Rolling coverage of the day’s political developments as they happen, including Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs and MPs debating and voting on the the Brexit bill allowing the government to trigger article 50
Ivan Rogers’ evidence to MPs on Brexit
Snap PMQs verdict
2.09pm GMT
Theresa May’s declaration that she wants a “seamless, frictionless border” post Brexit in Ireland amounted to meaningless “nice words”, the government has been told.
The Northern Ireland affairs select committee has been told by two customs lawyers with decades of experience of border controls that the continuing free movement of goods is legally impossible if the UK quits the Customs Union in a hard Brexit.
If Northern Ireland is no longer part of the customs union, Ireland is obliged to apply all these rules, what is done on the UK side if it’s outside the EU they can do what they want.
1.57pm GMT
As the debate goes on I will be updating some earlier posts, to include direct quotes from speeches initially just covered in reported speech. To get these to appear you may need to refresh the page.
1.55pm GMT
Dame Caroline Spelman, the Conservative former environment secretary, said it was important for the government to recognise the role played by foreign workers in agriculture. She said it was important for the government to ensure farmers could still hire foreign labour after Brexit.
Tim Farron, the Lib Dem leader, said the Lib Dems were a fiercely internationalist party. People may have voted for Brexit, but they did not vote for a destination, he said. That was why it was important to have a second referendum.
1.46pm GMT
Yvette Cooper, the Labour chair of the Commons home affairs committee, told MPs in her speech that she would vote for the bill, even though she backed remain. She said voting against the bill would make it harder to defend faith in democracy.
John Whittingdale, the Conservative former culture secretary, said he had hoped that David Cameron would return from his EU renegotiation with plans for proper reform of the EU.
1.39pm GMT
Here is the key quote from George Osborne’s speech. He said that German and French political leaders have told him they are not interested in offering the UK a complex, hybrid agreement.
The government has chosen not to make the economy the priority in this negotiation ...
The European Union is not prioritising the economy either in these negotiations. Having spent the last couple of weeks in Berlin and in Paris talking to some of the French and German political leaders, it is absolutely clear that while they understand that Britain is a very important market for their businesses, their priority is to maintain the integrity of the remaining 27 members of the European Union. They are not interested in a long and complex, hybrid agreement with the United Kingdom.
1.33pm GMT
Caroline Johnson, the new MP for Sleaford, has just given her maiden speech in the debate, backing the bill and backing Brexit.
John Bercow, the speaker, has just announced that 80 MPs still want to speak. He is imposing a four-minute time-limit on speeches, he says.
1.27pm GMT
Salmond says if Theresa May is determined to throw down the gauntlet to Nicola Sturgeon over Brexit, she can be sure that Sturgeon will pick it up.
1.24pm GMT
Salmond says Scotland has a great history. William Wallace was put in trial in Westminster Hall. He says he hopes he gets a pardon soon too.
He says the Scottish government put forward a plan to keep Scotland in the single market.
1.20pm GMT
Salmond says the Tory 2015 manifesto is not his bedtime reading. But on page 72 it says the Tories say yes to the single market, he says.
He says he debated Brexit with the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan during the campaign. Hannan told him no one was talking about leaving the single market, he says.
1.18pm GMT
Alex Salmond, the former Scottish first minster, is speaking now.
He says it is good to follow George Osborne. Osborne speeches don’t come cheap now, he says.
1.14pm GMT
Osborne says the Brexit negotiations will be “rather bitter”.
He spent four years negotiating with Michel Barnier, he says. He says he would advice David Davis to pack some Pro Plus, because there will be long nights.
1.12pm GMT
Osborne says the government has chosen not to make the economy the priority in the Brexit negotiations. Instead it has prioritised immigration control and escaping the jurisdiction of the ECJ.
He says the economy will not be the priority for the rest of the EU either. Having spoken to EU leaders recently, he has learnt their priority it maintaining the EU.
1.09pm GMT
George Osborne, the former chancellor, is speaking now.
He says democracy is easy to defend when it produces results you like. It is harder to defend when it produces results you do not like.
We have given the modern world a version of democracy that has spread far beyond our shores.
And therefore to vote against the majority verdict of the largest democratic exercise in British history I think would risk putting Parliament against people, I think it would provoke a deep constitutional crisis in our country, I think it would alienate people who already feel they are alienated, and I am not prepared to do that.
1.06pm GMT
Miliband says he thinks the UK will be weaker internationally outside the EU.
He says when he was climate change minister, he saw how the UK’s influence was increased by being a member of the EU.
1.01pm GMT
Ed Miliband is speaking now.
He did not want a referendum, he says. He opposed calls for one in the last parliament.
12.56pm GMT
John Bercow, the speaker, starts by saying there will be an eight-minute time limit on speeches for backbenchers.
He calls the first speaker, Ed Milband, the former Labour leader.
12.49pm GMT
I missed the questions from Angus Robertson, the SNP’s leader at Westminster, because I was writing up the snap summary. Here are his questions.
He started by asking how Theresa May would ensure the land border with Ireland stays open after Brexit.
Given that people will be watching this not just in Britain but also in Ireland, would she take the opportunity now to say how she will deliver these sensible and important outcomes?
These are absolutely the outcomes that we want to see. I was very pleased to meet with the Taoiseach and discuss the joint intent to ensure we don’t see a return to the borders of the past. We focus on the land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland; of course, the issue of movements from Ireland affects ports in Wales and, of course, Stranraer. We have agreed the work we’re going to do to deliver what I believe will be as frictionless as possible a border.
The prime minister has very helpfully explained that it is perfectly possible for parts of these islands to be in the single market, with free movement of people and at the same time protect and enhance trade with one another. This is very, very welcome, Mr Speaker.
Following the meeting of the JMC plenary sessions we did agree to an intensification of discussions. He really should listen to the answers that are given because he’s trying to imply something that isn’t there. We’re very clear we want to see a frictionless border between Northern Ireland and the Republic ... but I’m also clear another negotiation is to see as frictionless a border as possible with the EU ... and if he wants that, he shouldn’t want to take Scotland out of the EU by becoming independent.
12.41pm GMT
Labour’s Naz Shah asks about a female constituent lured to Pakistan and killed. Will the government encourage Pakistan to ensure that justice is done?
May says two people have been arrested and charged in Pakistan in connection with this case.
12.40pm GMT
The SNP’s Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh asks if the government will stand up for refugees, wherever they come from? And does she accept the right of women to wear the hijab?
May says women should be free to wear the hijab. What a woman wears is a woman’s choice, she says. And she says the government is opposed to discriminating against refugees on the grounds of religion.
12.37pm GMT
Labour’s John Woodcock asks what the government is doing to ensure that the proposed Moorside nuclear power station remains on track. He says Toshiba is reviewing its commitment to this.
May says the government remains committed to this.
12.36pm GMT
Nigel Adams, a Conservative, asks about the impact of the 2015 floods on Tadcaster.
May says she is glad the Tadcaster bridge has reopened.
12.35pm GMT
John Bercow, the speaker, says the Lib Dems are here now, and he calls Tim Farron, the Lib Dem leader, to ask a question.
Farron does not seem to be expecting this.
12.33pm GMT
Peter Bone, a Conservative, says the Lib Dems asked for extra time for the article 50 bill to be debated, but they were not there last night as it was being debated.
May says she has fought the Lib Dems all her career, and nothing they do surprises her.
12.32pm GMT
May says there is a committee that will look at whether Sir Philip Green will lose his knighthood. It is waiting for the results of the investigation into BHS to conclude.
12.29pm GMT
Labour’s Stephen Hepburn says the association of directors of adult social care says £4.6bn has been cut from adult social care since 2010. Does the government accept responsibility?
May says there is a longer-term issue here. The government wants a sustainable solution to social care. Labour ducked this for 13 years, she says.
12.28pm GMT
Labour’s Ruth Cadbury says air quality in London has recently been worse than in Beijing. So will the government shelve the plans to double the capacity of the M4?
May says the government does want to do more to improve air quality.
12.27pm GMT
Alec Shelbroke, a Conservative, asks what May is doing to ensure that other Nato countries spend more on defence.
May says the government has been pressing for this for some time. She agrees with President Trump that other countries need to do more. She will continue to raise this with other countries.
12.25pm GMT
May says Turkey is an important country to the UK, both in terms of security and because of its role in the migration crisis. She says she made it clear in her press conference in Turkey that she expected the country to uphold human rights.
12.19pm GMT
12.19pm GMT
Snap PMQs verdict: Strong and effective performances from Corbyn and May. Corbyn started with a superb, short zinger, and for the first four questions of the exchanges, as he quizzed May over Trump, he clearly had the upper hand. He asked a good question on the NHS and a UK-US trade deal too, but May was able to knock this back with a reply that was convincing rhetorically, if not necessarily technically and legally. (What on earth does “the NHS is not for sale” actually mean?) May only really got the better of Corbyn with her final answer, when she powerfully accused Corbyn of leftish grandstanding and of being not able to accept the realpolitik necessity of maintaining cordial relations with someone like Donald Trump. This is key to how she sees herself, while Corbyn rates ideological integrity much more. So both of them will be pleased with how PMQs turned out.
12.13pm GMT
Corbyn says he wrote to the PM about this. He holds in his hand her piece of paper (a discreet Neville Chamberlain reference.) She does not mention the convention in it. On trade, will May rule out opening up the NHS to US companies.
May says she could give a complex answer. But a simple answer is required.
The NHS is not for sale and never will be.
12.09pm GMT
Corbyn asks why May refused three times on Saturday to condemn the ban.
May says she has said it is wrong.
12.08pm GMT
Jeremy Corbyn also denounces the attack in Quebec. And he pays tribute to Dalyell, who he says doggedly fought to expose official wrong-doing and cover-ups. Dalyell made this House a better place. And he recommends his autobiography, called The Importance of Being Awkward.
Corbyn says last week May says she was not afraid to speak frankly to the US president. “What happened?”
12.03pm GMT
Peter Heaton-Jones, a Conservative, asks about a hospital closure in north Devon. He wants to be able to say the Tories are the party of the NHS.
May says the government wants people to have the best possible health care. There are concerns about the future of the north Devon hospital. But there are no specific plans for it at the moment.
12.02pm GMT
Theresa May starts by offering condolences to those killed in the gun attack in Canada. And she offers condolences to the relatives of Tam Dalyell, who died last week.
12.00pm GMT
PMQs is about to start.
LIVEBLOG: Here's the gang waiting to probe the PM in just a few minutes: https://t.co/ZnJG5t3ADV #PMQs pic.twitter.com/HE3cW3MpNV
11.59am GMT
Sir Ivan Rogers’ evidence on Brexit has been fascinating. It is probably one of the most revealing select committee hearings we’ve had on this topic since the referendum. Here are the key points.
Sir Ivan Rogers claims the UK could be asked to pay up to 60 billion euro to leave the EU #Brexit https://t.co/928wuMr2wY
My summary of the senior beltway wisdom of the people I spoke to on a daily basis was that it would probably take until the early to mid-2020s for ratification. I have not found a single senior person in any of those organs who has diverged from that view.
I never leak, I never have, I never would. I can categorically deny and rebut that.
[This will be] an unprecedentedly large negotiation covering large tracts of Whitehall ... on a scale we haven’t experienced probably ever and certainly since the Second World War ...
This is going to be on a humongous scale. We are going to have enormous amounts of business running up various different channels and then involve difficult trade-offs for Her Majesty’s government and difficult trade-offs for the other 27 on the other side of the table.
One of the key cases for leaving is the nimbleness and agility we would have (when) not a member state, on our own, to negotiate at speed with only our own priorities on the table.
I have no doubt that we will negotiate FTAs (free trade agrements) with other partners outside the EU faster than the EU can do it. No doubt at all.
11.45am GMT
Rogers says that David Cameron’s conclusion about it being impossible to get a UK opt-out from free movement being impossible if the UK remained in the single market is one that Theresa May has also accepted.
11.32am GMT
Labour’s Kate Hoey goes next.
Q: In the period before the referendum, did you ever tell other EU countries there was a real chance the UK might vote to leave?
11.22am GMT
Rogers says other EU countries are trying to include things in EU directives now that they know will cause difficulty for the UK.
Whitehall has had a lot to do on Brexit, he says.
11.16am GMT
Rogers says at the EU other countries are now less willing to listen to what the UK wants, because they know it will be leaving.
11.15am GMT
Here is some Twitter comment on Sir Ivan Rogers’ evidence.
From Politico Europe’s Charlie Cooper
Anyone who thought Rogers resigned because he's a starry-eyed Europhile should watch this committee. Hard-headed, unsentimental about EU
Sir Ivan Rogers warnings about a "spine chilling" Hard Brexit is a gift to Tory rebels such as Anna Soubry and Dominic Grieve
Listening to Sir Ivan Rogers brings home the huge complexity of our relationship with EU. Affects every aspect of UK economy. #brexit
11.14am GMT
Q: How robustly is the UK engaging in EU working groups at the moment?
Very robustly, says Rogers. He says this did not change after the referendum.
11.04am GMT
Q: How easy will it be to arrange a transitional deal?
Rogers says the appetite for a bespoke, interim deal will be limited. The EU may push for transitional arrangements that would be wholly unacceptable.
11.01am GMT
Stephen Kinnock, the Labour MP, goes next.
Q: How legally binding are our financial obligations? If we don’t pay, will the EU take us to court?
10.55am GMT
Here is the start of the Press Association story about Sir Ivan Rogers’ evidence.
Negotiations to leave the European Union are likely to descend into “name-calling” and “fist-fighting” before any agreement can be found, the UK’s former ambassador to the EU has warned.
Sir Ivan Rogers, who quit in January after telling Prime Minister Theresa May that Brussels diplomats thought it might take 10 years to reach a deal, said there was a “humongous” amount of work to do in what would probably be the country’s largest ever negotiation.
10.55am GMT
Labour’s Graham Stringer is asking questions now. Stringer voted leave.
Q: The more I listen to you, the more I think we should leave now. What would you say to MPs who think we should leave without a deal?
10.49am GMT
Back in the European scrutiny committee Rogers says that, if the Trump administration rules out trade deals with blocs like the EU, that could lead to tensions, because the EU might resent the UK getting special treatment.
But we are not at that point yet, he says.
10.47am GMT
Elsewhere in the Commons Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, is giving evidence to the international trade committee. As my colleague Dan Roberts reports, Fox started by taking a swipe at the former cabinet secretary, Gus O’Donnell, who has said publicly that setting up the new department was a mistake.
Liam Fox begins testimony to parliament by insisting that former cabinet secretary Gus O'Donnell apologise for insulting his new trade dept.
10.45am GMT
Rogers is now setting out what would happen if the UK gave up single market membership.
City firms would not have passporting rights, he says. That would matter more to some than to others.
10.42am GMT
Rogers says he has heard Angela Merkel says repeatedly over the years that the four freedoms of the EU - freedom of movement for goods, capital, services and workers - cannot be unpicked.
10.39am GMT
Rogers says the UK will have exploded a bomb under the EU’s seven-year budget plan when it leaves. That is why getting the UK to pay a price for Brexit is so important to EU leaders, he says.
10.36am GMT
Q: EU leaders are briefing that the UK will be required to pay billions when it leaves. Is that a real threat, or is it unreasonable?
Rogers says it can be both.
Rogers says walking away with no deal will be 'so unpalatable that we won't do it' but suggests it will be around as a poss during talks
10.29am GMT
Rogers says the EU will not be able to draw up a withdrawal treaty unless it knows where the UK is heading.
So he thinks the EU will have to negotiate the UK’s withdrawal, and a future trade deal, at the same time.
10.25am GMT
Rogers says he has no doubt that the UK will be able to negotiate trade deals with other countries more quickly than the EU.
But there is also an issue about how much negotiating “heft” the UK would have on its own, he says.
10.22am GMT
Q: Did you really say getting a trade deal could take 10 years?
Rogers says he never said getting a trade deal with the EU would take 10 years.
Ivan Rogers: "I never leak, I never have, never would, never have under any government."
10.14am GMT
Q: How important is confidentiality?
Rogers says he thinks quite a lot of the negotiations will take place in public.
10.12am GMT
Rogers says it is not fully appreciated how important it will be for the remaining 27 members of the EU to decide what they want themselves before they start negotiations with the UK.
10.11am GMT
Sir Ivan Rogers, Britain’s former ambassador to the EU, has just started giving evidence to the European scrutiny committee.
He says the Brexit negotiations will be “on a humongous scale”.
Sir Ivan Rogers in front of MPs: "This is a negotiation on a scale we haven't experienced since WW2. It's going to be on a humongous scale."
10.08am GMT
The UK in a Changing Europe, an academic research project, and the Mile End Institute have conducted some research about the attitude MPs have to Brexit. They polled 101 MPs and then weighted them, by party, to make them representative of the Commons.
And the conclusions are perhaps not that surprising; that there are significant differences between the views of leave and remain MPs.
Of leave MPs, 72% prioritise controlling immigration or not paying into the EU budget over retaining access to the single market. MPs who voted to remain in the EU, however, are more divided, with under half prioritising access to the single market over either immigration control or paying into the EU budget, with the rest taking a variety of different positions ...
A minority of MPs believe that the referendum result would not be honoured if Britain remained in the single market (just 26% think this would not honour the result) or continued to pay into the EU budget (35%). The latter contrasts with polling by Lord Ashcroft (in August) which found 81% of the public believed continuing to pay into the EU budget would not be compatible with leaving the EU.
9.56am GMT
Pro-European Tories want more concessions from the government over the Brexit process, but they seem reluctant to commit themselves to voting with Labour when MPs debate detailed amendments to the article 50 bill next week. Here is an extract from a story in the Times today (paywall) about their thinking.
Pro-European Tory MPs have warned ministers that they expect to see parliament given a “meaningful vote” on the outcome of Britain’s Brexit negotiations before a deal is ratified in Europe ..
The government has said that it will give parliament a vote on the final deal but has made clear it would not represent a chance to veto Brexit or call another referendum. Privately, pro-European MPs do not believe this promise is meaningful but, having won a concession over the publication of a white paper, they do not want to be seen as disloyal by siding with the opposition amendments. However, they have made clear to the whips that they expect further concessions: a proper debate and vote in parliament before any deal is finalised is their key demand.
9.39am GMT
The former head of NHS Digital has said he was put under “immense pressure” by the Home Office under Theresa May to release data on immigrants despite his concerns over its legality, the Press Association reports.
Kingsley Manning said he was challenged for “daring” to question if there was a legal basis for handing over confidential patient data that would help the Home Office trace suspected illegal immigrants.
We said to the Home Office: ‘We need to understand what the legal basis of this is.’
The Home Office response was: ‘How dare you even question our right to this information. This is data that belongs to the public. It is paid for by the taxpayer. We should use it for public policy’ ...
9.30am GMT
Sir Anthony Seldon, who has written the official history of Number 10 as well as books on the last four UK prime ministers, has come up with a list of the 10 most important things for a prime minister to do and the 10 to be most avoided. He offered the advice in a speech to the Institute for Government in Whitehall yesterday,
Professor Seldon was careful to avoid saying how Theresa May rated on these 10 yardsticks, but in questions after his lecture he said he was concerned that modern prime ministers travelled too much. Although he himself had favoured remaining in the European Union, the professor said that one advantage of Brexit would be that the prime minister would not have to travel to so many EU summits.
9.04am GMT
It’s the full Brexit again today. MPs will resume their debate on the second reading of the article 50 bill, or the European Union (notification of withdrawal) bill, to give it its full title, and they will vote at 7pm. The bill is certain to be passed, but we will find out this evening how many Labour MPs are willing to defy Jeremy Corbyn and vote against it.
Here is our live blog from yesterday covering what happened in the debate until it ended at midnight.
Related: Brexit: MPs debate article 50 bill - as it happened
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