Politics Live – readers’ edition: Friday 19 July

We’re not writing our usual blog today but here, as an alternative, is the Politics Live readers’ edition. It is a place for you to discuss today’s politics, and to share links to breaking news and to the most interesting stories and blogs on the web.

Feel free to express your views robustly, but please treat others with respect and don’t resort to abuse. Guardian comment pages are supposed to be a haven from the Twitter/social media rant-orama, not an extension of it.

You can read all today’s Guardian politics stories here.

• Public sector workers including teachers and police officers are reportedly to be given a £2bn pay rise.

• MPs have given Boris Johnson a brutal preview of the scale of the challenge facing his premiership, as Conservative rebels voted to block any attempt to suspend parliament in order to force through a no-deal Brexit.

• The European commission’s new president has said a hard Brexit would have “massively negative consequences” for both Britain and the EU, and said Brussels could provide emergency help for nations such as Ireland that bear the brunt of such an outcome.

• Theresa May is throwing down the gauntlet to her successor, pushing for fathers to have more time with their newborns. Writing in the Guardian she says she hopes that better paternity leave and time off work to care for premature infants will be one of her lasting legacies as prime minister.

• Sadiq Khan will demand an overhaul of tenancy laws in a campaign for London rent controls that is set to be the cornerstone of his 2020 re-election campaign.

Local council byelections take place on Thursdays. There were five yesterday. Britain Elects has the results.