Charities say high rates of people signed off work are caused by crumbling public services after years of underinvestment

Rishi Sunak has been accused of making mental ill health “another front in the culture wars”, as critics warned his plan to curb benefits for some with anxiety and depression was an assault on disabled people.

In a speech on welfare , the prime minister said he wanted to explore withdrawing a major cash benefit claimed by people living with mental health problems and replacing it with treatment.

Shifting responsibility for issuing fit notes, formerly known as sicknotes, away from GPs to other “work and health professionals” in order to encourage more people to return to work.

Confirming plans to legislate “in the next parliament” to close benefit claims for anyone who has been claiming for 12 months but is not complying with conditions on accepting available work.

Asking more people on universal credit working part-time to look for more work by increasing the earnings threshold from £743 a month to £892 a month, so people paid below this amount have to seek extra hours.

Confirming plans to tighten the work capability assessment to require more people with “less severe conditions” to seek some form of employment.

Labour has also rejected European Commission’s proposal which would have allowed young people to live, work or study in the bloc

Rishi Sunak has rejected an EU offer to strike a post-Brexit deal to allow young Britons to live, study or work in the bloc for up to four years.

The prime minister declined the European Commission’s surprise proposal of a youth mobility scheme for those aged between 18 and 30 on Friday, after Labour had already knocked back the suggestion back on Thursday night – while noting it would “seek to improve the UK’s working relationship with the EU within our red lines”.

The prime minister’s speech on cracking down on ‘sicknote culture’ was heavy on rhetoric but light on evidence and detail

Rishi Sunak’s big speech on reforming disability benefits was intended to show that the government had a grip on the economic and health challenges of the UK’s rising levels of long-term sickness. Instead, it came over as an administration running out of ideas, high on strident rhetoric, and desperate to cut welfare bills at all costs.

It was a “moral mission”, Sunak declared, to overhaul the current welfare system, which was “unfit for purpose”. Disability benefits were too easy to cheat, too cushy, too easily claimed. The speech was a clear appeal to the notion, in vogue on the right, that “mental health culture” has “gone too far”.

While most who wrote in favoured some sort of action to reduce the damage caused by tobacco, some warned about the UK becoming a ‘nanny state’

Dozens of people have shared with the Guardian how they feel about Rishi Sunak’s tobacco and vapes bill , which aims to create the UK’s first smoke-free generation. The proposed legislation would not ban smoking outright, but ensure that anyone born after 1 January 2009 would be banned from buying cigarettes.

About half of respondents said they were in favour of the proposed ban, at least in principle, primarily due to the strain that smoking puts on the NHS. Many of them, however, questioned its enforceability and whether there would be unwelcome consequences.

A party resigned to oblivion made for a sulky session that did Rishi Sunak and the Commons no favours

There’s something to be said for a prolonged death. It means you can get your grieving in when the patient is still alive. All the more important when that patient is you. The Tories have known the game is up for some time now. They can read the polls as well as the rest of us. They are facing electoral wipeout. It’s not totally out the question that they might even be the third largest party after the next election.

None of this comes easy for Tories, born to believe that they are the party of government. So there has been plenty of tears as they process their grief. First the denial. This can’t be happening, they told themselves. These things don’t happen to people like them. It is against the natural order. So they dictated their own reality. One of their choosing. The methodology of the polls was wrong. Of course it was.

Shift in rate reduction predictions to autumn hits prime minister’s strategy of winning back mortgage payers

• UK inflation falls by less than forecast to 3.2%, cooling rate cut hopes
• Business live – latest updates

When the Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, told an event in Washington on Tuesday that the UK economy was “disinflating”, it raised the hopes of mortgage payers and indebted businesses that a cut in the cost of borrowing could be on the way soon.

But less than 24 hours later, the latest UK inflation data and worsening interest rate forecasts have curtailed those aspirations.

Peers pass four amendments inserting safeguards into bill, including exempting migrants who helped British troops

Good morning. It is now more than five months since Rishi Sunak promised “emergency” legislation to address the supreme court judgment saying the government’s Rwanda deportation policy was unlawful. It has not proceeded at the pace of normal emergency legislation, but the safety of Rwanda (asylum and immigration) bill is now expected to clear parliament within the next 24/36 hours, and it should become law by the end of the week. (It does not became law until the king grants royal assent, and it can take a few hours to get Charles to sign the relevant bit of paper.)

But before parliamentary officials can send the bill to the Palace, the Commons and the Lords have to agree, and there are still four outstanding issues unresolved. Last night peers passed four amendments inserting safeguards into the bill. They would:

The problem is, we have no evidence that Rwanda is safe. All the evidence that is put before us demonstrates that at the moment it is not. The supreme court said in November it wasn’t safe. We signed a treaty with Rwanda which was supposed to remedy the defects, and this Act will come into force when the treaty comes into force. But even the treaty itself accepts that signing the treaty doesn’t make Rwanda safe.

All this amendment would say is that, instead of us in parliament in London being expected to assert in legislation that Rwanda is safe, when the evidence is including, from the government itself last night, that it isn’t currently safe, it’s a work in progress – instead of having to sign up to that untruth, the government would invite the monitoring committee to certify that Rwanda is safe and when it is safe, the flights can begin.

And should by any chance Rwanda ever cease to be a safe country, well the monitoring committee should say that as well.

Sunak likes to pretend his predecessor never happened. But are the moderates going to sit back and cede their party to fanatics?

It would be charitable to ignore Liz Truss. Attention is her addiction and any dose, even laced with scorn, sustains the toxic belief that she has important things to say. Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister has been bingeing on publicity for a memoir that cannot enhance her reputation. She is a stranger to contrition. She regrets only the haste with which she tried to implement an economic plan that she believes was sabotaged by the establishment.

She thinks the meltdown in financial markets that brought her down was engineered by the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility. Truss’s bizarre demeanour, self-regarding without self-awareness, limits the purchase her ideas might get on public opinion, even with audiences primed for conspiracy theory. The loudest cheers when she appears on television are from the Labour party.