British PM to tell Munich Security Conference that Europe together is ‘sleeping giant’ and will say UK won’t turn away from its allies

Keir Starmer will say the UK and Europe need to step up their commitments to Nato and avoid the risk of overdependence on the US for defence, as he sets out one of the main planks of his foreign policy vision on Saturday.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, the prime minister will warn against the idea of the UK turning inwards on security, instead calling for a focus on what he will call the “sleeping giant” of shared European defence capabilities.

Advice on how to respond to students questioning their birth gender has been updated. Here are the key changes

Ministers have released updated guidance on how schools and colleges in England should respond to students who are questioning their birth gender. How is it different to the previous Department for Education (DfE) guidance, released under the Conservatives in 2023?

DfE guidance urges teachers to respond to social transition requests ‘with caution’ and includes Cass report findings

Primary school-age children who question their gender could be allowed to use different pronouns under long-awaited government guidance on the subject.

The guidance, billed as moving away from a culture-war approach to the subject, has some notablechanges compared with a draft produced in 2023 under the Conservatives, which said that primary-aged children “should not have different pronouns to their sex-based pronouns used about them”.

From his public persona to a sense that he sold the country a pup, many factors seem to feed a sense of ‘great dislike’

• UK politics live – latest updates

In yet another confusing and chaotic period for British politics there is one thing on which just about everyone can agree: Keir Starmer is unpopular. Very, very unpopular.

His net favourability rating, the difference between those who have a generally positive or negative view of the prime minister has been, depending on the pollster, anything from -50 to -57, a nadir only beaten by Liz Truss. Recent focus group descriptions of Starmer include a “jellyfish” and a “doormat”.