Election will not be in nation’s interest says prime minister at start of New York visit

On arrival in New York on Tuesday, Theresa May ruled out the idea of another general election before Brexit day, saying it “would not be in the national interest”.

Speculation about the idea of an autumn election to break the Brexit deadlock within the government has increased since theprime minister’s Chequers plan got a cool reception from EU leaders in Salzburg.

Heather Stewart considers whether support for a possible public vote marks a real policy shift

The nub of the party’s conference motion, thrashed out over five gruelling hours late on Sunday, is that if Theresa May’s Brexit deal is rejected (assuming she gets one at all), Labour will seek a general election – but failing that, a referendum should not be ruled out.

Shadow Brexit secretary applauded after saying ‘nobody is ruling out remain’

Labour conference delegates overwhelmingly backed the party’s Brexit policy on Tuesday after Keir Starmer sparked a burst of sustained applause for dropping into his conference speech the line that “nobody is ruling out remain as an option”.

Brexit has been among the most contentious issues in Liverpool. Labour’s members are overwhelmingly pro-remain; but some MPs from leave seats in the party’s traditional heartlands are concerned about any shift that might smack of trying to reverse the 2016 referendum.

Members at odds over people’s vote at conference, with Keir Starmer going off message

Confused? You soon will be. After an hour in which delegates argued about constitutional arrangements and conference procedures which only they appeared to fully understand, Keir Starmer was finally called to the lectern to begin the Brexit debate. It was a question of priorities. First things first.

“Just when we need a strong government, what do we see?” he began. “Division. Chaos.” You had to admire his honesty. Trying to keep up with Labour’s internal manoeuvrings on its Brexit proposals over the previous 24 hours had proved to be next to impossible.

Rolling coverage of the Labour conference in Liverpool, including the debate on Brexit and a second referendum

• Keir Starmer’s morning interviews on Brexit - Summary
• Lunchtime summary
• Jeremy Corbyn’s broadcast interviews - Summary
• Afternoon summary

6.05pm BST

5.50pm BST

Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, has just finished her speech to conference. Here are the key points.

We know that in this country you generally need a warrant to enter someone’s home or intercept their telephone calls. So we will insist on time limited, judicial warrants for any undercover policing.

We know who suffers from crime the most: it’s the most vulnerable; women; the elderly; children; all of our ethnic minority communities; the LGBTQ community and disabled people.

So, it is has always been wrong to say ‘law and order’ is somehow a Tory issue. Fighting crime and upholding the law are key issues for our communities and therefore they are key issues for Labour.

The government refuses to accept that their cuts to fire services are responsible for longer response times. They refuse to accept that privatisation and deregulation, led inevitably to disasters like Grenfell. More than a year later they have not produced a single initiative that would prevent a repeat of Grenfell. The government is failing to protect communities and ensure their safety.

People always say politics is ugly to watch up close, and they’re talking about the cynicism and manipulation, the treachery, the low cunning beneath the high rhetoric. Democracy in action is ugly in a different way, more like a jumble sale: mess, chaos, mountains of tedium, elbows everywhere. You have to stay alert because you know that underneath the polyester there’s something – not wishing to overextend an analogy, let’s call it a second vote on Brexit – that you would treasure.

The Labour conference in Liverpool this week had that jumble sale feel. In any process that is remotely pluralistic, there are too many people in the room. And so 150 Labour delegates met to discuss their composite Brexit motion, boiling 150 motions from different constituency parties down to one single motion, which was passed this afternoon.

Prime minister says basic trade deal touted by hardline Tories would risk breakup of UK

A no-deal Brexit would be better for the UK than any Canada-style free trade agreement allowed by the EU, Theresa May has argued as she arrived at a United Nations summit determined to regain control of the narrative after some bruising recent days for her own Chequers proposal.

At the start of a two-day trip to New York, the prime minister knocked down the possibility of a more basic free trade deal with the EU touted by more hardline Brexiters in her Conservative party, saying it could prompt the disintegration of the UK.

The EU referendum forced us to acknowledge that people in large sections of the UK had lost faith in political parties and the Westminster elite. While for some, closer integration with the EU had brought greater prosperity, many leave voters felt their jobs becoming under threat, their prospects and those of their children narrowing and the public services they rely on coming under growing strain. The vote in the EU referendum was a fundamental rejection of what our membership of the EU had become, and was an indictment of the failure of successive EU and UK leaders to listen to the concerns of ordinary voters.

Related: Keir Starmer launched an unexpected Brexit zinger – and it hit the spot | Martin Kettle

German chancellor says terms of trade deal need to be made ‘concrete’ in next eight weeks

Angela Merkel has warned the British government that the 21-month Brexit transition period will not be long enough if the terms of a future trade deal with the UK are not made clear and concrete in the next eight weeks.

In a speech to industrialists, the German chancellor gave her support to the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who wants to avoid a vague political declaration on the terms of a future deal.

Prime minister licks her wounds after mauling at EU summit and comes out fighting

Welcome to the Guardian’s weekly Brexit briefing, bringing you the top stories of the past week in Brexitland arranged in a way that might – hopefully – allow you to make some sense of them.

Talking of making sense of Brexit, this might help too – Brexit: the final deal, a Guardian Live event on 11 October featuring Alison McGovern, the Labour MP for Wirral South; Anand Menon, the director of UK in a Changing Europe; and Henry Newman, of Open Europe, and chaired by Heather Stewart, the Guardian’s joint political editor. You can book tickets here.

Labour’s Brexit boss set the conference alight when he revealed that remain could still be an option on a people’s vote

Keir Starmer’s speech to the Labour conference in Liverpool was significant for two reasons: for what it said, and for how it went down. As usual, time will tell; but both the speech and the response have the potential to push Labour, and Britain, towards the eventual, but still improbable, reopening of the entire Brexit issue.

Starmer isn’t one of the great natural party conference orators. You still feel that he is learning how to perform some of the baser political skills that don’t always come naturally to a senior barrister. But there was no missing the zinger that he launched into the Liverpool hall towards the end of a well-argued speech about Brexit – or its effect.

Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, tells delegates at the Labour party conference in Liverpool that if Theresa May ends negotiations without a deal, 'campaigning for a public vote must be an option … and nobody is ruling out remain as an option'

• Starmer opens Labour's Brexit debate and says 'nobody is ruling out remain' - Politics live

Wirral West constituency party withdraws motion over reports role could be used to ‘sow disunity’

Labour has unexpectedly shelved plans to create a position for a second, female, deputy leader, a policy backed by the current deputy leader, Tom Watson.

Related: Starmer opens Labour's Brexit debate and says 'no one is ruling out remain' - Politics live

Shares rise by more than 8% after strong sales and says it is well-prepared for no-deal exit

Next has warned that a no-deal Brexit could lead to disruption at UK ports and higher prices in its shops, but shares in the company soared as the fashion and homewares retailer said the long hot summer had bolstered sales and profits.

The retailer’s shares climbed by more than 9% on Tuesday, making it the biggest riser in the FTSE 100, after Next said sales had risen by 1% more than expected, strengthened by the heatwave.

Shadow Brexit secretary says Labour will vote against ‘blind Brexit’ as he predicts May’s deal will fail his six tests

Labour is likely to vote down any withdrawal agreement Theresa May reaches with the EU, even if the alternative she presents is crashing out without a deal, the party’s Brexit spokesman has said.

Keir Starmer predicted the deal the prime minister was likely to secure in the coming weeks would fail Labour’s six tests, so the party was preparing to reject it in parliament.

In the concluding part of their journey into the heart of 2018's weirdness, John Harris and John Domokos go to a Leave Means Leave rally and ask an obvious question: how did this side win? For the answer, they go to Labour conference, and then to a massive distribution centre at the cutting-edge of the new economy

The Acropolis Museum in Athens is an architectural marvel that has rightly won awards. The way the remaining Parthenon marbles are bathed in sunlight and overlooked by the temple that was their original site is profoundly beautiful. But what I found most affecting when I visited last week was the deliberate absences in the exhibits – spaces pointedly left blank for the day when, Greeks hope, the rest of the sculptures that were carved by Phidias and his assistants circa 447–438BC will be returned.

Many readers will no doubt be aware that many of these priceless sculptures, once better known as the Elgin marbles, reside in a gloomy room in the British Museum, having been torn from the Parthenon in the early 1800s by Lord Elgin. It is a subject of great controversy, but one that most Britons, especially those who are young and not of an imperialistic bent, struggle to care about. When polled in 2014 by YouGov, only 23% of British people wanted to keep them.

Dotted around Labour conference in Liverpool are T-shirts bearing the slogan “Love Corbyn, Hate Brexit”, which is not an unusual combination but an increasingly unstable one. It is meant as a declaration but comes across as a plea – urging the leader to reward the devotion of his fans with a sign that he shares their pain at the prospect of leaving the European Union. He doesn’t.

Jeremy Corbyn’s attitude towards Brexit is not mysterious. He was a critic of the EU before the referendum, declared himself a tepid supporter of membership during the campaign and showed not a flicker of sorrow at the result. Despite emotional aversion to Brexit among Labour members, the leader is up for leaving.

Chemical weapons and Brexit are other items high on PM’s agenda at general assembly

Theresa May is to petition Iran’s president for the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and call for greater efforts to curb chemical weapons at the UN general assembly in New York, a trip also expected to be punctuated by repeated questions about Brexit.

May sets off for two days at the gathering of international leaders on Tuesday morning. A schedule released in advance by Downing Street shows that among those she will meet later that day is Hassan Rouhani.

Yet again, and probably not for the last time, Britain’s hardline leavers and media mouthpieces are knowingly trying to sell the public a lie about Brexit. Their old lie – there were lots to choose from – was that leaving the EU would mean massive new spending on the NHS. Their new lie is that Britain now has only two choices: no deal or a last-minute free-trade deal. The truth is very different. Britain still has time – not as much as it would have if the process had been better handled – to do what it chooses about Brexit, with a range of options from no deal to remaining in the EU. Time for cool heads.

At every turn in the debate, however, hardline leavers have failed to say what they want Brexit to entail. All they have offered are lying slogans and cynical insults. On Monday, to be fair, this changed a little. A report from the rightwing Institute of Economic Affairs set out the case for the free-trade deal – sometimes called the Canada option – in some detail. Boris Johnson tweeted his support for a “fine piece of work”. Jacob Rees-Mogg even suggested that the IEA version would be popular with the public and would be passed by the House of Commons if Theresa May buried her Chequers plan.

Its authors claim this report holds the key to delivering the ‘Brexit prize’, but what does it recommend?

It has been billed by Jacob Rees-Mogg as the “most exciting contribution” to the Brexit debate in months, proposing a Canada-style free trade deal as an alternative to Theresa May’s Chequers plan.

The free-market thinktank the Institute for Economic Affairs’ report Plan A+: Creating a Prosperous Post-Brexit UK claims it can deliver the “Brexit prize” and has already won the backing of leading Brexiters David Davis and Boris Johnson and former Treasury minister Greg Hands.

In his headline speech to Labour’s conference in Liverpool on Monday, the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, says his party would vote against any deal the prime minister, Theresa May, strikes with the EU if it failed to meet Labour's tests for supporting an agreement. 

He said, on Brexit, that the Tories should 'get out of the way and let us get on with securing a way forward'. 

• Highly paid water bosses would be forced out under nationalisation plan, Labour says

The former trade lawyer’s thinking is behind many policies proposed by the most enthusiastic Brexiters

Shanker Singham is known at Westminster as the “Brexiteers’ brain”. To his acolytes in the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative party, the former Washington lobbyist and lawyer is one of the most brilliant trade experts of his generation.

In the two years since the EU referendum, he has become one of the most influential policy specialists in the UK, courted by Eurosceptic Tory MPs and ministers who have adopted much of his thinking as their own.

The Labour leader says the party has been concerned about a dilution in workers' rights and environmental standards. Corbyn says he is open to the idea of a second referendum if members agree to that policy at the party conference this week

• Labour prepared to vote down May's final Brexit deal, says Corbyn

The Salzburg summit looked messy on Thursday, and Theresa May looked thunderous on Friday as she spoke from Downing Street of an impasse in the Brexit talks and the need for mutual respect. But this isn’t the “darkest hour” of which EU diplomats talk when they plan how a deal might be struck by Brexit day on 29 March.

Brussels is well acquainted with being cast as the baddy by grandstanding prime ministers and ministers. Ruling out one Brussels-led policy in bellicose terms lets governments accept quietly something else that may only be slightly less toxic to the voters and domestic political alliances that give them power.

Theresa May has accused the European Union of not treating the UK with respect, in a hastily arranged Downing Street statement a day after she was humiliated at the Salzburg summit, when EU leaders declared her Chequers plan would not work. The British prime minister said she stood by Chequers, adding that throughout the Brexit negotiations she had treated her counterparts with 'nothing but respect … and the UK expects the same'.

Theresa May demands respect from EU in Brexit negotiations

With little over a month to go until the supposed deadline for talks to conclude, Britain and the EU are deadlocked after the Salzburg summit flatly rejected Theresa May’s Chequers plan. This is where we’ve got to

In the third part of their summer-long quest to get to the heart of the UK's condition, John Harris and John Domokos head to Boston in Lincolnshire. They find Brexit voters who still think no one is listening to them and Polish people feeling ever more unwelcome. But in London, protesters against Donald Trump offer a ray of hope and the prospect of something that might finally heal the country's wounds

The European council president, Donald Tusk, has rejected Theresa May's Chequers plan for Brexit, despite the prime minister insisting it is the 'only credible proposition on the table'. The differing of opinions come at the end of a summit in Salzburg at which Tusk warned of a breakdown in Brexit talks unless May can deliver a solution for the 'Irish question' by October

• Chequers plan is dead, says Tusk as Macron calls Brexiters liars

What are the areas of contention and how likely is it that the UK, the EU and Ireland will find a solution to them?

Related: May to reject Barnier’s Irish border proposals as ‘unacceptable’

As their new series continues, John Harris and John Domokos meet Jeremy Corbyn's army of activists, teachers and parents at a Walsall school hit by funding cuts and protesters at a London march in support of a second Brexit referendum. They seem to live in different worlds but everyone has one thing in common: a sense that Britain has to change, before it's too late

Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund's managing director, has said there would be costs for the UK however it leaves the EU. Expressing the fund's growing concern at the possibility of an acrimonious departure in March, Lagarde highlighted consequences including reduced growth and currency depreciation

• IMF chief highlights recession risk of no-deal Brexit
  

UK and EU want to avoid hard border between north and south but can’t see how to do it

Barring a few high-profile interventions from two former prime ministers, Sir John Major and Tony Blair, Ireland was not the main issue in the EU referendum campaign. Yet the status of the 310-mile border is now the biggest stumbling block to a Brexit deal.

The only alternative to the Chequers plan is crashing out of Europe with no deal, Theresa May has told the BBC's Nick Robinson. In an interview marking six months until Brexit, the prime minister said she is confident of getting an agreement based on the compromise she reached with her cabinet in July

• Only alternative to Chequers is no Brexit deal, says Theresa May
  

Winston Churchill has often been voted the most important/influential Briton ever. I was surprised to read claims that Churchill was a Eurosceptic, so I read through all his four great “European” speeches from 1946 to 1949. They were carefully prepared as a historic record of his views, delivered at grand events amidst great ceremony and designed to achieve impact: they did.

As talk of second referendum grows, here are the key questions on the issue

Polls have consistently shown over the past year that Britons do not think Brexit is being managed well, but that had not been matched by any appetite to re-run the referendum. More recent polls have begun to show a different picture, however.

As the Prime Minister is set to encourage her Cabinet to back a complex new arrangement on post-Brexit customs, a cross-party group of MPs are increasingly confident they can deliver victory for amendments to key Government legislation that would instead offer business the certainty of remaining in a customs union with the European Union. The amendments have been tabled by MPs from across the House of Commons, including nine Conservatives.

The West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner has today published a report warning  that “if the UK fails to reach a satisfactory Brexit deal or leaves the EU without any deal at all, the UK risks falling off a ‘cliff-edge’ in terms of certain security and UK-EU policing cooperation.”

The Government was forced to offer concessions to potential Conservative rebels today in order to stave off defeat on the so-called 'meaningful vote' amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill.

Dr Phillip Lee MP has resigned from the Government over Brexit and said any final Brexit deal “should go to the people, once again, for their confirmation”.

The Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA), a transport trade union affiliated to the Labour Party, today voted in favour of supporting a People’s Vote on Brexit at their annual conference.  

People are changing their minds about Brexit. The latest polls since June 2016 now show a solid lead for those in favour of a Peoples Vote on the terms of a Brexit deal and for staying in the European Union (EU).

It has been reported Leave.EU campaign backers frequently met officials from the Russian embassy.

The decision by Labour’s frontbench to vote to only stay in the Customs Union but not in the European economic area could cost the UK £29 billion a year and more than 300,000 jobs by 2030.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer has today delivered a ‘reality check’ to Brexit advocates stating, in Germany, that “we will have to give up some of the advantages of [EU] membership”.

The CBI have downgraded their forecast for economic growth for 2018 and warned that “risks remain … skewed to the downside. In particular a more disorderly outcome to EU negotiations”.

BuzzFeed News has obtained a leaked audio recording of Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, admitting that the UK may well end up with a Brexit deal that is “far worse” than what Brexit supporters had hoped for. 

In a letter to Conservative MPs this evening, the Prime Minister has claimed the choice facing the UK on Brexit is between “the unacceptable” and “the unpalatable”.

New polling by YouGov suggests just 10% of the UK public think Brexit is going well, with 73% thinking it’s going badly. That includes 70% of Leave voters.

The Foreign Office Minister and Deputy to Boris Johnson, Alan Duncan MP, has thrown the Government’s opposition to a People’s Vote into confusion after reportedly agreeing today that there could be a People’s Vote on the final Brexit deal negotiated by the Government.

The Government has published a new proposal for the so-called ‘backstop’ option for the Northern Ireland border, after a morning of tense talks between Theresa May and David Davis.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan has called on MPs to back cross-party amendments to the Government’s Withdrawal Bill when it is debated next week in the House of Commons.

It has been confirmed this morning that MPs will debate amendments on the Withdrawal Bill next Tuesday and Wednesday.

There is reportedly more uncertainty today about whether or not the Brexit Secretary, David Davis, will resign over disagreements relating to the Government’s plans for the Northern Ireland so-called ‘backstop’ proposal.

Speculation has grown throughout the day that David Davis and Number 10 are locked in a fight over the so-called “backstop” on the Irish border.

At Prime Minister’s Questions today, Theresa May failed to say when her Government’s promised ‘Brexit White Paper’ would be published. 

One month ago, the major pro-Europe organisations came together to launch the single combined campaign, “People’s Vote”, i.e. for the British people to have a vote on the final Brexit deal to be proposed by the Government. 

In less than a year, Britain goes over the cliff edge of departing from the EU – with a 'transition' to unknown arrangements. If regrets set in afterwards, it will be too late as we will have to re-apply under Article 49 - just as any other applicant. When those `unknown arrangements’ become somewhat clearer during negotiations this summer, “the people” may well look at the implications and decide for themselves whether they want to proceed over the cliff.

It is becoming increasingly clear that while Theresa May’s Mansion House speech may have applied some sticking plaster on the gaping wounds within the Conservative government, it fails to address vital issues on which it simply offers more unrealistic fudge.

After her speech yesterday about the Brexit negotiations, the Prime Minister was asked by a German journalist whether she thought Brexit was worth all the effort and disruption it entailed. Although British withdrawal from the EU is probably the most important national decision taken since the Second World War and it will inevitably define the success or otherwise of Mrs. May’s Premiership, she was unable or unwilling to answer this question.

The European Union started out and continues to be an organisation whose primary objective is to create a lasting peace in Europe after centuries of conflict ending in two catastrophic world wars.  

When a young official at the nascent European Parliament introduced me to Altiero Spinelli, one of the people who had spurred my interest in European integration as a student, awe turned to action. In a very small way, everyone could contribute to shaping Europe’s future, as Jean Monnet had said.

On 22 June 1948, the MV Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks carrying 492 Caribbean passengers. More followed afterwards. These migrants and descendants of migrants have played a vital role in the construction of the NHS since its creation. Without them the NHS would not have been possible. More recently Indian, Filipino and European doctors and nurses have come to the UK to ensure that our NHS continues to be the best health care system in the world.

Brexit supporters are organised and disciplined in their constantly repeated sound-bites. Almost every day you can hear the mantra “Take back control of our money, borders, laws and trade”.

The realisation that any post-Brexit transition period will leave the UK still subject to EU legislation, including modifications to such legislation and to new legislation, has given rise to the idea that Britain should extend its membership so as to serve any transition period as a voting member rather than as a “vassal state”.

New Year media reports suggest the UK Government thinks the EU27 is bluffing when chief negotiator Barnier states that UK-based banks will lose their “passports” to do business in the EU27. Instead, DexEU Secretary Davis has called for a “Canada plus plus plus” trade deal – implying that financial services will not find themselves at a disadvantage.

The age demographics of the Brexit vote in June 2016 are well-known: around 73% of young people under 24 voted to remain, compared with only 40% of people over 60. Yet it is self-evidently young people who are going to have to live longest with the consequences of Brexit, if it happens. These consequences are numerous and wide-ranging, and can be grouped into three categories: economic, social and identity.

Even during the European referendum last year it was clear that those who wished the UK to leave the European Union fell into two quite different camps, those who wanted Brexit to mark a decisive break in the economic and social life of the United Kingdom; and those who wanted Brexit to take place with minimal social and economic disruption. 

Yesterday morning, briefings from both sides in the Brexit negotiations were confidently looking forward to announcing a deal on the phase 1 “divorce” package.

I am disappointed for all those who have worked hard in Leeds, and the other contending towns, to hear this news. But there is a degree of hollowness to those in the government who are claiming this is a total surprise or a vindictive move.

I was delighted to be invited to speak at the Brexit and Agriculture event in York last week organised by the National Farmers’ Union and the European Parliament UK office. It was extremely instructive to talk with farmers, NFU officials and agriculture students about their concerns regarding the Brexit negotiations. Over the course of the event and the discussions that followed, four main themes emerged.

In his recent testimony to the House of Lords, Sir Ivan Rogers, former British Permanent Representative to the European Union, criticized as premature and ill-prepared the Prime Minister’s triggering last March of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. This is unfair to Theresa May. No different date for the beginning of the Brexit negotiations could or would have rendered them any less painful for the British participants. No amount of extra preparation on the British side before triggering Article 50 could or would have resolved the numerous internal contradictions of the Brexit project.

Time is not on the UK’s side in these negotiations: The latest ONS annual Pink Book on the UK’s balance of payments shows a further deterioration of the current account to 6% of GDP (£114 billion) in 2016.

If Brexit is going to be so great, why have so many Brexiters been opposed to the government releasing its Brexit impact assessments? Why keep them hidden away if it’s going to be glorious? And why not show the EU that we’ll do spiffingly when we leave thank you very much, deal or no deal?