John Swinney, the SNP leader and Scottish first minister, has paid tribute to Kate Forbes following her announcement that she will leave Holyrood at the elections next year. (See 10.56am.)

In an open letter to her, Swinney said:

I have deeply valued the contribution you have made to the work of the Scottish National party and the Scottish government and am pleased we will continue to benefit from that in the approach to the May 2026 elections.

You have made a huge contribution to public life in Scotland and have been instrumental in making progress on economic issues for my government. You have much to be proud of in all of the work you have undertaken but I am especially heartened by the effect of your leadership on advancing support for the Gaelic language.

We all wrestle with the inevitable conflicts between family and public life and I sympathise with the dilemmas you have faced. I wish you, Ali and your family well and much happiness in the years ahead.

In her own tribute, Jackie Baillie, Scottish Labour’s deputy leader, thanks Forbes for her service as an MSP. She went on:

Of course, as much as being an MSP is a privilege, it is also a demanding job which can make for a difficult balance between our working and personal lives. In that spirit, I wish Kate all the very best in her future endeavours and hope that she can enjoy spending time with her family.

But it cannot have escaped the notice of voters that many of the SNP’s former rising stars are abandoning the stage, often to be replaced by defeated names of yesteryears and anonymous party apparatchiks.

Kate Forbes was the future once - but now, like many of her counterparts in the SNP, she can see the writing on the wall. The truth is this is a tired government with no vision and no ideas.

And Alex Cole-Hamilton, the Scottish Lib Dem leader, said his party would be fighting hard to win Forbes’s constituency, Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch. He said:

Kate and I were both elected to the Scottish parliament in 2016 and there have been several occasions when we’ve worked well together on shared interests since. I wish her family well for everything that comes next.

This is a top target seat for the Scottish Liberal Democrats, having won the equivalent seat at Westminster last year. We’re campaigning hard to fix the care crisis, to cut your energy bills, and for better local healthcare having recently secured the replacement for the Belford Hospital in the Scottish budget.

Labour and the Conservatives have both criticised Nigel Farage this morning for not being able to give details of Reform UK policies. In particularly, they focused on what he said when asked how Reform would pay for new prisons. (See 11.57am.)

In a statement, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said:

Reform are doodling fantasy prisons on the back of a pub napkin.

Once again Nigel Farage has made wild promises to the British public but completely failed to set out how he intends to pay for any of them. Empty words, zero plan, and not a shred of credibility.

And Labour issued a statement from a party spokesperson saying:

Nigel Farage offers anger, but no answers.

It’s farcical that Farage can’t say what his policies are, how much they would cost, or how they would even work. Reform aren’t serious and don’t have a clue as to how they would address the challenges facing working people.

This is what Farage said during the press conference when it was put to him that the supermax prisions his new prisons adviser seemed to be proposing would be particularly expensive. He said:

This is week three of the campaign. We laid out very clearly a plan. I was asked [at a previous press conference] about the cost of that plan, to which I said, how can we afford not to do this?

Now the supermax prisons – have we costed it, have we thought it through? It’s a debate. The point about this taskforce is we’re starting a debate, and we’d rather like it to become a full public debate too.

Vanessa Frake, the former prison governor who is now advising the party, said she was not calling for new US-style supermax prisons in her opening remarks. She said she was calling for the use of supermax regimes, which she said could be implemented “relatively easily”. (See 11.17am.)

The UK has been left behind in the cryptocurrency boom and is in danger of missing a second wave of demand, according to George Osborne, the former chancellor. Dan Milmo has the story.

Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.

Kate Forbes’s surprise decision to quit frontline Scottish politics next May inevitably raises questions about what this means for the next Scottish National party leadership contest and for the pro-independence movement.

John Swinney, the incumbent first minister and party leader, has insisted he plans to stay in post long after next year’s Holyrood election, quashing speculation his goal is solely to save the SNP from imploding and to secure a fifth term in power.

That promise presupposes the SNP will win next May’s election and that he wins handsomely; Scottish Labour’s collapsing poll ratings suggests for now that that is likely. But whether Swinney would stay on for a full five year term is another question. And if Forbes is no longer in the running, who might the contenders be?

Swinney faces a potential challenger in the shape of Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s hyper-ambitious Westminster leader, who is standing for election to Holyrood in May, and ousted the former SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford in a coup.

However, many see Swinney’s housing secretary Màiri McAllan, who recently returned to the cabinet after taking maternity leave, as his heir apparent. A very able minister, she has the conspicuous advantage of having a powerful coterie of allies in cabinet – mostly women ministers close to Nicola Sturgeon.

Swinney was openly dismissive of Flynn’s potential challenge when he was asked about it after he unveiled the SNP’s slate of Holyrood candidates some months ago – an event where McAllan was prominent and Flynn absent.

However, Flynn, an Aberdeen MP closely allied to Alex Salmond’s former aides, who trades in what he sees as a robustly realist defence of North Sea oil and gas jobs, has a power base too in the wider party.

If he becomes prominent in a post-election SNP government, Swinney will face pressure to give him a ministerial role, and that will then put serious strains on any putative partnership with the pro-independence Scottish Greens at Holyrood.

Like their sister party in England and Wales, the Scottish Greens are embroiled in a live leadership contest. Depending on the result in May, Swinney’s fortunes could well hinge on Green cooperation, and they, for now, are his best bet to hold onto power.

Q: Keir Starmer is reportedly interested in introducing digital ID cards, partly to tackle illegal immigration. Would you back that?

Farage said that was a Blairite idea. “I’m sure that Tony Blair would have us all microchipped,” he said.

He went on:

No, I don’t support it. I don’t trust big government.

If you want to see why my trust in government doesn’t exist, just think about what’s happened in the space of the last week, where they introduced legislation they tell you is purely to protect children [the Online Safety Act], and actually it is having a terrible effect on free speech and democracy.

I would not trust this government with digital ID, I have to say, I didn’t particularly enjoy the vaccine passport phase that we lived through.

As for the argument, it’ll stop crime, it’ll stop illegal immigration, it’ll stop illegal working, well, I don’t think digital ID will stop teenage girls being raped, I don’t think digital ID will stop the drugs gangs, I don’t think digital ID will stop illegal working.

Q: Since you have been running a campaign linking sexual crimes with migration, are you picking up more support from women?

Farage replied:

I do think one of the things that’s happened over the course of the last few weeks is, without doubt, we’re definitely seeing, not just high profile women coming to Reform – and you’ve seen one or two of those on the stage here and in Wales over the course of the last few weeks – but I think generally out there there is grave concern, particularly amongst mothers, about their teenagers, whether they can let them out.

So perhaps this issue has spoken the truth to people that they’ve been feeling increasingly for some time.

And I think that may be that changing the complexion of how people view Reform.

When I came back into this last June, people regarded it as being a bit of a blokeish party - something to do my reputation, I can’t quite think why.

But I think that’s changing and changing very rapidly. This campaign is very much a part of that.

Q: Where should people be deported to if they come from a country that is not safe?

Farage replies:

Sorry. I’ve had enough of this. If you come from Afghanistan, you go back to Afghanistan. End of.

This idea, we can’t send people to certain countries, all the false claims that people make about their own personal lives – I’m sorry. We’re done. We’re done. We’ve had enough.

Q: Are you trying to make people afraid, to get them to vote for you?

Farage replies:

No, they are afraid. They are afraid.

I dare you to walk through the West End of London after nine o’clock of an evening wearing jewellery. You wouldn’t do it. You know that I’m right. You wouldn’t do it, and that’s just in London – let alone what’s happening in so many other parts of the country, and the genuine fears.

Linking this to immigration, he claims there are “some people who come from certain cultures that pose a danger to our society”.

This is the contested claim raised by Robert Jenrick this morning. (See 9.53am.)

Colin Sutton, a former police officer who is now advising Reform UK on crime, introduces the next speaker – Vanessa Frake, a former prison governor and author of the memoir, The Governor.

Frake says when she went to Wormwood Scrubs, she was assigned the task of cleaning up D wing, where the lifers were based.

It was dirty, run down and had major drug issues. My attitude to the task was assertive and no nonsense. That’s the approach that I will take for my role within Reform UK [advising on crime].

She says the public have lost faith in how prisons are run. Assaults on staff are up, drug use is up, and thousands of offenders are being released early, she says.

She says the government has “appeased prisoners” who have been allowed to cook their own food. This has led to attacks on staff, she says.

She says she wants a “tougher prison regime for prisoners who will never be rehabilitated”, based on the supermax prisons in the US.

But, for prisoners who will be released, she wants more focus on rehabilition, she says.

UPDATE: I updated the headline after Frake said (at 11.57am) that she was proposing having a supermax regime in prisons for the most serious offenders, not building new supermax jails.

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, introduces a defector. It is Rupert Matthews, the police and crime commissioner for Leicestershire and Rutland. He was elected to that post as a Conservative in 2021. Before that he was a Tory MEP.

Matthews claims the police are “fighting crime with one hand tied behind their back”. He goes on:

The courts impose sentences that too often are derisory and Labour’s early release scheme means that crooks are back out after serving a fraction of their time in prison.

Now it’s all because our prisons are full. They’re full of foreign criminals who should be deported the day they are convicted, not kept here at the expense of British taxpayers.

It’s no wonder that criminals do not fear the justice system, no wonder that the law abiding have almost given up on reporting crimes, and our wonderful police officers are let down even by their own senior commanders.

Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.

Kate Forbes, Scotland’s deputy first minister and previous Scottish National party leadership contender, has announced she is quitting Holyrood at the next election.

The news will shock her party. Forbes has long been regarded by centrists in the party as a potential leader and was a favourite of many business leaders and SNP MSPs aligned with former leader Alex Salmond.

She said she had reflected over the recess about whether to stand again at next May’s Scottish parliamentary election, but had decided to put her young family first. In a statement she said:

I have grown up in the public eye, getting married, having a baby and raising a young family. I have consistently put the public’s needs ahead of my family’s during that time. I am grateful to them for accommodating the heavy demands of being a political figure. Looking ahead to the future, I do not want to miss any more of the precious early years of family life – which can never be rewound.

But her statement left open the possibility she may stand again at a later date, emphasising she did not wish “to seek re-election for another five-year term in the Scottish parliament”.

Her decision to quit now will also spare Forbes of the challenge of deciding whether or not to contest the leadership again if Swinney quits after the 2026 election; many see the housing secretary Màiri McAllan as the favourite to succeed him.

An MSP in the Highlands, Forbes came close to winning the leadership and becoming first minister after Nicola Sturgeon stood down in February 2023, following one of the most turbulent and combative campaigns of recent party history.

Forbes openly attacked many of Sturgeon’s landmark policies on social inclusion and accused her closest rival Humza Yousaf of incompetence, with the contest exposing significant strains with their pro-independence partners the Scottish Green party.

An active member of the socially conservative Free Church of Scotland, which does not admit women as church ministers, she was accused in turn of taking regressive stances on abortion rights, equal marriage and the climate crisis.

After Yousaf’s period as first minister and party leadership ended suddenly following his disastrous decision to abandon a coalition with the Greens, Forbes was brought back in to serve as deputy first minister by John Swinney as he sought to steady the ship.

Forbes said she enjoyed the privilege of becoming a minister for public finance, then as cabinet secretary for finance (a post she was given at extremely short notice after the then finance secretary quit on the eve of a budget) and most recently as deputy first minister and cabinet secretary for economy and Gaelic.

Kemi Badenoch, is not telling the truth about the “real failures of 14 years of Conservative government”, the former Conservative prime minister Liz Truss has said. Kevin Rawlinson has the story.

Good morning. During August, when parliament is not sitting and the tap of domestic news is running dry, opposition parties often like to run campaigns. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is following this model with gusto and today, for the third week in a row, he is holding a press conference on the subject of crime. Reform’s success in the polls is almost entirely down to the fact it advocates hardline policies to cut immigration and small boat crossings and Farage is trying explicitly to link this issue to crime, arguing that asylum seekers are disproportionately likely to be criminal.

The Conservative party don’t have a single theme for their summer campaigning. (Yesterday Kemi Badenoch was campaigning about the uselessness of the Liz Truss mini-budget, a topic where the nation largely agrees.) But in response to an overnight announcement from the government about new measures to crack down on small boat crossings, they have also been depicting these migrants (whose numbers, of course, increased dramatically while they were in office) as a threat to public safety. In a statement released overnight Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “This weak Labour government has lost control of our borders, and we now see rapes and sexual assaults by illegal immigrants reported on a near daily basis.” And, in an interview on the Today programme this morning, Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, doubled down on this claim. He said:

I am afraid there is increasing evidence of a serious link between illegal migration, migration generally, and crime, particularly sexual crime against women and girls.

In London, 40% last year of all of the sexual crimes were committed by foreign nationals, despite the fact that they only make up 25% of the population.

And some of the data that – we’re seeing we don’t have good data at the moment – some of the data we’re seeing is very striking. Afghans and Eritrean nationals are 20 times more likely to be convicted of a sexual crime than a British national.

These are very shocking statistics.

Farage recently told the New Statesman, for an interesting, lengthy profile written by Harry Lambert, that he thought Jenrick would “almost certainly” end up to the right of him on migration by the next election. “I suspect he will probably go further – that’s just my instinct for someone who wants to make noise,” Farage said.

Angela Eagle, the minister for border security and asylum, has been giving interviews this morning, and on the Today programme she suggested that there was not firm data to back up the claims that Jenrick was making. She said:

[Jenrick] did actually say that we don’t have good data at the moment, and yet he’s asserting with great certainty data points, and I don’t know where he’s got them from. So it’s difficult for me to criticise from a data point of view. But he’s admitted in that interview that we don’t have good data.

Asked if she thought that the Tories were “playing with fire” by linking asylum seekers with sexual crime, Eagle replied:

I think that we need to deal with all crimes, all sexual crimes, regardless of who has perpetrated them in the same way. And we need to crack down on violence against women and girls, which is why we’ve actually got Jess Phillips, a minister, whose entire job is about doing that.

Asked if she was open to discussing possible links between immigration and crime, Eagle replied:

I don’t mind having debates about anything, but I think we haven’t got good data on this, and I think that we’ve got to look at the principle. And that is that we’ve got to deal with all sexual criminality, whoever perpetrates it, in an almost colour blind way.

If a girl has been abused by somebody or has been subjected to a vile sexual crime, it doesn’t really matter what the colour of the skin of the perpetrator is.

As Eagle said, it is hard to assess the truth about the link between immigration and crime because the data is complicated, and in some respects limited. But one person who has tried is the researcher and scientist Emma Monk. On her Substack blog she recently published an analysis of the claim that some people arriving in the UK on small boats are 20 times more likely than Britons to be criminal. This is a claim that Jenrick referenced, describing it as “shocking”. Monk argues that it is shockingly inaccurate – or “ludicrous on multiple fronts”, to use her words. Her whole post is worth reading, but here is her conclusion.

As you can see, the claim that migrants arriving on small boats are 24x more likely to end up in prison was an easy manipulation of available statistics. It wasn’t entirely fabricated - they can point to ‘official statistics’ to claim credibility - but it’s clearly misinformation all the same.

A Tory MP briefed it to a right-wing newspaper, which published it unquestioningly. That was picked up by the rest of the right-wing media ecosystem, and now the 24x figure is firmly in the minds of those who want to believe it, and is being repeated all over the internet, and across dinner tables and garden fences.

There are only two items in the diary for today.

11am: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, holds a press conference.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

(For readers who keep asking why we feature the Reform UK press conferences, but not the Lib Dem ones, or the Green party ones, the answer is simple; they are not holding any.)

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