Must say the staff:attendee ratio at #LabourLive is a winning formula. Queue time approx 10 seconds.
As a vegetarian, I thought I’d be able to count on #LabourLive booking a falafel van... No heed paid either to Jay-C’s paean to salad (Kebab Awards 2016)
A gender normative attitude toward loos at #LabourLive
Decent turnout for Barry Gardiner, Dawn Butler, Ian Lavery & Len McCluskey in the Solidarity Tent #LabourLive
Slightly less interest in Declan McKenna (no, me neither) heading up the Pyramid stage at #LabourLive.
He’s singing a jaunty tune: “Gonna kick those posh boys up the arse. You toffs, you can naff off back to Eton”
The Labour-branded teddy bears on sale at #LabourLive are made in China and sold wholesale in UK for £3 to £4.50... Ethically made? I’ve asked Labour (will tweet the answer).
The Literary Tent is popular at #LabourLive. “It’s like a socialist Hay festival,” enthuses one party aide. The talks & panels are rammed, the music stages much sparser.
A-listers gutted to be missing out as reports of #LabourLive spread
McDonnell playing warm up act for Corbyn here at #LabourLive. “We have a dream”, he says, of a society that’s “radically more democratic”.
Headliner Corbyn finally arrives on the Pyramid stage at #LabourLive and launches into an Arundhati Roy quote: “Friends! Friends! Friends! To love, to be loved...”. Those near the front love massively excited, response where I’m standing a bit timer...
Good crowd now at #LabourLive. As of late afternoon, Labour sources said 13,000 of 20,000 tickets were nabbed.
Asked if that included freebies and “donated” passes, a Labour spokesman coughed: “It includes tickets arranged via an array of concessionary schemes.”
Corbyn was almost late to #LabourLive as he was working on his allotment today, according to insiders. His wife couldn’t get through to him on his mobile when the car turned up to his empty home, so she redirected it to collect him from him gardening activities.
Marc Wadsworth, who was expelled from Labour earlier this year following antisemitism allegations (which he denied), is at #LabourLive. He told me he has 24 Constituency Labour Parties backing his readmission and is considering his legal options, with £26k in a fighting fund.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
NEW: Afghan evacuees have arrived at Heathrow in past 48 hours with forged papers & with no documentation, a border officer on ground told @Telegraph.
Home Sec Priti Patel insisted security checks were 'vigorous' & 'digital identities' of all Afghans without docs were assured.
Ian Denison, Border Force assistant director, said some Afghans 'tell us they’ve lost the documents they had...
'We're not going to have an argument with the ppl that have been through the process they’ve been through... You see people with their life belongings in plastic bags'
He set out the security checks all arriving Afghans evacuees are obliged to go through, in a process that takes up to 4.5 hours.
This involves screening & checks by Border Force, Counter-Terror Command, and military intelligence.
Allies of Truss say she plans to sit Aussie trade minister Tehan “in the Locarno Room [in Foreign Office] in an uncomfortable chair, so he has to deal with her directly for 9 hours”.
They add “Australia need to show us the colour of their money” and match “words with action”.
Australia is accused of being “slow to move on key UK asks”, including on services, investment & biz visas – particularly in law & management consultancy.
Australia must make “some serious movement on their side” to unblock negotiations, say Truss allies.
The last strategic defence review in 2015 set out a cap of 180 nuclear weapons by mid-2020s.
BUT... it left wriggle room: "We will continue to keep our nuclear posture under constant review in the light of the intl security environment & the actions of potential adversaries."
The UK cap of 180 nuclear weapons represented a 65% reduction since the height of the Cold War.
For scale, US has around 3,800 warheads in active status and more in reserve, according to estimates.
Fears have been rising in recent years about China growing its nuclear stockpile