Category: Politics

Report from inquiry’s second module also says Johnson as PM ‘at times actively encouraged’ chaotic culture ‘Too little, too late’: report condemns Covid response ‘Chaotic and indecisive’: UK’s response under Tories Dominic Cummings “poisoned the atmosphere” of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street during the Covid crisis, the official inquiry into the pandemic has found, saying he helped create a toxic and macho culture with the full connivance of the then prime minister. Johnson’s chief aide “strayed far from the proper role of a special adviser”, the report finds, making “key decisions in 10 Downing Street which were for the prime…

Even Reform MPs failed to show up to hear the home secretary talk about migration, their specialist subject Truly we are spoiled. Not one, but two Commons announcements on immigration from the home secretary. Both of them statements of intent. Foreigners, your time is up. Britain isn’t just full. It’s super-saturated with all the wrong kind of people. Theresa May must be shaking her head. She got labelled with creating a hostile environment just for sending vans round to areas with a large proportion of immigrants, saying: ‘Piss off home. You’re not wanted.’ I guess those were gentler, kinder…

Second pandemic report focuses on decision-making, organisation and messaging by senior politicians including Boris Johnson ‘Too little, too late’: damning report condemns UK’s Covid response Dominic Cummings ‘poisoned the atmosphere’ of Boris Johnson’s No 10, Covid inquiry finds “Too little too late” is the key finding of Heather Hallett’s second report from the Covid public inquiry, which focused on politicians and the decisions they made at important points during the pandemic. At 760 pages long, there is no shortage of detail on exactly what went wrong and when in the UK during those tumultuous months in 2020 and 2021,…

Report on handling of pandemic contains stinging criticism of ‘toxic and chaotic’ culture inside Boris Johnson’s No 10 ‘Chaotic and indecisive’: key findings of report on UK’s Covid response under Tories Dominic Cummings ‘poisoned the atmosphere’ of Boris Johnson’s No 10, Covid inquiry finds The UK’s response to Covid was “too little, too late”, a damning official report on the handling of the pandemic has concluded, saying the introduction of a lockdown even a week earlier than happened could have saved more than 20,000 lives. The document also has stinging criticism of a “toxic and chaotic” culture inside Boris…

Second chambers are a good idea, but they should not be able to overturn clear decisions reached by an elected body If ever a British institution needed assistance in dying, it is the House of Lords. Its handling of the assisted dying bill on Friday of last week, continuing this week, is all but unconstitutional. A bill passed by the House of Commons after years of public debate is being blocked by a small group of peers under the pretence of scrutiny. Their purpose is to kill the bill by filibuster and impose their religious or moral views on…

Labour accused of delaying new rules to avoid backlash, after leak of EHRC guidance saying trans people could be questioned based on looks The UK government has insisted it will take as much time as necessary to “get right” new rules on access to single-sex spaces after a leak of guidance submitted by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) raised concerns that its publication was being deliberately delayed. The equalities watchdog submitted its formal guidance on how public bodies, businesses and other service providers should respond to April’s landmark supreme court ruling on biological sex to the UK…

Shabana Mahmood says becoming part of the UK is “not a right but a privilege – and one that must be earned”. Source link

Ford’s UK boss says it is “not the right time” to tax electric vehicles when demand has already stalled. Source link

Now Labour faces its toughest task yet in Wales – convincing voters to keep believing, ahead of the 2026 Senedd election Source link

Chancellor Rachel Reeves is considering both tax rises and spending cuts in the 26 November Budget. Source link

Home secretary says she will consider “a big increase” in payments to persuade people to leave the UK voluntarily. Source link

Clive Lewis says he would step down to allow Mayor Andy Burnham the chance to become Labour leader. Source link

After Caerphilly, Labour faces its toughest task yet in Wales – convincing voters to believe again Source link

Speaking to BBC Breakfast, the mayor of Greater Manchester did not reply when pressed about a possible challenge to Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership. Source link

Burnham says he is focused on his current role as Manchester mayor but could not say what the future holds. Source link

The home secretary says there is a postcode lottery in the performance of forces in England and Wales. Source link

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

Parliament suspends Laura Anne Jones, Reform’s only Senedd member, for two weeks in further blow after party lost Caerphilly byelection Reform UK’s only member of the Welsh parliament has been suspended for two weeks over a racial slur she posted in an office WhatsApp group. Laura Anne Jones used an offensive Chinese slur in a discussion about the threat of the Chinese government utilising TikTok for espionage. Continue reading… Source link

Study finds new party divide as backing for Labour and Conservatives plunges from 84% in 2020 to 58% in 2025 A new party divide is emerging among British Jews, research has found, with support rising fast for the Greens – buoyed up by younger and “anti-Zionist” Jews – while older Orthodox men turn to Reform UK as trust in the two main parties “collapses”. Support for Labour and the Conservatives among British Jews had fallen to 58% by July 2025 from nearly 84% in 2020, according to a report from the Institute of Jewish Policy Research (JPR), which said…

Exclusive: union leaders say proposed changes are immoral and could threaten patient safety if there is staff exodus Up to 50,000 nurses could quit the UK over the government’s immigration proposals, plunging the NHS into its biggest ever workforce crisis, research suggests. Keir Starmer has vowed to curb net migration, with plans to force migrants to wait as long as 10 years to apply to settle in the UK instead of automatically gaining settled status after five years. Continue reading… Source link

Who knows where this government’s credibility will be after next week’s exceptionally difficult budget By instinct and conviction, Rachel Reeves is a traditionally social democratic, centre-left Labour chancellor. When she delivers her budget next week, though, those qualities will be hard to discern. The reason for that is simple but powerful. She has become hemmed in on every side by avoidably tight commitments on taxation, spending and borrowing. Above all, however, she is hemmed in by Labour politics. It did not have to be this way. Reeves would have had a freer fiscal hand if she and Labour had…