Downing Street has signalled that Keir Starmer plans to ignore Liz Truss’s legal letter saying he should stop saying she crashed the economy because that, she claims, is untrue and libellous.(See 11.58am.)Asked about the letter at the morning lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson said:I am not sure I have seen the detail of the letter, but from what I can my gather, I don’t think the prime minister is the only person in the country who shares the view in relation to the previous government’s handling of the economy.I guess the question is whether she will be writing to millions of people up and down the country as well, who felt her economic record which pushed their mortgage bills up.

Here is Eleni Courea’s story about the letter.UPDATE: The PM’s spokesperson also said:You’ve got the prime minister’s language, which he absolutely stands by in relation to the previous government’s record.And you don’t have to hear it from the prime minister.I think you could ask people up and down the country of the impact of previous economic management on mortgages, on inflation.Asked whether Starmer had any plans to moderate his language about Truss, the spokesperson replied: “No.

”No 10 has said that Keir Starmer intends to take no notice of a legal letter he has received from Liz Truss demanding he stops making “false and defamatory” claims that she crashed the economy.(See 12.24pm.)Rachel Reeves will not break her promise to borrow money only for investment, even as gilt yields rose to their highest levels since the financial crisis, her deputy has said.David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has said a US military seizure of Greenland is not going to happen, as he played down Donald Trump’s threats to seize the territory from Denmark.

A Tory MP has urged the government to ban people convicted of violence against women from running for parliament, referring to a Reform UK member as the “convicted criminal already in our midst”.As PA Media reports, during a debate in the Commons on violence against women and girls, Conservative Ben Obese-Jecty described the details of Reform’s James McMurdock’s assault on his then-girlfriend.McMurdock did not publicly disclose his conviction prior to being elected and claimed he had “pushed” his partner when details were first revealed this summer.However, The Times later obtained information about his sentencing from the courts, which said he was locked up for 21 days in a young offenders’ institute for kicking the victim “around four times” in 2006 when he was a teenager.Obese-Jecty said he believes “in the rehabilitation of offenders”, but that “being sentenced for such a heinous crime means that you forfeit some of the privileges those of us who have never attacked a woman are granted.

One such privilege is being a member of parliament.” He told the Commons:The presence of a member of parliament with a conviction for violently assaulting a woman has never been acknowledged in this house, let alone addressed.Any debate in this house on the subject of violence against women and girls should address the convicted criminal already in our midst.As this government shapes its legislative agenda, I would ask the minister to consider whether it’s time to introduce legislation that bars those who have served a custodial sentence for violence against women and girls from standing as a member of parliament.McMurdock has said in the past he still feels “deeply ashamed” of what he did and that he paid for his actions in full.

Mick Lynch has said he will retire as general secretary of the RMT union, after four years during which he became perhaps the most recognisable presence on picket lines amid the biggest rail and tube worker strikes for decades.Labour’s proposal to loosen planning regulations for farmers will deluge rivers with chicken faeces, environmental campaigners have warned.Yesterday Keir Starmer criticised the Tory government for not implementing the recommendations from the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse when Kemi Badenoch pressed for a new inquiry at PMQs.Labour says it wants to implement the recommendations in the report published two years ago, but it has not said how it will do this in every case.There are 20 recommendations in the report.

One of them is for a tiered compensation scheme, open to anyone who “experienced child sexual abuse and exploitation where there is a clear connection to state or non-state institutions in England and Wales”.According to a report in the Financial Times, the current government, and the last one, estimate this could cost around £7bn.The report says:One former Tory official and a Labour figure both said they had been made aware of an initial estimate of close to £7bn for the compensation.Another person who worked at the Home Office during [Rishi] Sunak’s government said there had been broader estimates of £5bn to £10bn for the cost.“We were pushing for it, but Rishi didn’t want to do it,” they said.

“It was blocked.The government says it wants to deliver “meaningful change” in response to the report’s recommendations, but that it is still working out potential costs.Mick Lynch has said he will retire as general secretary of the RMT union after four years during which he became perhaps the most recognisable presence on picket lines amid the biggest rail and tube worker strikes for decades.Jasper Jolly has the story.Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, has said he thinks there is a case for a “limited national inquiry” in child abuse by gangs.

Keir Starmer has not ruled out an inquiry, but he told MPs yesterday that survivors thought it was more important to press on with implementing the recommendations of the previous national inquiry and that he agreed.The Tories tried to turn a vote on the children’s wellbeing and schools bill last night into a vote in favour of a new inquiry, but they lost as Labour voted for the bill to proceed.In an interview with the BBC, Burnham said:In my view the government was right to reject that form of opportunism [the Tory amendment that was voted down].But I did hear last night coming out of that debate ministers saying they are open to discussing issues now with survivors.I will add my voice into this and say I do think there is the case for a limited national inquiry that draws on reviews like the one that I commissioned, and the one we have seen in Rotherham, the one we have seen in Telford, to draw out some of these national issues and compel people to give evidence who then may have charges to answer and be held to account.

Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham says he believes "there's the case" for a "limited national inquiry" into grooming gangs.Listen to the Hotseat again on BBC Sounds 🎧 https://t.co/R0xzr0iybh pic.twitter.com/IzDjVfNeD7The PM’s spokesperson told journalists at the lobby briefing that it was wrong to suggest the government was about to change its mind on an inquiry.

He explained:We’ve had a national inquiry, it … engaged 7,000 victims, and what victims are telling us is that they want to see action, and that’s where the government is focused, and that’s why we’re not going ahead with another national inquiry,As Patrick Wintour wrote in his preview, David Lammy, the foreign secretary, used his speech today to say the post-cold war peace was “well and truly over”,Here is the full quote,The post-cold war peace is well and truly over,This is a changed strategic environment.

The number of conflicts higher than at any time since 1945.The spectre of famine from Gaza to Sudan.And the most refugees and displaced people on record.I am occasionally asked on my travels, here and of course on the doorstep around the country, when will the Kremlin threat, this upheaval that we’re experiencing, end? When will things get back to normal? My answer is that they will not.Europe’s future security is on a knife-edge.

Bevin warned in 1948 that we would only preserve peace by mobilising such force and I quote, “As will create confidence and energy on the one side and inspire respect and caution on the other.” And this is exactly what we need now.That’s why our foreign policy has had to change.Inspired by Bevin, I call our new approach Progressive Realism.Taking the world as it is not as we wish it to be.

Advancing progressive ends by realist means.Schools in England face possible strikes later this year after the National Education Union announced it will hold an indicative ballot of members for industrial action over the Department for Education’s proposed 2.8% pay rise next year.The NEU, the largest teachers’ union, will open the preliminary vote from the start of March on whether to proceed with a formal ballot.If carried, the union will then hold a formal strike ballot.

Daniel Kebede, the NEU’s general secretary, said the union objected both to the 2.8% award as proposed by the government to the independent School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB), and to the lack of additional funding for schools to meet the pay rise.Kebede said:Government must face up to the fact that the problems in teacher pay are far from resolved.Since 2010 pay for teachers in England has declined by a fifth.The profession no longer attracts enough graduates to keep up with the soaring vacancies.

The current proposal of 2.8% is not sufficient to even start to address the crisis in recruitment and retention.Thousands of teachers voted for the change that Labour promised for education.They promised to invest in education, to recruit 6,500 teachers and to value education and to secure the life chances of our children.We need to see their commitment in deeds as well as words.

Sentiment alone will not fill the excessive teacher vacancies nor will deliver the world class education our children deserve.The DfE’s evidence to the STRB submitted last month was that a 2.8% pay rise “would maintain the competitiveness of teachers’ pay” despite the challenging financial backdrop facing the government.David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has delivered his Locarno foreign policy speech.The full text is here.

Patrick Wintour covered it in a preview story, and Lammy wrote an article for the Guardian fleshing out some of what he was going to say.Lammy seems to have caused some concern at GB News by talking repeatedly in his speech about “irregular migration”, not illegal migration.“Irregular migration” tends to be the term preferred by policy specialists.That is because in some countries entering without authorisiation is a breach of regulations, not an offence.It is also a reaction against the use of terms like “illegal migrant” or “illegal asylum seekers”.

People object to this language on the grounds that acts are illegal, not people, and that under international law claiming asylum cannot be illegal.But in the UK migrants who enter the country without the appropriate paperwork are committing an offence – even if their intention is to claim asylum when they arrived.The last government tightened the law on this in the Nationality and Borders Act, which is why Tory ministers regularly talked about illegal migration.Labour ministers use the phrase too.Christopher Hope from GB News says Lammy told him both terms were appropriate.

I have just asked David Lammy if this change in description meant Labour was not taking the issue as seriously as the Tories.The Foreign secretary told me: “It can be both irregular and illegal - let me make that absolutely clear.” He added that his department is spending £84m to work “upstream” in the horn of Africa, and transit countries in western Balkans and southern Mediterranean countries, to combat illegal arrivals.The shadow women’s minister, Mims Davies, has condemned Elon Musk’s abuse directed at Jess Phillips and others, in comments which went notably further than those of her leader, Kemi Badenoch.Speaking in a Commons debate on violence against women and girls, one scheduled by coincidence a day after furious exchanges about whether there should be a new national inquiry into so-called grooming gangs, Davies said she backed Badenoch’s call for the inquiry.

However, she strongly condemned Musk, who has called Phillips, the safeguarding minister, a “rape genocide apologist” and a “witch”.Davies also warned that such language could make it less likely that women and girls who are abused and raped would want to come forward.There was a good turnout for the debate, but no one attended from Reform UK, some of whose MPs had spoken out very robustly on Wednesday about grooming gangs and the need to better protect women and girls.As Phillips sat opposite on the Labour benches, Davies said:Let’s all agree in this chamber this afternoon, and say quite clearly: we do not accept, or see any way that we should accept, any abuse directed to us as members of parliament, as ministers, and people speaking up for women and girls, that we have seen in recent days.She warned against what she called “a leap from rhetoric to intimidation, and then potentially to violence when it comes to the political arena”, saying:We need to make sure that that doesn’t seep down into what victims feel might happen to them if they come forward and speak out.

Speaking after Davies, Sarah Owen, the Labour MP who chairs the Commons women and equalities committee, said studies showing that around one in three women say they had been sexually assaulted meant misogyny was a far wider problem than often billed,In referring to Phillips as a “witch”, Musk had been “really digging deep into historic misogyny”, she added,Elon Musk relentless social media attacks on Labour over recent days and weeks have been so extreme, and frequently false and absurd, that people have found it hard to work out to what extent he’s serious, and to what extent this is just some behavioural abnormality,According to the Financial Times, he’s serious,Anna Gross and Joe Miller report that Musk has “privately discussed with allies how Sir Keir Starmer could be removed as UK prime minister before the next general election, according to people briefed on the matter”.

In their story, Gross and Miller say:Musk, the world’s richest man and key confidant of US president-elect Donald Trump, is probing how he and his rightwing allies can destabilise the UK Labour government beyond the aggressive posts he has issued on his social media platform X, the people said.“His view is that western civilisation itself is threatened,” one of the people added.Musk has sought information about whether it might be possible to build support for alternative British political movements — notably the rightwing populist Reform UK party — to force a change of prime minister before the next election, according to associates.Labour’s proposal to loosen planning regulations for farmers will deluge rivers with chicken faeces, environmental campaigners have warned.As Helena Horton reports, the environment secretary, Steve Reed, promised farmers today they would be able to build larger chicken sheds, but experts have said this would create “megafarms” and contribute to river pollution.

The Conservative party is saying that Rachel Reeves should cancel her trip to China because of the turmoil in the bond market.(See 12.10pm.)But Philip Hammond, who was chancellor when Theresa May was PM and who is now a Tory peer, told the World at One that Reeves should press on with the visit.He said:I wouldn’t personally recommend the chancellor to cancel her trip to China