Brexit: bill intended to block no deal to become law after being passed by House of Lords – as it happened

• A bill designed to stop Boris Johnson taking the UK out of the EU on 31 October without a Brexit agreement has cleared the House of Lords, and it is set to become law on Monday when it is due to get royal assent. The bill, drafted over the summer by a cross-party alliance of MPs and tabled by Hilary Benn, the Labour chair of the Commons Brexit committee, got through all its stages in the Lords in two days, without any amendments being passed. The bill is thought to be legally watertight, and it seems to have closed off the option of Johnson forcing a no-deal Brexit at the end of October - a threat he claims has to be on the table if the EU is to offer him the compromise he insists he can obtain. Johnson has said that he would rather be “dead in a ditch” than demand an article 50 extension and no one seems to know (including perhaps Johnson himself?) what will happen if he gets to 19 October - the Saturday after the October EU summit, and the deadline in the bill for sending a letter requesting a Brexit deal - and the law says he must request an extension. Johnson can only avoid this condition either by getting MPs to pass a withdrawal agreement, or by getting them to vote to agree to a no-deal Brexit. The latter will never happen, and the former (on the basis of what we know say far about the UK-EU renegotiation) seems a remote possibility. The bill means MPs will have recourse to the courts if Johnson were to refuse to request an extension, but quite how this might play out in practice is not clear.

• Opposition parties have agreed to reject Boris Johnson’s attempt to trigger a snap election for a second time on Monday, making it increasingly unlikely a poll will be held before 31 October.

• Boris Johnson has said he will win a new Brexit deal at next month’s EU summit by using his “powers of persuasion”, and rejected calls for a further extension to article 50.

• West Yorkshire police have criticised Boris Johnson for making a political speech before a backdrop of its officers, with the chief constable saying the force was assured this would not happen but that Downing Street changed plans at the last minute.

• The legal campaigner Gina Miller has vowed to continue her “fight for democracy” after the high court in London ruled that Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue parliament for five weeks was legal.

• Boris Johnson’s divisive strategy risks turning the Conservatives into a “Farage-lite” party that will alienate millions of traditional Tory voters, the former justice secretary David Gauke has warned.

• James Cleverly, the Conservative party chair, has been branded “childish” by one of his predecessors, Sayeeda Warsi, after he promoted a Tory advert branding Jeremy Corbyn a chicken for not agreeing to an early election.

• Boris Johnson called David Cameron a “girly swot” in unredacted government papers obtained by Sky News. In a note about proroguing parliament, Johnson said: “The whole September session is a rigmarole introduced by girly swot Cameron and show the public that MPs are earning their crust.”

Labour’s Alison McGovern says Johnson’s language says something about his attitude to women.

• Bankers bonuses could be banned in Britain in order to tackle high levels of inequality across the country, John McDonnell has said.

• The government is to review the provision and funding of special needs education for children in England, after the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, admitted that many families faced struggles as a result of the government’s reforms.

That’s all from me for today.

Thanks for the comments.

This is from Naomi Smith, chief executive of the anti-Brexit group Best for Britain, commenting on the Benn bill passing the Lords.

The Lords have guided Britain further away from the no-deal cliff edge towards which the PM has been stumbling blindly.

Parliament has forced Boris Johnson into a corner and his reckless Brexit strategy is in tatters. He must now uphold democratic process and formally seek this extension or face the courts.

If you want to read the Hansard with today’s House of Lords debate on the Benn bill, it’s here.

Here is a House of Lords library note (pdf) explaining what the Benn bill actually does. And there is a shorter summary here.

And this is from the Lib Dem leader in the Lords, Dick Newby.

Despite cynical attempts from Tory backbenchers to filibuster, the article 50 extension bill has seen safe passage through the House of Lords. It seems that - unlike our suitcases - their threats of disruption were empty.

Liberal Democrats in both the Lords and the Commons have fought tirelessly against the attempts by the prime minister to force a disastrous no-deal Brexit, and this bill is an important step towards trying to sort out the mess the government has made.

This is from the Labour peers’ Twitter account.

The Benn bill, intended to prevent a no-deal Brexit on 31 October, has just been approved by the House of Lords. It passed the upper house without being amended, which means that it does not have to go back to the House of Commons. It will become law as soon as it gets royal assent, which should happen on Monday.

There were two votes earlier today, on Brexiter amendments intended to sabotage the bill, but they were easily defeated – by 268 votes to 47, and by 283 votes to 28.

Earlier in the week a group of Tory Brexiter peers tried to filibuster a motion designed to allow the bill to clear the Lords by the end of today. But they backed down after dragging out a debate past 1am on Wednesday night/Thursday morning after the opposition parties agreed not to use guillotine motions.

Some polling quoted in a Financial Times story (paywall) by Jim Pickard helps to explain why Labour might be keen to delay the election until November. If Johnson were to go to the polls after 31 October without having delivered Brexit, support for the Brexit party would double, the poll suggests. Pickard writes:

An ICM poll suggests that support for the Brexit party would double from 9 per cent to 18 per cent if an election takes place after Halloween.

The poll, commissioned by Represent Us — which is pushing for a second Brexit referendum — found the Conservatives’ lead over Labour would evaporate in those circumstances.

The ICM poll suggests the Tories would beat Labour by 37 per cent against 30 per cent in an October election, while the two parties would be neck and neck on 28 per cent in a November poll.

We have already quoted extensively from what Boris Johnson said when he spoke to reporters at the farm in Aberdeen, but here are three more lines from him. They are from his interview with Sky News.

• Johnson claimed it would be possible to do a trade deal with the US that would cover beef without allowing American hormone-treated meat in to the UK. Talking about the opportunities available to the UK after Brexit, he said:

Look at fantastic Scottish beef, which I’ve just been looking at. Not a morsel of it currently goes to America. You could do a a free trade deal with America where you don’t import their hormone-treated beef, but you do a deal on high-quality products, you allow Scottish farmers to sell, to discover new markets around the world.

• He claimed Jeremy Corbyn was making a mistake in refusing to back an early election. He said:

I think it is the most sensational paradox. Never in history has there been an opposition party that has been given the chance to have an election and has turned it down. If I may say so, I think that they are making an extraordinary political mistake. But it’s their decision.

(Why Johnson would want an early election if it was also advantageous to Labour to have one was not explained.)

• He said the government was set to unveil a “golden age of infrastructure investment”. He said:

When global interest rates are so low, this is is the moment to have golden age of infrastructure investment. That’s what Sajid Javid set out in the spending review this week and in the budget this autumn you will be hearing a lot more about infrastructure, about improving our roads, our railways, doing fantastic things with full-fibre broadband across the whole country.

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6 Sept 201909.11 EDT

Boris Johnson says he will use 'powers of persuasion' to get Brexit deal from EU

Severin Carrell

Boris Johnson has said he will win a new Brexit deal at next month’s EU summit by using his “powers of persuasion”, and rejected calls for a further extension to article 50.

The prime minister said he had no plans to accept the new legislation which would require him to write to the EU asking for a “pointless” delay to Brexit, during a visit to Aberdeenshire on Friday.

“We’ve spent a long time trying to sort of fudge this thing and I think the British public really want us to get out. They don’t want more dither and delay,” he said after encountering a prize bull called Keene at a beef farm near Banchory.

Asked how he would deliver a new deal at the EU summit on 17 October, he said:

By powers of persuasion. Because there’s absolutely no doubt we should come out … It’s a pointless delay.

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Scotland’s highest civil court will not give its judgement before Wednesday on a challenge to the planned prorogation of parliament, the Press Association reports. The lord president, Lord Carloway, rejected an application to make an interim order to halt the process, despite hearing from the applicants that prorogation could be started two days before that, on Monday. He said the court had some extremely complex issues to decide, which would take some time, and it hoped to be in a position to give its judgement on Wednesday.

Here is the ITV political editor Robert Peston’s take on the election timing story.