UK politics - live: Tories lose vote on grooming gangs inquiry as Starmer hints at U-turn

David Lammy has responded to Elon Musk’s role in the debate on the response to child sex abuse gangs in the UK.

The foreign secretary said that while the X boss is at “one end” of the free speech debate, much of what has been published online is “peddling mistruth”.

“I insist that we focus on the truth, we focus on the facts. I recognise that there is a heated debate about free speech and Elon Musk is at one end of that debate,” he told BBC Breakfast.

“But to have free speech it must be based on facts and truth and some of what we’ve seen online is peddling mistruth is creating bad faith and is very unfair to those victims.”

The foreign secretary has taken a calm approach to Donald Trump’s recent comments that the US should acquire Greenland.

The president-elect siad he would not rule out using military or economic action to acquire the overseas Danish territory after he takes office on January 20.

But David Lammy would not condemn the comments and said they were “classic Donald Trump”.

He told Sky News: “I’m not in the business of condemning our closest ally. I am in the business of interpreting what sits behind this and there are some very serious national security issues and that is the basis in which Donald Trump has won his election.”

David Lammy has spoken about his plans to tackle people smuggling gangs to reduce Channel crossings.

Outlining the plans, he told Sky News: “I want to use sanctions now to go after particularly supply chains and the routes people are doing.”

When asked if he could sanction states who are inadvertently or intentionally harbouring criminals he said: “There may well be sadly leaders in countries who are behind this. Those who traffic don’t just traffic people they traffic drugs and they traffic guns and equipment as well.”

Here is what we are expecting to hear in Parliament today:

House of Commons:

09:30am: Transport questions

10:30am: Business questions to Commons Leader Lucy Powell

11:30am: A general debate on tackling violence against women and girls

House of Lords:

11am: Oral questions

11:45am: A debate on the Science and Technology Committee report titled “Long-duration energy storage: get on with it”

Andrew Norfolk, a journalist who helped uncover the grooming gangs scandal has voiced his frustration with claims that the media previously turned a blind eye to it.

“When we took the decision, The Times, in the summer of 2010 to look – genuinely look – and try and reveal what was happening and why, and to call for an inquiry – and this was 15 years ago, remember – that turned into four and a half years solidly of me working only on that story and nothing else,” he told Times Radio.

“Because the editor at the time, James Harding, decided that we were going to carry on writing about this story until he felt that every institution in this country that had a responsibility to protect children or to prosecute offenders had the understanding and systems and training in place to make sure that what was terribly wrong in this country would change for the better.”

He added: “What has happened this week has come entirely, it seems to me, because one rich man effectively playing with a train set who doesn’t give any great heed to the truth has decided to shoot his mouth off, scattergun attacks left, right and centre, and to my astonishment the British establishment, political media has just jumped to attention.”

Asked about claims that the scandal was neglected by the media, he said: “It no longer surprises me, I’m afraid – the easy, cheap, throwaway insults thrown in the direction of a mainstream media have obviously been going for years now. It is a tool the far right uses.”

Noting that the scandal is the far right’s “dream story”, Mr Norfolk said: “The narrative doesn’t work if it’s acknowledged that about the most mainstream media organisation you can get – the Times newspaper – was the organisation that actually carried on revealing what was happening.”

Jess Phillips has described the “deluge of hate” she faced after X boss Elon Musk used his huge platform to launch an attack on her.

Mr Musk labelled the safeguarding minister a “rape genocide apologist” after she denied a request for a government led inquiry into child sexual abuse in Oldham.

Speaking to Sky’s Electoral Dysfunction podcast, Ms Phillips said: “On Friday, it was just a deluge of hate,”

She added that despite the “bullying” she had received support from young women and constituents.

“It became the deluge of ‘we know this isn’t true’, and I think that the vast majority of people in the country can see exactly what is happening,” she said.

In a piece for Independent Voices, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn writes:

Many of us warned the last Labour government about the dangers of PFIs. Under such initiatives, private funding was used to pay the upfront costs of new hospital infrastructure, leaving NHS trusts to foot the bill. Last year, NHS trusts spent almost half a billion pounds on interest charges alone; that’s the equivalent of 15,000 newly qualified nurses.

Then came the Conservative Party, which spent 14 years indulging in an ideological experiment of its own: combining privatisation with austerity. This was no coincidence. By starving the NHS of resources, the government tested what Noam Chomsky has described as the “standard technique” of privatisation: “Defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.”

Today, the new Labour government is writing its own privatisation playbook.

The government will look at potential reforms to political party funding, Sir Keir Starmer said, as the leader of the Liberal Democrats raised the “spectre” of Elon Musk’s possible donation to Reform UK.

Harry Taylor reports:

Sir Keir Starmer’s backing for reform of social care will be “absolutely critical” if much-needed change is to be made, a key figure has said.

Sir Andrew Dilnot described it as “blindingly… bleedin’ obvious” that something should be done in an area which remains “pretty invisible”.

The economist, who was the architect of plans for a care costs cap more than a decade ago, welcomed the fact that a newly announced commission would be “another chance to try to raise this set of issues up the agenda”.

But he insisted it should not take three years to produce a final report and recommendations, suggesting it is “perfectly feasible” for the Government to set out by the end of this year what it is going to do.