Updated guidance for public bodies after the UK supreme court’s ruling that a woman is defined in law by biological sex is expected to be issued by the summer, the head of the equalities regulator said on Thursday.

Lady Kishwer Falkner, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, described the ruling as “enormously consequential”, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We are going to have a new statutory code of practice, statutory meaning it will be the law of the land, it will be interpreted by courts as the law of the land. We’re hoping we’re going to have that by the summer.”

She said it would give “clarity” that trans women could not participate in women’s sports or use women-only toilets or changing rooms, and the NHS must update its guidance on single-sex wards based on biological sex.

Asked if the supreme court ruling was “a victory for common sense”, she said: “Only if you recognise that trans people exist, they have rights and their rights must be respected. Then it becomes a victory for common sense.

“It’s not a victory for an increase in unpleasant actions against trans people. We will not tolerate that. We stand here to defend trans people as much as we do anyone else. So I want to make that very clear.”

She emphasised that trans people still had clear protection under legislation. “They are covered through gender reassignment … and they’re also covered by sex discrimination.”

Asked to give an example, she said: “We’ll have to flesh this out in the reasoning, but I think if you were to have an equal pay claim, then depending on which aspect of it that it was, you could use sex discrimination legislation. If a trans person was fired, lost their employment because they happen to be trans, that would be unlawful, still absolutely unlawful, and we stand ready to support those people and those claims.”

On the risk that trans people will no longer be able to use facilities designed for either male or female, she added that trans rights organisations should push for more neutral third spaces. “But I think the law is quite clear that if a service provider says we’re offering a women’s toilet, that trans people should not be using that single-sex facility.”

Falkner added that the EHRC would pursue the NHS to change its existing guidance on the treatment of trans patients, which currently say that trans people should be accommodated in single-sex accommodation according to their gender identity, rather than their assigned sex at birth.

“They [the NHS] have to change it. They now have clarity,” she said. “We will be having conversations with them to update that guidance.”

The “efficacy” of the gender recognition certificate, a UK legal document that recognises an individual’s gender identity, allowing them to legally change their sex, would be re-examined, she believed. The government is considering introducing digital IDs, “and if digital IDs come in, then what documentation will provide the identity of that person? So it’s going to be a space that we’ll have to watch very carefully as we go on.”

For gender-critical campaigners, the supreme court’s ruling on the legal definition of a woman was a “huge reset” that left them feeling “vindicated and relieved”.

For transgender rights campaigners, it was a “damaging attack on their rights”, signalling the start of “real issues” in their fight for legal recognition.

“I think this will be the kicking-off point for a very enhanced push for overt restrictions on the rights of trans people,” said Victoria McCloud, who changed her legal sex more than two decades ago.

The UK’s first trans judge, she applied to intervene in the supreme court appeal but was refused. Last year she quit her job as a judge, saying her position had become “untenable” because her trans identity was viewed as a “lifestyle choice or an ideology”. She now lives in the Republic of Ireland.

McCloud said the supreme court ruling came in the midst of “a scary time” for trans people in the UK and would mark the start of a more intense fight for rights. “The rest has been phoney war. The real issues now start,” she said.

“If I was a trans person in the UK today, I would steer clear of using any loo in a public space unless it was a combined-sex loo, because I personally cannot, as of this moment, judge whether I should use the male loo or the female loo,” she said.

“I haven’t got my head around the complexities of the judgment and its repercussions will be ongoing for some time. But I’m happy I live in the Republic of Ireland, where this problem is not an issue. They know where I’m allowed to pee here.”

Outside the supreme court on Wednesday morning, Susan Smith, a co-director of the gender-critical campaign group For Women Scotland, which brought the appeal, was one of a number of women jubilantly celebrating the result.

“It was quite something to walk out into banks of photographers and loads of people cheering and clapping. It was very emotional,” Smith said. “We’ve all given up a lot to fight this and we’ve all had to put up with a lot of abuse, a lot of misrepresentation of our motives and our position and our beliefs.

“We’ve finally got clarity on the law, and we know now that when spaces and services are provided under the Equality Act and they’re single-sex, it means exactly that. That feels like a massive relief.”

Smith said the ruling would help women feel safe if there was a male in a female-only space: “They will know that they are well within their rights to object to that.”

She added: “Gender reassignment is a protected characteristic, and it is still protected. But saying that women were just some amorphous collection of people and it was an identity anyone could have, it was really downplaying the very real and different issues that affect men and women.”

Maya Forstater, who founded the campaign group Sex Matters after she won an employment tribunal that found she had been unfairly discriminated against because of her gender-critical beliefs, said the ruling brought “relief, vindication, happiness and pride”.

“This judgment has been so clear and it’s from the highest court in the land,” she said. “There are dozens and dozens of women who have had to bring employment tribunal cases because they’ve been victimised for just saying what they think the law says. Now we know that we were right.”

She said the court judgment was about “recognising rules and reality”. “If you’re a man, you can call yourself what you like, you can dress how you like, but you cannot work in a rape crisis centre, you cannot go into a woman’s changing room,” she said.

McCloud said she also shared concerns about protecting women’s spaces – “I don’t want men in the women’s loos myself, thank you”. But she said people with extreme views “regard someone like me as dangerous” simply because of her trans identity.

“Gender-critical ideology is on the ascendancy, and this is obviously a success for them,” she said. “But the struggle starts now, both for them and for us, because they are going to want to enhance this success and we are going to want to clarify and protect the rights that we thought we had.”

Ellie Gomersall, a trans woman and Scottish Green party activist, said she was “gutted” when she saw the news and described it as “yet another attack on the rights of trans people to live our lives in peace”.

“This will only impact trans people who have got a gender recognition certificate (GRC), which actually the vast majority of trans people don’t. But I don’t want to underplay how damaging it is,” she said.

“It sets the idea that even if you jump through all of the hoops, you go through that really dehumanising and stigmatising process to get a GRC, you’ll still never be recognised in law for who you truly are.”

She added: “Some individuals and organisations will see this result and use it as justification or vindication to discriminate further against trans people, and that makes me really worried for my community.”

For all the negative stereotypes, many politicians are thoughtful, diligent and caring. But they are also human, and it is their more self-serving instincts that may have caused some to breathe a sigh of relief at the supreme court ruling on gender recognition.

After a challenge by the gender-critical group For Women Scotland – which started out as a dispute over Scottish government legislation about female representation on public boards – judges ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer to biological women and biological sex.

The verdict will be heavily contested, and could bring serious and perhaps unforeseen repercussions for transgender women. But such an unexpectedly definitive view allows leaders in Scotland and Westminster to (and there is no gentle way of putting this) dodge responsibility over one of the most contentious and toxic debates of our age.

The Scottish government’s response was particularly eloquent. While stressing that no one should see the ruling as cause to triumph, it otherwise talked blandly about “engaging with the UK government to understand the full implication of this ruling”.

There is logic to this. The Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act, the legislative focus of the deliberations, are both UK-wide and thus not something the Holyrood administration can decide unilaterally.

But beneath this reassuring constitutional hum lurks the sound of quiet footsteps, as the SNP’s first minister, John Swinney, shuffles his party away from an era when Nicola Sturgeon’s government was very proudly at the vanguard of transgender rights.

It was little more than two years ago that Sturgeon’s government was openly seeking a battle with Westminster over a plan to make it easier for transgender people in Scotland to get gender recognition certificates – a move blocked by Rishi Sunak.

We are in a very different political climate now, and not just with the open prejudice of the Donald Trump administration, which is purging transgender people from the military on the stated basis that their very identity makes them unfit to serve.

Scotland’s government has been on the receiving end of pushback from other controversies, for example the decision to send Isla Bryson, a transgender woman convicted of double rape, to a women’s prison. To again frame it in slightly unpalatable political terms, this is no longer seen as a vote-winner for the SNP.

For Keir Starmer and the Westminster administration, there had been an unspoken worry about a fudged or unclear court ruling, one that placed the impetus on politicians to decide.

Instead, as a UK government spokesperson said, it gave “clarity and confidence”, both for women and for those who run single-sex spaces. Clarity and confidence, perhaps. Political cover? Most definitely.

Starmer has spent his five years as Labour leader having TV and radio interviewers intermittently asking him to declare, yes or no, whether a woman can have a penis. Starmer’s standard dual response – under the law, a tiny number of trans people are recognised as women but might not have completed gender reassignment surgery – prompted an inevitable and arguably damaging wave of attacks from political opponents.

Kemi Badenoch has been particularly relentless in this, despite having served as equalities minister in a government that did not amend or clarify the Equality Act to reflect her view that, as she put it in a celebratory tweet on Wednesday, “saying ‘trans women are women’ was never true in fact”.

This was not just a Conservative obsession. Starmer faced criticism from some inside Labour – notably from the now independent MP for Canterbury, Rosie Duffield – for, as they saw it, failing to stand up for women. Others condemned him in the belief he was edging away from trans rights.

From a nakedly political-management perspective, the supreme court decision was ideal, making the decision judicial rather than political. No 10 officials believe there will be no need to tweak the Equality Act, leaving their role as little more than a neutral voice in helping organisations adjust to the new reality.

Starmer’s aides deny he has been on a political journey from a few years ago, when as a Labour leadership candidate he signed up to a pledge from the LGBT Labour group “that trans women are women, that trans men are men” – or 18 months later when he criticised Duffield for saying only women could have a cervix.

This is perhaps disingenuous. But in a debate where niceties and nuance are so often trampled on, the prime minister is very much not the first politician to try to fudge things.

The world’s largest meat company, JBS, looks set to break its Amazon rainforest protection promises again, according to frontline workers.

Beef production is the primary driver of deforestation, as trees are cleared to raise cattle, and scientists warn this is pushing the Amazon close to a tipping point that would accelerate its shift from a carbon sink into a carbon emitter. JBS, the Brazil-headquartered multinational that dominates the Brazilian cattle market, promised to address this with a commitment to clean up its beef supply chain in the region by the end of 2025.

In a project to understand the barriers to progress on Amazon deforestation, a team of journalists from the Guardian, Unearthed and Repórter Brasil interviewed more than 35 people, including ranchers and ranching union leaders who represent thousands of farms in the states of Pará and Rondônia. The investigation found widespread disbelief that JBS would be able to complete the groundwork and hit its deforestation targets.

“They certainly have the will to do it, just as we have the will to do it,” said one rancher. But the goal that all the cattle they bought would be deforestation-free was unreachable, he said. “They say this is going to be implemented. I’d say straight away: that’s impossible.” The problem of illegal cattle laundering would also not be resolved in time, said many, while another interviewee said land ownership issues meant quite simply that the deadline was “impossible”.

JBS told the Guardian that it contested the conclusions. “Drawing inferences and conclusions from a limited sample of 30 farmers while disregarding that JBS has over 40,000 registered suppliers is entirely irresponsible,” the company said in a statement. It said that “while the sector-wide challenges are significant and larger than any one company can solve on its own, we believe JBS has an in-depth and robust series of integrated policies, systems, and investments that are making a material and positive impact on reducing deforestation risks.”

To hit its targets, JBS needs to register all its direct and indirect suppliers and ensure none of the meat it buys from the Amazon is from cattle that has grazed on deforested land. It has established a network of “green offices” to provide free consultation to ranchers on how to comply with the three- to six-month process of regularisation, which involves drawing up a plan to plant more trees, withdrawing from contested territory, or making other environmental remediations. Then details will go into the JBS database, which continually monitors farms using artificial intelligence, and owners will be contacted if they fail to meet their obligations. In Pará, the company is also working with the state government on an ear-tagging scheme that would track the state’s entire herd of 26 million cattle by 2026.

The Pará state governor, Helder Barbalho, who has supported the traceability plan, expects JBS to meet its deadline, but he acknowledged there had been resistance and that small farmers in particular would need more support. He said the Bezos Earth Fund had committed 143m reais to this task: “We are still mobilising resources so that we can finance this policy that is very important for us to present to livestock farmers.”

But ranchers and rancher unions interviewed by the Guardian and its partners said that technical hurdles and uncertainties over land ownership – many ranches were created by invading public land – stood no chance of resolution by the company’s self-imposed deadline.

Adelosmar Antonio Orio, known as Ticão, who works for the Tucumaã-Ourilaãndia Union of Rural Producers, said the logistical challenges, such as ranchers needing special equipment including ear trackers and satellite internet systems, would make the scheme impossible to complete before the year-end deadline. “Not even they [JBS] know how this traceability is going to be implemented,” he said. Others argued that new small- and medium-sized producers were being asked to bear most of the burden of the new system and that JBS and the government had not done enough to explain the new tracking system and provide the technological support needed to make it work.

The thorny subject of land ownership would also be impossible to resolve, argued many, including Cristina Malcher, the president of the Commission of Women in Agribusiness, a national advocacy body for women in agriculture. “The deadline of 2025 is impossible to meet, because if you don’t know who owns the land, then you don’t have environmental regularity,” Malcher told the Guardian.

Ticão agreed. “By the end of the year, we need to resolve all the land problems, all the environmental problems.” Could it be done in time? “Definitely not,” he said. His union colleagues expressed similar disbelief that the deadline could be met.

The investigation also spoke to indirect suppliers who openly admitted to using middlemen to clean up the environmental record of their livestock, a practice known as cattle laundering. Several producers predicted that a new tracing system would lead to new loopholes, such as slaughtering the cattle elsewhere and then selling the meat – rather than live cattle – at a low price to JBS.

JBS has not mapped its entire supply chain, due under its deforestation commitments by the end of this year. But the company said: “JBS has already enrolled the equivalent of over 80% of its annual cattle purchases on to a blockchain-enabled, web-based transparent farming livestock platform.”

JBS has previously been linked to deforestation on a number of occasions, and the New York attorney general, Letitia James, filed a lawsuit last year accusing the company of misleading consumers with its climate goals in an effort to increase sales. A bipartisan group of 15 US senators urged the Securities and Exchange Commission to reject JBS’s application for a share listing. “Dozens of journalistic and NGO reports have shown that JBS is linked to more destruction of forests and other ecosystems than any other company in Brazil,” they wrote in an open letter.

JBS told the Guardian: “The challenges of addressing illegal deforestation on cattle operations that span millions of farms across hundreds of thousands of square kilometresare significant.” It detailed its response, which includes zero tolerance for deforestation sourcing policy, state-of-the-art supply chain monitoring, free technical assistance for producers to help regularise their farms, and the JBS Fund for the Amazon, which finances projects focused on the sustainable development of the Amazon biome.

The company also said: “JBS works with farmers, ranchers and partners across the food system to develop solutions that support a growing global population while optimising resources and reducing agriculture’s environmental impact. Cattle raising in the Amazon is undergoing a sectoral transformation, and one company cannot solve all the industry’s challenges.”

Brazil is the biggest exporter of beef in the world, and more than 40% of its vast 240m-cattle herd is raised in the Amazon region. As a result, swathes of the nature-rich rainforest are being cleared and burned to create pasture.

This is pushing Amazon destruction close to a point of no return, prompting environmentalists and consumer groups to demand deforestation-free meat products. Governments, meat suppliers and retailers have promised to clean up their act, but one of the biggest hurdles is a complex and obscure supply chain that can hide the origins of meat products.

From birth to slaughter, most of the cattle raised in the Amazon are moved around multiple farms. Before sale to big meatpacking companies such as JBS (the world leader), they may spend up to 75% of their lives on indirect supplying ranches. This system creates loopholes and blind spots in oversight, which allow “cattle laundering”, as it is known, where cattle from illegal or deforestation-linked farms are mixed into the supply chain. Farms that have been linked to deforestation may be embargoed by the Brazilian environment agency IBAMA.

Global consumers of Brazilian beef cannot know for sure whether their burgers and steaks caused destruction of the rainforest until there is a way to track the entire supply chain, which can be understood as follows:

How beef is ‘laundered’ in the Amazon

A university student died after being caught in an “underwater vortex” while diving off the south coast of England, an inquest has heard.

Emily Sherwin, 20, who studied marine conservation, was diving off Old Harry Rocks near Swanage, Dorset, when she got caught in the current and became separated from her dive buddy.

She did not surface and a large air and sea search was launched but her body was not found, the inquest in Bournemouth heard on Thursday.

Sherwin lived with her parents, Charles, a dentist, and Ellen, a consultant oncologist, close to Poole harbour in Dorset.

She had just finished her first year at the University of Plymouth and was planning a placement in the Pacific for her third year.

She was invited out with her friend, Beth Pryor, on the dive on 23 July last year, the day after Sherwin’s 20th birthday.

The pair were part of a crew that went from Poole Quay to Old Harry Rocks and at about 5.50pm entered the water and descended.

Pryor said in a statement that at a depth of about 7 metres (23ft) they were caught in an underwater vortex and spun around. She said: “We both went down below the surface and we were horizontal facing each other and we were holding each other’s arms.

“I signalled to Emily that something was wrong and pointed to my ears and gave her the signal to go back up. I did this two or three times.

“At this point we got caught in a vortex and started to spin around. I wasn’t able to check my dive computer due to the spinning. I just felt disorientated.

“We held each other’s arms and I signalled to go up but I did not see her do it back. Visibility was poor and I could only see about one metre. I could see Emily was vertical and not rising. At this point things get a bit hazy as it all happened so fast.

“She was vertical and her regulator was out of her mouth. She was sinking at the time and I attempted to reach down but that was not possible. At this point I could feel some water seeping into my mask.

“We hit the bottom of the seabed hard and I was unable to see Emily. I ascended to the surface quickly and spoke to the skipper, who signalled the mayday and then other boats and the rescue helicopter came to the area.”

Sherwin’s mother, Ellen, said: “She had loved her first year at university and was looking forward to returning to move in with her friends in September. She had been celebrating her birthday the night before.

“She was fit and healthy and passionate about the natural world and especially sea life. Her hero was David Attenborough.

“She started diving in 2023 and immediately loved it as she felt a sense of calm in the water. She described it as her safe space.”

The coroner Richard Middleton gave a narrative conclusion and said Sherwin’s cause of death remained unknown.

Queen Elizabeth II’s private solicitor spent eight years helping to manage the offshore wealth of the uncle of the recently deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, an investigation has established.

Rifaat al-Assad became known as the “butcher of Hama” after allegations he played a key role in a massacre of thousands of Syrians at the city of Hama in 1982. In 2024, Switzerland formally charged him with war crimes.

Concerns about Rifaat’s activities, including his record as the head of a feared Syrian paramilitary force known as the Defense Brigades, have been publicly raised in Europe and the US by the media, human rights groups and government officials since the 1980s. He left Syria for Europe in 1984 after a failed coup against his brother.

Inquiries by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism have established that Mark Bridges, also known as the third Baron Bridges, served as a trustee on at least five trusts holding assets in France and Spain on behalf of Rifaat al-Assad or his relatives between 1999 and 2008.

During the same period, Bridges also held one of the most prestigious legal positions in Britain: private legal adviser to the British monarch. He was Queen Elizabeth’s solicitor from 2002 to 2019.

The findings raise questions about whether it was appropriate for the monarch’s personal lawyer to take the ethical and reputational risk of working for an individual accused of human rights atrocities, in view of potential embarrassment to the queen had the connection been discovered while she was still alive.

There is no suggestion of any regulatory wrongdoing by Bridges, who was knighted for his services to the queen in 2019. His firm, Farrer & Co, said the trusts were established on the advice of another leading law firm, that Bridges’s work for Rifaat al-Assad was in complete compliance with regulatory requirements in effect at the time and that Bridges had been presented with evidence contradicting the allegations made against him.

Assad’s luxury property empire

The property empire amassed by Rifaat al-Assad after his arrival in Europe spanned the most luxurious postcodes of Paris, London and the Costa del Sol.

His acquisitions, which he claimed were part-funded by cheques worth millions of dollars from the king of Saudi Arabia, included Witanhurst in London’s Highgate – the second-largest private residence in the capital after Buckingham Palace – and a seven-storey mansion near Paris’s Arc de Triomphe.

Assad held his property empire through offshore companies and trusts, obscuring his ownership. One trust was registered in the Bahamas, while some of the purchases used shell companies in Gibraltar, a British overseas territory, before transfer to Spanish and later Maltese companies.

In 2014, prosecutors in France began investigating whether Rifaat al-Assad’s wealth had in fact been obtained through corruption. Bridges had ceased acting as a trustee for Rifaat in 2008, his lawyers said, but continued to provide “limited and ad-hoc” legal advice until 2015 “in circumstances whereby the regulatory requirements imposed on the firm were met”.

Two of the trusts that Bridges had managed were said to own the Spanish portion of Rifaat al-Assad’s real estate empire, including a deluxe villa with swathes of land near Marbella.

In 2019, Spanish prosecutors alleged that these same trusts controlled shell companies holding more than 500 properties in Spain worth €695m (£595m). According to the Spanish prosecutors, the offshore setup was designed to “hide the true ownership of the huge amount of real estate properties” and enabled the “laundering [of] dirty money from abroad”, referring to funds allegedly stolen from the Syrian state.

In 2020, a French court convicted Rifaat al-Assad of tax fraud and laundering embezzled public money – primarily about $200m (£151m) stolen from Syrian state funds and $100m in fraudulent loan agreements from Libya. Assad was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. He fled to Syria in 2021 while his conviction was under appeal.

Allegations of atrocities

Though not the only trustee serving Assad, Bridges was by far the most eminent. In addition to his services to the queen, he led the private client team at Farrer, an elite law firm with a reputation forged through serving British royals and aristocrats as far back as 1769.

There is no evidence Bridges knew or suspected that Rifaat al-Assad’s money was stolen. Assad claimed his wealth came from benefactors, including the Saudi royal family, and in 2018 the Gibraltar supreme court concluded that it had been reasonable for Rifaat’s trustees to believe this story.

The question of Rifaat al-Assad’s status as an alleged war criminal, however, is more complicated.

In February 1982, armed militias affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood staged an uprising against the Assad regime in the town of Hama, in western Syria. To suppress the uprising, Syria’s then president, Hafez al-Assad, Rifaat’s brother, dispatched the Syrian army and a paramilitary group called the Defense Brigades.

An Amnesty International report published in 1983 found that while “it is difficult to establish for certain what happened”, allegations against Syrian regime forces included “collective execution of 70 people outside the municipal hospital” and “cyanide gas containers … alleged to have been brought into the city, connected by rubber pipes to the entrances of buildings believed to house insurgents, and turned on, killing all the buildings’ occupants”. It is estimated that 10,000 to 40,000 people may have been unlawfully tortured and executed.

As head of the paramilitaries, Rifaat al-Assad was believed to have taken a leading role in the carnage. In a 1989 book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, the journalist Thomas Friedman described how, after initial skirmishes, “Rifaat’s tactic shifted from trying to ferret out nests of Muslim Brotherhood men to simply bringing whole neighbourhoods down on their heads and burying the Brotherhood and anyone else in the way.”

Allegations of atrocities against Rifaat al-Assad were widely known by the point Bridges began working as a trustee for his offshore wealth in 1999.

In 2013, Swiss prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into Rifaat al-Assad’s role in suppressing the Hama uprising. In 2021 it issued an international arrest warrant for Assad, and in 2024 he was formally charged with war crimes. Assad has always denied these charges. His whereabouts is unknown

‘Credible information’

Farrer said Assad’s trustees, including Bridges, “were provided with credible information, when they were appointed and at different junctures thereafter, which fundamentally contradicted the claims being made in the media about Mr al-Assad”.

The firm added that it and Bridges were restricted by a duty of client confidentiality from revealing what this evidence was, or commenting on whether it was appropriate for the queen’s solicitor to also have represented Assad. However, it did share 11 French defamation judgments, dating from the late 1980s and early 1990s, that found in Assad’s favour.

The majority related to allegations made in various news outlets that Rifaat al-Assad’s wealth was sourced from organised crime. In the case of the two judgments that substantially addressed allegations of human rights abuses, the courts found that the journalists had failed to reflect certain nuances of Amnesty International’s report by glossing over uncertainties about whether the Assad regime directly ordered the atrocity.

Public attitudes towards British lawyers acting for foreign politicians with questionable reputations have hardened in recent years.

This month, a taskforce of senior lawyers and civil society experts said law firms must request more “credible explanations” from their clients as to the source of their wealth, and that it was unsustainable to disregard reputational risks to the legal profession.

“Whether the same decision [to act for Assad] would be made today, in the light of further information now available and, arguably, the more stringent demands of the regulatory environment, is a point on which one might speculate,” Farrer said in its response.

Train passengers face disruption on Britain’s biggest intercity line over the next four days, with a later Easter bringing a busy bank holiday getaway by road, rail and air.

Engineering works will top and tail the west coast main line over the long weekend, with services cut from London Euston to Milton Keynes and replacement buses taking passengers north of Carlisle to Glasgow.

Limited services will run on Good Friday and Easter Monday from London to Birmingham and Manchester, with no direct fast trains on Saturday and Sunday.

Network Rail said most of the railway would stay open despite more than 300 engineering projects taking place. Works will also partly close London Victoria station, diverting Southeastern services and affecting lines around Southampton.

Motoring organisations have forecast a more crowded Easter on the roads, which they partly ascribed to the bank holidays falling later in April than last year.

A survey by the AA of its members indicated that up to 15% more cars would be on UK roads this Good Friday than last – more than 19m. The RAC said that just over 19m leisure trips would be made by car over the next four days. Both groups gave the caveat that unsettled weather could significantly alter the numbers on the road.

About a third of that number were planning to travel but were undecided on dates, according to the RAC, which suggested that sunny weather could lure millions more out on to congested roads.

Drivers are at least less likely to be affected by roadworks, according to the Department for Transport, which said National Highways would be clearing the cones from 1,127 miles (1,814km) of motorways and A-roads in England for the weekend.

Traffic is nonetheless expected to be intense, peaking between 11am and 1pm on Friday. Hotspots will include retail parks and hotel routes to the south-west, including the south and western section of the M25 between the M23 and M40, the M5 at Bristol and the A303 in Wiltshire.

According to the tourism authority VisitEngland, about 10.6 million British adults are planning to take a holiday in the UK over the bank holiday period.

Approximately 2.2 million Britons are expected to head abroad for the Easter weekend, according to the travel organisation Abta; the number will peak on Good Friday.

The Port of Dover expects to process about 5,500 cars on to cross-Channel ferries on Friday morning. Highway authorities have put the Operation Brock traffic management system in place until the end of the holiday to avert tailbacks.

More flights will leave the UK this Easter than last: 11,282 are scheduled over the long weekend, the aviation analytics company Cirium said, a 6% rise on 2024, although still slightly down from the highs of Easter 2019. However, some airlines are flying larger and fuller planes, and the Civil Aviation Authority said passenger numbers this weekend could match pre-pandemic levels.

The international destinations attracting the most UK passengers are Dublin, Amsterdam, Málaga, Alicante and Mallorca. Abta said its members were also reporting a large number of bookings for Thailand.

The National Education Union (NEU) has warned that it will campaign against Labour MPs if the government fails to improve its pay offer to teachers in England for next year.

Daniel Kebede, the NEU’s general secretary, criticised the prime minister, Keir Starmer, and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, for “betrayal” of their supporters, and told the union’s annual conference to prepare for industrial action if their pay and funding was not satisfactory.

“Government says it would be indefensible for the NEU to take industrial action. Well I say to this government: it is indefensible for a Labour government – a Labour government! – to cut school funding,” Kebede told delegates.

The Department for Education (DfE) has recommended a 2.8% rise to the independent School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) for the 2025-26 pay award. The DfE has yet to publish the STRB’s findings but Kebede said any outcome needed to be above inflation and include compensation for school budgets.

Kebede said: “If the STRB recommendation is not above inflation, if it is not a pay award that takes a step towards a correction in pay, if it does not address the crisis in [teacher] recruitment and retention, and unless it is fully funded, then we stand ready to act industrially.

“We will make Labour MPs pay a high political price through our campaigning in their constituencies, with our parents, across the country.”

Earlier, the NEU conference in Harrogate had rejected the government’s 2.8% offer as “inadequate” and voted to hold a formal ballot on strike action if it was not improved and school funding was not boosted to compensate for the extra salary costs.

The DfE responded that the NEU’s decision was “premature” before the STRB’s final report had been published and the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, said: “Any move towards industrial action by teaching unions would be indefensible.”

The NEU delegates also voted to label Reform UK as “far-right and racist”, setting off verbal skirmishing between Kebede and Nigel Farage, Reform’s leader, with Kebede calling Farage “a pound shop Trump” and Farage declaring “war” on the NEU and saying its general secretary was “a self-declared Marxist”.

In his speech, Kebede said: “While this government might be rolling out the red carpet for Farage to walk into No 10, through their austerity agenda, we won’t stand for it.

“Farage wants war, that’s fine – but I want our union to continue to live rent-free in his head as we organise for an education system and society where any child regardless of background, of colour, of religion, feels safe, happy and can flourish.”

Kebede also referred to the provocative Netflix series Adolescence, saying that schools were seeing a rise in misogynistic behaviour, enabled by social media platforms and the widespread availability of violent and degrading pornography online.

“We are in a safeguarding crisis. And it is being fuelled by tech companies that prioritise profits over people, engagement over ethics, and algorithms over accountability, Kebede said, adding: “We cannot entrust this technology to the Silicon Valley tech bros who are only in it for the money.”

Donald Trump early on Thursday blasted the Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, for not lowering US interest rates and expressed a wish for him to be gone from his role.

The US president lambasted Powell as “always too late and wrong” in a post on his Truth Social platform. Trump noted that the European Central Bank (ECB) was poised on Thursday to lower interest rates again, without mentioning that the body has been responding to the chaos caused by Trump’s initiatives on tariffs.

Trump has been pressuring Powell repeatedly to cut US interest rates even though the central banker is independent of the administration in setting monetary policy and the White House typically does not publicly lobby the Federal Reserve.

The ECB had been expected to cut interest rates for the seventh time this year in order to prop up economic growth, and then did so not long before US markets were due to open. Powell enraged Trump on Wednesday night by warning that the president’s sweeping tariffs could raise inflation. That would make the Fed even more hesitant to cut interest rates.

Europe was preparing another interest rate cut following the global financial turmoil caused by Trump’s tariffs push, where he has gone back and forth on whether, when and how deeply to tax imports from other countries, and on which countries, since he returned to the White House for a second term.

He retreated sharply earlier this month from his decision to impose tariffs worldwide, pausing most of the charges for 90 days, although most notably not on China, after markets plunged and US government bonds – traditionally seen as one of the world’s safest financial assets – had suffered a dramatic sell-off. Wall Street chiefs and other experts also forecast a heightened likelihood of recession.

After insisting for days that he would hold firm on his aggressive trade strategy, unveiled in full on 2 April, which he dubbed “liberation day”, Trump announced on 9 April that all countries that had not retaliated against US tariffs would receive a reprieve – and only face a blanket US tariff of 10% – until July.

Powell on Wednesday said the US economy was well-positioned but added that Trump’s tariffs were likely to cause “at least a temporary rise in inflation. The inflationary effects could also be more persistent.” He indicated that the prospect of sweeping tariffs on virtually every trade partner could put the Fed in the unenviable position of having to choose between tackling inflation and unemployment.

The World Trade Organization, meanwhile, warned that Trump’s tariffs would send international trade into reverse this year, depressing global economic growth.

Trump also said as part of his Truth Social post at daybreak on Thursday that “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough”. He dubbed him, further in the post, “Too Late” and put forward the argument that prices were coming down, from oil to eggs.

Trump nominated Powell to become Fed chair during his first term in the White House, in 2018, and Joe Biden renominated him during his term in the White House, in 2022. The US Senate confirms the chair and the US president cannot terminate the head of the Federal Reserve before the end of their four-year fixed stints.

The US central bank has held interest rates steady at 4.25% to 4.5% since the start of this year.

Trump said in his post: “The ECB is expected to cut interest rates for the 7th time, and yet, “Too Late” Jerome Powell of the Fed, who is always TOO LATE AND WRONG, yesterday issued a report which was another, and typical, complete “mess!” Oil prices are down, groceries (even eggs!) are down, and the USA is getting RICH ON TARIFFS. Too Late should have lowered Interest Rates, like the ECB, long ago, but he should certainly lower them now. Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!”

The Doctor Who screenwriter Russell T Davies has said he has no time for “online warriors” who claim the show is too woke.

Speaking to BBC Radio 2, the Welsh writer – who was also behind the hit series Queer As Folk and It’s a Sin – said: “What you might call diversity, I just call an open door.”

The sci-fi series returned to the BBC last week with Ncuti Gatwa again playing the Doctor and Varada Sethu joining him as his companion. It marks the first time the two leads have both been played by minority ethnic actors.

Jodie Whittaker became the first female Doctor in 2017 under the previous head writer, Chris Chibnall, and Gatwa became the first black actor to play the TV lead of Time Lord in 2023.

“Someone always brings up matters of diversity,” Davies said on the Radio 2 programme Doctor Who: 20 Secrets from 20 Years. “And there are online warriors accusing us of diversity and wokeness and involving messages and issues.

“And I have no time for this. I don’t have a second to bear [it]. Because what you might call diversity, I just call an open door.”

When asked whether he wrote the show’s diverse themes consciously, he said: “I don’t even know if it’s conscious. That’s life, and I think it’s the only way to write.”

He said it would be harder to write scripts with “a narrow window” of references. “Why limit yourself? Why breathe in the exhaust fumes? Why be toxic?” he said. “Come over here where the life and light and air and sound is.”

Sethu, who plays the Doctor’s new companion Belinda Chandra, addressed comments about the show’s perceived “wokeness” in an interview with the Radio Times.

“I just think we’re doing the right thing if we’re getting comments like that,” she said. “Woke just means inclusive, progressive, and that you care about people. And as far as I know, the core of Doctor Who is kindness, love and doing the right thing.”

Gatwa told the Radio Times that the two actors taking the lead roles indicated “progress, in terms of how we reflect the societies that we live in”.

Rumours have surrounded the show for several weeks, with unconfirmed reports suggesting that Gatwa may leave and the BBC may axe Doctor Who. The BBC has said only that any decision on a new series would be made after the current one ends.