Slashing jury trials could clear courts backlog within a decade, says Lammy

The backlog of nearly 80,000 trials clogging up the court system could be cleared within a decade if parliament agrees to slash the number of jury trials, David Lammy, the lord chancellor, has claimed.In an interview with the Guardian, the deputy prime minister, who is facing a backbench rebellion over the proposals, has urged Labour MPs and the public to back a version of Canada’s judge-only trials in thousands of criminal cases in England and Wales.Dozens of Labour MPs have expressed concerns about the proposals, which they say could make it harder for defendants from working-class and minority ethnic backgrounds to challenge a prosecution.One rebel Labour MP, the former shadow attorney general Karl Turner, has said he could stand down and trigger a byelection unless the government scraps plans to restrict jury trials.Speaking from Toronto, where he witnessed criminal cases in which the defendants faced a possible sentence of up to three years after their cases were heard by a single judge, Lammy said: “It has been happening in Canada for decades

Mandelson praises Trump’s ‘graciousness’ and declines to apologise for friendship with Jeffrey Epstein – as it happened

Laura Kuenssberg asks Peter Mandelson if he liked Donald Trump when he was the UK ambassador to Washington.Mandelson says he did like Trump, listing off numerous reasons why, but said he did not like all of his “language”.I like him, yes, I liked his humour, his graciousness…I liked his directness. You knew exactly what he was thinking and where you stood and what he wanted. And how he was proposing to engage, with you

It is Labour’s party machine that is out of touch | Letters

To combat rightwing populists, Chris Powell calls for “a local action network, a permanent organising infrastructure … to listen, act and communicate – identifying local problems, launching campaigns to fix them and publicising every small win” (What is Keir Starmer doing to push back the populists? Not nearly enough. We have a plan to take them on, 1 January).An organisation that could fill this role already exists: it’s called the Labour party. And, under Jeremy Corbyn, it had a Community Organising Unit to do just what Powell now asks for.That he overlooks this starkly illustrates how “analysts” and “advisers” such as himself have contributed to the party’s slide to the brink of oblivion

Lib Dems call on Reform MPs to donate income from X to charity amid Grok row

The Liberal Democrats have urged Reform UK MPs who receive payment from X for their posts to donate the money to charities working to combat sexual exploitation, after the site was flooded with AI-generated sexualised images of women and children.The Lib Dem spokesperson for science, innovation and technology, Victoria Collins, said Nigel Farage and other MPs paid by the Elon Musk-owned site were receiving “tainted money”.A series of MPs have called for the government to stop posting on X after the site’s inbuilt AI tool Grok started generating huge numbers of images of women and children in bikinis or other minimal attire, often in sexually provocative poses, in response to user prompts.The site has now limited the image creation function to paying subscribers, a move that Downing Street condemned as turning “an AI feature that allows the creation of unlawful images into a premium service”.X users who are verified earn money based on the amount of engagement they generate

Badenoch claims forthcoming business rates U-turn for pubs ‘too little, too late’ – as it happened

We don’t yet know the extent of the government U-turn shortly to be announced related to business rates for pubs and other parts of the hospitality sector. (See 2.24pm.)But Kemi Badenoch is already saying it is “too little, too late”. In a post on social media, she says:Yesterday Keir Starmer told us Labour had ‘turned a corner

Reeves condemns Farage opposition to lifting two-child benefit cap

Rachel Reeves has said she was angered by Nigel Farage’s suggestion that only British-born families should have the two-child benefit cap lifted, saying the Reform UK leader would keep children in poverty based on their skin colour.The chancellor, who will introduce legislation to lift the cap on Thursday, said it had been a burden for her not to be able to do so sooner, but it had been vital to do it at a moment of market stability.Farage told a press conference on Wednesday that his party would vote against the scrapping of the two-child limit, having previously suggested he could back the change. He said he was concerned it would “benefit huge numbers of foreign-born people”.Reeves said those comments were akin to saying some families deserved to have children in poverty