Year: 2025

The new code of practice on access to single-sex services cannot gain legal force until it gets sign-off from ministers. Source link

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Discover and buy more of Ben’s cartoons here Order your own print of this cartoon from the Guardian Print Shop Continue reading… Source link

If the promise of a better private rental sector is to be realised, councils will need new staff as well as stricter rules Tenants need rights. Apart from food and water, shelter is the most basic human need and relevant to almost everyone all the time – unlike, say, healthcare, which most people do not use on a daily basis. A rebalancing of the law towards renters and away from landlords, which the government has done in its Renters’ Rights Act, was sorely needed. Failures and abuses of power have been ignored for too long. With no-fault evictions outlawed…

After 14 years of Tory rule, the Guardian’s parliamentary sketch writer thought he had seen it all. Westminster would surely tick along nicely once Keir Starmer’s party took over. How wrong he was … I feel I should probably start with an apology. A few days after the 2024 general election, I wrote that it felt as if the grownups were back in charge. It wasn’t as if I was carried away by the vision of Keir Starmer or the charisma of Rachel Reeves. More that I felt we had regained a basic level of competence. That politics would…

Exclusive: Courts minister says change needed to stop criminals opting for juries to delay cases, sometimes by years, and clear huge backlog UK politics live – latest updates Criminals will be stopped from “gaming the system” by choosing trial by jury in order to increase the chances of proceedings collapsing, the courts minister has said, promising to enact radical changes to limit jury trials by the next election. Drug dealers and career criminals were “laughing in the dock” knowing cases can take years to come to trial, Sarah Sackman told the Guardian, saying inaction would be a road to…

The tactics that gave Labour its huge majority in 2024 were no preparation for government – and the prime minister has proved he has nothing more to offer The mood among Labour MPs these days follows Edgar’s law. This states that the scale of any misfortune can only be measured against unknown future disasters. As Shakespeare has the banished son of the blinded Earl of Gloucester say in King Lear: “The worst is not, so long as we can say ‘this is the worst’.” According to Edgar’s law, there is no opinion poll so gloomy for Labour that it…

Rachel Reeves hints there will be budget measures to push down prices and Bank of England is likely to act UK inflation eases to 3.6% before crunch budget Business live – latest updates After three months on a high plateau, inflation is beginning to ease again. The drop from 3.8% to 3.6% in the October consumer prices index sets the UK on a downward path that reduces the pressure on shoppers, businesses and the government. Never mind that City economists had expected a fall last month. It appears to be a turning point back towards normality after a topsy-turvy…

A moral crusade won’t work. To defeat Faragism, Labour must revive a vision of social cohesion and collective responsibility Last month, as the Nobel peace prize eluded Donald Trump’s covetous grasp, the Harvard professor Michael Sandel received an accolade sometimes described as a Nobel equivalent for philosophers. The $1m Berggruen prize is awarded annually to a thinker deemed to have helped humanity find “wisdom, direction, and improved self-understanding”. Somewhat wistfully, given the state of the polls, I found my mind wandering back to the early 2010s, when Sandel was recruited by the Labour party to deliver just these benefits…

A former friend and others who were at Dulwich college with the now Reform UK leader speak of his behaviour ‘Deeply shocking’: Nigel Farage faces fresh claims of racism and antisemitism at school It had been a fun sleepover at Nigel Farage’s house and Jean-Pierre Lihou, a teenager with an appetite, was delighted with his schoolfriend’s mother’s hospitality. “I remember the fantastic cooked English breakfast, as opposed to what you get at a boarding house on a morning,” Lihou recalled. “I was a boarder and he was a day boy,” he said of their education at Dulwich college in…

A fixation on reducing numbers leaves no room for rational discussion of what that means for the economy and society British political debate has long been dominated by public anxiety about rising levels of immigration. How might that change if the population tide were to turn? Not at all, would appear to be the answer. Net migration has in fact been falling since before Labour came to power last July, and yet there has been no end of demand for ever tighter controls and no end of government acquiescence. New figures published this week by the Office for National…

Usually raucous backbenchers snoozed through the session as Keir and Kemi’s exchanges descended into a slanging match It’s like watching dead men walking. Or, to be accurate, a dead man and a dead woman walking. Ghosts of Christmas parties past, haunting the dispatch box. Cast your mind forward to a year from now. It’s more than likely that prime minister’s questions will look very different. A change of cast. If not a change of fortune. Keir Starmer may not even make it much further than the end of May. The budget chaos and No 10’s curious briefings against itself…

Alert says Beijing trying to recruit British sources in parliament, even if potential gains may be unclear An unexpected connection on LinkedIn. An offer of work from a headhunter, most likely a young woman, based in China. The chance to earn perhaps £20,000 part-time writing a handful of geopolitical reports for a Chinese company peppered with “non-public” or “insider” insights. Payment in cryptocurrency or cash preferred. It may seem obvious, on this telling, that something about this approach would be amiss. Nevertheless, China’s powerful ministry of state security (MSS) still considers it worthwhile to deploy recruitment consultants to try…

Critics say current system is a ‘dog’s dinner’ – with homes in Blackpool paying more than in one of London’s wealthiest borough Council tax is one of the biggest outgoings for many households – so reports of a shake-up that could add thousands to some annual bills are causing concern. After abandoning a plan to increase income tax in the budget, Rachel Reeves is expected to rely on several smaller tax-raising measures to repair the public finances. Continue reading… Source link

Health secretary says he is not comfortable with some elements of policy but that it is the right thing to do for the country Wes Streeting has admitted he is not comfortable with forcibly deporting families under the home secretary’s migration plans, while maintaining it is still the right thing to do. The health secretary said he thought the number of forced removals would be low under the proposed model, which is similar to Denmark’s, because there would be an increased financial incentive for people entering the UK illegally to return to their country of origin. Continue reading… Source…

Samantha Niblett highlighted government’s multi-billion-pound deals with Microsoft and ‘getting locked in’ Microsoft has “ripped off the NHS”, it was alleged in parliament on Wednesday, as MPs called on ministers to divert more of the government’s multibillion-pound computing budget away from US technology companies and towards British alternatives. The Seattle-based firm’s UK government contracts include a five-year deal with the NHS to provide productivity tools reportedly worth over £700m, while the wider government spent £1.9bn on Microsoft software licences in the 2024-25 financial year alone. Continue reading… Source link