Starmer has ‘full confidence’ in Streeting despite health secretary’s allies saying he is planning to resign – as it happened
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Libby Brooks is the Guardian's Scotland correspondent.
An odd dispute of interpretation has emerged overnight between the Scottish and UK governments. Yesterday evening a Scottish government spokesperson announced that, during a call between first minister John Swinney and prime minister Kier Starmer, both parties agreed to meet face to face next month to discuss a referendum on independence.
It is particularly welcome that the prime minister agreed to meet next month to discuss a referendum on independence.
The PM committed to meeting to discussed shared issues including the cost of living.
As the PM told the first minister, the manifesto this government was elected on was unambiguous that Labour does not support independence or another referendum'. Our position remains unchanged.
We, in Scotland, as in the rest of the UK, had a devastating set of election results and we were simply unable to articulate our offering, or indeed critique, of the SNP government because of the noise created at the centre.
Therefore, we became, and the prime minister became, the inadvertent midwife of a fifth-term SNP government. And that scenario you saw then, people waiting for a speech to try and articulate his new direction, a strategy, and it simply was not forthcoming.
This is not one faction of the Labour party. This is about the Labour party articulating, I think, now a commonly held view that this is unsustainable and unstable.
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