Brexit news – live: Raab claims trade deal is ‘great’ for fishermen as Cabinet accused of ‘corrosive’ culture

The MP for Scotland’s Northern Isles has told the government to “get a grip” after Dominic Raab claimed that its Brexit deal is “great” for the fishing industry.

“It’s hard to find a minister who will admit to having even sat down and read the trade deal” said Alistair Carmichael, the Lib Dem MP for Orkney and Shetland. 

“Brexit might be a game to the likes of Dominic Raab and Boris Johnson but for thousands of people in Scotland this is their business and their livelihood on the line. The government needs to get a grip now.

“Fishermen are telling the PM that his deal did not do any of the things he claimed for it, let alone what he had promised.  The harder the Tories spin, the angrier fishing communities get.  The government needs to start listening to the people who know what they are talking about and start to clean up the mess that the prime minister has created.

“The government doesn’t know whether it is coming or going on the crisis facing our fishing industry. One second this is a ‘great deal in the short term’ and the next there are ‘some teething problems’. One day there will be compensation for Scottish businesses and the next there is no money to pay for it.”

Our political editor Andrew Woodcock writes that the travelling political circus of the G7 that will descend on the rugged shores of Cornwall in June is variously seen as the premier diplomatic event of the year or as a talking shop which causes untold disruption but delivers little of value.

His Politics Explained piece explores what we can expect from the annual gathering.

“We don’t want to trip up at this late stage,” said Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, as he announced a ban on flights from Brazil and 15 other countries including Portugal in an attempt to prevent a Brazilian variant of coronavirus getting into the UK.

Not for the first time in the pandemic, the government has shut the stable door slowly, and long after the horse has bolted. It has already “tripped up” several times.

The Independent’s latest editorial on UK politics warns that the prime minister is still being too slow in learning from his errors. 

Our political editor Andrew Woodcock has this report on Dominic Raab’s comments when asked whether he thought it was right for people to be going on holiday at the moment.

Kelly Tolhurst has resigned as a housing minister in order to spend “precious time” with her family following “devastating” family news.

In a letter to Boris Johnson, the MP for Rochester and Strood, said she hoped to have the opportunity to serve again in government “in the fullness of time”.

Downing Street said that assistant whip Eddie Hughes has been appointed as her replacement.

With Dominic Raab pledging to “beef up” checks on whether new UK arrivals are self-isolating, a leading epidemiologist criticised the government’s “pretty lax” approach so far to quarantining foreign arrivals and contacts of coronavirus cases.

Amid reports that ministers are considering introducing quarantine hotels, which Mr Raab did not deny, Professor John Edmunds said that if there is a quarantine policy it should be made “as effective as you possibly can”.

“If you’re going to have quarantine then you should probably make it as effective as you possibly can,” the Sage member told Times Radio.

“Ours has been rather lax, not just for visitors coming into the UK the vast majority of whom do not have covid but we’ve also been rather lax with our quarantine of individuals who have been in direct contact with a case; indigenous cases. We’ve been pretty lax about that.

“We just ask them to stay at home and so I think yes, if we’re going to have quarantine we should try and make it work as best as possible.”

Priti Patel should take responsibility for an error that has led to hundreds of thousands of police records being deleted from UK-wide databases, the shadow home secretary has said.

Asked by a member of the public whether the home secretary should resign over the matter, Nick Thomas-Symonds told the Fabian Society conference audience: “A cabinet minister who actually took responsibility for their own department would be a novelty in this government, I am sad to say.

“There was a time when ministers did take responsibility and, of course, I would take responsibility as the home secretary for what happens in the department and my responsibility to put it right.”

He added: “Far from having a home secretary that takes responsibility, the home secretary hasn’t even appeared in public since this crisis broke on Thursday night – indeed we had to learn about it from the newspapers rather than learn from it actually from her and what she was going to do about it.

“Ministers in this government, I am afraid, just don’t take responsibility. There is a culture of not taking responsibility and it is corrosive, frankly, to the quality of governance right across the Cabinet.”

A British lawyer prosecuting a case against Hong Kong pro-democracy activists under the Chinese territory’s notorious national security law has been branded “mercenary” by foreign secretary Dominic Raab, our political editor Andrew Woodcock reports.

Asked about the decision of barrister David Perry QC to act on behalf of authorities against nine activists facing seven-year jail sentences for unlawful assembly, Mr Raab said he could not understand how anyone could “in good conscience” take on such a case.

Mr Raab also said it was “disgraceful” for the Chinese Embassy in the US to say that the Beijing government’s activities in Xinjiang province were “eradicating extremism” and ensuring Uighur women would no longer be treated as “baby-making machines”.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s family has said she could be free to leave Iran on 7 March, when her sentence is due to expire, my colleague Tom Batchelor reports.

The British-Iranian woman has been under house arrest in Tehran since being moved from jail last spring. Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, has written to the foreign office asking for details about the end of her sentence, including what arrangements have been made for her to be given the correct papers to travel and how an ankle tag she wears will be removed, The Sunday Times reported.

Someone is currently admitted to hospital with coronavirus “every 30 seconds” in England, Sir Simon Stevens has said, however some 140 inoculations are being given out every minute.

The NHS England chief executive told Andrew Marr: “Since Christmas Day we’ve seen another 15,000 increase in the inpatients in hospitals across England, that’s the equivalent of filling 30 hospitals full of coronavirus patients.” 

While hospitals now have 75 per cent more Covid patients than during the first peak, sir Simon said jabs are being administered “four times faster” than people are newly catching the virus.