UK Politics

Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inboxGet our free View from Westminster emailAssaulting a shopworker is to be made a separate criminal offence after the Government U-turned in the face of a long-running campaign.Ministers had previously ruled out legislating to create a new offence, saying in response to a parliamentary petition in October they did not think it was “required or will be most effective”.on Wednesday Rishi Sunak announced that his Government would be amending its Criminal JusticeBill to bring in the new offence.He said: “I am sending a message to those criminals – whether they are serious organised criminal gangs, repeat offenders or opportunistic thieves – who think they can get away with stealing from these local businesses or abusing shopworkers, enough is enough.“Our local shops are the lifeblood of our communities, and they must be free to trade without the threat of crime or abuse.”The new offence will carry a maximum sentence of six months’ imprisonment or an unlimited fine, the same sentence for the existing offence of common assault.Repeat offenders could also be forced to wear an electronic tag, as could consistent shoplifters, under amendments to the Bill currently making its way through Parliament.The Government also plans to pilot community sentencing measures with an as-yet unnamed police force to tackle high levels of shoplifting, along with greater use of facial recognition technology to identify people wanted by the police in crowded areas.Judges already have the power to ban repeat offenders from certain shops under criminal behaviour orders, with breaches bringing a maximum sentence of five years.Retail crime has hit the Co-Op More

Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inboxGet our free View from Westminster emailThe UK will not suspend arms exports to Israel despite “grave concerns” about humanitarian access in Gaza, David Cameron has said. The foreign secretary said he had reviewed the latest legal advice to ministers on whether Israel is breaking humanitarian law in its war on Hamas. The “ultimate judgement” was that the export licences “will continue” following the killing of seven aid workers in an air strike last week. Rishi Sunak has been under mounting pressure, including from within his own party, to immediately suspend the sale of arms amid a growing chorus of opposition to the number of civilians killed. Tory grandees, hundreds of lawyers, dozens of MPs and peers from across the political spectrum, as well as top military commanders, have all called for a halt in recent days. Lord Cameron said continuing to allow arms exports puts the UK in line with other “like-minded countries” and reiterated the UK had a “robust legal process” for assessing those licences.He added the government would not publish or comment on legal advice, but would “act in a way that is consistent with it”.He also rejected calls to publish the advice, saying it was an “important principle” that it was not made public. But, he added, the UK continued to have “grave concerns” about humanitarian access to Gaza, saying Israeli promises to “flood Gaza with aid … now need to be turned into reality”. He also warned the UK and US may need to start looking at a “plan B” for the Israel-Hamas conflict if the current strategy does not work and there is an attack on Rafah. Lord Cameron said the UK would not be suspending arms exports to Israel More

Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inboxGet our free View from Westminster emailThe Post Office is an “atrocious organisation” which was run by “thugs in suits” and was willing to do “anything and everything” to hide Horizon IT failures, former subpostmaster and campaigner Alan Bates has said.In damning testimony to an official inquiry, Mr Bates also said the Post Office had spent more than two decades trying to silence him and terminated his contract because he stood up to it.He said this led to him being branded “unmanageable” and later dismissed. He renewed his call for the company to be taken over by a bigger firm with the resources to mend it, suggesting Amazon could pick up the business for £1.Rishi Sunak described the scandal as “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history”.Hundreds of subpostmasters were prosecuted by the Post Office for theft and false accounting because of the faulty Horizon computer system made by Fujitsu.Earlier this year the prime minister announced he would bring forward legislation to exonerate the wrong Post Office workers after an ITV drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, highlighted their plight. Mr Bates said the Post Office was seemingly willing to do “anything and everything to try and keep the failures of Horizon hidden“ regardless of who it has to “trample” in the process.He also accused the government of allowing the “once great institution” to be stripped by “little more than thugs in suits” who have been acting with “impunity regardless of the human misery and suffering they inflict”.He told the inquiry he thought the Post Office was “definitely trying to outspend” campaigners as part of its “aggressive” tactics at the High Court. He said the mediation scheme set up to address the scandal was part of a “cover-up” and a “fishing expedition” to discover what evidence subpostmasters had.And he called for the government to be held responsible for its part, after “pumping huge amounts of money” into the Post Office.He added: “I have spent the last 23 years campaigning to expose the truth, and justice, not just for myself, but for the entire group of wrongly treated/wrongly convicted subpostmasters.“I have dedicated this period of my life to this cause which, sadly, has been necessary since Post Office Limited has spent this entire period denying, lying, defending, and attempting to discredit and silence me and the group of SPMs [subpostmasters] that the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) represents.”Former subpostmaster and lead campaigner Alan Bates arrives at the inquiry on Tuesday More

Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inboxGet our free View from Westminster emailWatch live as David Cameron holds a joint press conference with US secretary of state Antony Blinken in Washington DC on Tuesday 9 April.The foreign secretary has already held talks with Donald Trump in Florida amid his push to shore up US support for Ukraine.Lord Cameron met with the presumptive Republican presidential candidate on Monday ahead of his trip to DC to appeal to Congress over a stalled package of aid.On his visit to the US capital, he will warn that success for Kyiv in defeating Russia is “vital for American and European security” as he urges lawmakers across the Atlantic to approve “urgent” further assistance for the country.Lord Cameron will push for Ukraine to be given the resources needed to “hold the line” and “go on the offensive” in 2025, the Foreign Office said.He will meet with Mr Blinken as well as Congressional leaders, who he will urge to “change the narrative” on support for Ukraine while a multibillion-dollar aid package remains held up on Capitol Hill. More

Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inboxGet our free View from Westminster emailArtificial intelligence (AI) can be a “sword and a shield” against harmful content, not just a tool to spread it, Sir Nick Clegg has said.The former Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister is now the head of global affairs at tech giant Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.Speaking during an AI event at Meta’s London offices, Sir Nick said that while it was “right” to be “vigilant” about generative AI being used to create disinformation to disrupt elections, he said AI was the “single biggest reason” Meta was getting better at reducing the spread of “bad content” on its platforms.I would urge everyone… to think of AI as a sword, not just a shield, when it comes to bad contentSir Nick CleggIn 2024, billions of people are set to go to the polls with elections due in a number of the world’s largest democracies, including the UK, US and India.It has led some experts to warn of the potential threat posed by the rapid rise of generative AI tools – including image, text and audio content apps – and the possibility of them being used to spread misinformation and disinformation with the aim of disrupting democratic processes.A number of senior UK politicians have already been the subjects of so-called deepfakes, which have spread on social media.And on Tuesday, fact-checking charity Full Fact said the UK was currently vulnerable to misinformation, and more government intervention was needed on the issue with elections on the horizon.Sir Nick said focus on the issue was important, but argued that good AI was potent protection against bad AI, and that Meta and others had the tools needed to fight the spread of harmful material.“I would urge everyone – yes, there are risks – but to also think of AI as a sword, not just a shield, when it comes to bad content,” he said.“If you look at Meta, the world’s largest social media platform, the single biggest reason why we’re getting better and better in reducing the bad content that we don’t want on Instagram and Facebook is for one reason; AI.”He added that the use of AI to scan Meta’s platforms to find and remove harmful content had reduced the levels of bad content by “50 to 60% over the last two years” meaning that now “for every 10,000 bits of content, one bit of content might be hate speech”.“Some of the work teams have been doing inside Meta to improve the way that we use our most advanced AI tools to triage content, so that we make sure that the 40,000 people we have working on content moderation really look at the most acute edge cases and they don’t waste a lot of their time looking at stuff that is inoffensive or not a problem has really improved rapidly in recent months,” he said.“It is right that there is an increasingly high level of industry wide cooperation, particularly this year because of this unprecedented number of elections.“We should be vigilant, but I would urge you to also think of AI as a great tool to navigate that difficult landscape and I’m quietly optimistic that the whole industry is trying to really lean into this as cooperatively as possible.”During the event, Sir Nick also announced that Meta’s next AI large language model – used to power AI tools, including chatbots built by Meta and other firms – would be released shortly.Sir Nick said the new model, known as Llama 3, would begin to roll out “within the next month, hopefully less” and would continue over the course of the year. More