Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed the government is in talks with Labour rebels over concessions on its welfare plans.
The prime minister said talks would continue in the coming days to "get it right" ahead of a scheduled vote on Tuesday next week on legislation to deliver the proposals.
It comes after more than 120 Labour MPs backed an amendment that would stop the bill progressing through Parliament.
MPs have continued to sign up to the amendment, despite concerted efforts by ministers and party managers to persuade backbench colleagues to fall in line. The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is understood to be involved in the discussions with rebels.
Six more Labour MPs backed the amendment overnight, bringing the total to 126 - around half those Labour MPs who do not hold a government role.
PM confirms talks with rebels over welfare concessions
During a statement in the Commons on this week's Nato summit, Sir Keir said he recognised MPs of all parties were "eager" to reform the "broken" welfare system.
"We want to see reform implemented with Labour values and fairness," he said.
"That conversation will
continue in the coming days, so we can begin making changes together on Tuesday."
Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill changes who would qualify for certain disability and sickness benefits.
The bill tightens eligibility requirements for personal
independence payments (Pips), halves the healthrelated element of universal credit (UC), and increases the UC standard allowance.
Working-age healthrelated benefit spending has increased from £36bn to £52bn in the five years between 2019 in 2024, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), a think
tank.
It is expected to double to £66 billion by 2029, without changes to the system.
Ministers have said the welfare legislation, which aims to save £5bn a year by 2030, is crucial to slow down the increase in the number of people claiming benefits.
The IFS sets out how the change could also save £6bn by 2029 - although the overall spend on welfare is still expected to rise by £8bn to about £60 billion.
However, some Labour MPs have criticised the proposals - arguing there has not been sufficient assessments of the impact of the measures.
Trade minister Douglas Alexander told the BBC he thought there was "common ground" between the government and the rebels. "My sense is overwhelmingly Labour MPs want to get this legislation right," he added. "If there are improvements that can be made, let's have the conversation."
Weight loss jabs study begins after reports of pancreas issues
Desk report:
A study into potential serious side effects of weight loss jabs has been launched after hundreds of people reported problems with their pancreas.
The Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and Genomics England are asking people on weight loss drugs who have been hospitalised by acute pancreatitis to get in touch.
There have been hundreds of reports of acute and chronic pancreatitis from people who have taken drugs such as Mounjaro, Ozempic and Wegovy, although none are confirmed as being caused by the medicines.
The aim is to "better predict those most at risk of adverse reactions", said MHRA chief safety officer Dr Alison Cave.
The study is being run through the MHRA's Yellow Card scheme, which allows
anyone to report an issue with a medicine, vaccine or medical device to help identify safety issues as early as possible.
Patients aged 18 and over, with bad reactions to the weight loss jabs - which are also licensed for type 2 diabetes - are being asked
to report the detail on the Yellow Card website., external
They will then be asked if they would be willing to take part in the study, which will check whether some people are at a higher genetic risk of acute pancreatitis when taking these medicines.
Patients will be asked to submit more information and a saliva sample, with the overall aim of reducing the occurrence of the side effects in future, says the MHRA.
Cases recorded on the Yellow Card website up until
13 May this year include 10 in which patients, who were using weight loss drugs, died from the effects of pancreatitis - but it is not clear whether other factors also played a part.
It is impossible to know exactly how many people in the UK are on weight loss drugs as many users obtain them online through unregulated sources, rather than through their doctors.
Health officials have suggested the jabs could help turn the tide on obesity. However, they have also warned the drugs are not a silver bullet and often come with side effects, commonly including nausea, constipation and diarrhoea.
And the MHRA has also warned that Mounjaro could make the oral contraceptive pill less effective for some patients.
Desk report:
On Wednesday, Sir Keir Starmer insisted that he would plough on with the government's proposed welfare reforms.
For Labour MPs, that only made things worse.
Today's task for the prime minister and his team: make things better.
The clear change of tone right from the start of the day was the first sign of that change. It was reinforced by Sir Keir in the Commons, who said that he recognised MPs of all parties were "eager" to reform the "broken" welfare system.
"We want to see reform implemented with Labour values and fairness," he said. He said talks with Labour rebels would continue in the "coming days", ahead of the scheduled vote next week on legislation to deliver the proposals.
The bill tightens eligibility requirements for personal independence payments (Pips), halves the healthrelated element of universal credit (UC), and increases the UC standard allowance. These reforms aim to save £5bn a year by 2030.
Two areas where the talks will focus are the eligibility criteria
Starmer changes tone in bid to win back Labour MPs
for Pips, and the proposed cuts to the health-related elements of UC.
These are sensitive matters at the heart of the welfare package. But the government simply needs to find a way to get to, and through, the vote on Tuesday.
Take a step back, and this is apocalyptic territory for a government which won a vast landslide less than a year ago.
Spending the week speaking
to Labour MPs and officials has been quite staggering. Invective is being sprayed everywhere. At the heart of this rebellion is the unease in the Labour Party, which spreads right across all factions and none, about cuts to the generosity of the welfare state.
For so many Labour MPs, that safety net, and a passionate commitment to it, form their irreducible core. Frustrations with No 10
But the rebellion has also no
doubt been fuelled, catalysed and exacerbated by other latent frustrations among Labour MPs.
Among them is a view that Starmer's Downing Street operation doesn't listen to them.
Frustration at the political handling of the welfare row is being directed with increasing intensity at Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister's chief of staff, as well as his political secretary, Claire Reynolds.
Of course, McSweeney is Starmer's second chief of staff in Number 10.
His predecessor, Sue Gray, was removed after only three months.
The first-ever Downing Street chief of staff was Jonathan Powell, who held the role for Sir Tony Blair for a decade. He's now back as Starmer's national security adviser.
But one Labour insider suggested that the anger at the Downing Street operation was displacement activity for the real culprit.
"He could make Jonathan Powell his chief of staff, and it wouldn't make up for the fact that it's the prime minister who doesn't have enough political nous."
And perhaps there's something more fundamental at play here in our political culture.
Boris Johnson won what was then considered to be a massive majority - 80 - in 2019, and we assumed he could get to do what he wanted for five years. That turned out not to be the case, to say the least.
In 2024, Sir Keir Starmer won a majority of double that – and here he is in a serious crisis.
Two-tier policing row over Palestine protester dressed as Holocaust victim
Desk report:
Scotland Yard has been accused of “two-tier” justice after police ignored a proPalestinian protester dressed as a Holocaust concentration camp inmate.
Jewish leaders and MPs criticised the “religiouslyaggravated” outfit worn by Maria Gallastegui, in which she replaced the star worn by inmates with an Islamic symbol. They complained that police failed to challenge a protest “clearly designed to cause distress”, but warned men “waving Israeli flags” at a Palestine Action march that they could be guilty of breaching the peace.
Ms Gallastegui, 66, a full-time protester who gave up her job as a coach driver nearly 20 years ago for a life of activism, joined a protest against plans to ban Palestine Action after its activists attacked RAF aircraft with paint.
Critics contrasted her treatment with that of Hamit Coskun, who was prosecuted and fined for a religiously aggravated public order offence after he set fire to a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London. Free
speech advocates argue that offensive behaviour should not be criminalised, regardless of whether it is committed by protesters against Islam, such as Mr Coskun, or against Israel. Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “We appear to have a two-tier blasphemy law in this country, which protects Islam from offensive references but not others.”
Alex Hearn, of Labour Against Anti-Semitism, said:
“Dressing as a concentration camp inmate, with the yellow patch replaced by an Islamic symbol, has caused many people upset.
“This religiously-aggravated performance appropriated and distorted the Holocaust and was clearly designed to cause distress. It’s shocking that while police act swiftly
on less obvious public offencesthis blatant display went unchallenged at the heart of our democracy.”
Labour Against Anti-Semitism has written to Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, asking him to investigate the incident as a potentially religiouslyaggravated offence that had “appropriated and distorted the Holocaust” and risked
“trivialising the suffering of six million Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution”. Ms Gallastegui has been arrested previous times over the past two decades, including during a protest for the right to protest in Parliament Square in August 2005.
She previously lived in a tent in Parliament Square for six years after joining the campaign against proposals to change the law to restrict protests in front of the Commons and Lords.
In 2021, she lived and slept in a 150-year-old tree in Hackney to challenge the council’s “reckless” and “irresponsible” plans to fell it to make way for a 600-home development.
“We are passionate people,” she told the BBC at the time. “Any campaign that we can think of doesn’t start overnight. There are a lot of underlying issues that the system is not dealing with.” A supporter of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks co-founder, Ms Gallastegui was banned from going within 100 yards of Belmarsh prison after she damaged a wall in a mock jail break attempt while he was held in the jail.
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Desk report:
Seven million people have been dragged into paying higher rates of income tax as a result of a stealth raid on wages, figures show.
Frozen thresholds have forced an extra 520,000 taxpayers into the 40p bracket in the last year, according to estimates by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC).
It brings the total to just over seven million in 2025-26, a 60pc rise from the 4.4 million in 2021-22 when income tax thresholds were first frozen under the Tories. The sharp rise in higher-rate taxpayers comes despite Labour’s manifesto pledge not to raise taxes on working people.
The number of 45p additionalrate taxpayers has more than doubled from 520,000 to 1.2 million over the same period.
The figures also reveal that an extra two million pensioners have been pulled into the tax net in the last four years.
Some 8.7 million people aged
Seven million workers dragged into higher income tax bands
66 and over are now paying tax on their income, up by a third in 2021-22.
Income tax thresholds, including the £12,570 tax-free “personal allowance” have been frozen since 2022. Keeping thresholds frozen
means earners lose a larger share of their incomes to tax, as inflation pushes up wages in a process known as fiscal drag.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has committed to maintain the freeze until 2028 – the deadline under the Tories.
However, there are fears that the Chancellor may choose to extend the freeze beyond this date in a bid to plug gaps in the country’s finances.
Expectations are mounting that the Chancellor will be forced to raise taxes in the
October Budget despite stating that the slew of tax rises last October was a “once in a generation” event. Labour’s winter fuel payment aboutturn, a rumoured end of the two-child benefit cap, higher government borrowing costs and a possible productivity downgrade have all piled pressure on Ms Reeves to raise revenue.
Jon Greer, head of retirement policy at Quilter, said: “The sharp rise in the number of people who are state pension age and now paying income tax is a direct consequence of the decision to freeze the personal allowance since 2021 and a textbook example of fiscal drag in action.
“Many of these individuals are not high earners but are simply victims of a frozen threshold in a period of rising prices. For some, it’s their first experience of paying income tax in retirement, and it’s leading to confusion, frustration, and unexpected bills.”
Peta attacks Prince and Princess of Wales because their dog had puppies
Desk report: Animal rights activists have criticised the Prince and Princess of Wales for breeding their cocker spaniel.
A photograph of Prince William surrounded by four new puppies bred from the family dog Orla was posted on social media to mark his 43rd birthday on Saturday.
The previously unseen picture, taken by the Princess in May, was accompanied by the caption: “Happy birthday! Love C, G, C, L, Orla and the puppies.” The initials referred to the Princess and their children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) have called the royal couple “staggeringly out of touch” for “churning out a litter” when animal shelters are so full of dogs needing new homes. The charity suggested that the Prince and Princess follow the example set by the King and Queen, who recently adopted a puppy named Moley from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home.
The new pet joined the family shortly after the death of Beth, the Queen’s Jack Russell terrier. She had adopted Beth in 2011 and a second terrier called Bluebell in 2012 from the Battersea shelter, of which she is patron.
In a statement, Elisa Allen, the vice-president of programmes
at Peta, said: “The Prince and Princess of Wales should know that shelters here and worldwide are overflowing with puppies desperate for a second chance at a loving home, and that churning out a litter in the midst of this animal homelessness crisis is staggeringly out of touch.
“If William is going to lead, he might well take a lesson from King Charles and Queen Camilla, who have chosen to adopt from a shelter rather than contribute to the problem.”
The Prince and Princess were given a cocker spaniel called Lupo as a wedding present from James Middleton, the Princess’s brother. Lupo died unexpectedly in 2020 and they welcomed Orla several months later.
It is believed that the royal couple plan to keep one of the new puppies, which have brought great joy to their children. Campaigners including Tory MP Andrew Rosindell have written to the
Charity Commission to call for Peta’s charity status to be revoked.
The letter, from Peta Watch, alleged that the charity operates as an “extremist political protest group”, which organises protests, demonstrations and stunts without providing any evidence of undertaking charitable activities. Mr Rosindell, the former chairman of the AllParty Parliamentary Zoos and Aquariums Group, said he had “major concerns” about
the organisation’s charitable status.
“It is completely wrong that an extreme organisation like Peta, which is blatantly political in its activities, is given the tax advantages afforded to a charity while failing to use the donations it receives to help animals in need,” he said.
The campaigners have alleged that although Peta claims to produce educational materials for schools, it admitted in a response to a Peta Watch report “that the organisation does not monitor how many schools use its materials, nor does it track student responses”.
They said: “Worse still, Peta has gleefully attacked other genuine animal welfare charities such as the RSPCA. Only genuine charities should have charitable status.” They have also accused Peta of “spreading baseless fake science” by linking dairy consumption with autism and equating zoos to the slave trade.
In response to the campaign, Ms Allen said: “Peta’s aim is, and always has been, to reduce animal suffering and people are glad to receive information from our investigations and other fact-checked resources that give them the ability to make compassionate decisions.”
Desk report:
The graffiti epidemic on London’s Tube is “helpful” for Sir Sadiq Khan, Transport for London (TfL) insiders have admitted.
Sources said the declining condition of the Bakerloo line was benefiting the London Mayor’s campaign for a multimillion pound Government handout to fund new trains.
The remarks prompted accusations that Sir Sadiq had chosen not to completely eradicate the vandalism because it boosted his political ambitions.
Earlier this month, a group of Londoners cleaned graffiti from the interior of Bakerloo trains.
Vandals have defaced the interiors of the line’s trains with tens of thousands of “tags”, a form of signature that gives them kudos among fellow graffiti artists. Sources at TfL, which Sir Sadiq leads, said it welcomed “anything that helps make the case for new trains” –including the graffiti.
An insider said: “In terms of the graffiti, anything that helps make the case for new trains is going to be helpful. We would rather the graffiti wasn’t happening, obviously. “But if this is going to help, we want to replace them and we need money from the Government to do it.”
Sadiq Khan ‘avoids cleaning Tube graffiti’ in push for extra funding
Sir Sadiq is lobbying the Government to fund new trains for the Bakerloo to replace the line’s existing 1970s rolling stock.
He has also called for the line to be extended to Lewisham, in south-east London, but has said TfL could not afford either without receiving additional taxpayer cash from central Government. Keith Prince, the transport spokesman for the City Hall Conservatives, said Sir Sadiq could “solve this blight” of graffiti if he wanted to.
He said: “The idea that graffiti
on the Tube is this shockingly bad purely because Starmer won’t give Khan money for the Bakerloo line is just nonsense, and nonsense that Londoners will see right through. Pull the other one, Sadiq, and actually use your powers as TfL chair to solve this blight.” Former police officers believe the Bakerloo and Central lines are particularly targeted by graffiti vandals because they do not have any CCTV cameras in their carriages.
Graham Wettone, a retired Metropolitan Police officer,
said: “The ‘tag’ is the type and style of initials or icon left by the so-called artist and has become in some places an accepted form of ‘modern art’. “The absence of CCTV is likely to be one significant factor, because there is less of a deterrent to the offenders.”
Andrew Trotter, a former chief constable of the British Transport Police, added that not having CCTV made it difficult to even identify the culprit, let alone prosecute.
He said: “You always want CCTV. I think one of the great
things about trains these days is that just about every train, every carriage, every platform is covered. Any time there is an investigation, you know your officers are very good at getting the CCTV and tracking people through the system. So it is a real shame.” Rory Geoghegan, a former police officer and the founder of the Public Safety Foundation, said the graffiti epidemic would not end unless CCTV was fitted to the Bakerloo and Central lines.
He added: “The mayor and TfL urgently need to get a grip. Secure the depots, clean the trains, retrofit CCTV, and make clear that public space will be protected. Anything less is a failure of leadership.”
TfL has no plans to install CCTV, however, because it believes this would be “prohibitively expensive”.
“We’re already talking to the Government – and we’ve already said several times –about wanting to replace the trains,” an insider said. “So it wouldn’t make a great deal of sense to retrofit CCTV on the Bakerloo line, just from a financial perspective.” Graffiti is also widespread on the Bakerloo because TfL no longer has enough of the half a century-old rolling stock to take vandalised trains out of service to be cleaned, which is the policy on other lines. That means transport chiefs are forced to continue using vandalised trains to maintain a regular service.
Reform would win mostseats in general election
Desk report:
Reform UK would win the most seats of any party if a general election were held today, a poll has found.
The first large-scale MRP poll conducted by YouGov since Sir Keir Starmer entered No 10 last year showed that Nigel Farage’s party would win 271 seats if voters went to the polls now.
Britain would face a hung Parliament, with Reform not returning enough MPs to govern on its own. But it would make Mr Farage the leading contender to become the next prime minister. The YouGov model, which makes projections for results in every parliamentary constituency, puts Labour in second place, with 178 seats, and the Liberal Democrats third with 81.
still be nine MPs short of a Commons majority.
The results represent the fragmentation of British politics and the weakening of the traditional two main parties, which would win a combined vote share of only 41 per cent. Seven Cabinet ministers would lose their seats to Reform, including Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, and Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary.
Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, and Jonathan Reynolds, the Business Secretary, would be among the casualties. Sir James Cleverly, the former Tory home secretary and ex-party leadership contender, would lose his seat to Reform.
The Conservatives were distant third on 15 per cent.
In July, Reform won over four million votes but returned just five MPs. Mr Farage gained further success at the local elections in May, where
The Conservatives would suffer further collapse if the country went to the polls again, winning just 46 seats, down from 121. The YouGov poll is the latest indicator of Reform’s remarkable rise since the general election and comes days after an Ipsos survey put the party on 34 per cent, nine points ahead of Labour on 25 per cent.
Reform returned hundreds of councillors and seized control of eight authorities from the Tories. The MRP projection put Reform as the largest party in the East Midlands, eastern England, the North East, the South East, Wales, the West Midlands, and Yorkshire and
the Humber. But it would face a difficult situation in Westminster, with there being no realistic prospect of a twoparty government emerging, according to YouGov. If Mr Farage and Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, were to try and form a coalition, they would
The poll comes as Sir Keir faces his latest political crisis, with more than 120 of his own MPs prepared to defy him over plans to reform the welfare system. On Wednesday night, it emerged that Sir Keir was preparing to back down over the cuts in order to stave off the biggest rebellion of his premiership.
India pushing Muslims to Bangladesh
Desk report::
On May 31, the 67-year-old bicycle mechanic returned to his home in India’s northeastern state of Assam after spending four harrowing days stranded in Bangladesh, the neighbouring country he claims he had only heard of “as a slur” since birth.
Ali’s weeklong ordeal began on May 23 when he was picked up by the police from his rented house in Kuyadal, a small village in Assam’s Morigaon district, during a government crackdown on “declared foreign nationals” – a category of people unique to Assam. The state is a tea-producing hub where the migration and settlement of Bengali-speaking people from neighbouring areas for more than a century has led to ethnic tensions with the Indigenous natives, who mainly speak Assamese.
The tensions have gotten worse since 2016, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power for the first time in Assam. More than a third of the state’s 31 million population is Muslim –the highest percentage among Indian states.
Ali is among the more than 300 Muslims in Assam “pushed back” into Bangladesh since May, according to state Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. “These pushbacks will be intensified. We have to be more active and proactive to save the state,” Sarma told the state’s legislative assembly earlier this month. ‘Hell underneath the blue sky’ After he was picked up by the police on May 23, Ali was taken to a detention centre more than 200km (124 miles) away in Matia, India’s largest facility for undocumented migrants, in Assam’s Goalpara district. Three days later, at the crack of dawn on May 27, soldiers belonging to India’s Border Security Force (BSF) took him and 13 others, including five women, in a van to the IndiaBangladesh border.
“The BSF was forcing us to cross over to the other side, whereas BGB and [Bangladeshi] locals said they would not take us as we were Indians,” Ali told Al Jazeera, referring to Bangladesh’s border force, the Border Guard Bangladesh.
Stranded in open fields at the no-man’s land between India and Bangladesh, Ali’s group spent the next 12 hours in kneedeep water with no access to food or shelter.
A haunting image of Ali, squatting in the swamp, brows
raised and eyes looking back at the viewer, went viral on social media “We saw hell underneath the blue sky and we saw life fading away from us,” he told Al Jazeera. If they tried to move to the Indian side, the BSF soldiers threatened them with violence, Ali said. “They shot at us with rubber bullets when we begged them not to push us into the other side. It was no no-man’s land for us. It was as if there was no country for us.”
Rahima Begum, 50, who was picked up in a similar manner from eastern Assam’s Golaghat district, says she is haunted by the memories of her time spent in the no-man’s land.
“I was beaten by the BGB when I tried to run across to the Bangladeshi side,” she said. “I had no escape. The BSF said they would shoot us dead if we did not move to the other side.” Jiten Chandra Das, a journalist from the border town of Rowmari in Bangladesh who reported on the incident for a Bangladeshi newspaper, told Al Jazeera he saw BSF officers firing rubber bullets at the stranded “Indian nationals”, adding that they also “fired four rounds of ammunition in the air” to force them into the other side.
In a statement on May 27, the BSF denied the allegation, saying it only tried to stop Bangladeshi nationals from “unauthorised entry into India”.
After a standoff that included angry interventions by Bangladeshi villagers and senior BGB officials, Ali was dropped by BGB soldiers at a border point in India’s Meghalaya state, from where he made his 10-hour journey back home through dense forests.
A May 31 report by Assambased The Sentinel newspaper said the BSF received 65 purported Indian citizens from the BGB.
Several Muslims who had been pushed towards Bangladesh told Al Jazeera that at least 100 of them returned home on their own after the BGB left them at the international border. Their claims could not be verified independently, but most returnees said “men in civil dresses” received them from the international line on the Indian side and “deserted them” on a highway.
The drive to expel “illegal” Bangladeshis gained momentum in India after April 22, when gunmen allegedly linked to Pakistan killed 26 people in Indian-administered Kashmir’s town of Pahalgam, triggering renewed anti-Muslim sentiments across the country. Apoorvanand, a professor of
After the last page
Hindi at the University of Delhi, told Al Jazeera the Pahalgam attack gave the BJP – which runs both the federal and Assam governments – an excuse to expel vulnerable Muslim groups, such as the Rohingya or the Bengalispeaking Muslim migrants.
“Muslim identities in any form are synonymous with terrorism in India under the BJP government,” he said. “The government treats Bengali Muslims as illegal Bangladeshis.”
Opposition parties and rights groups in Assam also allege that the government’s ongoing drive only targets Muslims. “They have selectively pushed out Muslims from Matia,” Debabrata Saikia of the Congress party told Al Jazeera, referring to the detention centre.
BJP spokesman Manoj Barauh denied the exercise was religion-based, saying that undocumented Hindus were not pushed to Bangladesh because they “could face religious persecution” in a Muslim-majority country.
The Assam situation Assam has seen ethnic and religious tensions for decades, the roots of which lie in the British colonial past.
In the 19th century, British colonisers developed tea gardens across the hilly areas of Assam, sparking largescale migration of Bengalispeaking workers – both Muslim and Hindu, many from the region presently known as Bangladesh.
When the British left in 1947, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned to create India and Pakistan, whose territory included East Pakistan, where most residents spoke Bengali and not Urdu, Pakistan’s national language. After more than two decades of a popular movement over language, an India-backed rebellion in 1971 saw East Pakistan emerge as an independent nation, Bangladesh.
Today, Muslim-majority Bangladesh shares a 4,096km (2,545-mile) border with India, nearly 260km (160 miles) of it with Assam.
Meanwhile, authorities in Assam set a cut-off date of March 24, 1971 – the day before Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan – for tens of thousands of Bengali-speaking residents to prove they entered Assam before that date to claim Indian citizenship.
Such citizenship cases are handled by Assam’s special Foreigners Tribunals set up
across the state. The tribunals act as quasi-judicial courts, empowered with declaring people “foreigners” over minor spelling mistakes or inconsistencies in government documents. In a 2019 report, rights group Amnesty International said the Assam tribunals were “riddled with bias” and work in “arbitrary ways”.
In the same year, Assam published a final National Register of Citizens (NRC), a list the government had been working on for decades to identify “illegal” residents. The list excluded nearly 2 million Assam residents, about 700,000 of them Muslims. Hundreds of these Muslims were put in detention camps after the NRC was published to be forcibly deported. Ali’s name appears in the NRC, but he was still declared a foreigner in 2013 by a tribunal in Morigaon over alleged discrepancies in his father’s name, Samat Ali, which appeared as “Chamat Ali” and “Chahmat Ali” in different legal documents. He spent two years in a detention centre after he was stripped of his citizenship, a decision upheld by the state’s High Court in 2014. He says he is too poor to challenge the decision in the Supreme Court.
‘They made me a Bangladeshi’ Many Muslims pushed towards the Bangladesh border have their citizenship cases pending before the courts. Therefore, they say that the government crackdown against them was illegal and arbitrary. Chief Minister Sarma has admitted that his government brought back from Bangladesh “some of the people through diplomatic channels who had pending petitions in courts”.
Among them was Shona Banu, a resident of the Barpeta district’s Burikhamar village, who was pushed towards Bangladesh on May 27.
“I never thought the country I was born into, and the country my parents and grandparents took birth in, would send me to Bangladesh border,” the 59-year-old told Al Jazeera.
“They made me a Bangladeshi, but the only time I saw Bangladesh was when it was 10 metres [33 feet] away from the no-man’s land.”
Khairul Islam, a primary school teacher in Morigaon’s Mikirbheta village, said his “forced deportation to Bangladesh felt like a death sentence”.
Starmer caves in to rebels on benefits
Sir Keir Starmer has caved to welfare rebels by agreeing that existing disability claimants can keep their benefits.
In a major concession, The Telegraph understands that the Prime Minister has agreed
that nobody currently getting the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) will lose out.
Instead, changes to who is eligible for the money, which is given to help people with the extra cost of disabilities, will only apply to new claimants.
The change will cost the Treasury around £1.5 billion a year by the end of the decade, slashing the original savings from the welfare cuts plan by a third.
The move puts further pressure on Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, to find more money in her autumn Budget, potentially through tax rises.
Sir Keir was forced into the change to avoid what looked set to be the first defeat in the House of Commons of his premiership in a crunch vote on welfare on Tuesday.
The changes to the overall package were secured after the leaders of a rebellion, who had attracted backing from more than 120 Labour MPs, held talks with the senior government figures.
Sir Keir was understood to have been personally involved. One leading rebel said “major concessions” had been won. The source said: “We wanted to unite around something better. We are getting there.”
Uprising It is now expected that Labour MPs who led the uprising against the welfare cuts will recommend to fellow rebels that they accept the package and back down. It remains possible that some of the more hardline of the 127 Labour MPs who backed an amendment that would have killed off the welfare legislation could still hold out and vote against it, including members of the Socialist Campaign Group.
But leading rebels who are more moderate believe that the new package is different enough to make sure that the legislation is passed with Labour votes on Tuesday.
Under the original version of the Personal Independence Payment cut, some 800,000 of the 3.7 million current claimants would lose money. Now they are expected to keep it.
The original welfare package, which included changes to Universal Credit, was meant to save the Treasury some £4.6 billion by 2029/30.
Letting all current PIP claimants keep their benefits unaffected would see that drop to £3.1 billion, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a leading economic think tank - a reduction of £1.5 billion.