Brexit news : Budget cancelled as Boris Johnson warned UK faces ‘winter of discontent’

Number of state schools not fully open due to Covid quadruples in a week, latest DfE figures suggest

Four per cent of state schools that responded to a survey, around 650 schools, said they were partially shut for this reason last Thursday, Zoe Tidman reports.

This is a jump from one per cent, or around 160, who said they were not fully open due to a confirmed or potential Covid-19 infection on 10 September a week before.

Around three quarters of state schools responded in both weeks.

Keir Starmer apologises for shadow minister’s ‘good crisis’ comments

Sir Keir Starmer has apologised after Labour's shadow education secretary Kate Green said the party should not “let a good crisis go to waste” at the Labour Connected conference on Sunday, referring to the pandemic.

Boris Johnson accused Labour of exploiting the Covid-19 pandemic for political gain at PMQs, claiming triumphantly that the “cat’s out of the bag” and the “reality of the Opposition position has been exposed”.

In a recording obtained by the Guido Fawkes website, the shadow frontbencher said: “I think we should use the opportunity... don't let a good crisis go to waste. We can really see now what happens when you under-resource schools, when you under-resource families and communities.”

The Labour leader told Sky News: "I don't think the prime minister was right with his comments but equally the shadow education secretary, she didn't mean that in its proper context. The Labour Party has apologised and I'm very happy to do so [again]."

He added: "And in fairness, I think even the prime minister would recognise that we've been an instructive Opposition in the sense that I have openly supported him on the substantive decisions he's had to make."

Ben Chu: Cancelling the Budget is right – but Rishi Sunak should have seen the writing on the wall sooner

No plan, they say, survives contact with the enemy, writes our economics editor Ben Chu. 

And little that Rishi Sunak had planned for the UK economy after he was unexpectedly parachuted into the Treasury to replace Sajid Javid in February has survived contact with coronavirus. 

The “infrastructure revolution”, the new fiscal framework, the mass house building, the doubling in investment for research – all the projects that the fresh-faced Mr Sunak talked up in his March Budget have been utterly swamped by the pandemic and the emergency effort by the Treasury to keep the British economy from collapsing. 

In that sense, Wednesday’s confirmation that the next Budget, which had been due in the coming weeks, has been shelved simply continues the theme of 2020: Covid dominates all.

Read Ben’s full analysis on the Chancellor’s decision to shelve the upcoming budget here:

MPs vote for controversial military bill which ‘decriminalises torture’

Parliamentarians have approved the Overseas Operations Bill at second reading by 331 votes to 77. It will undergo further scrutiny at a later date.

It is part of the government’s pledge to tackle repeated and “vexatious claims” against the Armed Forces, but some ministers warned it would give “a free pass over alleged war crimes”.

Defence minister Johnny Mercer criticised opposition members for painting a "caricature" of the bill which he said was "totally, totally false".

“I haven't heard such an amount of vacuous nonsense for a long time from the Opposition. They bring in these terms around protecting our troops and talk about protecting our troops, invoking what I'm afraid is a litany of things that are not true,” he told the Commons.

"I started writing them down but I got bored after about two hours - 'almost impossible to prosecute', 'independent investigations', 'breaks Armed Forces Covenant', 'time limit on prosecutions'. None of that is there.

"That has been written down word for word and it's disgraceful that members opposite would use to build on the back of our armed forces personnel a caricature of this Bill that is totally, totally false."