Tel Aviv is becoming increasingly isolated, and Britain remains one of its closest allies in Europe. Starmer’s decision will count

• Azriel Bermant is a lecturer in international relations at Tel Aviv University

In Israel, there has been feverish speculation about the new Labour government’s readiness to impose a ban on UK arms sales to the country. Faced with escalating tensions in Lebanon, Britain is now reportedly delaying its decision , but that has done little to calm Israeli concern about what could happen if it did decide to go through with it. Although military exports to Israel were only estimated at £18.2m last year, an arms embargo is widely perceived as an appropriate and powerful means to register disapproval of Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians.

Following the 7 October attacks by Hamas on Israel, Keir Starmer, as the then leader of the opposition, stood firm in his support for Israel and initially resisted calls for a ceasefire. Yet the British public mood has turned against Israel owing to the increasingly harrowing humanitarian situation in Gaza and the number of Palestinian civilians who have been killed. Labour has already dropped its opposition to an international arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant. The UK has resumed payments to the UN Palestinian relief agency Unrwa. Yet it is the prospect of Britain suspending military exports to Israel that is particularly alarming for many Israelis. UK components are used in the F-35 fighter aircrafts that Israel purchases from the United States, as well as in helicopters and radar equipments.

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Exclusive: MP also allegedly used her ministerial car for gym trips and ordered advisers to run personal errands

Kemi Badenoch asked officials to pay for a holiday flight with taxpayers’ money to the United States while in government but was rebuffed by her former department’s top civil servant, the Guardian understands.

Officials at the department for business and trade (DBT) ended up booking her travel to Texas for a family holiday in February last year, sources claimed, although the former cabinet minister covered the cost herself.

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Mark Bill offers the new chancellor some suggestions on raising taxes and closing loopholes. Plus letters from Joseph Koppenhout and David Tucker

The reported £20bn public finances black hole ( Rachel Reeves expected to reveal £20bn shortfall in public finances, 25 July ) represents substantially less than 1% of GDP. Easy ways to cover this gap include increasing council tax on the wealthiest – ie, in England, an extra £1bn each on bands F, G and H. An extra billion each from airport passenger duty, closing loopholes in capital gains tax and inheritance tax, taxing unused properties and land, and a tax on holiday lets, with much of the rest coming from a tax on profits made in the UK but offshored.

This could be combined with cuts, especially in the interest that the government pays on much of its borrowing, and the nuclear decommissioning programme, which is overengineered.
Mark Bill
Liverpool

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An economist and former BBC chair will head up the taskforce, which is aiming for towns with 40% affordable housing

Good morning. Parliament starts the summer recess today, most of the Westminster political class will be making plans for a post-election holiday, but the business of government goes on and this morning ministers are announcing plans for what they say will be “a new generation of new towns”.

Angela Rayner , the deputy PM and housing secretary, is setting up a new towns taskforce which has been asked to recommend sites for new towns within 12 months. It will be chaired by Sir Michael Lyons, an economist, former council chief executive and former chair of the BBC who has unrivalled experience as an adviser to governments, particularly on local government matters. The deputy chair is Dame Kate Barker, an economist and former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, who has also led previous housing policy inquiries for previous governments.

The programme of new towns will create largescale communities of at least 10,000 new homes each, with many significantly larger. These places could deliver hundreds of thousands of much-needed affordable and high-quality homes in the decades to come, tackling the barriers to growth and helping more working people across the country own their own home.

The new towns will help unlock the economic potential of existing towns and cities across the country, and the government will continue to drive growth and regenerate areas that have been held back by constraints on their expansion for far too long. While the programme will include large-scale new communities that are separate from existing settlements, a far larger number of new towns will be urban extensions and regeneration schemes that will work with the grain of development in any given area.

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The right calls them ‘economic migrants’; progressives respond by focusing on women and children. I’ve fallen into that trap myself

The Rwanda policy has been scrapped and the Bibby Stockholm is to be closed down. The policy on asylum seekers was almost a gift from the last government to this; it was so expensive and cruel that to abandon it was both common sense and a moral imperative. The Rwanda scheme cost £700m and, according to Yvette Cooper, ejected four people, all of whom left voluntarily. Had it not been ditched, the cost estimate for the next decade was £7bn . Using the Bibby Stockholm barge to house asylum seekers has cost taxpayers more than £22m to date. The expense itself was a performance of contempt and dehumanisation. No money could ever be found to clear the backlog, or help to establish safe routes; yet no amount was ever too much to make an asylum seeker feel despised.

So yes, great work everyone, voting those sadists out; but the migration debate, not just in Britain but across Europe and, of course, in the US, is sliding towards necropolitics – the politics of who gets to live and who has to die – a descent into barbarism that simply wouldn’t be possible if the category of refugees hadn’t been sorted, implicitly and explicitly, into the deserving and the undeserving.

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Exclusive: At least three department officials allegedly felt pushed out by MP’s behaviour as business secretary

Kemi Badenoch, the frontrunner to be the next Conservative party leader, has been accused of creating an intimidating atmosphere in the government department she used to run, with some colleagues describing it as toxic, the Guardian can reveal.

At least three officials found her behaviour so traumatising that they felt they had no other choice but to leave, sources claimed.

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The chancellor and shadow chancellor are both on this morning’s media round

Q: Do you accept that, having funded a 22% pay rise for junior doctors, other health workers will want the same?

Reeves says the pay review bodies recommended different settlements for different groups of workers.

A total of £1.7bn of funding was provided to NHS England to mitigate against the direct cost of industrial action in 2023-24 and ease pressures on hospitals. This was provided through a combination of reprioritised Department of Health and Social Care funding and new funding from HM Treasury. This includes the cost to cover shifts and lost pay efficiencies, whilst subtracting salary savings across those staff on strike.

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Keir Starmer has suspended seven of his MPs who rebelled against the whip to scrap the two-child benefit cap. So why won’t Labour scrap the controversial limit, and what does this first test of Starmer’s leadership tell us about the party’s financial position? The Guardian’s John Harris is joined by columnist Gaby Hinsliff and former Downing Street chief of staff and Conservative peer Gavin Barwell to discuss the issue. Plus, the Conservative leadership race begins

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Former security minister is the second candidate to declare in a leadership race that will run until November

Tom Tugendhat has confirmed he is entering the race to become the next Tory leader, insisting he could win the next general election.

Writing in the Telegraph, the shadow security minister said: “I am not just running to be the next leader of the Conservative party. I am running to be the next Conservative prime minister.

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