Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, has told published a consultation paper on employment status reform. This sets out how the government proposes to implement plans he announced at Labour conference to close the “bogus self-employment loopholes” that deny workers basic rights.

Explaining the plans, the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade says:

Bogus self-employment is a practice whereby some businesses mislabel staff as self-employed to avoid statutory obligations.

However, the day-to-day reality is that many of these people are treated as workers, not self-employed. External estimates suggest that as many as 900,000 people may currently be affected by this and could be missing out on core employment rights.

The proposals to be consulted on could provide greater clarity to businesses and workers, levelling the playing field for those businesses who are already doing the right thing and clamping down on abuses. This could help workers such as parcel couriers, delivery drivers, hairdressers and gig economy workers.

But, in a good article on this topic for LabourList, Tom Berger points out that the plans don’t include a firm commitment to create a single status of worker in employment law – something that in opposition the party did commit to.

Meri Ahlberg, a senior policy adviser at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a thinktank that has argued for employment status reform, said:

The measures in the government’s consultation are a step forward for making sure people have the rights and protections everyone deserves. But without putting single worker status and tax reform on the table for the near future, it will still be cheaper to employ people in less secure jobs and millions of workers will be left without sick pay and parental pay. It’s time basic protections were in place for everyone, however they work, and that existing protections are enforced properly.

And this is what Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, said in reply to Andy Burnham.

We are very thankful, all our people in Ukraine, we absolutely thankful to your nation. You are strong people, a very supportive nation …

[This is a] terrible war. Absolutely terrible as.

Zelenskyy said Ukraine was being attacked by ballistic missiles and hundreds of Iranian drones.

There was no energy ceasefire, he said. It looked like “escalation from Russian side”.

He said he wanted the war to stop.

We have massive attacks today, and it’s a pity that we had also some difficulties. What I want to discuss with Andy – about Starlink and about intelligence. There are lot of different surprises on which you can’t count.

He said UK was one of Ukraine’s strongest partners.

A reporter asked Zelenskyy if he could confirm that the US had stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine, and if it had slowed down Starlink – meaning Ukrainian weapons lose access to the internet at very high speeds (making them inoperable). Zelenskyy did not answer.

Here are fuller quotes from the public statements by Andy Burnham and Volodymyr Zelenskyy before their main meeting.

Burnham said:

Mr President, it’s a great privilege for me to welcome you to Downing Street today. And you’ve just seen the reaction [a reference to the crowd cheering as he arrived]. Obviously, you’ve seen the solidarity and the support you’ve got from everybody here in Britain. We’re behind you. And that will not change.

We know that the last few days, the last few hours, have been very dark and difficult days for Ukraine. We know that the country sustained heavy bombardments in the last 24 hours in Kyiv, particularly. And we would want to extend our condolences to all of those people in Ukraine who’ve lost loved ones as a result of what has been happening.

President Trump made a call at the weekend for an energy ceasefire. And, Volodymyr, you have shown your leadership in saying that you would be prepared to sit down and discuss what that looks like, to make sure we protect people from a very harsh winter that lies ahead in Ukraine.

Sadly, what we have seen from Russia is further attacks on critical national infrastructure in Ukraine. It’s clear to the world, again, who the aggressor is in this conflict.

However, in these moments, Britain will continue to provide you with whatever support that we can. And today I’m announcing that we are accelerating the delivery of British-made air defences for you, and we will make sure that they’re in place as soon as possible. (See 9am.)

I’ve also asked all of our ministers here in the government to do whatever they can, extra, to support you, and they are looking at all possible avenues …

All of the people of Ukraine have our support. There are such connections between our two countries. We will forever stand by you through this difficult time.

Andy Burnham told Volodymyr Zelenskyy Britain’s support for Ukraine “will not change”, as he welcomed the leader to Downing Street.

In public remarks before their main meeting got under way, Burnham said:

You have seen the solidarity and the support you have got from everybody here in Britain. We are behind you and that will not change.

He added that recent days had been “dark and difficult” for Ukraine, which has suffered “heavy bombardment in the last 24 hours”, and he extending the UK’s condolences to those who had lost loved ones.

Burnham said Zelenskyy was “prepared to sit down and discuss” the energy ceasefire proposed by Donald Trump, but added: “Sadly, what we have seen from Russia is further attacks on critical national infrastructure in Ukraine.”

He said:

In these moments, Britain will continue to provide you with whatever support we can.

Zelenskyy said he was “thankful” for British support, saying:

Our people, we survived and continue to do this because we have strong partners and I’m very proud that we have one of the strongest partners in our history and it’s your people, Andy.

Andy Burnham has welcomed President Zelenskyy to Downing Street.

As they posed for pictures outside No 10, there was a loud cheer from Foreign Office staff who were there watching. (The Foreign Office is next door to Downing Street.)

Another ‘show of support’ feature of President Zelenskyy’s visit is the fact that he was invited to meet the king at Buckingham Palace. Foreign leaders coming to Downing Street for a political visit don’t normally get to meet the king at the same time. But Charles and Zelenskyy have met many times before, and the king is a strong supporter of Ukraine.

Zelenskyy posted this on social media about the meeting.

Thank you to His Majesty King Charles III for the audience. For me, it is important to have the opportunity to personally thank him for the unwavering support of Ukraine. We appreciate all the assistance from the United Kingdom.

A decision on whether to give the green light to the Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea is “imminent”, Miatta Fahnbulleh, the energy secretary, has said.

But a decision on Rosebank, the largest untapped oilfield in the North Sea, will take “a bit longer”, the minister told the Energy UK annual conference in London on Wednesday.

As the Press Association reports, while Fahnbulleh would not be drawn on what the decision on either project would be, she told delegates at the Energy UK conference:

We have got all the information on Jackdaw and my department has gone through that, so there is a decision that will be imminent.

“Rosebank will take a little bit longer,” she said, adding her first two months in the job had been dominated by the question and she wanted to make the decisions as quickly as possible.

Zack Polanski has hit back at Andy Burnham after Burnham said the “Zionism is racism” motion passed by the Green party at their conference was antisemitic. (See 12.57pm.) Polanski posted these on social media.

I’m the only Jewish leader of a political party.

I’m a victim of Antisemitism every day and I’ve made it clear Jewish people are welcome in my party.

You’re a Prime Minister who arms a genocide and locks pensioners up for opposing it.

The dangerous & irresponsible blurring of challenging Israel & Antisemitism is deeply revealing.

A Labour Government who apologised over their actions over Gaza is demonstrating that it was all performative. Andy Burnham still stands with Israel whilst it kills innocent people.

Polanski was not at the conference when the motion was debated and he has said that he would not have voted for it in the form it passed because he wanted to see it amended. But he has also said he supported the main thrust of what it was saying.

The SNP will launch the biggest pro-independence campaign since the 2014 referendum, John Swinney has announced.

The first minister said the Choose Scotland campaign will kick off during the party’s conference in Aberdeen this weekend. As the Press Association reports, the launch is part of the SNP’s £100,000 “hearts and minds” campaign to win over voters and will be “anchored” by a new, pro-independence, party political broadcast.

Swinney said:

As we approach conference, the wind is in the sails of the SNP and the Yes movement – we have been emphatically re-elected, we have the biggest, pro-independence majority in the history of the parliament, independence is in the lead, the momentum behind constitutional change across these islands is building and there is a growing consensus we have the right to decide our own future.

Our task is to build on that momentum which is why, at this conference, we will be launching the Choose Scotland campaign – the biggest campaign since the referendum and what will be the most sophisticated, pro-independence campaign Scotland has ever seen.

Peter Walker is a senior Guardian correspondent.

Kemi Badenoch’s flagship Conservative party conference policy document overstated the estimated cost of net zero by nearly £500bn because of a “source error”, her spokesperson has said, seemingly meaning it was copied from elsewhere and not checked.

A chapter on net zero in The Right Way, a policy document produced for the Tory conference in Birmingham, said the Climate Change Committee (CCC) estimated in 2020 that reaching net zero by 2050 would cost £957bn.

This baffled experts, and the CCC said it did not recognise the figure. The claimed total was double the £478bn cited in the 2020 document, seemingly because someone tallied a row showing totals for each individual column, along with the figures which made up the totals, thus doubling them.

Badenoch’s spokesperson said:

That was a source error, and it has been corrected online.

The incorrect total was previously published in a report by the rightwing thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs and also included in an article in the Spectator, from which it was seemingly copied.

Badenoch’s spokesperson defended the error, saying:

Quite frankly, the people who want to get upset about this should be upset more about the fact that net zero is costing us £500bn.

This is also incorrect. The 2020 estimate from the CCC was £478bn, but its most recent estimate puts the total at £110bn.

At least we learned one thing from PMQs – the Conservative party still has not settled on a reliable line of attack against Andy Burnham (and the one deployed by Kemi Badenoch today was possibly its worst yet.)

Various themes have been deployed: that Burnham is continuity Starmer; that he’s leftwing; that he’s just “eyelashes and a black T-shirt”; that he’s an unprincipled opportunist; and that he is a people pleaser who can’t say no or take tough decisions. There is a bit of truth in most of these assertions (and quite a lot in the final one, which in time may turn out to be the line most useful to the Tories), but none of them has stuck yet, and so today Badenoch tried another.

Badenoch sought to depict Burnham as a serial gaffe-merchant and she set this up with her opening question:

The prime minister has had a busy few weeks tying himself in knots, explaining why national security shouldn’t come at the expense of social security, bumbling into a row still ongoing about Manchester City.

He spent the last 48 hours trying to unsay that Russia influenced the 2016 referendum, when we all heard him say it. Does he ever get tired of putting his foot in his mouth?

What’s true about this is that, unlike his predecessor, whose instinctive response to a question was to recall the No 10 line-to-take and stick to it rigidly, Burnham is someone more inclined to answer questions and to say what he thinks. This has sometimes led to him having to take back something he said (as he did over Manchester City), or reframe an argument in different language (as he did after the PMQs national security/social security answer). But these are not grotesque errors, and any downside is probably more than compensated for by the appeal of a PM who can actually talk like a human being.

Badenoch then proceeded to develop this argument by claiming that Burnham received a slap-down from the head of MI5 yesterday. (See 12.16pm.) Given that Ken McCallum told reporters yesterday “I strongly agree with what the prime minister said”, to get from there to Badenoch saying it “the first time I have ever heard the head of MI5 slap down a prime minister for doing Russia’s dirty work for them” required some extraordinarily ingenious spin. It was arguably clever – but also nonsense.

The detail is tedious, but it has to be explained. Essentially, it rests on two acts of misrepresentation. Burnham told the Rest is Politics that there was Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum (which is true), but the Tories have suggested or said outright that Burnham was saying the Russians altered the outcome and that the result was illegitimate. Burnham has never said either of these things.

The second dodgy assertion came yesterday when CCHQ issued a press release saying McCallum had delivered “an extraordinary slap down to the prime minister”. This was in a response to McCallum saying Burnham was right about Russian interference in 2016. McCallum did also say that the impact of Russian interference was limited, and that it would be a mistake to go on about it too much because that would “play into our adversaries’ hands”. But, if that is the problem, you have to ask, who has been banging on it for the past three days? And who raised it at PMQs yesterday?

Burnham saw off the Badenoch attack quite easily. (Badenoch will probably get written up as having scored a great victory in the papers that have swallowed this hogwash, but if the Tories end up believing their own spin, they are in more trouble than they realise.)

One of Burnham’s strengths is that he does not seem to get rattled by this sort of rubbish. His decision to use his final response to Badenoch to praise what she said about race and Englishness at PMQs was a good one, and he even managed to adopt a cordial tone towards Nigel Farage. Being nice and personable does not guarantee success in politics, but it is a start and it helps to explain why Burnham is currently the most admired of the party leaders.

Harriett Baldwin (Con) asked Burnham to rule out any deals with the Green party in the light its motion saying “Zionism is racism”.

Burnham replied:

Can I condemn the motion that was passed unequivocally?

It is wrong. It is antisemitic, and this side of the house will have nothing to do with it.

And we will always take the right response when it comes to any partnerships we have with other parties.

We cannot support a partnership with a party that holds [the] position that has recently been adopted.

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said every week unidentified males from Iran are arriving in the UK on small boats. He asked Burnham to accept this was a national security emergency.

Burnham began his reply recognising that the person accused of killing Ann Widdecombe has been charged with planning an attack against Farage. He went on:

Can I start by recognising it’s been a hard time for him and his family. There’s a lot we disagree on, but I defend his right to say it, and I will work hard to secure his safety.

On Iran, he said:

We’ve seen the issues at RAF Fairford recently, and they have been dealt with in the right way with the utmost seriousness by the police and security services.

And the key point is, of course, we do need to get, boat crossings down. I hope he would recognise that they are coming down. Removals are up. There is much more to be done, but there is clearly progress in the right direction.

Davey asked Burnham to accept that President Trump’s decision to buy diesel from Russia is “yet another shameful Trump betrayal of the Ukrainian people and European security”.

Burnham said he called President Zelenskyy on Saturday “because I recognised it was another very dark and difficult moment for him”.

But he said that his role was to “try and repair bridges so that the support comes back”. He wanted to bring people together.

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, got a huge cheer when he spoke – a reference to his success in seeing off a supposed threat to his leadership. (See 10.55am.)

He asked when Burnham would hold another round of cross-party talks on social care reform.

Burnham welcomed Davey’s commitment to this issue, and said he was determined to change the system.

He said he would organise more cross-party talks, “certainly before the end of the year, but hopefully within the next month”.

Badenoch said she met a beauty salon owner yesterday struggling with taxes. She went on:

That is the brutal reality for tens of thousands of small business owners.

She said Burnham promised the biggest change for 40 years when he became PM. But now he is promising a no change budget, she said.

Burnham said he used his conference speech to address difficult decisions.

But he ended praising Badenoch for what she said in her conference speech criticising ethnonationalism.

I’m going to commend her for drawing a line on a decade of division where she drew a line with the party over [Reform UK] there for suggesting that her children weren’t British. That is wrong in every single respect.

She was brave and she was right to call it out. That is what I want to see more of in the next decade as we go forward.

Badenoch claims that yesterday the head of MI5 had to slap down Burnham over his Russia comment. She claims she has never heard that before.

This is the first time I have ever heard the head of MI5 slap down a prime minister for doing Russia’s dirty work for them.

Either the prime minister knew what he was doing on that podcast, trying to undermine the 2016 referendum, or he opened his mouth on a matter of national security and said the first thing that came into his head.

So does the prime minister agree with the director-general of MI5 that talking up Russian interference was a mistake?

Burnham says, if Badenoch had read in full what Ken McCallum said yesterday, she would not say that. He went on:

I think it’s important that we are clear-eyed about what happened in the past. There is, incontrovertible evidence that outside actors, enemies to this country, have interfered in our democratic processes, and it is inconceivable that that was not taking place across the whole of the last decade.

Badenoch was referring to McCallum saying it was important not to overstate the impact of Russian interference in the Brexit referendum.

Kemi Badenoch says she thinks Burnham’s “carefully worded” answer on Manchester won’t suffice.

She also refers to Burnham’s comments about defence and welfare, and about Russia and the Brexit referendum, and she asks if he ever gets tired of putting his foot in his mouth.

Burnham says he is glad Badenoch has raised Russia again. He says:

It gives me an opportunity to say to the whole house how I intend to lead this country. We have lived through a decade of division, and we know that hostile actors have been seeking to interfere in our democratic process. That is a matter of fact.

He says that, when Badenoch was a minister and in charge of the elections bill, she said she had not even read the Russia report.

He goes on:

I will draw a line. I will defend our democracy, and I will lead this country forward with positivity, unity and hope in the next decade.

Jerome Mayhew (Con) asks if anyone from Manchester City raised with him, or anyone from his team, the charges the club was facing from the Premier League.

Burnham says the club did not raise that issue with him.

He says he has released information about his contacts with the club.

UPDATE: Mayhew said:

The prime minister sees himself as a man of candour.

So will he tell the house, did anyone associated with the running of Manchester City football club raise the charges they were facing, and have now been found guilty of, either with him or any member of his team?

And Burnham replied:

They did not raise those issues with me.

I’m very happy for everything to be set out in full.

It is why I asked the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), in response to a call from the leader of the opposition and others, to set out a full statement of my key dealings with the owners of Manchester City football club.

That statement was published on Monday, and it includes the issues in the news today.

That is the position.

PMQs is about to start.

Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.

Reform UK has hit back at the Conservative party in the ongoing row about Nigel Farage’s comments about the Chagos Islands. (See 9.56am and 10.01am.)

As Tony Diver from the Telegraph reports, after the Telegraph published its story last night there was some briefing from inside the Trump administration critical of Kemi Badenoch for attacking Farage on this issue.

After @genevieve_holl reported this last night, various sources in the Trump administration who are supportive of Farage said Badenoch was needlessly trying to cause a political row (per @katyballs @MrHarryCole) and accused her of undermining the Anglo-American relationship.

It is possible that these people are particularly sensitive about this topic because they are still considering buying the islands, as @connorstringer and I reported earlier in the year. Domestic opposition to the idea of the US running Chagos in the UK would be a problem for the White House.

All of this has caused a bit of a stink in SW1 because there is not usually a cigarette paper between right-wing parties on the Chagos issue.

Responding to these reports, a Reform UK spokesperson said:

Calamity Kemi Strikes Again.

Kemi Badenoch has risked causing a diplomatic row with Britain’s allies, all because she cannot control the Tory spin doctors around her that oversaw the disastrous premierships of Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Theresa May, and even David Cameron.

The latest Tory lie, about Nigel Farage’s Chagos island commitment, just show that absolutely nothing has changed inside the Nasty Party, and it never will.

Nigel has been the most fiercely outspoken man on the Chagos sellout, delivering a smashing blow to the joint Tory-Labour plans to hand control of the British islands to China’s allies. It was the government that Calamity Kemi served in that engaged in 11 rounds of surrender. Now, just like with her fake Stanford scholarship, she’s trying to rewrite history.

Reform UK also released this quote from Misley Mandarin, who calls himself interim first minister of the Chagossian government. In reality, that means he is the leader of the handful of Chagossians who landed on one of the archipelago’s atolls earlier this year. Referring to how the last Conservative government opened negotiations with Mauritius over a sovereignty handover, Mandarin said:

Kemi and the Conservatives cannot be trusted by the Chagos people.

If they really have interest in the Chagos, why would you have started negotiating about things you already own?

Last night Harry Cole from the Sun quoted a senior Trump administration official telling him:

We are confused at why @KemiBadenoch is attacking @Nigel_Farage …

We understood Nigel Farage’s comments to mean that we would get perpetual use of the base, which, frankly, we’ve always had.

Barack Obama, the former US president, delivered a message about hope on a visit to Northern Ireland yesterday. He urged people to “insist that we can do better than we’re doing right now”.

He was in Belfast to accept an honorary degree, and at a Q&A event later he was asked what hope meant to him.

He said people had to “rediscover what’s the story we tell about how we’re going to live together, and see each other, and recognise each other, and disagree, and yet, still care for each other”. He went on:

The Good Friday agreement came about not just because of exhaustion and people being weary of violence. It was also – somebody started imagining something better, and they saw themselves and each other in a different kind of way.

People ask me sometimes how I can still be hopeful. It’s an assertion. It’s a practice. It is me saying: this is how I prefer to live.

I am going to assume the best in people. I am going to be willing to recognise my own flaws and consider how I can be better.

I’m going to insist that we can do better than we’re doing right now.

And there’s something in us that recognises ourselves and others, that has an impulse towards kindness, but also an impulse towards cruelty, and I know which side of that contest I want to be on. And I will fight for that, even if I don’t always think it’s going to win.

Earlier, at the degree ceremony at Queen’s University Belfast, Obama said:

The Good Friday agreement is still a shining example of what can happen when people put aside old wounds and choose peace.

But as we have seen in many countries, including in my home country the United States, peace and democracy are not inevitable. They have to be chosen, again and again.

Charities and volunteers who help asylum seekers get to the UK should face potential criminal prosecution, Nigel Farage has said in an interview with a rightwing US podcaster. Peter Walker has the story.

This is not the first time Reform UK has proposed this idea. Zia Yusuf, the party’s home affairs spokesperson, says he would call this “Polanski’s law” because Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, is a proud supporter of the rights of asylum seekers.

As my colleague Peter Walker predicted, the Lib Dem MPs’ ‘crisis meeting’ about the future of Ed Davey as leader last night went nowhwere in the end. Chris Mason from the BBC has a good story about it here. Here’s an extract.

The Liberal Democrat leader arrived smiling, flanked by several loyal MPs, but made no comment as he entered the room.

Nearly four hours later, when the meeting broke up, his deputy Daisy Cooper said: “There is overwhelming support for Ed in the parliamentary party and a real sense that we need to come together as a group.”

Earlier, behind closed doors, we understand Sir Ed told his MPs: “We have made changes. I am happy to embrace more changes. I want us to work as a united front.” Another tacit nod to things being less than united recently.

The Lib Dem MP Bobby Dean has been giving interviews this morning. He told Sky News that the meeting was “mostly it was a show of strength for Ed, really, a lot of people behind [him]. I know that there were some individuals that came out [to criticise Davey] in the last week, but it really isn’t the group feeling.”

While in some respects the Nigel Farage/Kemi Badenoch Chagos Islands row (see 9.56am) is just a slightly manufactured spat between two leaders who are not in a position to decide the future of the Chagos Islands anyway, it is revealing about the state of opposition politics, in three respects.

First, this is further evidence that the fight between the Tories and Reform UK is increasingly bitter. Here they are arguing over a policy where, essentially, their views are very similar. This time last year there was informal talk of a potential pact. Now there is an acrimonious fight to be the dominant party on the right.

Second, it is interesting that Badenoch keen to attack Farage on the grounds of his closeness to Donald Trump. Two years ago, Badenoch found it hard to say a bad word about the US president. But, as Trump gets every more erratic and unpopular, Badenoch is increasingly willing to say he’s wrong – and having him as a friend becomes ever more of a problem for the Reform UK leader.

And, third, this is further evidence that papers like the Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Sun, which until recently were probably more pro-Farage than pro-Conservative, and now siding more with Badenoch’s party. (Farage was complaining about this at his press conference on Monday.)

While Andy Burnham prepares for PMQs, he may be amused by a peculiar row that has broken out between Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch, the leaders of the two most prominent rightwing opposition parties. It is about the Chagos Islands – a subject on which until recently the Tories and Reform UK were united in their opposition to Labour’s proposed deal transferring sovereignty to Mauritius.

The Telegraph has a story by Genevieve Holl-Allen quoting what Farage, the Reform UK leader, recently told a US podcast. He said he would have handed it over to President Trump. Farage said:

I’d have gone in and said, ‘Right, you know what, mate? Chagos, it’s yours. Diego Garcia, in perpetuity, the most strategic American military base in the world, which it is.

Outside mainland America, Diego is the most important thing America has for nuclear subs, for long-range bombers, for all of it.

I’d have said, ‘Right, I’m guaranteeing you that. I’m giving up on this surrender. In return, just please stop talking about the Falkland Islands. I know you like [Argentina’s president Javier] Milei, but this really matters to us’. And there’s a trade, you see.

I give him something. I ask for something back. He’d get that. He’d understand that. He’s a businessman. He’s a trader.

The Telegraph put these remarks to Badenoch, and its story leads off on her reaction. The Tory leader said:

Giving away British territory in return for someone keeping quiet is not a deal. It is humiliating.

There is no pride in our country in the way he talks about us. This is careless, loose talk from a man who wants to be responsible for Britain’s national security.

The Chagos Islands are British. And the Falklands are British and will remain British, irrespective of what the American president says. When Donald Trump is right, we should say so. When he is wrong, we should have the confidence to tell him.

Last night Farage hit back, claiming the Telegraph, and Badenoch, had misinterpreted what he had said. He was not really talking about giving the US the whole of the Chagos Islands, he said; he was just proposing guaranteed use of the Diego Garcia military base in perpetuity (which is close to what Labour is offering the US anyway). Farage said:

This is totally dishonest journalism. I make it clear that I am opposed to the surrender of sovereignty to Mauritius. I would offer the use of Diego Garcia to the USA in perpetuity. In return I would want America to go quiet on the Falklands.

No one has fought harder to save the Chagos Islands from being given away than I have, unlike the Tories and Labour trying to give them away. I have even helped repopulate the islands with Chagossians.

Good morning. Andy Burnham is taking PMQs this afternoon, but he will regard his most important engagement as the meeting he has with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, later in No 10. Peter Walker has a preview.

When Keir Starmer talked about his best achievements as PM, he said one of the things he was most proud of was being able to embrace Zelenskyy outside No 10 only 24 hours after President Trump humiliated him in the Oval Office, in what was a moving and unequivocal show of British support for Ukraine at a moment of peril. The circumstances are not exactly the same today, but Trump called for Zelenskyy to be replaced at the weekend, and – again – Burnham is signalling that, if Ukraine cannot always rely on Washington, it can rely on London.

In an overnight statement, Burnham said:

Our rock-solid support to Ukraine is vital for keeping us safe here in the UK and ensuring those on the frontlines have the equipment they need to push back Russia.

My message to the Ukrainian people could not be clearer, we are with you for as long as it takes, and we will go further and faster in our support to back your courageous fight for peace in Europe.

It is not just the right thing to do, but it’s the necessary thing to do. Russia’s aggression cannot be allowed to succeed on our continent.

Burnham is also announcing that the UK will “accelerate deliveries of British Lightweight Multirole Missiles (LMMs), which have proven extremely effective against jet-powered drones that are being used to strike far beyond the front lines in Ukraine, including Kyiv and beyond.” No 10 says:

The [Russian] drones are faster and can fly far higher than propeller-driven Shaheds, making them harder to detect and destroy before they hit targets.

The UK has already committed £1.6 billion to deliver more than 5,000 LMMs to Ukraine over the next four years and will accelerate £10m of the £45m package of missiles announced today to meet Ukraine’s most urgent winter requirements.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10.30am: Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser, gives evidence to the Lords constitution committee on constitutional safeguards.

Noon: Andy Burnham faces Kemi Badenoch at PMQs.

After 12.30pm: MPs debate a Tory opposition day motion saying that the government should not place asylum seekers in a military camp near Piddington, and that it should “withdraw from the European convention on human rights in order to deport illegal migrants”.

Afternoon: Burnham hosts Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, in Downing Street.

3pm: Miatta Fahnbulleh, the energy secretary, gives evidence to the Commons energy committee.

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