PA Media has snapped this:

The decision to grant planning permission for what would have been the UK’s first coal mine in 30 years at Whitehaven in Cumbria has been quashed by a high court judge.

Approval for the mine was granted by the last government in 2022. Labour opposed the decision, and it did not try to defend the decision of the last government in court.

Even when Keir Starmer was on course earlier this year to win the election by a landslide, pundits were saying that, given the number of “tough choices” the government would have to take, it would not take long before it became unpopular. Today the polling firm Ipsos has released its latest Political Pulse opinion survey and these predictions have turned out to be accurate; Labour’s ratings have fallen rapidly.

Labour is still much more popular with voters than the Conservative party. But, over the summer, the number of people saying they view Labour, and key figures like Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, unfavourably has risen significantly.

Here are the figures for the Labour party.

Here are the figures for Starmer.

And here are the figures for Reeves.

The Ipsos polling does not include voting intention (VI). Asking people who they would vote in a general election is rather pointless at this stage in the electoral cycle, and polling companies mostly have not been publishing VI figures. But some in the Labour party may be alarmed by this snippet in Dan Bloom’s London Playbook for Politico.

A More in Common poll shared with Playbook has Labour’s lead down to just 4 (!) points — with the party on 29 percent, Tories 25, Reform UK 18 and Lib Dems 14. An Ipsos tracker adds 46 percent of voters view Starmer unfavorably — up 8 points since August. He never could expect much of a honeymoon.

Ipsos says, at 46%, Starmer’s unfavourability rating is his joint highest as Labour leader. The only other time so many people were saying they were unhappy with his performance was just after Labour lost the Hartlepool byelection in 2021.

But it is not all bad for Labour. Although the Conservative party is slightly less unpopular than it was at the time of the general, the Ipsos figures shows that its recovery still has a long way to go.

And Starmer has a higher net favourability rating than any of the four Tory leadership candidates left in the contest (Robert Jenrick, James Cleverly, Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat).

Commenting on the figures, Keiran Pedley, director of politics at Ipsos, said:

There are some early warning signs in these numbers for Keir Starmer and Labour. Whilst the next general election is several years away – and perceptions of Labour remain stronger than perceptions of the Conservative Party – these figures do represent a sharp drop from those recorded in August.

Good morning. Keir Starmer is in Washington today where he is holding talks in the White House with President Biden which should confirm a decision that might help Ukraine significantly in its war against Russia. Dan Sabbagh is travelling with him, and here is his overnight story.

The key meeting will take place late tonight. This blog will have closed by then, and most of our coverage of the Ukraine elements of Starmer’s trip will be on our Ukraine war live blog, which is here.

Back in the UK, parliament is now in recess, because the party conference season is starting this weekend (with the Liberal Democrats, in Brighton). The government is focusing on an announcement that will toughen the law on what it describes as “the sharing of non-consensual intimate images” – or ‘“revenge porn”, as it is more commonly known.

“Revenge porn” is already illegal; it is an offence under section 66B of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. But today Peter Kyle, the science secretary, is announcing that online porn will now be place in the most serious category of online offence under the Online Safety Act.

Explaining what this will mean in practice, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology says in a news release:

The Online Safety Act will require social media firms and search services to protect their users from illegal material on their sites, with protections due to come into force from spring next year. The most serious forms of illegal content are classed as ‘priority offences’ meaning regulated online platforms will have additional duties to proactively remove and stop from appearing on their sites.

Today’s move will mean intimate image offences are treated as priority offences under the Act, putting them on the same footing as public order offences and the sale of weapons and drugs online.

If firms fail to comply with their duties the regulator Ofcom will have robust enforcement powers, including imposing fines that could reach up to 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue.

And this is how Kyle explained it in an interview with Sky News this morning.

The two actions that will result from what I’m doing today is that social media companies must take action to prevent any material going online in the first place. They must prove to our regulator Ofcom that they have taken the measures – in other words, they are using the algorithms – to protect people, not to allow content to go on.

Secondly, if content does make it onto these platforms, the platform owners must take action to remove it swiftly. If they don’t, there will be very heavy fines as a result.

What I’m trying to do is move away from the fact where these companies are allowed to produce products into our society, harms emerge, and then we deal with the harms. What I’m trying to do is make sure the safety is baked in from the outset, so the harms don’t emerge in the first place.

There is not much in the diary today, but the UK politics news never dries. I’m sure we will find plenty to cover.

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