launching a bid to push Sunak to the right on immigration policy. He has written a report with Neil O’Brien, another former minister, and Karl Williams, research director at the Centre for Policy Studies thinktank, with more than 30 recommendations that would slam the brakes on mass immigration into the UK. Jenrick is clearly gearing up to run for the leadership after the general election and, as Sam Blewett argues in his London Playbook briefing for Politico, today’s intervention “has the whiff of something planned a while back by the rebel faction”, when it was assumed that this week Sunak would be facing a no confidence vote.

The proposals in Jenrick’s report include: raising the salary threshold for people getting health and social care visas, limiting the number of health and social care visas issued to 30,000 a year (last year 146,000 were issued), abolishing graduate visas for students, setting an annual cap on the number of visas issued a year, and recommitting to reducing net migration to below 100,000 a year.

In an article for the Daily Telegraph, Jenrick says Sunak could implement many of his recommendations before the election. He says the PM should make this a priority, “instead of banning smoking or regulating London’s pedicabs”, to see off the threat from Reform UK. He says:

Instead of banning smoking or regulating London’s pedicabs, the government could use the time left in the parliamentary session to deliver the post-Brexit immigration system voters were promised. We shouldn’t wait to save conservative policies for our manifesto when we are 20 points behind in the polls in an election year – that would be government by posturing and an abdication of duty. The Government has a solid majority and could deliver these today.

The local election results reaffirmed two clear trends, obvious to those of us who spend time on the doorsteps listening to voters. First, Conservative voters feel badly let down and are struggling to find reasons to back us. Second, we are haemorrhaging support to the Reform Party. This is primarily because of mass migration and the allied and growing problem of extremism, although clearly other factors are also at play.

In the precious time we have left before the election, reducing net migration to the 10,000s and delivering the highly-selective immigration system we call for in our report would be the single biggest thing the Government could do to win over these wavering voters.

It would be surprising if none of this comes up at PMQs.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: John Swinney is sworn in in Edinburgh as Scotland’s new first minister. Later in the day he will appoint his cabinet.

9.30am: Former ministers Robert Jenrick and Neil O’Brien launch their report, Taking Back Control, calling for tighter immigration controls at an event organised by the Centre for Policy Studies thinktank, which is publishing the paper.

11am: More in Commons holds a briefing with its assessment of the local elections.

Noon: Rishi Sunak faces Keir Starmer at PMQs.

2pm: Sunak is hosting a meeting at No 10 for Tory MPs to discuss the results of the local elections.

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