The war of words between Keir Starmer and the Unite union is escalating.After No 10 issued a strong statement criticising its conduct in the Birmingham bin strike (see 1.32pm), Unite has hit back, questioning Labour’s commitment to “working people” and saying the government should intervene directly in the dispute and force the council to settle.In a statement issued in response to what Downing Street said earlier, Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, said:It is not surprising that many workers in Britian question the Labour government’s commitment to working people when it issues a statement clearly blaming bin workers in a dispute not of their making.The bottom line about this dispute is that these workers woke up one morning to be told they would be taking up to an £8,000 pay cut.

They are being made to pay the price for austerity and bad decisions by Birmingham city council.Hold the front page, Unite has already agreed major changes, with the removal of job and knock and shift pay last year and in Unite’s current proposals there are no equal pay issues.This authority is determined to impose cuts on workers at any cost and has moved the goalposts again.Unite’s team of decision makers has been in negotiations in good faith for weeks.It is the leader of the council who is missing in action and not been in any of the talks.

Indeed the council are only scheduling meetings once a week.Unite has said it is ready to negotiate anytime and everyday if necessary.The government is going to have to wake up and smell the coffee that they are part of this dispute, as the commissioners report directly to them and they own the £3.9bn debt of the council.If the government were really concerned about the residents of Birmingham they would get the decision makers in a room of which they are clearly one, to ensure that Unite’s solutions on the table were adopted.

Yet again workers and communities pay the price for government inaction.Keir Starmer will be speaking to international leaders this weekend to discuss how they should respond to the Trump tariffs, Downing Street has said.(See 12.54pm.)Downing Street has refused to confirm President Trump’s claim that Keir Starmer was “very happy” about the treatment the UK is getting under the new US global tariff regime.

(See 12.34pm.)David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has suggested that President Trump has taken US economic policy back almost 100 years with his “return to protectionism”.(See 9.499am.

)The FTSE was down almost 5% at close of play today, representing the biggest daily drop since early in the Covid pandemic, amid ongoing concern about the impact of the Trump tariffs, the business live blog reports,Downing Street has criticised the Unite union for its conduct in the ongoing bin strike in Birmingham – and Unite has hit back,(See 1,32pm and 3,45pm.

)An activist whose case had been cited by the US state department over “freedom of expression” concerns in the UK has been convicted of breaching a buffer zone outside an abortion clinic.Sunday marks the start of a new tax year.It will be the day the employer national insurance contribution rise takes effect.But the Institute for Fiscal Studies says it will be significant for another reason too; it says the new financial year will mean the end of the working tax credit and the child tax credits – two important benefits that are being phased out, and replaced by universal credit.Tax credits were created by Gordon Brown when he was chancellor.

It is often alleged that he did not disclose to Tony Blair quite how much money they were going to cost, and they had a big impact reducing child poverty.The IFS has published a good briefing on how they worked and what they achieved.Anyone who thinks politicians never change anything should give it a read.Here is the IFS’s conclusion.The tax credit system, and subsequent increases to benefit entitlements in the 2000s, significantly boosted benefit income for families with children, reducing child poverty.

It was able to do this without drastically harming work incentives by implementing higher benefit entitlements for families in and out of work – meaning that the cost of the benefit system increased substantially.Since 2010, there has been a partial reversal of direction, with benefits for larger families in particular significantly reduced.But the legacy of a larger welfare system, more targeted at children and low-income working families, lives on in universal credit.In their London Playbook briefing for Politico, Andrew McDonald and Bethany Dawson have what they describe as a mini-scoop – plans from Conservatives Together, a group set up by the former Tory defence secretary Grant Shapps last autumn.They explain:The not-a-think-tank Conservatives Together — formed by ex-defence secretary Grant Shapps to playfully copy Morgan McSweeney’s Labour Together — is building an “army” of campaigners and a “fellowship” of prospective Tory candidates.

Playbook has seen an internal document that lays out the path ahead for the campaign group.Cons Together is focusing on three areas as it tries to reassure a sharply divided Tory party that it’s there to help rather than fuel factional infighting.“We’re not about policy,” the document reads.Instead, it will set up a fellowship program for Tory candidates to train them into how to be MPs … do data analysis that it will pass to CCHQ … and set up a a branded T-shirt-clad “army” of campaigners to direct to constituencies and areas with very few activists (which is most of them, right now).The news that Shapps and his organisation are focusing on training for potential MPs will probably be welcomed by Simon Hart, who was Tory chief whip when Rishi Sunak was PM.

Hart recently published his diaries, Ungovernable, and while most of the press coverage of it concentrated on his stories about the sexual shenanigans of MPs, one of the main arguments of the book was that the Conservative party is very bad at choosing candidates,At one point he writes:Another meeting with John Redwood about Northern Ireland, about which he knows much more than me,Our meetings are always polite, but completely devoid of humour,Like [Bill] Cash, he purports to be on the government’s side but sincerely believes he knows better than everyone else on every topic,Politics just doesn’t work like that.

It is a collective endeavour, involving compromise and agreement.It leaves me reflecting, more and more, about how these people get through the process of candidate identification and selection.After recalling other encounters with awkward or unhinged MPs, Hart normally ends up making the same point.In another entry he says:With each passing day I came increasingly to realise that our system of candidate identification, selection, training and mentoring was flawed and is at the root of almost every challenge the party and the government was facing.Hart’s book is sometimes very funny, and worth a read, not least because he comes across as likeable, and mostly a good judge of character.

He seems to like journalists (on a meeting with the Guardian’s Jessica Elgot, he says “she speaks a lot of sense” – which is true, she does), on Kemi Badenoch he says “she is another one who lives in a permanent sense of outrage, it must be so tiring” and on Lee Anderson he says: “I have tried to avoid the conclusion that he is a total knob, but he has made it nearly impossible.”Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.Jamie Greene, the Holyrood MSP who quit the Scottish Conservatives in protest at the party becoming “Trumpesque in style and substance”, has jumped ship to join the Scottish Liberal Democrats.Greene was unveiled as the Scottish Lib Dems opened their spring conference in Inverness on Friday in a carefully choreographed move which exposes the tensions and strains the Tories face as they shift ground to counter the rise of Reform UK.A list MSP for the West of Scotland, he is now the fifth Scottish Lib Dem at Holyrood.

He was on the one nation wing of the Scottish Tories, which grew in influence under former leader Ruth Davidson, and had offered qualified support for trans rights, in opposition to the Tories’ growing attacks on gender reform.In his speech, Greene said:In politics, I have worked to make life better for the people I represent and to live up to the values of ambition, openness, and freedom that have driven me all my life.As my former party misguidedly revels in the worst aspects of our politics, I have chosen to join a party whose values align with mine - the Scottish Liberal Democrats.Alex Cole-Hamilton, the Scottish Lib Dem leader, said he was “over the moon” and claimed it showed his party, which hopes to win moderate, centre-right voters after losing seats to become Holyrood’s fifth party behind the Greens, was growing in strength and influence.He said:Jamie is respected on all sides of the chamber.

He is one of the parliament’s most effective communicators and has a selfless compassion which is seldom seen in our line of work.He speaks to a massive constituency of people who voted for Ruth Davidson’s Conservatives and are now dismayed to see that party lurching to extremes.His words have sent a shockwave through our country’s politics.Cole-Hamilton has also welcomed the defection on social media.I am delighted to welcome Jamie into the Scottish Liberal Democrats.

There are many who voted for Ruth Davidson’s Conservatives who are dismayed to see the party lurching to extremes.Jamie is one of them, but he sees in the Liberal Democrats a chance to do things differently.pic.twitter.com/JJUqtULf0lPublic support for Welsh independence has reached 41%, a poll suggests.

YesCymru, which is campaigning for an independent Wales, has released a poll of Welsh voters saying that, in a referendum now, 41% of those expressing a preference would vote for independence, and 59% would vote against,The group says this is one of the highest pro-independence figures ever recorded,But the pro-independence numbers are even higher if independence is linked to EU membership,When respondents were asked to “imagine a scenario where Wales could rejoin the European Union if it became an independent country” and then asked the same polling question, 51% said yes to independence, and 49% said no,The online polling was carried out by Redfield and Wilton Strategies, with a sample of 1,000.

YesCymru chair Phyl Griffiths said:This poll is a milestone moment for the Welsh independence movement.It shows that support is growing at a fast pace, up 5 points from the same company’s poll last year, and that nearly half of working-age adults now have confidence in Wales’s ability to govern itself.We’re witnessing a real shift in attitudes, and people across Wales are ready to have a serious conversation about independence.The war of words between Keir Starmer and the Unite union is escalating.After No 10 issued a strong statement criticising its conduct in the Birmingham bin strike (see 1.

32pm), Unite has hit back, questioning Labour’s commitment to “working people” and saying the government should intervene directly in the dispute and force the council to settle.In a statement issued in response to what Downing Street said earlier, Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, said:It is not surprising that many workers in Britian question the Labour government’s commitment to working people when it issues a statement clearly blaming bin workers in a dispute not of their making.The bottom line about this dispute is that these workers woke up one morning to be told they would be taking up to an £8,000 pay cut.They are being made to pay the price for austerity and bad decisions by Birmingham city council.Hold the front page, Unite has already agreed major changes, with the removal of job and knock and shift pay last year and in Unite’s current proposals there are no equal pay issues.

This authority is determined to impose cuts on workers at any cost and has moved the goalposts again.Unite’s team of decision makers has been in negotiations in good faith for weeks.It is the leader of the council who is missing in action and not been in any of the talks.Indeed the council are only scheduling meetings once a week.Unite has said it is ready to negotiate anytime and everyday if necessary.

The government is going to have to wake up and smell the coffee that they are part of this dispute, as the commissioners report directly to them and they own the £3.9bn debt of the council.If the government were really concerned about the residents of Birmingham they would get the decision makers in a room of which they are clearly one, to ensure that Unite’s solutions on the table were adopted.Yet again workers and communities pay the price for government inaction.Some news away from the continuing fallout from Trump’s tariff announcement.

Politico is reporting that the UK is reviewing how it defends critical infrastructure such as undersea gas pipelines and data cables,Protecting “critical undersea infrastructure” will be included in the government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR), due to be completed by the end of the month, an MoD spokesperson confirmed to the outlet,It will assess the state of the armed forces, the threats the UK faces and the capabilities needed to combat them,Keir Starmer last month announced significant cuts to Britain’s international aid budget to help pay for a major increase in defence spending,The prime minister said the UK government would increase defence spending to 2.

5% of GDP by 2027 – three years earlier than planned – as the Trump administration signalled it was no longer primarily focused on European security and that Europe would have to take the lead in defending Ukraine from Russian aggression.Starmer has so far resisted pressure to boost defence spending to 3% of GDP, but some defence chiefs want him to go further, amid growing fears of sabotage and other forms of hybrid warfare by Russia.Concerns over the potential sabotage of power cables, telecom links and gas pipelines have been increasing after a string of outages in the Baltic Sea following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.In January, the UK took the rare step of publicly naming a Russian vessel, the Yantar, as a spy ship operating in the North Sea.Defence minister John Healey said Yantar, used for intelligence and mapping critical infrastructure on the sea floor, entered British waters on 20 January and the Royal Navy tracked it for two days until it entered Dutch waters.

European authorities are investigating several cases of damage to infrastructure under the Baltic Sea, including to a power cable linking Estonia and Finland.Finnish authorities detained a ship, suspected of being part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” used to avoid sanctions, after that cable and others were damaged.Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has said the government is “working hard” to get a trade deal with the US – but without saying how long this might take.Talking to journalists on a visit in London, she said:Of course, we don’t want to see tariffs on UK exports, and we’re working hard as a government in discussion with our counterparts in the US to represent the British national interest and support British jobs and British industry.Asked how long those talks might take, she replied:I’m not going to give a running commentary on those discussions