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Specialist firearms officers on Balmedie Beach ahead of a visit by Donald Trump and Keir Starmer. Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA
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Starmer to meet Trump to discuss Gaza and trade, as minister suggests UK could recognise Palestinian state by next election
Good morning. Keir Starmer has a lead role in the Trump show today. He is flying to Scotland for a meeting with the US president, who is combining a golfing holiday with meetings with leaders like Starmer, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister.
The von der Leyen talks culminated in the announcement of what Trump described as a “powerful” trade deal (albeit one that only means the Trump tariffs won’t damage US-EU trade as much as they otherwise might have done; it is not an improvement on the status quo ante.)
Starmer is set to spend a lot of time with Trump today. He is arriving before lunch, and he is not flying back to London until this evening, after what No 10 describes as a “private engagement” (dinner?) at Trump’s golf course in Aberdeenshire. There is a bilateral scheduled, but Trump does not like long meetings and Downing Street has not said much about what else the two men will be doing. Starmer has reportedly been working out how to respond if Trump invites him to play a round of golf. According to my colleague Eleni Courea, who is Scotland covering the trip, that is one humiliation that Trump won’t be inflicting on the PM, who is a good footballer but a total novice at Trump’s favourite sport. But Starmer will also be flying to Aberdeen with the president on Air Force One, we expect. In White House terms, that is a token of respect.
Normally when political leaders meet, they speak to the press afterwards, to brief on what they have agreed. Today Trump and Starmer will hold their main event with reporters before their talks and so we are not expecting them to announce anything of substance at this point. Instead, we may just end up with Trump giving us one of his stream-of-consciousness peformances. While he has been in Scotland, these have include rants about European immigration (“you got to stop this horrible invasion that’s happening to Europe – immigration is killing Europe”) and wind turbines (“when they start to rust and rot in eight years you can’t really turn them off, you can’t burn them – the whole thing is a con job”).
At one point it was expected that Trump and Starmer would use the meeting today to tie up loose ends in the US-UK trade deal, particularly relating to steel tariffs. But Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, has been giving interviews this morning and he told the Today programme he “wouldn’t expect announcements from this visit” on trade.
Instead, the situation in Gaza may be the focus of the Trump/Starmer talks and, as Pippa Crerar reports, Starmer will urge Trump to use his influence with Israel to get Benjamin Netanyahu to resume peace talks with Hamas.
This is a difficult subject for Starmer because the PM is coming under increasing pressure from members of his own cabinet to recognise the state of Palestine. Doing this would anger Trump, who takes the Israeli view that this would amount to rewarding Hamas for the 7 October attack. And it would not have any immediate practical impact on the situation in Gaza. But Labour MPs are increasingly coming round to the view that, as Wes Streeting, the health secretary put it, it is best to recognise the state of Palestine “while there is a state of Palestine left to recognise”. As Mark Malloch Brown, a former UN deputy secretary-general and a minister in Gordon Brown’s government, told the Observer yesterday, recognition would also send a message to Israel that “you can’t bomb your way out of the reality that you’re going to have to negotiate with the Palestinians.”
In interviews this morning Reynolds said that the UK was committed to recognising the state of Palestine; it was just a matter of timing, he said.
He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain:
It is a case of when, not if.
It’s about how we use this moment, because you can only do it once to have a meaningful breakthrough.
And on Sky News he went further, implying he expects recognition to happen during this parliament.
In this parliament, yes. I mean, if it delivers the breakthrough that we need.
But don’t forget, we can only do this once. If we do it in a way which is tokenistic, doesn’t produce the end to this conflict, where do we go to next?
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Rachel Reeves, chancellor, is on a visit in Bournemouth.
11am: Nigel Farage, Reform UK leader, holds a press conference with “a special guest”. According to the Daily Mail, he is Colin Sutton, a former detective chief inspector, who is joining the party as a crime adviser.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
Around noon: Keir Starmer is due to arrive at President Trump’s Turnberry golf course in South Ayrshire, Scotland, where the two leaders are due to speak to the media at around 12.30pm. They will hold a formal meeting in the afternoon before flying to Aberdeen, where Trump owns another golf course and where they are expected to have a private dinner.
Around lunchtime: Kemi Badenoch is expected to record a media clip.
Afternoon: The Stop Trump Coalition holds a protest outside Trump’s Aberdeenshire golf course.
Late afternoon: Angela Rayner, deputy PM, hosts a reception for the Lionesses following victory in the Women’s Euro 2025.
Also, David Lammy, foreign secretary, is in New York for a meeting on a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
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Reform UK say it would repeal Online Safety Act, calling it 'greatest assault on freedom of speech in our lifetimes'
The Reform UK press conference is over. Apart from the revelation about Colin Sutton joining the party as a crime adviser, the main announcement was that Reform UK says it will repeal the Online Safety Act if it wins power.
Nigel Farage, the party leader, said that Reform was in favour of protecting children from dangerous content online (which is one of the main aims of the act). But he said that it was technically flawed, and that it imposed too many restrictions on freedom of speech.
However, Farage left it to Zia Yusuf, the former party chair who now runs Reform’s local government Doge operation, to explain in detail what the problems were. Yusuf said:
Britain is descending rapidly into some kind of dystopia.
This Online Safety Act, Orwellianly named, what it does, it does absolutely nothing to protect children. What it does do is suppress freedom of speech in this country and really force social media companies to censor anti-government speech ….
I use the word dystopia advisedly. Inevitably, if you look through history, any student of history will know that the way countries slip into this sort of authoritarian regime is through legislation that cloaks tyranny inside the warm fuzz of safety and security, and [they] hope nobody reads the small print.
Well, we have read the small print. We at Reform think this is the greatest assault on freedom of speech in our lifetimes, and I can announce today that as prime minister Nigel Farage and a Reform government will repeal the Online Safety Act.
Yusuf cited three aspects of the legislation in particular that he claimed were unacceptable.
First, he said the legislation gives the secretary of state the power to tell Ofcom to “rewrite the rules about what speech social media platforms must censor”. He said:
That is a pretty terrifying thing for a single individual to have. In fact, it’s the sort of thing that I think Xi Jinping [the Chinese president] himself would blush at the concept of.
Second, he said the act says it is illegal to something you know to be false which causes “non-trivial psychological harm”. Yusuf said this would force social media companies to “ proactively censor” that sort of speech.
Third, Yusuf said the penalties were excessive. Social media companies can be fined up to 10% of global revenues under the act. And executives can be jailed if they break the law. Yusuf said this would create a “perverse set of incentives”, and that it would lead to social media companies being “over-zealous on their censorship”.
As an example, he claimed that X had suppressed social media posts about a protest about an immigration hotel in Leeds. There was many other examples, he claimed.
(Supporters of the bill would argue that getting social media companies to be “zealous” about suppressing harmful content is exactly what the act is meant to be doing.)
But Yusuf also argued that the bill was flawed, because a surge in sign-ups for VPN providers suggests people are finding ways of getting round the restrictions requiring age verification for some types of content, including porn. He claimed this showed that “13, 14, 15-year-olds know far more about how the internet works than the dinosaurs that crafted this legislation and voted it through”.
Yusuf also said that “sending all of these kids onto VPNs is a far worse situation, and sends them much closer to the dark web where real dangers lie”. So it “actually makes children less safe on the internet”, he claimed.
Swinney ducks question about cost of policing Trump's visit to Scotland, but says VIP visitors must be protected
A reader asks:
Is there any indication of the costs associated with policing an American private individual holidaying on his own property in Scotland?
I have not seen any figures. But this is what John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, said when he was asked how much the policing operation cost on BBC Breakfast this morning.
All of that will be worked out and we’ll address that with Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority, and we’re talking to the United Kingdom government about these questions, but it’s important that we have a secure policing operation.
It’s also important that members of the public who wish to express their point of view, who want to protest about the visit or about other issues, are able to go about their exercise of their democratic right to protest. That’s exactly what they’ve been able to do since Friday, and that’s the way it should be.
Swinney also said the government should be paying to protect Trump.
The security arrangements have gone well since President Trump arrived on Friday, and that’s as it should be, because we’ve got an obligation to make sure that when we have major international visitors, when they come to Scotland, that they are protected and able to go about their activities.
Swinney says SNP need majority in next year's Holyrood elections to hold second independence referendum
In a column for the Daily Record, John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, has said that, if the SNP get a majority in next year’s Holyrood elections, that will be a mandate for a second independence referendum. He said:
Over the next few months, the SNP will set out some radical policies that we know will transform Scotland – ambitious ideas that can be realised with the powers of independence.
For us to achieve that independence, the first step is to secure a legal referendum recognised by all. In 2011 we secured that reliable and dependable route when the SNP achieved a majority of seats at Holyrood.
That is the only mechanism that has been proven to deliver such a vote - so that is what we need to deliver again.
That is why I have submitted a motion to the SNP conference proposing that we work to deliver a majority of SNP MSPs in the Scottish parliament to secure that referendum on independence.
Even if the SNP does win a majority next year, the Scottish government would need the consent of Westminster to hold legally-binding independence referendum. But after the SNP victory in 2011, the then PM, David Cameron, decided it was not feasible for the UK government to block a referendum requested by the majority of MSPs.
In response, the anti-independence Scotland in Union campaign said this intervention showed “precisely why we need to get rid of the SNP at the next election”.
John Swinney says he will use meeting with Trump to ask for Scotch whisky to be exempt from US tariffs
John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, will reportedly be joining Donald Trump for dinner in Aberdeen this evening, ahead of a bilateral meeting they have having tomorrow.
In interviews this morning ahead of the meetings, Swinney said that he would ask the president to exempt Scotch whisky from US trade tariffs. He told BBC Breakfast:
Tariffs are very important for the Scottish economy and obviously scotch whisky is a unique product.
It can only be produced in Scotland. It’s not a product that can be produced in any other part of the world. So there’s a uniqueness about that, which I think means there is a case for it to be taken out of the tariffs arrangement that is now in place.
Obviously the trade deal with the United States provides a degree of stability for economic connections with the United States, but the application of tariffs is increasing the costs for the Scotch whisky industry. So one of my objectives will be to make the case to President Trump that Scotch whiskey should be exempted from those tariffs …
The tariffs just now are costing the industry about £4m each week, so it’s a very significant burden on the industry.
Asked if his previous claim that Trump’s call for the displacement of the Gazan people out of the region amounted to “ethnic cleansing” would cause problems when the two men met face to face, Swinney replied:
I think what’s important is that we focus on the solutions that are required now, and the absolutely immediate situation is a necessity for a ceasefire and for humanitarian aid to need to flow into Gaza so that the people of Gaza can be saved from the starvation that they face.
And I think President Trump is ideally positioned. In fact, he’s perhaps uniquely positioned to apply that pressure to Israel to ensure that there is safe passage for humanitarian aid to support the people of Gaza, who face an absolutely unbearable set of circumstances as a consequence of the conflict.
And a key part of that must be the application of a durable ceasefire, the flow of humanitarian aid and the progress towards a two state solution in the Middle East.
Former senior detective to join Reform UK as crime adviser
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is holding a press conference now. There is a live feed here.
I will post the main points after Farage has finished.
This is what PA Media have filed about the Colin Sutton appointment.
A top ex-detective who spearheaded a series of high profile murder investigations will join Reform UK as its adviser on police and crime.
Colin Sutton, who led the investigation into serial killer Levi Bellfield, is to help Nigel Farage’s party develop its pledge to halve crime in five years.
Farage has said he will spend £7bn on policies towards this goal, including by recruiting 30,000 extra police officers.
The Reform leader told the Mail on Sunday newspaper that ex-police officer Mr Sutton would be a “huge asset” to his party.
Sutton told the paper he would give all frontline officers tasers, reopen 300 closed police stations, and stop investigations into online arguments as part of Reform’s policing offer.
The two men will appear together at a press conference on Monday morning.
Keir Starmer’s plane has landed at Prestwick airport outside Glasgow, the BBC is reporting. That means he should be at Turnberry within the hour.
Here are more pictures from Turnberry this morning.
Reynolds rejects Benjamin Netanyahu's claim recognition of Palestinian statehood would reward Hamas terrorism
When President Macron announced last week that France will officially recognise the state of Palestine in September, the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu strongly condemned the decision. In a post on social media, he said:
Such a move rewards terror and risks creating another Iranian proxy, just as Gaza became.
A Palestinian state in these conditions would be a launch pad to annihilate Israel — not to live in peace beside it. Let’s be clear: the Palestinians do not seek a state alongside Israel; they seek a state instead of Israel.
And, in an article for the Telegraph at the weekend, Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, reiterated the same argument. She said:
Palestinian recognition would be a reward for hostage-taking, for rape, for murder, for burning innocent people alive.
This morning, asked if he agreed with Netanyahu that recognising the state of Palestine would amount to rewarding Hamas for the 7 October attack, Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, replied”
No, I think that is not the right way to characterise it.
We all recognise that both Israelis and Palestinians need a two-state solution, no matter how difficult that is. That requires a state to exist on both sides.
This conflict has clearly been going for a very long period of time. But the scale of the horrific things that we are seeing – we’ve surely got to use this as a moment to really move forward on a two-state solution. And that is how we want to use recognition.
Business secretary Jonathan Reynolds says he does not expect Trump/Starmer talks to lead to trade announcement today
This is what Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, told BBC Breakfast this morning about how he does not expect the Trump/Starmer talks today to lead to a decision on some of the matters left unresolved in the US-UK trade deal announced earlier this year. He said:
We were very happy to announce the breakthrough that we had a few months ago in relation to sectors like automotive, aerospace, which are really important to the UK economy.
But we always said it was job saved, but it wasn’t job done. There’s more to do.
The negotiations have been going on on a daily basis since then. There’s a few issues to push a little bit further today.
We won’t perhaps have anything to announce a resolution of those talks, but there’s some sectors that we still need to resolve, particularly around steel and aluminium, and there’s the wider conversation about what the US calls its reciprocal tariffs.
Reynolds delivered a similar message on the Today programme. (See 9.30am.)
UK is stuck in a ‘debt doom loop’, says top investor
One of the world’s most prominent hedge fund investors, Ray Dalio, has warned that the UK is stuck in a “doom loop” as it faces a worrying mix of higher taxes, rising debts and slower growth. Kalyeena Makortoff has the story.
Starmer to meet Trump to discuss Gaza and trade, as minister suggests UK could recognise Palestinian state by next election
Good morning. Keir Starmer has a lead role in the Trump show today. He is flying to Scotland for a meeting with the US president, who is combining a golfing holiday with meetings with leaders like Starmer, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister.
The von der Leyen talks culminated in the announcement of what Trump described as a “powerful” trade deal (albeit one that only means the Trump tariffs won’t damage US-EU trade as much as they otherwise might have done; it is not an improvement on the status quo ante.)
Starmer is set to spend a lot of time with Trump today. He is arriving before lunch, and he is not flying back to London until this evening, after what No 10 describes as a “private engagement” (dinner?) at Trump’s golf course in Aberdeenshire. There is a bilateral scheduled, but Trump does not like long meetings and Downing Street has not said much about what else the two men will be doing. Starmer has reportedly been working out how to respond if Trump invites him to play a round of golf. According to my colleague Eleni Courea, who is Scotland covering the trip, that is one humiliation that Trump won’t be inflicting on the PM, who is a good footballer but a total novice at Trump’s favourite sport. But Starmer will also be flying to Aberdeen with the president on Air Force One, we expect. In White House terms, that is a token of respect.
Normally when political leaders meet, they speak to the press afterwards, to brief on what they have agreed. Today Trump and Starmer will hold their main event with reporters before their talks and so we are not expecting them to announce anything of substance at this point. Instead, we may just end up with Trump giving us one of his stream-of-consciousness peformances. While he has been in Scotland, these have include rants about European immigration (“you got to stop this horrible invasion that’s happening to Europe – immigration is killing Europe”) and wind turbines (“when they start to rust and rot in eight years you can’t really turn them off, you can’t burn them – the whole thing is a con job”).
At one point it was expected that Trump and Starmer would use the meeting today to tie up loose ends in the US-UK trade deal, particularly relating to steel tariffs. But Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, has been giving interviews this morning and he told the Today programme he “wouldn’t expect announcements from this visit” on trade.
Instead, the situation in Gaza may be the focus of the Trump/Starmer talks and, as Pippa Crerar reports, Starmer will urge Trump to use his influence with Israel to get Benjamin Netanyahu to resume peace talks with Hamas.
This is a difficult subject for Starmer because the PM is coming under increasing pressure from members of his own cabinet to recognise the state of Palestine. Doing this would anger Trump, who takes the Israeli view that this would amount to rewarding Hamas for the 7 October attack. And it would not have any immediate practical impact on the situation in Gaza. But Labour MPs are increasingly coming round to the view that, as Wes Streeting, the health secretary put it, it is best to recognise the state of Palestine “while there is a state of Palestine left to recognise”. As Mark Malloch Brown, a former UN deputy secretary-general and a minister in Gordon Brown’s government, told the Observer yesterday, recognition would also send a message to Israel that “you can’t bomb your way out of the reality that you’re going to have to negotiate with the Palestinians.”
In interviews this morning Reynolds said that the UK was committed to recognising the state of Palestine; it was just a matter of timing, he said.
He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain:
It is a case of when, not if.
It’s about how we use this moment, because you can only do it once to have a meaningful breakthrough.
And on Sky News he went further, implying he expects recognition to happen during this parliament.
In this parliament, yes. I mean, if it delivers the breakthrough that we need.
But don’t forget, we can only do this once. If we do it in a way which is tokenistic, doesn’t produce the end to this conflict, where do we go to next?
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Rachel Reeves, chancellor, is on a visit in Bournemouth.
11am: Nigel Farage, Reform UK leader, holds a press conference with “a special guest”. According to the Daily Mail, he is Colin Sutton, a former detective chief inspector, who is joining the party as a crime adviser.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
Around noon: Keir Starmer is due to arrive at President Trump’s Turnberry golf course in South Ayrshire, Scotland, where the two leaders are due to speak to the media at around 12.30pm. They will hold a formal meeting in the afternoon before flying to Aberdeen, where Trump owns another golf course and where they are expected to have a private dinner.
Around lunchtime: Kemi Badenoch is expected to record a media clip.
Afternoon: The Stop Trump Coalition holds a protest outside Trump’s Aberdeenshire golf course.
Late afternoon: Angela Rayner, deputy PM, hosts a reception for the Lionesses following victory in the Women’s Euro 2025.
Also, David Lammy, foreign secretary, is in New York for a meeting on a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
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