Brexit news live: Latest updates as Bank of England say EU ‘poaching’ UK business

At the last election, Labour promised to sharply increase the UK’s corporation tax if elected.

However, the party now says it would oppose the government doing the same. The reversal comes ahead of Rishi Sunak’s Budget next week, in which the chancellor will reportedly announce an increase in the rate from 19 to 23 per cent by the end of this parliament.

Labour Treasury spokesperson James Murray said: “This is not the time to consider tax rises, we are in the middle of an economic crisis.”

He also refused to say whether Labour would back a windfall tax on supermarkets, which some suggest will appear in the upcoming Budget.

Our deputy political editor Rob Merrick has more on the story:

The Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, has accused the European Union of trying to poach business from the City of London in the wake of Brexit, accusing the bloc’s activity as a “very serious escalation”.

Mr Bailey told the Treasury Select Committee on Wednesday the bloc seemed more interested in taking derivatives clearing business out of London into the EU than making sure the UK’s regulations are “equivalent” to the bloc’s.

“That seems to be where the debate is heading,” he told MPs.

Priti Patel has said it is “far too early” for people to book to start booking holidays overseas.

Her remarks to the Commons Home Affairs Committee on Wednesday come after the travel industry reported a surge in demand this week, following the prime minister’s announcement about the gradual lifting of lockdown.

On the subject of whether people should book holidays abroad, the home secretary said: “Well, it’s too early. It’s far too early.

“It is too early and we have to look at the data at every single stage, and the road map outlined by the Prime Minister makes that abundantly clear.”

David Cameron has said that Boris Johnson should be more interventionist in order to achieve a green recovery after the pandemic.

Speaking to the Guardian, the former prime minister added that Mr Johnson’s approach to reshaping the economy needed to be “muscular”.

“My advice would be…you have to roll up your sleeves and be quite muscular in your interventionism,” he said.

Here’s our Whitehall editor Kate Devlin with more details:

Education secretary Gavin Williamson will lead today’s 5pm press conference from Downing Street.

Jenny Harries, England’s deputy chief medical officer, will also be speaking.

The government should commit to a “major fiscal stimulus” to help the UK recover from the pandemic, the SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford has said.

During PMQs, he urged Boris Johnson to “rule out a return to Tory austerity cuts”, saying that the stimulus should be worth at least 5 per cent of GDP.

The prime minister responded by expressing his pride at the “massive investments” made so far by the Treasury. He also added that more than £13 billion of these funds have gone to Scotland.

In reply, Mr Blackford said: “The prime minister’s boasting, but the cold hard reality is that the UK has suffered the worst slump of any major economy and 120,000 people have lost their lives – that’s under your guidance, prime minister.”

Some hauliers in Northern Ireland saw a 30 per cent drop in revenue last month, an industry representative has said.

Seamus Leheny, Northern Ireland policy manager at Logistics UK, said this was the result of too many trailers returning empty from the UK, unable to find freight because of post-Brexit bureaucracy.

“A significant amount of those lorries going over laden are struggling to find loads to come back to Northern Ireland,” he said.

Mr Leheny has called on the British government to financially compensate those having to ship empty trailers back to Northern Ireland.

Internal feuding threatens to ruin the Scottish National Party, a party formerly known as the slickest political machine in the UK.

There is the well-known dramatic rupture between the party’s two towering figures, current boss Nicola Sturgeon and her predecessor Alex Salmond – the once-close allies who are now sworn enemies. And, among other issues, there is also a dispute over the timing of the second independence referendum.

So how deep do the divisions go? Can they be healed? And could they damage the party’s push for another independence referendum in the coming year?

Adam Forrest has all the answers:

Ruth Davidson, leader of the Conservative Party in Scottish parliament, has said the Crown Office’s decision to redact evidence by former SNP leader Alex Salmond raised “real question marks” over the independence of government institutions.

Parliament agreed to belatedly redact large sections of Mr Salmond’s written evidence in which he accused Nicola Sturgeon of misleading Holyrood and breaching the ministerial code, following a letter from the Crown Office expressing concern about possible contempt of court.

Ms Davidson told BBC Radio 4’s World At One programme: “This actually has gone far beyond Sturgeon versus Salmond, it has gone beyond the complainant versus the treatment they received and how they were failed – this has now got to the structure of democracy in Scotland and whether our institutions are robust or whether they have been corrupted.

“And that matters, and that should matter to everybody within the United Kingdom, whether they are in Scotland or not.

“And we have real question marks now over the Scottish government, around the officialdom in Scotland, whether that’s the civil servants, and we have real question marks now around the Crown in Scotland, which is the supposedly independent prosecution service in Scotland and you need to have a rule of law that works and works well.

“This is absolutely striking at the heart of how Scotland is governed, how it works and what we can expect of a government and the institutions that run all our lives.”

If you missed the updates on Mr Salmond’s case yesterday, you can catch up via our Whitehall editor Kate Devlin here:

Our deputy political editor Rob Merrick reports the following:

In the Commons, the health minister Edward Argar has refused to apologise for his boss Matt Hancock’s incendiary claim that that there was “no national PPE shortage” last year.

Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, said the comment – made after the High Court ruled against the health secretary over the award of contracts – was “so insulting” to medical staff forced to wear bin bags and home-made goggles, demanding he say sorry.

But Mr Argar insisted a National Audit Office report backed up the claim, because the NHS did not run out of PPE, although there were what he called “local shortages and challenges”.

Labour secured the urgent question to put pressure on Mr Hancock, who has brushed off the court ruling as simply “delayed paperwork”, amid a national emergency.

Significantly, Conservative MPs clearly back the argument that he did what was necessary to meet that emergency – despite the furore over contracts going to Tory friends, including the former landlord of the health secretary’s local pub.