Downing Street has offered a concession to Tory MPs worried about the internal market bill, which gives ministers the powers to break international law. The move will satisfy many Tory MPs who refused to vote for the bill at second reading on Monday - it has been welcomed by Sir Bob Neill, who was leading this particular rebellion - but some Conservatives, particularly in the Lords, may continue to oppose the legislation because today’s concession does not address the argument the very act of passing the bill breaks the Brexit withdrawal agreement - even if its powers are never used. (See 6.22pm.) Labour has said the changes announced tonight will make the bill worse. This is from Charlie Falconer, the former lord chancellor who is now shadow attorney general.
Boris Johnson has told MPs on the liaison committee that he thinks the EU is not negotiating with the UK “in good faith” - even though Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, told another committee this morning that it was. Johnson has admitted that the UK does not have enough coronavirus testing capacity. He told the liaison committee: We don’t have enough testing capacity now because, in an ideal world, I would like to test absolutely everybody that wants a test immediately. Angela Rayner has tackled Johnson over a “collapsing” Covid test regime and a wider crisis in the care sector, using a prime minister’s questions where she stood in for Keir Starmer to accuse Johnson of refusing to take responsibility for his failings. Headteachers and school governors have written a strongly worded letter to the prime minister “imploring” him to take personal charge of the crisis in Covid testing, warning that children’s return to education is being put at risk by failures in the system. Johnson has suffered another embarrassing resignation over his controversial Brexit policy after Lord Keen, the UK government’s law officer for Scotland, stepped down. The UK foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, is facing a growing backlash in the US Congress after senior Democrats warned they would scupper any future US-UK trade deal if the UK does anything to jeopardise the Good Friday agreement in an attempt to leave the European Union on its own terms. At a press conference in Washington, Raab defended the internal market bill, the UK proposal that has alarmed Democrats, saying the UK was responding to a threat posed by the EU and that any measures taken would be defensive, precautionary and proportionate. The British public backs an ambitious transformation of the UK into a greener, fairer more equal society as it emerges from the Covid-19 crisis, according to an inquiry by a cross-party group of MPs. A spate of deaths from Covid-19 in a hospital in Greater Manchester are “a canary in the mine” for the rest of the country if it continues to struggle to test and trace infections, one of the UK’s most senior public health chiefs has warned. A trip to Doncaster races by a group of sports fans from south Wales is being blamed for a cluster of Covid-19 cases in an area where a new, strict lockdown is being imposed. That’s all from me for today. But our coverage continues on the global coronavirus live blog. It’s here.