Minister rejects growing Tory enthusiasm for leaving European convention on human rights – UK politics live | Politics

Severin Carrell

Mark Drakeford, the first minister of Wales, has said he could stand for election to a directly elected senate at Westminster if Labour follows through on its pledge to abolish the House of Lords.

Drakeford, the Welsh Labour leader, has previously refused invitations to stand as an MP and instead devoted himself to the Senedd in Cardiff, overseeing the implementation of new powers for the devolved parliament.

But Drakeford, 68, the most electorally successful of Welsh Labour leaders, confirmed on Wednesday he plans to quit as an MS at the next Senedd elections in 2026; he has said he will quit as first minister before then, to allow his successor time to bed in.

Replacing the Lords with an elected senate for the UK’s nations and regions is one of Keir Starmer’s major post-election pledges, alongside a suite of new powers for the devolved governments and England’s region.

The measure was central to a constitutional reform commission led by former prime minister Gordon Brown, which Drakeford has endorsed.

The timetable for abolishing the Lords has slipped. Labour now favours installing a large slate of new peers in its first months of power, to act as a counterweight to the Tory majority built by recent prime ministers.

Quizzed about his future by Iain Dale and Jacqui Smith on the Edinburgh fringe on Thursday, for their podcast For the Many Live, Drakeford vehemently ruled out accepting a peerage: he said the Lords was a “desperate, desperate anachronism. It’s not for me.”

The Brown report “powerfully argues for a much smaller elected chamber of the regions and the nations, with a particular responsibility for the constitution”. Asked by Smith whether he would stand for the new senate, Drakeford said:

I wouldn’t rule that out, put it like that. But I wouldn’t go to an unelected one.

Treasury minister John Glen has said he does not back the UK leaving the European convention on human rights.

He made the comments when asked on LBC’s Nick Ferrari if he is in support of “what we understand to be a growing sentiment within the Conservative party that the United Kingdom should quit the European convention on human rights”.

Earlier this week, Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, said the government would do “whatever is necessary”, even if that meant pulling out of the ECHR, the 70-year-old pan-European treaty that protects human rights and political freedoms in the continent.

His comments are an escalation of the government’s previous statements that leaving the ECHR was not an immediate step it was going to take. It has insisted that it can deliver on Rishi Sunak’s pledge to “stop the boats” within the convention.

Glen told Ferarri he did not support leaving because he believed in the plan and said it hadn’t finished the legal process yet.

He said:

This is a Europe-wide problem. We’ve had a 30% increase in illegal immigration across Europe, but we’re working with Turkey, new arrangement with them last week, with France, with Albania. The arrangements with France have led to 33,000 fewer crossings – also tougher fines for employers and landlords.

We’ve got the professional enablers taskforce. We’re working with media companies as well. So this is a multi-dimensional approach as well as the immigration (bill) which of course many criticised us for and it was a real battle to take through the Houses of Parliament. But we’ve got a legal challenge waiting on that, but I believe in plan A and we will see that come to fruition in the autumn.

Glen said he did not want to “speculate about alternatives” to the government’s immigration policy.

Asked about “small boats week” on Times Radio, he said:

I think it’s important to recognise that there are many dimensions to the government’s policy.

We have diplomatic arrangements with Turkey, in France, Albania. Indeed from France, we’ve seen 33,000 fewer arrivals because of that arrangement.

But we’ve got to understand is this phenomena of illegal migration of criminal gangs taking people across Europe and across the Channel, we have seen a 30% increase in Europe as well over recent months.

Glen went on:

We’ve obviously passed legislation in the House of Commons. There is a legal challenge to that, but we are confident, and the government has been made clear by the legal system that they support the principle of offshoring our illegal immigrants to Rwanda, and we haven’t finished the conclusion of that legal process yet, but we are confident that that will work.

Asked about a “plan B”, he said:

Well, we believe that the actions that we’ve taken – and I’ve just taken you through a number of them – and including the legislation which hasn’t yet been fully enacted, because of the legal challenge outstanding in the autumn, will work and we stand by that.

I don’t want to speculate about alternatives until we’ve exhausted the process that we think will work.

I will be looking after the politics blog today. If you have any tips or suggestions, please get in touch: nicola.slawson@theguardian.com.