“This is gutter politics,” was Armed Forces Minister Al Carns’ reply when quizzed about the theft. “We’ve got two wars on, one in the Middle East, one in Ukraine, and we’re talking about someone’s phone.”

But like it or not, the theft of Morgan McSweeney’s work phone is a big political issue, said Alex Glover in The Spectator. In October, when he was still Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, McSweeney was walking down a street in Pimlico, phone to his ear, when a man on a bicycle snatched it from his hand and pedalled off with it. Or so McSweeney told the police.

But that phone held text messages to his friend Lord Mandelson, messages that could have cast light on how the latter got to be appointed our US ambassador, and which would now have to be disclosed as part of the inquiry into the Mandelson/Epstein scandal.

Holes in the tale

To many, the theft sounds too convenient to be true. Not to Starmer, though. As he puts it: “The idea that somehow everybody could have seen that some time in the future there would be a request for the phone is, to my mind, a little bit far-fetched.”

I don’t know the exact fate of the “stolen” phone, said Dan Hodges in the Daily Mail, but I know this: “Starmer is lying his posterior off about what happened.” The phone was reported stolen over a month after Mandelson was sacked as ambassador, by which time everyone, Starmer included, knew the huge significance of his chief of staff’s phone messages. Indeed, meetings were held in Downing Street to “game-out” how to proceed should the government be forced, as it now has been, to release documents relating to Mandelson.

Understandable reaction

And there are huge holes in the tale McSweeney told police, said Amy Gibbons in The Daily Telegraph. He did say that it was a “government phone”, but he never mentioned that he worked for Starmer and that it contained sensitive information. He even gave them confusing details about where the theft took place. Amazingly, the stolen phone wasn’t reported to the intelligence services, nor did No. 10 make any attempt to recover it.

I’m confused, said John Crace in The Guardian. For years, right-wing hacks have been going on about London being “a hellscape ... where simply using your phone is an invitation to be mugged”. Yet instead of cutting McSweeney some slack, they’ve convinced themselves that his is “the only phone in London not to have been nicked”.

Not getting details right just after you’ve been mugged is understandable behaviour for anyone in shock, but not in McSweeney’s case it seems. “After all, it’s a well-known fact that men with ginger hair and a beard can’t be trusted.”

British businesses are to be offered a £3,000 state bonus for hiring a young person who has been out of work for six months as the number of economically inactive young people nears one million.

Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden said it was part of the government’s plans to “back Britain’s young people” after youth unemployment hit its highest level in more than a decade.

How bad is it?

According to the Office for National Statistics’ latest labour market overview, 14% of Britons aged 18 to 24 were unemployed in the final quarter of 2025, compared with 12.7% in the same period in 2024.

This growth has largely been driven by young people who are “economically inactive”, meaning those who are out of work and not seeking it. The most recent data from the ONS says the number of young people not in employment, education or training (Neet) between October and December 2025 reached 957,000, up from around 800,000 in 2019.

Why is it so hard to find work?

For many of those not in employment or training, “the challenge is not so much a lack of skills or visibility as the dearth of openings in a stagnating labour market”, said the Financial Times. “Young people say they lack work experience and something to talk about to employers,” said Sareena Bains, chief executive of charity Movement to Work. “Those opportunities are becoming few and far between.”

The tough labour landscape has been made worse by the roll-out of AI, which threatens to erase many entry-level jobs.

Business groups have also criticised the government’s decision to raise employer’s national insurance contributions and the youth minimum wage, as well as changes to workers’ rights, all of which could make companies less inclined to take a risk on a newcomer to the workforce over an experienced worker. In February, Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist, told the Commons Treasury Committee that changes around tax and the national living wage have had a “particular effect on those aged 16 to 18, and 18 to 21”.

Having analysed the effects of setting minimum wage rates by age, Alan Manning from LSE concluded that the evidence is “too weak” to blame youth unemployment on the minimum wage.

What else is to blame?

The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has identified a “toxic cocktail” of “rising employment taxes, perverse incentives to claim benefits and a broken migration system”. The think tank’s Wasted Youth report found that businesses are turning to non-EU migrants while a growing number of young Britons are claiming benefits.

Health is another major factor. The share of Neet young people who report having a health condition that limits their ability to work rose from 26% in 2015 to 44% in 2025 – a 70% increase, according to The Health Foundation. This “mirrors trends among young people generally”, said the think tank. “Regardless of whether they are in work or education, 16–24-year-olds today are much more likely to report having a work-limiting health condition than they were in the past”. This increase is “driven primarily by mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions”.

What is being done?

As well as the £3,000 incentive for firms to hire young people out of work for six months, the government has also announced small and medium-sized businesses will get a £2,000 bonus if they take on a young apprentice, and jobs with training subsidised by the state are to be expanded to 22- to 24-year-olds.

Current policies to help Neet young people and expand apprenticeships were “not stacking up to the scale of the challenge”, Stephen Evans, chief executive of the Learning & Work Institute, told the FT.

A more radical proposal, backed by former home secretary David Blunkett and former chancellor Jeremy Hunt, is a Future Workforce Credit, a £670 million effective tax cut for employers hiring Neets that would cover 30% of their salary. CSJ modelling based on similar interventions suggests the approach would get 120,000 young people into jobs while saving £765 million in tax and welfare spending.

“Every now and then, world events take a turn that exposes Britain’s decades of self-deception” on the subject of defence, said Fraser Nelson in The Times. On 1 March, the RAF’s main base in Cyprus was hit by a drone apparently launched by Hezbollah from Lebanon. It caused only minor damage; what was shocking was that the UK seemed unprepared for such an event, although Lebanon is just “a short drone-hop away”, and an attack like this had been anticipated for years.

Our response was to dust down HMS Dragon, a Type 45 destroyer then undergoing maintenance at Portsmouth. (With a fair wind, she’ll arrive next week.) In a panic, Cyprus turned to Greece and France, “asking to be protected from the risk Britain’s bases had exposed them to”. Greek frigates and F-16s were on the scene within hours. A French warship and air defences followed. “Quite the humiliation” for Britain. And proof that “our commitments far outpace our resources. Holes are showing, in shocking places.”

‘Point of maximum weakness’

The blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, the attacks on the Gulf states, where around 300,000 British citizens live: this is exactly the kind of emergency that “would once have found the Royal Navy in its element”, said David Blair in The Telegraph. But for the first time in centuries, Britain does not have a single warship in the Persian Gulf or the eastern Mediterranean. Three of its six destroyers and both its aircraft carriers were out of action, undergoing repairs or refits.

After years of slow decline, the Navy has “reached its point of maximum weakness” at a moment when a crisis is exploding in the Middle East “and Russia threatens the whole of Europe”. Both Bahrain and the UAE have reportedly expressed concern about the UK response; Cyprus voiced its disappointment publicly. Britain could also only send a few extra fighter jets to the region because the RAF, too, has been “cut to the bone”, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. It has 130 active jets, down from 850 in 1989. The Army is “in no better shape”, with just 70,000 active personnel, a third of the number it had in 1990.

Our current malaise “is the result of politicians from all parties trying to outrun” the same question for decades, said Matt Oliver in The Telegraph. How can Britain be “a great military power” if it won’t pay for it?

At the start of the 1990s, Britain’s health and defence budgets both hovered at 4% of GDP. Today, health accounts for 8% and defence just over 2%. New Labour was often accused of failing to invest in the forces. But the “squeeze” was harder during the Coalition years: the budget fell by 22% in real terms from 2010 to 2016. Yet even today, the Ministry of Defence has one of the largest military budgets in the world, at £66 billion per year.

So taxpayers may wonder what has gone wrong. The answer lies in part in “a string of procurement disasters”, for which civil servants and top brass must share the blame. We have expensive platforms – aircraft carriers, F-35 jets, nuclear subs – but insufficient manpower, weapons stockpiles and all-round resilience. As ex-defence secretary Ben Wallace recently put it, our forces have been “hollowed out”.

End of ‘peace dividend’

The challenge is formidable, said Larisa Brown in The Times. Al Carns, the Armed Forces Minister, has said that, by 2029, “Europe could be at war with Russia”. Former senior military chiefs warned in a letter to the prime minister this month that Britain “is facing its 1936 moment”. Assuming that funding can be found, the UK and Europe’s defence industries will have not only to ramp up production, but also to cope with the transformation of the modern battlefield already seen in Ukraine – by drone technology, robotics, cyberwarfare and, increasingly, autonomous weapons.

Add to that the likelihood that Donald Trump’s America would not “fight for us”, said Edward Lucas in The Times – or certainly cannot be relied upon to do so. “Europeans may loathe Trump, but they’re not ready to fill the gaps... They lack the hi-tech weapons, high-end intelligence, logistics expertise and ‘mass’ (quantity) that the Americans have provided since D Day.” Filling these will be costly and difficult, “if we manage at all”.

Yet politically, defence remains a hard sell, said The Independent’s editorial board. Among voters, there is no clamour to build “new cyber-defence units in the way there is demand for, say, cutting NHS waiting lists”. Keir Starmer and his cabinet know that the era of the “peace dividend” is over, said George Eaton in The New Statesman – that Britain and Europe “need to go faster on defence”, as the PM put it last month. But nothing much is happening. Labour may or may not increase defence spending from 2.4% of GDP to 3%, as the Ministry of Defence wants, by 2029 – the year that Carns thinks we could be at war with Russia. The government shows no willingness to confront voters with the fiscal trade-offs that come with higher spending. Britain remains “in denial on defence”.

The British public was “expecting to be surprised” by the first tranche of the Mandelson files, said Ailbhe Rea in The New Statesman. Yet despite hopes for “damning correspondence” to be in the 147-page document, “there was very little I didn’t already know”.

As it turned out “the first drop of the Mandelson files contained neither a smoking gun nor bombshell revelation”, said Beth Rigby on Sky News. Details about Peter Mandelson’s severance payment after being sacked as the UK’s ambassador to the US, and the “rushed” vetting process for his appointment have made the headlines, but the number of documents withheld, redacted or yet to be released mean the picture remains incomplete.

What did the commentators say?

Keir Starmer “must release all the Mandelson files”, said The Telegraph in an editorial. It appears some of the files “may not see the light of day for years” due to ongoing police investigations. The police are “entitled to do their job and proceed with their investigation without undue interference”, but “questions about the prime minister’s judgment on this matter are not going away. The public deserve to know just how credulous Sir Keir really was.”

The comment in the files by Jonathan Powell, Starmer’s national security adviser who was also Tony Blair’s chief of staff, that the appointment of Mandelson was “weirdly rushed”, is a “quietly damning analysis that will haunt Starmer forever”, said Rea. And the decision to give Mandelson a “£75,000 payoff” after his dismissal, when his contract, also included in the release, showed that “he was owed precisely £0”, raises questions, too.

But there is undoubtedly a “missing piece of the puzzle”, such as the correspondence between the former No. 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and Mandelson. Reportedly, McSweeney asked Mandelson “three questions”, which Mandelson claimed he answered truthfully, a comment the government disputes.

It was clear from the files we have seen so far that due process was not followed in the vetting of Mandelson for the US ambassador role, said The Times in an editorial. The documents show Mandelson was “offered classified briefings” by government officials before he was granted appropriate security clearance: “it is hard to imagine this being granted to other ambassadorial appointments”. The government refuted allegations that the vetting process was “fast-tracked”, yet now it is claiming this was allowed “because Mandelson was a privy councillor, which does suggest due process was not followed”.

The files released in this first tranche “failed to include any interventions, comments or guidance from Starmer himself”, said Anna Gross in the Financial Times. “The prime minister emerges from this admittedly partial picture less as the main character in his own drama than as an oddly disembodied presence,” said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. We are left to wonder whether Mandelson’s appointment was the result of the PM’s readiness to “delegate” high-level decisions to McSweeney, or belief that the risk of having “his own personal Machiavelli” close to Donald Trump “was worth it”. Either way, as he was forced to admit this week, it was “his mistake”.

What next?

It will be several weeks at least before more documents are released, as they must first be examined by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee. Senior government figures told The Guardian that Starmer “could suffer further resignations when ministerial WhatsApp messages are published in the next tranche”.

These files will include informal messages between Mandelson and government figures “for six months before his appointment, and during his time as ambassador”. These “could prove a powder keg for already inflamed tensions between Washington and London”, said Rigby. Only documents that pose “significant security concerns” will be withheld.

As counter-terrorism police arrest four people today on suspicion of spying for Iran on London’s Jewish community, political focus is intensifying on the spread of Tehran’s tentacles of power across the Western world.

A group of Labour MPs have already written to the government asking for a clampdown on charities that could be operating an Iranian “influence network” in the UK. They warned that a web of such organisations appears “to be actively promoting the Iranian regime’s ideology and interests”.

Iran’s nerve centre in the UK

One of the charities cited by the MPs is the Islamic Centre of England. “Based in the affluent north-west London suburb of Maida Vale”, it has been “accused of being an outpost of the Iranian regime” and has been under investigation by the Charity Commission since 2022, said The Telegraph.

At the centre this week, mourners lit candles in front of photographs of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the former Supreme Leader of Iran who was killed in US-Israeli air strikes on Tehran last weekend. Chants of “We will obey you, Khamenei” were heard, said The Times.

“These are vigils for a man who had British blood on his hands, who ordered terror plots on British soil,” said Kasra Aarabi, of United Against Nuclear Iran, who has been monitoring the activity. “That is deeply concerning.”

The Times revealed last year that the Islamic Centre of England was broadcasting daily religious messages from Khamenei during Ramadan. The paper called it “Iran’s nerve centre” and it was described by the think tank Policy Exchange in 2024 as “sitting at the heart of a network of institutions that project influence”.

The centre has said it does not endorse extremism or unlawful activity and was focused solely on religious, educational and community services. A spokesperson added: “The centre does not represent, promote, or advocate for the political views or agendas of any state, figure or regime. Its religious guidance is confined to matters of faith, ethics, and spirituality. The centre promotes religious peace, and harmony between different faiths.”

‘Seeds of suspicion’

The Tehran regime’s intelligence services “have long targeted Jewish and Israeli people, along with dissidents living in Britain, frequently using criminal proxies as part of their operations”, said The Telegraph.

More than 20 “potentially lethal Iran-backed plots” were identified by MI5 in the year to October 2025, said the intelligence service’s director general Ken McCallum last year.

Research published last June by the National Union for Democracy in Iran, a US-based think tank, found Britain had become a “flashpoint” for Iranian influence. It warned that education was at the “front line” of the Islamic regime’s efforts and it has been “ushering in a generation of radicalised, ideological based zealots”.

The think tank said the regime “has effectively created a life-long, Islamic Republic-centric curriculum for children of all backgrounds in the United Kingdom” and claimed it was “planting seeds of suspicion (against their own British government), and establishing historical falsehoods as reality”.

The Greens’ first ever Westminster by-election victory has prompted further soul-searching for a listless Labour Party less than two years on from their landslide election win.

“By-elections seldom matter much once the circus packs up, but this one is existential” for Labour, said Patrick Maguire in The Times. The rise of Reform UK has been much talked about and the “essay question of British electoral politics remains how the left might beat them”. But now “nowhere in the country does the answer appear to be a vote for the Labour Party”.

But the Gorton and Denton result is as much about the Greens’ emergence as an electoral force as it is about the love Labour’s lost.

What did the commentators say?

The result caps six months in which Zack Polanski “has presided over a leap in his party’s poll ratings and sought to retool its message”, said Politico. In her victory speech Hannah Spencer, the party’s fifth and newest MP, followed the way Polanski has “tried to foreground cost-of-living concerns, at the expense of the Greens’ traditional eco message”. But the party has also faced claims that it is stoking division.

“The extent to which the party has campaigned in an unashamedly sectarian manner is shocking,” said The Times in an editorial. The party released a video in Urdu, appealing directly to the constituency’s large Muslim population, featuring Keir Starmer shaking hands with Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist prime minister of India, while Spencer said voters should “punish Labour for Gaza”. The win does nothing for “those who believe elections should be fought on issues, not religious identity or about conflicts far away”.

Nigel Farage claimed that there were high levels of “family voting”, an illegal practice which can include husbands instructing their wives how to vote. “Whether the vote was genuinely corrupt,” said Jake Wallis Simons in The Telegraph, “there is little doubt that we are witnessing the manipulation of tribal voting as a decisive power-play in our political system.”

But “in reality the result was not a victory for sectarianism or ‘cheating’”, said Adam Bienkov in Byline Times. Instead it showed the ability of “most voters in the Greater Manchester seat to reject the politics of Reform”. In Matthew Goodwin, Reform chose “an extreme and divisive candidate, with a history of dabbling in racist comments and discredited race science”, and he has been rejected by voters. “For now at least, in a battle between hope and hate, hope has won.”

What next?

The Green Party is now a “large, viable, organised electoral vehicle, aiming to replace Labour at the polls”, said Ben Walker in The New Statesman.

The result in Gorton and Denton “says to the one in three current Labour voters also giving thought to switching that a Green vote is no longer a wasted vote”. With the upcoming local and devolved elections in May, Green “gains in London and urban northern England, as well as Wales and Scotland, would embed the feeling that the Labour Party is no longer the pre-eminent party of the left”.

The Greens can now “position themselves as the ‘anti-Farage’ party in swaths of working-class Britain”, said George Parker and Jennifer Williams in the Financial Times. In 2024, they won 6.7% of the national vote and four seats at Westminster, “but the party came second in 40 constituencies, 18 of which were in London. In all but one of those seats, the party was second to Labour.”

The outcome of today’s by-election in Gorton and Denton, one of the most unpredictable in years, will be closely scrutinised as a political bellwether.

The southeast Manchester constituency was a Labour stronghold with a 13,400-vote majority until former MP Andrew Gwynne resigned. Now, polls have it as a three-way contest between Reform UK, Labour and the Green Party, whose candidate Hannah Spencer is a local councillor and plumber. Reform’s candidate, GB News presenter Matt Goodwin, has also painted the by-election as a referendum on Keir Starmer’s leadership. The prime minister blocked Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham from standing as Labour’s candidate, selecting city councillor Angeliki Stogia instead.

But in an era of multi-party politics, by-election results are decided by increasingly tight margins, making turn-out and tactical voting significant factors. Last year, a split vote on the left meant Reform won Runcorn and Helsby from Labour by six votes.

What did the commentators say?

It can be “unwise to extrapolate from by-election results”, said The Economist in 2023. Turnout is poor and half the seats gained at by-elections between 1992 and 2019 were lost at the next general election. Some parties, like the Liberal Democrats, can “outperform” in them.

They are “awkward beasts and don’t necessarily follow the usual rules”, said Louise Thompson, politics lecturer at the University of Manchester, on The Conversation. Gorton and Denton is a new constituency, formed from parts of three others in 2024. There are “huge socio-demographic differences” between its predominantly white, working-class wards and areas with a “much higher student and Muslim population”.

The “likeliest split outcome is straightforward”, said Ben Walker in The New Statesman: Denton votes Reform; Gorton and its neighbours go Green. Yet that would “reveal little about the overall winner”. Forecasting site Britain Predicts has it as a “strikingly tight” race: Green on 31%, Reform on 30% and Labour on 29%. Based on expected turn-out, only “a few hundred votes separate first from third”.

There might also be a “squeeze” effect. In such contests, smaller parties “often underperform” because voters gravitate towards “perceived frontrunners, where their vote seems more likely to make a difference”. If the Greens are seen as the tactical voting preference, “they should win the seat emphatically”. If Labour is seen as the way to beat Reform, “they should eke out a narrow win”.

It’s therefore the system, not the outcome, that should be “receiving more attention”, said Ian Simpson of the Electoral Reform Society. First past the post is “not designed with more than two candidates in mind”. Where three or more parties are contesting a seat, candidates are increasingly elected with “fewer than a third of voters in their area”. More than two-thirds of ballots cast are “simply ignored”.

In a multi-party contest, the debate becomes dominated by tactical voting, around “which party is best placed to stop another party from winning”. In this case, both Labour and the Green Party tried to persuade voters that they were the only option to “stop Reform”.

But these claims have been “unsubstantiated”, said The Independent’s John Rentoul. To vote tactically, “you need to know how other people are planning to vote”. That hasn’t been possible here; people have already been voting by post. Stronger Green wards may have also been “over-represented” in polls.

Normally, this wouldn’t matter. By-elections exist to “register protest against the government”. Their history is “littered with sensational upsets” that nevertheless “left the governing party untouched and were reversed at the subsequent general election”.

But “Gorton and Denton feels different”. The government is “fragile”; MPs are “panicky”. Parliamentary politics is split five ways. “Will Reform or the Conservatives lead the right at the next election? Will Labour, the Greens or the Lib Dems lead the left?” Any outcome will “shape politics for months”. It could influence tactical voting calculations in the May local elections and even the general election. “Most by-elections do not matter. This one does.”

What next?

The results are due at 4am tomorrow. A Labour win would “embolden Starmer and prompt a thousand think-pieces about a corner turned”, said Rentoul.

A victory for Reform’s “divisive, hyper-online” Goodwin would be “the biggest sign yet” that Reform’s poll lead “represents real voter intentions” rather than just “dissatisfaction with the government”, said The Guardian’s Jessica Elgot.

But a Green victory might be “the most catastrophic result for Starmer’s leadership”. It would show that the Greens are “a serious progressive force, not a protest vote”.

Whatever the result, there are “big implications” for Starmer ahead of what are widely expected to be “disastrous results” for Labour in the local elections. But if this by-election has barely 1,000 votes between the top three parties, “each would be wise not to overanalyse the results – but that won’t stop anyone”.

Keir Starmer will ask his independent ethics adviser to investigate whether Cabinet Office minister Josh Simons breached the ministerial code, amid allegations he was involved in a smear campaign targeting journalists.

Simons was director of the Labour Together think tank when it allegedly paid a PR firm thousands of pounds to investigate the personal, religious and political backgrounds of journalists who were digging into how its undeclared funding bankrolled Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign.

“I have heard of black briefings, but never heard of anything like this,” former Labour MP Jon Cruddas, who helped set up Labour Together in 2015, told Democracy for Sale. “This is dark shit.”

What is alleged?

In November 2023, The Sunday Times reported that the pro-Starmer think tank Labour Together had failed to declare £730,000 in political donations between 2017 and 2020. It was headed at that time by Morgan McSweeney, who would later serve as Starmer’s chief of staff in Downing Street. The think tank attributed the discrepancy to an administrative error.

An investigation by Khadija Sharife and Peter Geoghegan, published on Geoghegan’s Substack site Democracy for Sale, revealed that Labour Together paid PR firm Apco “at least £30,000” for material on the journalists. At the time of the payment, the directorship of the think tank had passed to Simons, a former policy adviser to Jeremy Corbyn who was elected MP for Makerfield near Wigan in 2024. In September 2025, Simons became a Cabinet Office minister.

Apco’s report, codenamed “Operation Cannon”, divulged personal information about the journalists involved, including claims about the “faith, relationships and upbringing” of Sunday Times reporter Gabriel Pogrund, said the BBC.

Labour Together then passed “some of Apco’s material” on to the security services, “raising serious questions about whether public authorities were drawn into an effort to discredit legitimate journalism”, said Geoghegan in The Guardian.

What has the response been?

For a think tank so closely aligned to a political party to hire a PR firm to investigate journalists is “highly unusual”, said Sharife and Geoghegan, and the revelations have “sparked” a “furious response” both inside and outside Labour.

While not denying that Labour Together hired Apco, Simons has said he was “surprised and shocked” that the report included “unnecessary information” on Pogrund. “I asked for this information to be removed before passing the report to GCHQ.”

Starmer has said he “didn’t know anything” about the Apco report, and has asked the Cabinet Office to “establish the facts”. An investigation has since been launched by its propriety, ethics and constitution group, but critics claim this is the government effectively marking its own homework. More than 20 Labour MPs have written to the PM and Labour Party general secretary Hollie Ridley, demanding an independent investigation.

How deep does this go?

Simons is not the only Labour figure who is “either directly or indirectly connected to what is fast becoming another crisis threatening Sir Keir’s grip on power”, said The Telegraph.

Labour Together’s influence “goes deep into the heart of the government”. It provides a “crucial source of funding” for the party’s frontbenchers, “spending tens of thousands of pounds” to pay for assistants for the likes of Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner, Yvette Cooper, David Lammy, John Healey and Shabana Mahmood.

Another connection is Kate Forrester, who at the time the report was commissioned in late 2023 was a director of Apco’s London operations, while also serving on Labour Together’s advisory board. She is married to Paul Ovenden, who was Starmer’s head of communications at the time.

“This scandal cuts to the heart of Number 10,” said Geoghegan in The Guardian, but it also “raises broader questions”. Chief among these is London’s position as “the global centre of the private intelligence industry”, which is worth a reported £15 billion a year and yet “remains almost entirely opaque”.

Minerals are a hot topic in 2026. Lithium, the crucial ingredient in batteries that power smartphones and electric vehicles, is in particular demand. While most of the discussion has been around the potential treasure troves of Greenland or Ukraine, Cornwall is believed to sit on the largest lithium deposits in Europe.

Mining company Cornish Lithium made a “major production breakthrough” last October, said The Telegraph: it produced lithium hydroxide, a raw material required to make lithium-ion batteries. “It is believed to be the first time lithium hydroxide has been produced in Britain outside of a laboratory.”

Cornwall’s ‘roaring future’

If the world is ever to get close to net zero, lithium will be at the centre of it, said The Times. It can store more energy than most elements and is ideal for rechargeable batteries. That means it is playing an “increasingly important role” in the energy system. When “hooked up to a grid”, batteries can “absorb renewable energy when it is abundant and release it when scarce”.

The world has developed a “sudden and ravenous appetite” for lithium. That demand is expected to triple over the next decade as the green transition accelerates, said the International Energy Agency.

“Lithium is now among the most important mined elements on the planet,” said The Guardian. Most is extracted in Australia, the so-called lithium triangle in South America (Chile, Argentina and Bolivia), and China. The latter also “processes and therefore controls a majority of it for use in batteries”.

Cornwall doesn’t compare in scale but it is “probably the largest lithium deposit in Europe”. Cornish Lithium and another company, British Lithium, are “leading the way to tap into it”. And as the race to secure critical minerals intensifies, “there’s renewed enthusiasm for domestic exploration projects for critical minerals”, said Jamie Hinch on The Conversation.

In September, the National Wealth Fund announced a £31 million commitment to Cornish Lithium. And last month, the government released its critical minerals strategy, which could be a “watershed moment” for Cornwall, said Cornwall Live. The promised funding could be a “huge boon for the Cornish economy not seen since the heyday of tin mining”.

‘Supply chain dominated by China’

The “reshoring of mining” back to Britain can mitigate the “decline of employment opportunities” through the loss of industry, said Hinch. Cornish Lithium said it will create more than 300 jobs over the Trelavour Lithium Project’s 20-year operation, and 800 during construction. There is a “tempered optimism” that lithium could “rejuvenate” the county, which has some of the most deprived areas in the UK.

Cornwall’s “mining renaissance” extends beyond lithium, said The Economist. Britain’s last tin mine, South Crofty, near Redruth, has been dormant for nearly 30 years. It is now “being resuscitated by Cornish Metals” and is scheduled to resume operations in 2028, as the only mine in Europe that primarily extracts tin. The Trump administration said this month it was willing to loan up to $225 million (£165 million) to support the reopening, for some of its output in return.

Cornwall’s mineral deposits also present political opportunities, said Politico. Labour MPs are “betting” that local development of lithium mines – not to mention copper, tin and tungsten – will “help them keep their seats” at Westminster.

But China still looms on the horizon, said Politics Home. The superpower “produces more than 50% of 17 of the top 27 critical mineral groups, and refines 90% of the world’s rare earths”. It controls “critical mineral extraction on five different continents”.

Though the UK could initially bypass China by refining lithium “on home soil”, it would still be “entirely dependent on a global supply chain dominated by China”, said The Times. Once lithium has been refined, it needs to be turned into a battery cathode, and “almost 90 per cent of cathodes are made in China”.

But if Britain found a way to circumvent this step, such as piggybacking on “plans for several” commercial cathode facilities in Europe, it could capitalise on the manufacturing of battery cells on its own shores. To that end, processing gigafactories are expected to open in Sunderland and Somerset next year.

Keir Starmer’s much-criticised trip to China could not have come at a better time for the beleaguered prime minister.

Following another gruelling week in which one potential leadership challenger was seen off – for now at least – when Andy Burnham’s attempt to return to parliament failed, and another, former deputy PM Angela Rayner, declared “I’m not dead yet”, you could perhaps forgive the PM for wanting a few days away from the never-ending Westminster drama surrounding his future.

What is driving this new leadership speculation is Starmer’s dire unpopularity with voters: in a recent YouGov poll, 75% said they viewed him unfavourably; only Liz Truss has ever had worse ratings.

For Labour MPs, it’s the prospect of losing the next general election to Reform that has them “bordering on cold panic”, and “turbo-charges questions about Keir Starmer’s future as prime minister and so raises the profile of those seen by some as possible successors”, said BBC political editor Chris Mason.

What did the commentators say?

The threat from Burnham may have been thwarted but he still poses a fundamental problem for Starmer: that he is everything the PM is not.

It’s just one of those “unfortunate coalitions”, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian: “everyone who wishes a Labour government stood for something, and had a discernible sense of purpose, likes Burnham; everyone who has fond memories of the Blair years likes him, but everyone who hated the Blair years also likes him”. Plus, “everyone who doesn’t really concentrate on politics likes him,” while those who do are “exhausted by watching the discourse” as “the entire mainstream seeks to chase off Reform politics by sounding exactly like it”.

The “real winner” from the NEC’s decision to block Burnham’s return was undoubtedly Wes Streeting, said Ben Walker in The New Statesman. The health secretary, who has made little secret of his wish to one day take over the top job, is the “current front-runner” in the parliamentary Labour Party although among the rank-and-file membership, who he would need to win over, he is “more divisive”.

“Streeting would probably defeat Starmer in a head-to-head contest, but if he has to face off against another, more soft-left, candidate, it might be trickier.”

With Burnham out of the race, who could that other candidate be? Angela Rayner, who resigned as deputy PM in September after failing to get proper tax advice on a property sale, this week made clear to supporters her intention to return to the government. Allies told The Times she would have 80 MPs ready to back a leadership bid and would be “well placed to challenge” the PM “after what are expected to be a difficult set of elections in May”.

This still may be “too soon” for Rayner to stand against Streeting, said Kitty Donaldson in The i Paper. Instead, some Labour MPs have “talked up the prospect” of former leader and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband becoming the “choice of the soft left”.

“I know he has said he doesn’t want it, and I think he wants to be chancellor, but who knows, maybe we can bring him round?” one left-learning MP told the paper.

What next?

The “pathway to a coup is still unclear” and Starmer’s team “cling to the hope that something may turn up” before the crucial 7 May local and devolved elections, or that his rivals will “lose their nerve”, said the Financial Times.

But barring a better-than-expected result, which few if any see as likely based on current voter sentiment, the pressure on the PM from his own MPs to make way following an electoral bloodbath could become overwhelming.

Even if Labour did decide to ditch Starmer, “they haven’t a mandate for such a departure”, said Danny Finkelstein in The Times. There is “no point” changing leader “unless they also embark on a new course” so whoever replaces him as PM “should call an election and present a new programme for government”.

For now, all the mooted candidates have denied they are plotting a run for the leadership, and Starmer told Bloomberg on Monday that the public had given him a personal mandate to lead Britain for five years and vowed to complete a full term.

“But as anyone in Westminster would tell you”, said Politico’s London Playbook, “it gets harder every week to find many Labour MPs who truly believe he will.”

Justice Secretary David Lammy has unveiled a watered-down version of his plans to dispense with jury trials for all but the most serious offences.

Under his original plan, offences carrying a sentence of less than five years would have been heard in new judge-only courts. But following “cabinet feedback”, this has been scaled back to offences with a penalty of less than three years.

The current crown court backlog stands at around 80,000 cases, said the Ministry of Justice, and without urgent action could exceed 100,000 by 2028. “We must be bold,” Lammy said today in setting out the government’s plans, to rectify a court system on the “brink of collapse”.

What did the commentators say?

Trial by jury is one of the “central reasons” Britain’s legal system has “garnered such high levels of trust and respect around the world”, said The Times in an editorial. Lammy is correct that the “status quo cannot go on”, but “fundamental changes” towards a system of “secrecy” would face “grave public apprehension”.

Even if Lammy drives through his proposals, “scrapping jury trials alone might not be enough to clear the backlog”. If less serious offences could be overseen by a judge and two magistrates, as recommended in Brian Leveson’s judicial review, trial times could be reduced from “two days to a few hours”.

“Destroying jury trials because everything else is broken is a terrible idea,” said Tristan Kirk in London’s The Standard. Lammy’s proposal is an “act of pure desperation” from the Labour government. There is a “serious risk” that overhauling the system will cost “huge amounts of money and time” for “limited benefit”. Jury trials are “worth nourishing and investing in, instead of being constantly eroded”.

Had this come from a Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage government, Labour would “say we were on a rocky road, with something like fascism at the end of it”, said a Sunday Times editorial. Once gone, it is likely juries will “never come back”. Departing from centuries of tradition exposes the deputy prime minister’s “short-term” thinking, abandoning what many Britons see as a right “in the interests of expediency”. “Trial by jury is sacrosanct. Scrapping it is an affront to justice.”

This is out of character for Labour, said an editorial in The Telegraph. It “beggars belief” that a party “so obsessed with the artificial construct of the ECHR” would abandon such a “long-standing right”. The answer should be to “address the problems of capital and funding” in the criminal justice system, instead of “dispensing with the core principles of English justice”.

But “David Lammy is right to slash the use of juries”, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. “Archaic” and “inefficient”, they are “quaint relics of medieval jurisprudence”. We are falling behind many of our European neighbours, where judge-only courts have long been standard. Per 100,000 citizens, England and Wales imprison 145, compared to 71 and 54 in “jury-free” Germany and the Netherlands. “I do not believe that Britons are twice as criminal as Germans, or three times as Dutch.”

Labour’s reforms could be revolutionary for rape cases in particular, said The New Statesman. Currently, “women are being retraumatised for far too long” with delays of up to “half-a-decade” to have their cases heard in a system that “lets them down so badly”. Trying lower-level offences more efficiently will free up crown court time to make sure “the most serious crimes are heard quickly and fairly”. If reform isn’t enacted we risk perpetuating a system that “denies timely justice” and “fails to deter crime”.

What next?

Under the current proposals, magistrates will be allowed to hear cases with potential sentences of up to 18 months – as opposed to the current 12 – and this could still rise to two years, said The Telegraph.

The next stages of proposals aim to “create a new part of the crown court where there are no juries”, for sentences up to three years, said Sky News. This departs from the Leveson review, which proposed a panel of a judge supported by magistrates. Cases involving crimes that carry sentences of five years or more will still be heard in front of a jury.

Labour has been accused of breaking another manifesto pledge after a last-minute U-turn watering down a key protection in its flagship Employment Rights Bill.

Changes to the proposed legislation included the government ditching plans to give workers the right to claim unfair dismissal from day one of a new job. The decision has been described as a “complete betrayal” by one Labour MP and leaves the bill as a “shell of its former self”, according to Unite general secretary Sharon Graham. But it is hoped the compromise will be enough to win over sceptical peers in the House of Lords and get the bill passed into law by next April.

What protections does the bill offer now?

Protection against unfair dismissal, which currently only comes into effect after two years in a job, will now kick in after six months – in line with most European countries. A compensation cap on successful unfair dismissal claims imposed by the Tories will also be lifted.

Other rights, such as the right to claim sick pay and paternity leave, and to apply for flexible working, will be enshrined from day one, and zero-hours contracts will be banned. The threshold for calling a strike will also be lowered, with a union requiring only a simple majority of members who voted rather than at least 40% of those eligible to vote as the current law dictates.

The enforcement of employment rights will be overseen by a new Fair Work Agency, which will have the right to inspect workplaces, issue fines and bring legal action on behalf of employees.

What has the reaction been?

The TUC’s general secretary Paul Nowak said the bill is “essential to better quality, more secure jobs for millions of workers across the economy”. But opposition politicians and business leaders have warned the new provisions are likely to have the opposite effect.

With unemployment already at a near five-year high, “employers have stopped hiring, in part because a rising living wage and steep rises in their national insurance charges have made it too expensive, but also because the looming legislation makes it too risky”, said Matthew Lynn in The Telegraph.

“The measures could cost firms £5 billion a year and risk being passed on to staff through smaller pay rises and hidden taxes which reduce wages over time,” said The Sun.

“No company can plan, invest or hire with this level of uncertainty hanging over them,” Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said. Even the tweaked legislation is still “terrible for economic growth” – a key mission of the Labour government.

What happens next?

Despite anger in some parts of the party over the changes, the focus among Labour MPs is “keeping the rest of the package intact”, particularly the end of zero-hours contracts, said The New Statesman.

Former deputy leader Angela Rayner, who led the passage of the bill through Parliament before she was forced to resign, reportedly plans to lay an amendment tomorrow to speed up the bill so it can be implemented as early as next year.

Several Labour MPs told The Guardian that they “fear that the climbdown by the government will embolden peers and critics of the bill to push for further changes”. “This can’t be the thin of the wedge and we won’t let it be,” said one.

Your Party has established its foundations, with members voting on the party’s name, leadership structure, membership status and a party constitution at its inaugural conference in Liverpool. But by the end of the weekend cracks were already beginning to show.

The group was established by Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn to present a “full-blooded left-wing challenge” to Labour, said Politico. However, if the antics at the conference were anything to go by, it is “mixing deep idealism with the kind of factional splits that would make Monty Python blush”.

What happened at the launch?

Members of Your Party confirmed its formal name will remain the same. Just over 37% voted to make the placeholder name permanent, with other shortlisted options Popular Alliance (25%), For the Many (23%) and Our Party (14%) being overlooked. Sultana had complained that her preferred option of “Left Party” was not included in the options.

Members also voted in favour of dual membership – where individuals can hold active membership of two parties – by 69.2% to 30.8%. Another takeaway from the conference was the introduction of a collective leadership model by a narrow margin of 51.6% to 48.4% of votes. Sultana had previously championed the move as enabling “maximum member democracy”, whereas Corbyn called for a party structured on sole leadership.

On the eve of the conference, Sultana and Corbyn held separate rallies. Sultana’s comprised of two events at a Holiday Inn in Bristol, and welcomed speakers from Bristol Apartheid Free Zone, Stand up to Racism, the National Education Union and refugee charity Borderlands. Meanwhile at Corbyn’s rally, “there were squabbles and four people were evicted”, said Tanya Gold on UnHerd.

Co-founder Sultana had boycotted the first day of the conference in protest against an expulsion of members from the Socialist Workers Party. She described the decision as a “witch-hunt”. Party officials had said that entry was contingent on attendees not being members of other parties.

The left-wing party had aimed to attract around 13,000 people to the event, said the BBC. This was revised down to around 2,500, “which made the cavernous halls of the conference centre feel much emptier”.

Who won between Corbyn and Sultana?

The two co-founders have been at loggerheads since the party was launched in July, but their relationship hit new lows at the conference. “There would have been more chance of Ted Heath and Maggie deciding to be co-leaders of the Conservative Party than of this pair even being in the same room together,” said Stephen Pollard in The Spectator

Leadership disagreements aside, Sultana undoubtedly came out on top, said The New Statesman. Her “fiery remarks” about the exclusion of the Socialist Workers Party members on day one were well supported, and she “appears to have triumphed in every major debate about Your Party’s future except its name”.

But perhaps neither Corbyn nor Sultana emerged as the true leader of the political left, said James Heale in The Spectator. “Zack Polanski is the real winner of the Your Party conference”, as the “acrimonious affair” in Liverpool was on “display for all to see”. Polanski’s Green Party has seen membership rise sharply since he took over as leader in September. The frustrations within Your Party “are likely to only intensify” as it seems “it is Polanski, not Corbyn or Sultana, who is likely to dominate the British left for the near future.”

Will collective leadership work?

Your Party will be run by an executive committee of 11 elected members. This will include a chair, deputy chair and spokesperson to provide “public political leadership”. However, the collective model will exclude MPs from the top roles on the executive committee. Regional elections will take place in February, geared to choose the executive. Until then a “caretaker” committee of members will take on the leadership.

By establishing a collective leadership style, and also allowing members of rival parties to join, Your Party has “paved the way for maximum infighting in the months and years ahead”, said Heale in The Spectator. And it “runs the risk of repelling enthused members, who do not wish to partake in rancour and recriminations”.

Net migration in the UK has fallen to its lowest level since 2021 after the “single largest outflow of people in a century as a proportion of the UK population”.

In the year to June, 693,000 people – 1% of the UK’s population – left the country. This was “the highest proportion of the population to leave the UK since 1923”, said The Times.

Overall, net migration stood at 204,000, down by more than two-thirds on the previous year’s 649,000, according to the Office for National Statistics. The provisional figures show 70,000 more EU nationals left the UK than arrived, while 109,000 more British nationals left than arrived.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood spoke last week of the “unprecedented levels of migration in recent years”. “That will now change,” she said. “In fact, it already has,” said The New York Times, but not in the way Mahmood and the government may want, as the “number of people who claimed asylum in the year to September 2025 reached a record high of 110,051”, said the BBC. That figure is more than half of the net migration total.

What did the commentators say?

The Conservatives are “keen to claim credit” for the “sharp fall” in net migration, said Michael Simmons in The Spectator. They say that stronger visa rules and restrictions on dependents introduced under Rishi Sunak are only now “feeding through” into the data.

Labour, on the other hand, can “claim progress” as these official migration statistics cover almost all of its first year in government. But ministers should “tread carefully”, however. The “underlying picture is far less clear-cut” and there is no evidence yet that the fall in migration can be maintained.

The exodus of young people in particular should “trigger alarm bells about the UK’s demographic conundrum”, said City A.M. Around 91% of British nationals who left the country were of working age, “scuppering” the idea that it was mainly pensioners leaving for Europe. If anything, this suggests that younger people are “ditching the country to boost living standards”.

The numbers themselves aren’t at the forefront of most people’s minds, but the optics of the government’s “handling of illegal migration and related issues” are, said UnHerd. To date, ministers have made “little progress” on delivering tangible results, and “show no sign yet of making any more”.

A mere “promise” to end the use of migrant hotels – such as the Bell Hotel in Epping – will “pay no political dividends” and save no money, if the government resorts to social or privately rented housing. If the government wanted to make a difference, it could change the “state’s legal obligation to house asylum seekers”: no such move has been made.

What next?

We must look at these figures in a wider context, especially if the government is considering applying arbitrary migration targets, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times.

The influx of people entering the UK is not a standalone issue, but an “outgrowth” based on other decisions. Instead of jumping to “targets” – “the kind of thing that states tend to do badly” – answering the questions over housebuilding, university funding, or economic advantages is the way forward. “Trying to work backwards” by reverse-engineering the problem and starting with migrant controls, “is a fool’s errand”.

Small boats will continue to be a thorn in Labour’s side, especially if the UK remains “incapable” of stringent deportation systems, or an Australian method of “offshore processing”, said UnHerd. That being said, if Mahmood avoids another “Boris-wave” of high net migration, or prevents migrants becoming a “permanent burden on the British taxpayer”, then “she will deserve real credit. But if Labour ministers hope that will be enough to neutralise immigration as an electoral issue, they are surely mistaken.”

“Make no mistake, this is a major moment for the government – and quite the twist on the usual cheery breakfast telly,” said Sam Blewett in Politico. With less than a month to go until her Budget announcement, Chancellor Rachel Reeves made a televised speech with the aim of “setting the context” for what is to come on 26 November.

Reeves refused to confirm whether the Labour government would reverse its manifesto pledge not to raise income tax, stoking speculation that her blueprint for balancing the books could come at the cost of public opinion.

What did the commentators say?

The chancellor’s claim that “each of us must do our bit” was the “clearest indication yet that broad-based tax rises are coming”, said James Heale in The Spectator. Her 25-minute address had “echoes of Mrs Thatcher’s famous TINA: There Is No Alternative” speech. The question is whether Reeves “has a solution to stop this vicious cycle from repeating again in another 12 months’ time”.

The prolonged trailing of the sacrifices to be made in the Budget could well be a tactical ploy, said Politico: “setting expectations so low that the budget doesn’t sting as much as people fear”. This “by no means typical” televised speech proves that “senior strategists are trying to handle this make-or-break fiscal statement with the utmost caution”.

Reeves’ expected pledge to prioritise the NHS in the Budget is a “gamble” to leverage national support, said Kate Devlin in The Independent. She is banking on the fact that the public sees the health service “as a kind of religion”, and looking to fulfil the commitment of reducing waiting times – one of the consistent themes of the Starmer government – to curry favour. She hopes that those who are “hit” by reported National Insurance rises “will prefer to be able to see their GP than have some extra money in their pockets”. Whether this will pay off, “time will tell”.

“Households will not be fooled” by Reeves’s tax “wheeze”, said Adam Smith in The Telegraph. Labour is already in a situation that “no amount of communications spin will be able to fix”. The heart of the matter is that, if the rumours are true, “the government will have increased income tax after repeatedly promising not to”. No. 11 will be “kidding themselves” if they believe the public will think otherwise.

What next?

Reeves will claim that Trump’s tariffs, increased defence spending, and a dire fiscal inheritance from the Conservatives, have all affected her decisions, said George Eaton in The New Statesman. This cannot work forever: by next autumn, Labour will have been in office for more than two years and “memories” of their “economic inheritance will be even less fresh than they are today”.

While the “politics of raising tax remain fraught”, another potential pitfall for the Labour government is the “perception of inaction”. Reeves can only gamble that the road she chooses for the country “leads somewhere better”.

In Washington DC last week, Rachel Reeves “started laying the groundwork for a painful Budget”, said Hugo Gye in The i Paper.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund, the Chancellor “adopted a strategy of doom and gloom”, confirming that both tax rises and spending cuts are on the table for 26 November, to help reverse an estimated £22 billion black hole in the public finances. Reeves blamed a likely growth downgrade by the Office for Budget Responsibility on Brexit, and warned that “those with the broadest shoulders should pay their fair share”.

‘Sitting on their assets’

Having already gone after non-doms and private schools, Reeves clearly believes the wealthy can be squeezed a bit more before the pips squeak, said Fraser Nelson in The Times. Problem is, we currently have a tax system “where the top 100 super-taxpayers contribute almost as much as the North Sea oil industry; where the top 0.1% pay more income tax than the entire bottom 50%”. The wealthy are already contributing their fair share – “and the fair shares of many others”.

Actually, in some ways the well-off are criminally “untaxed”, said Vicky Spratt in The i Paper. The UK’s vast property wealth – which has increased by almost £3 trillion in a decade – is hardly touched by the taxman. Homeowners who rode the historic house-price inflation wave through the 2010s have become “incredibly rich”. Reforming property taxes is the obvious answer. What’s wrong with asking them to contribute a small amount of the wealth they attained simply “by sitting on their assets”, when those on lower incomes are struggling to choose whether to “heat their homes, eat or pay rent”?

‘Electoral suicide’

A property tax is one option; Reeves is also reportedly looking at targeting pensions and cash Isas. But even if the Chancellor does choose to soak the better off, it still won’t be enough, said Andrew O’Brien on UnHerd. The Treasury now “needs huge amounts of cash”: the NHS alone has a £37 billion capital shortfall; we need another £17 billion just to fill potholes. It would be quicker and fairer to “stick this all on income tax”, where an extra 4p would raise around £30 billion a year. Unfortunately for Reeves, that would break a manifesto pledge, so it would be “electoral suicide”.

All options are painful, said Chris Blackhurst in The Independent, but the worst situation is the one we have now: a Treasury with a “tin ear” that feeds us a “drip, drip” of threats about November’s Statement – while also claiming to be kickstarting economic growth. In reality, businesses are putting decisions on hold, and the wealthy are eyeing the exits; “Britain is at a standstill”. All of this, and “the Budget is still over a month away”.

Plaid Cymru’s triumph in the Caerphilly Senedd by-election is a “reset for Welsh politics”, said the party’s leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth.

The Welsh nationalists got 47% of the vote in a record turnout of 50%. Reform UK came second on 36% and Labour a distant third with 11%. Here are five things we learned from a historic night in south Wales.

UK politics is evolving 

The result was terrible for the “two big beasts of Westminster politics”, said political editor Chris Mason on the BBC. Labour was “humbled, pummelled, crushed”, while the Tories got just 2%. “Yes, you read that right,” – they “managed just 13% of the vote between them”.

So the “key lesson” from Caerphilly for “every political leader” is that UK politics is “moving at speed, with voter loyalties shifting and atomising in unprecedented ways”, said The Guardian. “Those who cannot adapt will be crushed.”

Bad headlines ‘hampered’ Reform  

Reform UK “threw everything at the campaign”, said Sky News. Nigel Farage “visited three times” and his party was expected to win, but when the result was declared at 2.10am, the party leader was “nowhere to be seen”.

The outcome “represents a clear disappointment for Reform”, said The Guardian, and it’s “possible the party’s chances were hampered” by reports that its former leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, had admitted to taking bribes to make pro-Russia comments in the European Parliament.

In-fighting harmed Labour

Labour “had a horror of a start to this campaign”, said Wales Online. Its council leader “quit”, explaining that he “couldn’t support” either Keir Starmer or the "Johnny-come-lately" by-election candidate, Richard Tunnicliffe.

The Caerphilly “drubbing” could reinforce the “ongoing narrative” that Labour is going to do badly in the full Senedd elections next May. Canvassers “might now think twice” about "whether it is worth their effort” to go door-knocking over the winter.

Reform’s regional obstacles 

Reform coming second with 36% of the vote is a “solid performance for an upstart”, said Mason, but “insurgencies remain insurgent by winning – and they were easily beaten”. It’s “clearly not easy for them to be the first choice ‘none of the above’” alternative to Labour and the Tories when there’s “another party also claiming that mantle”.

So this could continue to be "a challenge for them in Wales, as it is in Scotland with the SNP, in a way that it isn’t in England”.

Labour faces threat from left

Much has been made of the threat to Labour from the right, but “the road to a Labour recovery does not simply lie in winning back voters from Reform”, said polling expert John Curtice in The Times. “The party is losing ground to its left as well as its right.” In Caerphilly it was Plaid who “were able to do most of the damage”.

Welsh Labour is clear where the blame lies for its poor performance. It “remains supportive of and loyal to first minister Eluned Morgan”, said Tom Harris in The Telegraph, but there is “simmering resentment towards Keir Starmer” for the “party’s unpopularity”.

“It has all the makings of a gripping spy novel,” said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Two young men – one a parliamentary researcher, the other a teacher – are accused of passing secrets to China; but amid “swirling political intrigue” the case mysteriously collapses weeks before going to trial.

The government has been forced to deny that it intervened in the case to appease China, after the Crown Prosecution Service accused it of failing to provide the necessary evidence to prosecute both Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry. The two men had been charged under the Official Secrets Act, accused of passing parliamentary information to Beijing between 2021 and 2023. The current government and the last one have blamed each other for failing to officially designate China a threat to national security – without which, it is argued, the case would have been thrown out.

Yesterday, No. 10 released three witness statements from Keir Starmer’s deputy national security adviser outlining the UK’s handling of espionage allegations that led to the case collapsing. These clearly state that China has been carrying out “large scale espionage” against the UK, but stressed the need for a “positive economic relationship” with Beijing.

‘Who knew what?’

“Key questions remain,” said The Telegraph, including “why did Starmer do nothing to prevent the case collapsing?” and “did the Chinese government make any representations to the UK about this case?”

Another “crucial question”, said Tom Peck in his political sketch for The Times, is “who knew China had become a threat and by when?” That matter “took over Prime Minister’s Questions” yesterday despite MPs admitting privately that they “don’t actually understand” the issue.

‘More confidence needed’

“You don’t need to be George Smiley to know that Beijing is doing everything it can to compromise our security,” said Michael Gove in the Daily Mail. Its spies “bribe, bully, honeytrap and eavesdrop” in order to acquire state secrets and intellectual property.

As well as a profound threat, China is also a crucial partner, said Josh Glancy in The Sunday Times. So Labour’s balanced policy makes sense: engage, but “proceed with extreme caution”. What seems to be lacking is “confidence” in our values; there’s “an undue fear of ruffling China’s feathers”. Look at Germany. Its trading relationship with China is three times larger than ours, and yet last month a German national was imprisoned for spying for Beijing, without any trade bust-ups. Engagement is well and good, but with a nation as ruthless as China, “it works best in tandem with strength”.

Keir Starmer has met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Mumbai as the pair attempt to emerge from “the shadow of tariff turmoil” brought forth by the US.

On a trip meant to promote business opportunities between the UK and India – two of the world’s largest economies – Starmer said he is hoping to implement the previously signed trade deal as soon as “humanly possible”.

In July, Starmer and Modi signed a trade agreement in the UK, “sealing a deal to cut tariffs on goods from textiles to whisky and cars, and allow more market access for businesses”, said Reuters. But projections, which predict an increase in trade of more than £25 billion by 2040, are ultimately “a floor, not a ceiling, to the ambition of the deal”. This week’s visit provides opportunities to further that partnership, said Starmer.

What did the commentators say?

“This trip has a big first,” said Sky News. Taking more business leaders along than on any previous such visit, the UK government’s “enthusiasm to take advantage of the signed, though not completed, free trade deal is clear”. Business leaders said that they’ve joined the tour to boost business in India, and also to “raise their profile with the prime minister”.

Overseas markets like India are more important to domestic businesses than ever. But the bosses’ enthusiasm might also be “a response to the nervousness about a £20 billion – £30 billion black hole Chancellor Rachel Reeves will have to fill” in the upcoming Budget.

Even so, “the visit had some awkward undertones”, said Bloomberg. Just before Starmer arrived in India, Modi wished Russian President Vladimir Putin a happy birthday. Starmer, who has been vocal in pressuring Putin to end his invasion of Ukraine, “deflected a question while on the plane to India” about the exchange. “Just for the record, I haven’t sent birthday congratulations to Putin, nor am I going to do so. I don’t suppose that comes as a surprise.”

And despite blossoming trade relations with India, “tensions over migration are expected to linger”. Indian and British businesses had reportedly pushed for more visas for highly skilled workers moving from India to the UK when the two countries were formalising their trade deal over the summer. But Starmer said that “the visa situation hasn’t changed with the free trade agreement”, adding that the visit was more about “business-to-business engagement and investment and jobs and prosperity coming into the United Kingdom”.

What next?

Starmer’s visit to India has already coincided with some developments that promise continued cooperation between the two countries.

British Airways has “announced a third daily flight” between Heathrow and New Delhi starting next year, and it plans to look into further opportunities in India as trade “expands”, said The Hindu. The new flight, which also includes the announcement of a New Delhi-Manchester route operated by India’s IndiGo, is expected to generate tens of millions of pounds in exports and tourism income, as well as 450 new jobs.

Starmer “also used the visit to announce that three Bollywood films will be made in the UK” by major film studio Yash Raj Films starting in 2026, said the BBC. Bringing Bollywood back to the UK after an “eight-year hiatus”, the move is expected to bring thousands of jobs and “pour millions into the economy”.

Plus, the prime minister – having praised India’s digital ID system as a “massive success” – is to look into how the UK can take inspiration for its own implementation of widespread digital IDs, said The Guardian. “Starmer defended the introduction of a similar measure in the UK, saying he believed the rollout of a voluntary system could be expanded to school applications, mortgages and driving licences.”

People who have been granted asylum in the UK will no longer be given automatic settlement and family reunion rights – as part of a government effort to “reduce the pull factor for small boat crossings”.

To “make the system fairer”, Keir Starmer has announced changes to asylum policy that end a refugee’s so-called “golden ticket” rights to bring their family to the UK and earn settled residency status after five years. Automatic family reunification will end, and migrants granted asylum will have to wait 10 years and meet new “contribution-based” conditions before they can apply for indefinite leave to remain.

With Nigel Farage announcing his party’s intention to scrap all indefinite leave to remain, the government’s announcement “marks the latest hardening of Labour’s immigration policy in an attempt to stymie the popularity” of Reform UK, said The Times.

What is the current process?

People who have been granted asylum used automatically to gain the right to petition for their spouse and children to join them in Britain. In early September, the government temporarily suspended applications to this family reunification scheme.

Refugees are also currently given the right to stay in the UK for five years, during which they can study, work and apply for benefits. When the five years are up, they can apply for indefinite leave to remain, which gives them the right to apply for a British passport.

The government has said it wants to “continue to play its role in welcoming genuine refugees” but this current system is “not fit for purpose”. It is therefore making the “route to settlement” longer. “There will be no golden ticket to settling in the UK,” said Starmer. People will have to earn it “by contributing to our country, not by paying a people smuggler to cross the Channel in a boat”.

How will things change?

The suspension of automatic family reunification rights will now become permanent – meaning refugees must meet the same requirements for family reunion as any other migrant.

Refugees will still be “entitled to a package of core protection” but will not be able to apply for indefinite leave to remain until they have been in the country for 10 years. Additionally, there will be new “contribution” requirements for indefinite leave to remain. These include being in work, making National Insurance contributions, not taking benefits, learning English “to a high standard”, having a “spotless” criminal record, and “giving back” to the local community.

Refugee advocates have expressed their concern. “Blocking our chance to settle or to reunite with family members still at risk of harm keeps people like us, and our children, on the outside, never really allowed to feel secure or like we truly belong,” Kolbassia Haoussou, a refugee and a director at the charity Freedom from Torture, told The Guardian. These measures “are taken straight from the populist playbook the government itself has condemned”.

There are also concerns that restricting legal paths to family reunion “only pushes more desperate people into the arms of smugglers” in an effort to reach their loved ones, Jon Featonby, chief policy analyst at The Refugee Council, told the paper.

How many people have arrived in the UK through the family reunification scheme?

Numbers have been rising. Between 2010 and 2020, refugee family reunion consistently accounted for 30% to 40% of the 10,000 to 20,000 people granted asylum-related permission to stay in the UK each year, according to the University of Oxford’s The Migration Observatory. By 2023, that total number had jumped significantly to 63,000, “partly due to family reunion”. In 2024, 19,700 people were issued with a family reunion visa – a “likely knock-on effect” of the government’s efforts to clear the backlog in asylum applications.

Andy Burnham has made no secret of his desire to one day lead the Labour Party. The mayor of Greater Manchester has twice run for the leadership – in 2010 and 2015 – and just two years ago reaffirmed his aspirations for the top job, telling The Telegraph: “If the party thinks well maybe it is your time, I wouldn’t turn away from that.”

That naked ambition “has always made him an anxiety-inducing blot on the landscape for the incumbent leader”, said The Guardian, “but the road to No. 10 is a very difficult one”. Burnham may have a vision for his path to the leadership – “but he doesn’t have complete control of how to make it a reality”.

What did the commentators say?

After a disastrous two weeks, “Starmer’s premiership is on its knees”, said Kitty Donaldson in The i Paper, “with his own internal critics now publicly putting a timeline on how long it can last”. Some are warning he could be ousted after May’s elections.

The “despondent mood among his MPs isn’t limited to his left-wing critics”. Mainstream figures and grassroots Labourites are “questioning whether the chaotic departures of Angela Rayner and Peter Mandelson are fundamental markers of Starmer’s political judgement, his vision for the country, and even his basic competence”.

By contrast, Burnham has been consistently chosen as the next PM in polls of Labour members and his appeal extends to voters who backed Labour in the last general election. Last week, the man dubbed “the King in the North” by supporters launched a new soft-left campaign group, Mainstream, which “many expect to become a Trojan horse for a leadership bid”, said The Telegraph.

Backing calls for wealth taxes, nationalising utility companies and ending the two-child benefit cap, Burnham “would want to lead a government with a strikingly different tone – more sympathetic to dissent, more open to the Liberal Democrats and to the Green Party – a soft-left administration with strong appeal to many Labour members”, that would also be “better at combating Reform”, said The New Statesman’s Andrew Marr.

He has already called for a “reset” at the Labour conference later this month, and No. 10 is “braced for Burnham to pop up in Liverpool as a rallying point for a change of direction”, said Donaldson.

What next?

Under current rules, 20% of the parliamentary party (80 MPs) would be required to challenge Starmer by nominating an alternative candidate, “and it’s far from agreed who that could be”, said Politico.

Burnham faces an even greater obstacle than most candidates as he would first need to fight and win a parliamentary seat in order to stand in any future leadership race. One obvious option would be Gorton and Denton in south Manchester, where suspended Labour MP Andrew Gwynne has applied to retire on medical grounds. But that seat, along with many in and around Manchester, is vulnerable to Reform, according to the latest forecast from Election Maps UK.

“The harsh reality is that there is no realistic route for him to become leader” in the near future and attempting to do so could “hand Farage a huge opportunity in a genuine showdown”, said The Independent. “Even if the Labour Party needs saving, trying to bring back Andy Burnham would be a gamble too far.”

“In the end Angela Rayner had to go,” said Steven Swinford in The Times. Her tax affairs and her living arrangements were complicated, but the case turned on a point that was “remarkably simple”. She had, she admitted, underpaid £40,000 in stamp duty by wrongly claiming that her new £800,000 flat in Hove was her only home. And though she’d tried to blame her failure to pay the second-home surcharge on bad legal advice, that defence started to unravel when the conveyancing firm she had used told the press that they were being scapegoated, and that they had not given her any advice on her tax position – which was not straightforward.

‘Catnip’ to voters

Rayner, it transpired, had sold her 25% stake in her former marital home, in her Ashton-under-Lyne constituency, to a trust she and her ex-husband had set up for their severely disabled son, with the funds that he’d got from a settlement with the NHS in 2020. They’d wanted, she said, to safeguard their son’s future in the house, which had been adapted to cater for his needs. She seems to have thought that, as a result of this sale, she no longer had a legal interest in the property. But Sir Laurie Magnus, the Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards, found that she had been twice advised to get expert advice to clarify this, but had not done so. As a result, he concluded that she had breached the ministerial code. Having defended her for days, Keir Starmer had little choice but to accept Rayner’s resignation as housing minister and deputy PM.

How her enemies on the right must be crowing, said Ros Wynne Jones in the Daily Mirror. Ever since Rayner arrived at Downing Street, wearing a spearmint trouser suit from Me+Em, they’d been gunning for her. Her suit, we were told, was “ghastly” – “too bright, too baggy and too expensive for a working-class woman”. Having attacked her in 2022 for going to Glyndebourne (“above her station”), they attacked her again when she went to a rave in Ibiza. Newspapers pored over her affairs, in the hopes of finding that she’d dodged taxes during the sale of her council house in Stockport (she was vindicated); and smeared her as “Three Pads” when it emerged that she had moved to Hove – though for normal intents and purposes, that flat was the only home she owned. The third “pad”, a flat in London, came with the job, and she has now lost it. It reeked of classism, but it was also tactical: as one of the few working-class people on the Labour benches, and charismatic and relatable to boot, Rayner was “catnip” to voters, and a huge asset to the Government. She had to be brought down.

A major blow to Starmer

Yes, her backstory resonated with many, said George Chesterton in The Daily Telegraph: she grew up on a council estate in Stockport, where she cared for her bipolar mother. She fell pregnant at 16, left school with no qualifications, having been told she’d “never amount to anything”, and trained as a care worker, before becoming a union rep. That she should have risen, from this background, to deputy PM is impressive; but what matters is not how ministers reach high office, it’s what they do when they get there. Rayner has long courted controversy (she had to apologise for referring to Tories as “scum”); she is not viewed as a “policy heavyweight” (her department has made little headway towards its target of 1.5 million new homes); she has seemed overfond of expensive freebies; and her vote share was reduced at the last election. Now we discover that she is also careless with her taxes.

Her middle-class supporters like to refer to her as a working-class hero, said Paul Burke in The Spectator, but her own “ilk” see her as a “chancer” – a woman who claims not to be interested in money while feathering her nest, who calls for higher taxes while not paying her own. She may feel as if she has been hounded by the press, but if it hadn’t been for journalists asking questions, she’d never have paid the tax, said John Rentoul in The Independent. She seems to have made a genuine mistake, and no doubt there are many right-wing politicians who deliberately avoid taxes – but Labour ministers always pay a heavier price for their financial transgressions because they are so “sanctimonious” about such matters. Rayner herself was brutal in her denunciations of Tory ministers who seemed to have not paid their taxes. Now, to many, she looks no better than her Conservative predecessors.

This saga is a major blow to Starmer, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. It has not only undermined public trust in his Government, it has deprived him of a minister who served a vital function in it. Much like John Prescott did for Tony Blair, Rayner acted as a bridge between the PM and the Labour Left. She embodied Labour’s promise of social mobility; and she conveyed that rare thing in politics: authenticity. Rayner was able to connect with voters like few others. Her departure leaves a very big gap.

Candidates in Labour's deputy leadership race face a frantic few days to secure enough support to make it on to the final ballot sent out to party members.

In a truncated contest to replace Angela Rayner, MPs have until 5pm on Thursday to get the support of 20% of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) – that is 80 Labour MPs. They also need the backing of three affiliates, of which two must be affiliated trade unions or 5% of constituency Labour parties.

"Such a high bar will certainly be difficult for those on the left of the party to meet," said The New Statesman, with left-wing MP Richard Burgon describing the proposed timetable as "the mother of all stitch-ups".

Those who meet the threshold will then go forward to a preferential vote of Labour members, with the winner announced on 25 October.

Many expect the contest to come down to a favoured candidate of the government versus someone from the soft left who has the support of backbenchers and unions. There is general consensus that whoever it is, they cannot be an MP from London and should probably be a woman – to serve as a counterweight to Keir Starmer and his new deputy PM, David Lammy.

So who is expected to throw their hat into the ring?

Emily Thornberry

The chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee was quickest out of the gate to canvass potential support among MPs and has emerged as an "early frontrunner", said The Telegraph. Disappointed to have missed out on a cabinet post despite a long history on the shadow front benches, she has "established a reputation as a fiery Labour grandee", criticising the PM's position on the war in Gaza. One MP said she was the "yin to Starmer's yang", and "someone who has that charisma and communication if we are going to turn those polls around". But like another rising star, Tooting MP Rosena Allin-Khan, Thornberry has one big problem. Both represent London constituencies, "putting them at a disadvantage" as the "consensus grows" that Labour's new number two should come from outside the capital, said Kitty Donaldson in The I Paper.

Lucy Powell

The former Commons leader, who was sacked in Friday's reshuffle, would be "an interesting candidate", said Politico, in part "because she is (or was until Starmer fired her last week) close to the leadership – but that same sacking means she can also present herself to the membership as no No. 10 patsy". She ticks the requisite boxes in that she is a woman and from the north of England, and has already received the backing of Andy Burnham, the influential mayor of Manchester. Powell, the Manchester Central MP, has also "emerged as the front-runner among colleagues in the PLP", said Donaldson.

Bridget Phillipson

The education secretary "would be seen as a de facto Downing Street choice, potentially pitting her against Thornberry, who would position herself as a voice for backbenchers", said The Guardian. Conveniently, the Sunderland MP is due to address the TUC Congress in Brighton later today, where she is expected to draw on her personal story "steeped in the proud working-class tradition of learning, of self-improvement" that took her "from a tough street of council houses to the cabinet", said Politico. Phillipson "is a rare member of Starmer's top table who might get a decent amount of support from the unions". She is probably the closest fit to Rayner.

Alison McGovern

The former employment minister, who was moved to the housing and communities department in Friday’s reshuffle, "would also be seen as acceptable to Downing Street", said The Guardian. One union ally told Politico that McGovern, "a big fan of Gordon Brown, has the potential to be a compromise candidate for No. 10 backing: she's a minister but she doesn't have the toxic baggage".

Anneliese Dodds

The former development minister "bolstered her integrity credentials inside the party" after resigning "over principles and not in disgrace after the international aid budget was cut", said Sky News. Starmer's first shadow chancellor, she also has "a forensic knowledge of the internal workings of the Labour Party and, as a former women and equalities minister, has broad appeal within the party". But while well respected, "some MPs may want someone more brash", more in the mould of Rayner, said Politico.

Keir Starmer's year-two reset could not have got off to a worse start after the resignation of his deputy Angela Rayner plunged the government into chaos.

In a bid to try to turn crisis into opportunity, the prime minister has carried out a wide-ranging cabinet reshuffle, signalling he intends to adopt a much harder line on key issues such as immigration and welfare. Hailed by some, criticised by others, the shift represents a "great Rightwards gamble", said The Telegraph.

What did the commentators say?

After the government's "most disastrous week in office, one thing above all is clear", said The Sun: "Keir Starmer has a massive credibility problem."

The PM must "act urgently to stop the rot" in three main areas. First, Shabana Mahmood, the new home secretary, needs enhanced powers to stop migrants illegally crossing the Channel. Second, the PM must resist the urge to raise taxes in November's Budget and "instead force through massive cuts to our obscene £300 billion welfare bill". Lastly, he should scrap the government's "unachievable, unrealistic and unaffordable" net zero targets.

Immigration is "fast becoming Britain's most combustible issue", said Bloomberg. Only by adopting a "more responsive agenda" will Labour be able "to respond to growing public frustration" and halt the Reform UK surge. Starmer needs to "acknowledge legitimate public worries; make a robust economic case for managed levels of legal immigration; and offer credible reforms to secure the border and bolster public services".

The appointment of Mahmood is "a clear attempt to address these problems, signalling a shift to the Right in both policy and rhetoric", said The Telegraph. She is on record as criticising Britain's "maximalist" approach to the European Convention on Human Rights and is believed to support the idea of using disused military barracks to house those waiting for their asylum claims to be processed – the latter being "strikingly similar to Reform's policy of custom-built detention centres".

For progressives, though, this lurch to the right on immigration and welfare "isn't the answer to a haemorrhaging of hope, trust and electoral support", said The Mirror's associate editor Kevin Maguire. Instead, the PM should focus his efforts on "funding a fairer country". "Security at work, fatter wage packets, a healthy NHS, lifting kids out of poverty" – these are the "prizes that win Labour hearts, minds and, of course, votes".

What next?

With many Labour MPs already "deeply anxious" about the direction of the reshuffle, No. 10 is "braced for a deputy leadership contest in which candidates publicly criticise Starmer's first year in government", said The Guardian.

In a taste of what is to come, one potential contender, Emily Thornberry, said that "domestically, things just don't seem to be working". She warned that further "mistakes" from the PM could lead to Labour having to "hand our country to Farage".

The fate of the workers' rights bill currently before Parliament will provide a good indication of Labour's new direction of travel. Overseen and pushed by Rayner, many on the left fear her departure could lead to it being watered down or scrapped altogether under the direction of key Starmer ally Pat McFadden, now in charge at the Department for Work and Pensions.

Justin Madders, who was removed from his post as employment minister in the reshuffle, warned on Sunday that it "would be really, really foolish for the government to row back on key manifesto commitments that are popular with the public and will show what a positive difference a Labour government can make".

If Labour does change tack on employment rights, "Starmer would sign the government's death warrant", said Maguire.

John Prescott was famously nicknamed "Two Jags" because of his love of the luxury motor car – but his tastes were "relatively modest" in comparison with those of the present Deputy Prime Minister, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail.

Angela Rayner, who is also Secretary of State for Housing, is amassing a veritable "property empire", having just purchased an £800,000 seafront flat in trendy Hove. Combine that with Rayner's "handsome, four-bedroom £650,000 detached house" in her constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne, and the three-bedroom, grace-and-favour ministerial apartment that she gets to use at Admiralty House on Whitehall, and the Deputy PM now has "Three Pads" and a "stately" ten bedrooms at her disposal. Not bad for an avowed socialist whose government is "doing its damnedest to make life harder for ordinary homeowners".

There's nothing wrong, of course, with a working-class woman bettering herself, said the Daily Mail. In fact, it is "admirable": Rayner has done "astonishingly well for someone who left school aged 16, pregnant and without qualifications". But the hypocrisy is galling. Labour has demonised second-home owners, punishing many with an extra 100% council tax charge. Rayner's own department argues that they damage communities and price local families out of the market – yet here she is, "expanding her property portfolio".

So Rayner has bought a flat, said Ben Kentish in The i Paper. And now, like at least a quarter of MPs, she owns a grand total of two properties. As real estate moguls go, "she is hardly Donald Trump". Strange that her Hove flat has received so much more hostile coverage than, say, the actual property empire owned by the Tory MP Jeremy Hunt (he has seven buy-to-let properties in Southampton; plus properties in Pimlico, Surrey and Italy). The whole thing "reeks" of classism.

"This is one of those stories that seems to want to be a scandal", but doesn't quite manage it, said Sam Leith in The Spectator. Rayner has never said that she is against second-home ownership. She has vocally supported the double council tax on such homes – which, by the way, was brought in by the last Tory government – believing it will help combat inequality in housing. And she's happy to pay the double tax on the Hove flat. When a person does something they consider to be in the public interest but which personally disadvantages them, we don't generally call it hypocrisy. On the contrary, "we usually hold this to be rather a noble thing".

In the midst of a leadership election, the Green Party is facing an ideological reckoning.

Voting opened for members on 1 August, pitting current co-leader Adrian Ramsay and his new running mate Ellie Chowns against "insurgent candidate" Zack Polanski, said Channel 4 News. Polanski, the "gay, Jewish, London Assembly member from Manchester", is "standing on an eco-populist platform, promising to out-Farage Nigel Farage". But Ramsay and Chowns are worried his "new direction" will narrow the appeal of the Greens to just the progressive left.

What did the commentators say?

With Labour moving "rightward" to tackle the "ongoing threat" of Reform UK, the government is "more exposed on its left flank", said Megan Kenyon in The New Statesman. In this "moment of flux" for British politics, the Greens could succeed – but new pressures are emerging, most notably Jeremy Corbyn's yet-to-be-named party.

The former Labour leader is a "bloody nightmare for the Greens", Robert Ford, political science professor at the University of Manchester, told Politico. Some "see room for a pact", but not everyone is convinced – namely Ramsay, Chowns and Corbyn himself, who has suggested the Greens are "not left-wing enough" for an alliance.

Chowns has said it's crucial for the Green Party to protect its "distinctive identity" and keep the environment "front and centre", while trying to connect with a "wide range of voters". But Polanski has said he's "open to working with anyone who's up for challenging the far-right threat of Reform" as well as the "unpopular Labour government".

Worries about Corbyn's new party "could be a boost" for Ramsay and Chowns' campaign over Polanski’s, said The Economist, by "reinforcing the argument that the Greens should focus on being distinctively environmentalist".

What next?

Recent polls show Labour losing nearly as many supporters to the Greens as to Reform, but whether they can "turn the opportunity into political power remains to be seen", said The Economist. "Their choice of leader will be an indicator of how the eco warriors will approach the battle."

"The tensions are already on show," said Peter Franklin on UnHerd. During a "deeply awkward" LBC interview, Ramsay was repeatedly asked if he likes Polanksi. He eventually said he does, "but I've seen happier performances in a hostage video". It's an "excruciating dilemma" for the Greens. "The losers don't just stand to lose a leadership election, but the party they once believed in."

Nearly a year after the Southport riots, tensions are rising again as violent protests followed the alleged sexual assault of a teenager in Essex.

More than 100 people gathered on Sunday evening outside The Bell Hotel in Epping, which is believed to house asylum seekers. The protests began on Thursday, peacefully at first, after a 41-year-old asylum seeker from Ethiopia, Hadush Kebatu, was charged with three counts of sexual assault, including allegedly attempting to kiss a 14-year-old girl. He denied all the charges when he appeared at Chelmsford Magistrates' Court on Thursday.

Protesters chanted "Save our kids" and the demonstration descended into what police later called "mindless thuggery". Six people were arrested and eight police officers were injured.

"We are going to have a summer of riots," a "parliamentary veteran" told Newsnight's Nicholas Watt. "You can just feel it. It is a tinderbox. My constituents feel they are losing control."

What did the commentators say?

The scenes in Epping were "almost a perfect, and chilling, echo" of last year's Southport riots, where far-right agitators stoked unrest after 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana murdered three children and injured 10 more, said Sharan Dhaliwal in Metro. "Last year, living in Hounslow – a heavily immigrant borough – I was terrified" as reports of rioting came "flooding in" on social media. Now, many are "living in fear again".

Sara Khan, a former government adviser, warned that she "didn't doubt" there could be more unrest this summer, saying lessons hadn't been learned from the Southport riots. "I mean I think it's a really good time to ask the government: what have you been doing post-Southport?" she told ITV. "What are you putting in place to make sure that we don't see a repeat of what we saw last summer?"

A government-commissioned report published in March 2024, authored by Khan, found that Whitehall is unprepared for rising threats to social cohesion. The report warned that extremists are exploiting local tensions, disinformation is spreading rapidly online, and worsening poverty is "feeding anger and fuelling division".

Many of the reports on this subject suggest that "much of the polarisation around immigration and asylum could be solved by sanitising the conversation", said Rakib Ehsan on UnHerd, as if "the situation would be improved if there were greater opportunities for forms of 'civic participation' which could cultivate a 'shared sense of belonging' between Britons and foreign newcomers."

But "only fundamental reform of the UK's lax immigration regime and dysfunctional asylum system will improve social cohesion", he said.

The ongoing small boats crisis in the Channel – "made up of predominantly young male migrants from countries with vastly different cultural norms" – is "placing tremendous strain on social cohesion". And even the best community projects "would struggle to compensate for treating some of the most deprived parts of the country as dumping grounds" for asylum seekers.

And while "parts of the press" label the protesters as far-right, many appear to be "ordinary locals who are simply fed up with being ignored by the political class", said Laurie Wastell in The Spectator. "We're good, local, taxpaying people," said one protester, a mother-of-three, as she made a speech on a van draped with St George's crosses. She isn't worried about being smeared: "if she's 'far-right' for standing up for schoolgirls' safety, she says, 'then so be it'".

What next?

Tensions in Epping remain high and there are fears the situation could be "further inflamed" next weekend, if the far-right activist Tommy Robinson "makes good on a promise to show up with thousands of supporters", said The Guardian.

A public inquiry is to examine the events surrounding the so-called "Battle of Orgreave" – where over 100 striking miners and police were injured in violent clashes and, after which, criminal charges against 95 miners were dropped amid allegations of police falsifying evidence.

Still one of the most contentious episodes in modern British history, what happened in June 1984 "cast a shadow over communities in Yorkshire and other mining areas", said Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. "The violent scenes and subsequent prosecutions raised concerns that have been left unanswered for decades."

What happened?

On the morning of 18 June 1984, about three months into a major strike over coalpit closures, 8,000 striking miners assembled for a mass picket at the Orgreave coking plant near Sheffield. They were met by 6,000 police officers from forces nationwide, led by South Yorkshire Police.

Things quickly turned violent. Miners threw stones and the police charged on horseback and hit miners with truncheons. Police snatch squads used batons and short shields – the "first time they had ever been used on the UK mainland", said The Guardian – and many miners were arrested.

"It wasn't frightening to start off with," Chris Skidmore, an "Orgreave veteran" turned campaigner told Sky News, "but then what I noticed was the amount of police officers who had no identification numbers on. It all felt planned."

"And it wasn't just one truncheon," said his fellow former miner and campaigner Carl Parkinson. "There were about 30, or 40. And it was simultaneous, like it was orchestrated."

Despite accusations of policy brutality and use of excessive force, it was the miners who were blamed for the violence, with then prime minister Margaret Thatcher talking of "mob rule". Charges of rioting and unlawful assembly were brought against 95 of the miners – but, the following year, all charges were dropped after police evidence was repeatedly discredited.

Why is this being revisited now?

South Yorkshire Police paid out more than £400,000 in compensation to some accused miners and their families in 1990, without any admission of wrongdoing. No police officer was disciplined and the events of the day, and its aftermath, were never officially scrutinised.

The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign was formed in 2012 by ex-miners and trade unionists to expose "police violence, lies and cover-ups" surrounding the events of 18 June.

Its aim is to discover who was responsible for "organising and ordering the deployment of multiple police forces, including mounted police armed with truncheons, shields and dogs, against striking miners". It called for a public inquiry to find out how it was decided that "striking miners should be attacked and arrested at Orgreave and charged with riot and unlawful assembly, which carried heavy prison sentences". It's also demanded to know why key documents "and other evidence had been destroyed or embargoed until 2066 and 2071".

Responding to pressure from the campaigners, the government has announced that the inquiry – which is to be chaired by the Bishop of Sheffield, Pete Wilcox – will be a statutory one, meaning witnesses will be compelled to give evidence.

What has the reaction to the inquiry been?

South Yorkshire mayor, Oliver Coppard said the announcement of the public inquiry was a "landmark moment for justice and accountability. We owe it to the miners, their families, and our communities to ensure that the events of Orgreave are finally understood."

John Dunn, from the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, said he hoped the inquiry will get to the truth of what happened. "How did 6,000 police know to be waiting in full riot gear and why were they given the instructions to run rampant through innocent people?"

But police in South Yorkshire have reacted less optimistically. "This will be long and protracted," said South Yorkshire Police Federation chair Steve Kent. "And the associated costs of this inquiry will lead to there being even less money in the policing purse, which will only have a negative impact on the public of South Yorkshire."

One and a half million 16 and 17-year-olds will be eligible to vote at the next general election, in the biggest shake-up of UK electoral laws in a generation.

Announcing the plans last week, deputy PM Angela Rayner said the changes were about strengthening democracy, not "trying to rig votes for a particular party". And, although many may assume the move will boost Labour's electoral chances, the reality may not be as clear-cut as that.

What did the commentators say?

"There isn't enough polling of this age group to say with confidence how they would vote," said Becky Morton, political reporter for the BBC. But "there's no reason to think 16 and 17-year-olds would break away from the pattern of young people leaning to the left". The latest YouGov poll suggests that more than half of 18 to 24-year-olds would vote either for Labour or the Green Party if a general election were held tomorrow, with just 9% saying they'd vote for the Conservatives, and 8% for Reform UK.

And yet "there is a chance that the move could backfire for Keir Starmer if the Greens or a new hard-Left political party co-led by Jeremy Corbyn picked up momentum", said Ben Riley-Smith in The Telegraph.

The 16 and 17-year olds who will be eligible to vote in the next general election are just 13 or 14 today, which could be an unexpected boon to Reform UK. The party "is reaching increasing numbers of young people on social media", largely because of Nigel Farage's big presence on TikTok, said the BBC's Morton. "It's not clear if this would translate into votes but the party is polling reasonably well" with today's young men – although not with young women.

The "big losers" from expanding the franchise "look like being the Conservatives and also the Lib Dems", said Ross Clark in The Spectator. The Lib Dems "used to cultivate young votes" through promises "to legalise dope and the like. But they no longer seem to be cutting through; they have become a party of the middle-aged and middle-class."

Handing 16 and 17-year-olds the vote has "significant electoral implications", said Sky News election analyst Will Jennings, but "the consequences may be overstated". Young people "turn out to vote in far lesser numbers than older age groups". In recent elections, the number of over-65s who voted has been approximately 15-20% greater than the number of those aged 18-25.

So, although the electorate will have a "slightly more left-leaning demographic" at the next election, "older voters will continue to be dominant".

What next?

Lowering the voting age "could increase turnout over time", but that "won't happen immediately", Dr James Griffiths, from the British Election Study, told Channel 4 News. The "main argument" for giving 16-year-olds the vote is that it "helps build the habit of voting" at at early age.

This has proved the case in Scotland, where 16 and 17-year-olds can already vote in council elections and elections for the Scottish Parliament. Research, based on the Scottish example and reported in The Times, found that "people who take part in their first election aged 16 or 17 are more likely to turn out to vote in future elections than those who first voted at the age of 18".

"The democratic effect turned out to be entirely positive," Ruth Davidson, former leader of the Scottish Tories, told the paper.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves is to announce the biggest mortgage shake-up in a decade as part of financial regulation reforms aimed at boosting growth and supporting more first-time buyers.

In her Mansion House speech, Reeves will make permanent an insurance scheme that encourages lenders to offer potentially riskier, high loan-to-value mortgages, implementing a key pledge in last year's election campaign.

According to the Bank of England, the reforms would mean up to 36,000 additional mortgages being given to first-time buyers over the first year, with loans of more than 4.5 times a buyer’s income. It follows BoE recommendations that some banks and building societies offer more high loan-to-income mortgages.

Britain's biggest building society, Nationwide, announced last week that it is aiming to increase its high loan-to-income lending limit. The changes mean that from Wednesday, eligible first-time buyers with a salary of £30,000 can apply for a mortgage (this is down from £35,000), and joint applicants with a £50,000 combined salary (down from £55,000) will be able to apply.

What did the commentators say?

While Reeves' plans "promise to bolster homeownership", regulators warn they are "in direct contrast" with banks' pledges to help borrowers manage repayments, said The Telegraph. Nikhil Rathi, chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority, said in January that "things are going to go wrong" if regulation is relaxed, since "not everybody is going to play completely by the rulebook", risking more repossessions.

Reeves may be wanting to revive the "go-go spirit of the 1980s" with "'Big Bang' style deregulation", but the shake-up "is doomed to fail", said Matthew Lynn in The Spectator. "The main reason why people can't afford homes is that we don’t build nearly enough of them, and prices are too high, not that the banks are not allowed to lend potential purchasers enough cash." Easing lending rules will only "stoke a housing bubble". And "do we really need another 2008 financial crisis?"

Reeves' mortgage reforms, and other announcements likely to be included in her speech this evening are a "spin of the financial services roulette wheel", said The Independent, "largely prompted by the fact that she is running out of options".

Her reforms feel like a return to the pre-2008 model, the result of which was that "the deregulated financial services industry took several risks too many, and the economy was plunged into crisis, taking whole banks with it".

We are not quite repeating the mistakes of the 2000s, when people could "literally self-certify their income". But Reeves is "nodding back in that direction".

The greater worry for Reeves is that if her "bonfire of red tape does not produce the increase to the nation's wealth that she needs", then she may not "have any more dice to throw". And that could mean the prime minister "ends up looking for someone else to do the job".

What next?

Ahead of tonight's Mansion House address, Reeves unveiled other financial reforms during a visit to Leeds. These included cutting "unnecessary costs" tied to senior banker accountability rules and launching a campaign to encourage consumers to invest savings in stocks. The government will also review post-2008 ring-fencing rules that protect consumer deposits from banks' riskier activities.

Meanwhile, the Financial Ombudsman Service's independence will be reduced, and the rate of interest and total compensation banks must pay to wronged customers will fall.

"To launch a political party is quite something," said Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail. "To bungle the launch of one," though, requires a special type of incompetence. This was on full display last week when firebrand Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana announced she was quitting Labour to co-lead a new left-wing party with Jeremy Corbyn - only for the whole project to collapse into farce within moments of its unveiling.

Sultana had proudly declared the (as yet unnamed) Leftist breakaway movement on X, saying that at the next election, voters would face a choice between "socialism or barbarism". Problem is, she appears to have "jumped the gun". "Comrade Corbyn" was reportedly blindsided by her post and furious; he refused to confirm he would be co-leading the party, only going so far as to say that a "real alternative" to Labour was coming. The chaos was an "absolute gift" to Keir Starmer, said Zoë Grünewald in The i Paper. Rocked by the biggest rebellion of his career over welfare reform, the PM should have been left "on the ropes" by the prospect of a credible left-wing alternative. Instead, it was his challengers who looked "confused and divided".

It wasn't the smoothest of debuts, said Peter Franklin on UnHerd, and the turbulence may continue. It has been reported that Corbyn and Sultana want their alliance to be based on opposition to the "genocide in Gaza" and on the cost of living. That will mean rallying support from among secular progressive Leftists and Muslim voters - which won't be easy. These factions "agree on foreign policy and largely on economics", but they're "worlds apart on social issues such as abortion".

But if the left-wingers do get their act together, said Andrew Grice in The Independent, it could spell catastrophe for Starmer. A Corbyn-led party would attract at least 10% of the vote, according to More in Common - more than enough to unseat scores of Labour MPs. Cabinet big-hitters such as Wes Streeting and Jess Phillips, whose constituencies have large Muslim populations, and who only just staved off challenges from "Gaza independents" at the last election, would very likely lose their seats if Corbyn's alliance comes to fruition. The Greens may well also be losers here - unless they form a pact with the left-wingers.

It seems the death of the Labour Left was exaggerated, said Aletha Adu in The Guardian. A year ago, riding high on electoral victory and having suspended Corbyn and removed the whip from Sultana, Starmer's team gloated that they'd buried the Left. But if the welfare rebellion and this alliance are anything to go by, it is "very much alive".

After the government was forced into a further, last-minute climb-down on its welfare reform bill, questions are now being asked about how the Treasury will balance the books.

The extra expense is expected to be in the range of £2.5 billion and could mean "tax rises in this autumn's budget are inevitable", said Chris Mason at the BBC, while the Chancellor Rachel Reeves is "being questioned by Labour figures at all levels" about where the money will come from.

What did the commentators say?

Though the bill eventually passed through Parliament, the debacle showed the government is "transparently not in control of events" and the "implications" of the concessions are "head-spinning", said the BBC. Tax rises look likely, and potential changes to policies like the two-child benefit cap will "no longer be possible".

That lack of control in trying to make billions of savings ended as it did in the government's "attempt to cut the winter fuel allowance", with it "spending slightly more than if it had done nothing at all", said Will Dunn in The New Statesman.

It leaves the chancellor in a "deeply frustrating position", not least because she is cornered by her own "fiscal rules" and the promise "not to raise any of the three biggest revenue-raising taxes". Perhaps now is the "time to be bold" for Reeves; "tweaks to the system" are not likely to solve Britain's problems, but an "overhauled" tax system might.

Bending the fiscal rules would mean softening "her self-proclaimed 'iron chancellor' image", but she has already "declined to explicitly rule out amending the rules", said George Parker and Sam Fleming in the Financial Times. A change, however, could "damage the chancellor's credibility with investors and put her job on the line", particularly given her already "mounting fiscal and political woes".

Reeves "could yet strike lucky", and "growth could bounce back" to rapidly ease the pressure, said Heather Stewart in The Guardian. However, the current fiscal outlook means "she would have to proceed with caution" to "allow herself more leeway", and the Treasury "surely" must now be "poring over a menu of potential tax rises" to announce in the autumn budget.

Higher taxes would not be opposed by many left-wing Labour MPs, and the successful rebellion against the welfare bill means they "scent blood in the water", said Ben Riley-Smith in The Telegraph.

The "worsening economic forecasts" and the "eroded" authority at the top of government will be where the rebels "press their advantage", with almost certainly calls for "new wealth taxes" to help balance the books.

What next?

Labour entered government determined to present "stability and strength" in its handling of the economy, but so far its "tax and spending decisions" have turned into a "grim spectator sport", said Stewart. The Treasury now has "unenviable tasks" ahead of it before the autumn, including working on a "possible package of tax increases" and hoping the Office for Budget Responsibility's forecast will not "downgrade its expectations of productivity" as much as is predicted.

There are now two choices facing the government: "muddle through" with "compromises" until facing "disaster at the next election", or "try to make history" with bold plans, said Dunn. But while it's easy to "present such plans", actually "getting it past the party and the public is very different".

Tonight's expected rebellion by backbench Labour MPs could be the first of many as Keir Starmer struggles to keep control of his party in power.

The government was forced into a U-turn on the welfare bill last week and offered a number of concessions, but No. 10 still fears it could have a major rebellion on its hands as many MPs are saying the changes do not go far enough.

Starmer and his No. 10 operation are caught in a perfect storm. A large number of marginal seats, better organised backbench operations and a desire to be seen to be representing their constituents means MPs are becoming harder to control.

What did the commentators say?

"Attempting to defuse a backbench rebellion is not something that's meant to happen, one year into government, with a working majority of 165," said the BBC's political editor Chris Mason.

There is speculation that as many as 40 to 50 Labour MPs could rebel, but "things remain fluid". Given the size of the Starmer's majority, around 80 MPs would need to vote against the government to defeat the bill, with a key factor potentially being how many choose to abstain from the Commons vote this evening.

This latest backbench campaign comes just weeks after another "embarrassing climbdown" over means testing the winter fuel allowance, said the Institute for Government. These U-turns have set a "dangerous precedent" for Starmer's government so early in its first term – and this challenge from his MPs is "unlikely to be the last" he faces.

That's because backbenchers these days are "less inclined to be loyal to party leadership". Many MPs are "keener now to be seen to be representing the concerns of the constituents (who are jamming their inboxes with worries about losing their winter fuel subsidy or PIPs) than to help Rachel Reeves balance the books". And the significant rise in the number of marginal seats at the last election also means the incentive to prioritise their constituents is "even stronger for MPs who feel insecure about their chances of holding their seat at the next election".

Today’s backbenchers are also very well organised, having learnt from the likes of the European Research Group. They also benefit from having modern tools such as WhatsApp to help them. It means that "even a substantial majority is no longer a guarantee that a government can get its business through if its own backbenchers are opposed and have worked out how to work together".

Rebellions are "rarely a one-time thing", said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. Indeed, the data shows that rebelling "gets easier with practice". Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart, from the University of Nottingham, analysed rebellions in the 2001 parliament under Tony Blair "and found a worrying trend of MPs who had previously been obedient getting a taste for revolt". And "once Theresa May had lost one vote on Brexit", she subsequently "suffered 10 defeats on Brexit votes in nine months".

Yet there is "nothing inherently politically significant about large backbench rebellions", said Cowley in The Times. "How many people can remember the details of the largest backbench revolt suffered by John Major?" Or James Callaghan? Or Gordon Brown? It is not the size of the rebellion that should cause concern, but whether the issue "alienates significant elements" of the party, and whether the issue is "one which is central to government activity, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future".

What next?

Ministers say they have offered the rebels "everything possible to back down" in the hope they will avoid defeat in the Commons vote, said The Times.

Starmer could now remove the whip from "the sizeable group of backbenchers still intent on voting against the government". Or he could suffer a "further blow to his authority, which has already been severely undermined by the row".

And with the PM now looking "politically weakened", he could face yet another rebellion as MPs demand he "ditches the hated family farms tax", said The Express.

Keir Starmer could be facing the first serious challenge to his authority, after more than 100 of his own MPs have signalled support for an amendment that would effectively sink his government's welfare-reform bill.

Thirteen Labour committee chairs have tabled what's known as a "reasoned amendment" to the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill, calling for a pause in reforms that would make welfare savings of £5 billion a year by tightening the rules around disability benefits. So far, 108 Labour MPs – enough to overturn Starmer's majority – have signed the amendment, which would, if voted through next week, halt the passage of the entire bill through the House of Commons.

Why are so many Labour MPs rebelling?

The recent partial rowback on winter-fuel payments was seen by Labour backbenchers "as a sign that the government is listening to their concerns", said LabourList. But many are far "more concerned" about the proposed eligibility restrictions to personal independence payments (PIPs) for those with disabilities, and the effect they could have on their constituents – and their party's election prospects.

Dissent among backbenchers has been growing since the plans were first announced earlier this year. Last week, The Guardian reported signs of a swelling rebellion against the reforms and, on Thursday, Lewisham MP and government whip Vicky Foxcroft resigned her frontbench post in protest.

Things then "came to a head" on Monday evening in a "fiery meeting" between the Parliamentary Labour Party and Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall, said The Independent. Several MPs are apparently "privately claiming it could end up with Sir Keir being forced out as leader".

What do the rebels want?

Rebels have "coalesced around two points", said PoliticsHome: "a full impact assessment" of the PIP cuts, and "movement" on the tightening up of the scoring system used to evaluate whether claimants qualify for PIP support or not.

The problem for many Labour MPs runs deeper, however. There's confusion and anger at the government's seeming "all pain, no gain" approach to balancing the books, choosing to spend "political capital" in places that cause "maximum pain" but "generates the least return", said The Economist.

The proposed £5 billion cut to welfare benefits are "deep enough to upset a base which sees any reduction in disability benefit as a sin" yet "nowhere near enough to placate bearish investors who see welfare spending going up for ever".

What will happen?

Cabinet Office secretary Pat McFadden told BBC Breakfast today that the government would "keep talking to people between now and the vote", but that "there is no escaping the need for reform of the welfare system".

Starmer seems to be preparing to "clamp down on the rebels by forcing them to show up" to next week's vote, said The Telegraph. Backbenchers opposed to the bill will not be allowed sit out the showdown by arranging to be absent from Parliament.

It's thought that MPs who are considering voting against the government have been "threatened with losing the whip and even, according to two sources, deselection", said The Independent.

It's a "complete nightmare for Starmer, who is facing quite a remarkable challenge to his authority after just 12 months in power", said Politico London Playbook. "If the government can't get these cuts through with a 156-seat majority, particularly with loads of young MPs hungry for a ministerial career, then what hope does it have for future fiscal consolidation efforts?"

Labour's crackdown on the 200-year-old status of non-doms – and closure of a loophole that allowed them to avoid UK inheritance tax via offshore trusts – has caused an outcry among the wealthy.

This has snowballed into an alleged "exodus" of rich people from Britain, and Rachel Reeves is said to be considering reversing her controversial decision to impose 40% inheritance tax on the global assets of non-doms, government officials told the Financial Times.

The measure, which came into force in April, is the aspect of abolishing the non-dom regime that is "causing most heartburn", said one official. Another confirmed that the chancellor will change the rules if it is "found to be good for Britain's international competitiveness", said the paper.

What did the commentators say?

Reeves' initial decision to raise taxes on non-doms was a "calculated gamble", said Eir Nolsøe and Madeleine Ross in The Telegraph. And it will be a while before we know whether that gamble has paid off. "The only way to know about what non-doms are doing is to look at the tax data," said Arun Advani, an economics professor at the University of Warwick.

The HMRC data for the tax year that ended in April won't be available until well after the filing deadline of January 2026. "Late filing is particularly prevalent at the top of the income distribution," said Advani, because "the £100 late fee is not really that costly".

Data from global mobility specialist Henley & Partners suggests Britain experienced a "record exodus" last year, losing almost 11,000 millionaires, said The Telegraph, but some of this data is "based on flimsy metrics". Bloomberg also analysed five million company filings, and found that about 4,400 company directors disclosed "an overseas move in about the last year". That number "likely includes non-doms and British nationals moving in protest over recent tax changes", said The Telegraph.

There are "financial crisis-level discounts" on homes in London's poshest areas like Mayfair and Knightsbridge, according to Savills estate agents. If even 25% of the UK's non-doms leave, the Treasury would "make no extra money from scrapping the tax status", according to analysis by the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

If the FT's report is true, Reeves "may finally have seen sense", said The Spectator's economics editor, Michael Simmons. The changes to inheritance tax rules meant non-doms would have had to pay tax on their global assets "even on wealth earned before they came to the UK". That this would have applied retroactively, for up to 10 years, is "what really sent non-doms over the edge".

But it's a challenge for Reeves to make these "180" changes without it looking like a "screeching U-turn". And there is "constant speculation" on whether she will have to hike taxes in October. If that happens, it would be "politically very difficult to implement what would be seen as a tax cut for the uber-wealthy, even if it's clearly economically the right thing to do".

Plus there is a "looming rebellion" over Reeves' £5 billion cuts to sickness and disability benefits, said Stephen Bush in the FT. Taken together, the "double whammy" of a U-turn on non-doms and cuts to benefits "provokes a lot of political anxiety".

That said, it could be "the catalyst the market needs", said MoneyWeek. The report in the FT was "welcomed" by London's property advisers and estate agents. The move won't reverse the alleged exodus, said Becky Fatemi, executive partner at Sotheby's International Realty UK. "But it could stop the bleeding."

"It's a small step but a significant one pointing towards the bigger rethink that's urgently needed: the UK's broader tax stance on international wealth."

What next?

Some believe Reeves will "not give ground on the issue", said the FT. "We won't do it, the politics are dreadful," one Labour adviser told the paper.

A Treasury spokesperson said the government would "continue to work with stakeholders to ensure the new regime is internationally competitive" and continue to "focus on attracting the best talent and investment to the UK".

But even if this U-turn doesn't happen, "the fact that Reeves has woken up to the problem is a vindication" for all those who have "raised the alarm on the wealthy fleeing the country" – and were "pilloried" for it, said Simmons in The Spectator.

Reeves was warned before the election that this policy risked costing the Treasury more than it would bring in. "Now it looks like there could be a political cost as well."

"One thing is abundantly clear; we as a society owe these women a debt."

That was Louise Casey's assessment in her audit of group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse, published yesterday. Keir Starmer commissioned the audit in January after Labour "came under extreme pressure to hold an inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal", said The New Statesman.

The government had "repeatedly refused to hold a national inquiry", arguing that councils should investigate "at a local level instead". But yesterday, Starmer "quietly let slip that the government had changed its mind".

There will be a full statutory inquiry into the way the grooming scandal was mishandled by authorities – as Casey's report "directly recommends". But critics have argued that another inquiry does not necessarily mean society's debt to the victims, to use Casey's language, will be repaid.

What did the commentators say?

"The report is damning," said Megan Kenyon in The New Statesman. The strength of its findings has "forced Starmer's hand".

Casey described a "collective failure to address questions about the ethnicity of grooming gangs". Institutions like the police, social services and councils "shied away from" these questions for fear of appearing racist; "two-thirds" of perpetrators did not have their ethnicity data recorded. But such data as there was identified "clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage men", Casey wrote. "It is not racist to want to examine the ethnicity of offenders."

Among the audit's many recommendations, said The Guardian, is a time-limited national, independent inquiry, co-ordinating "a series of targeted local investigations".

But there has already been a "comprehensive, seven-year" Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, chaired by child protection expert Alexis Jay, said Emma Norris and Cassia Rowland at the Institute for Government.

The "more serious charge on institutional failure to tackle child sexual abuse" is that even now, three years on from Jay's final report, none of her 20 core recommendations have been implemented in full. A "better alternative to a new inquiry", and the best way to help the victims of child sexual abuse, would be to "listen to and act on" the inquiry that has already taken place.

But this new inquiry isn't quite the same, said Isabel Hardman, assistant editor of The Spectator. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told MPs yesterday that it would not be "another overarching inquiry" like Jay's, but one with a purpose "to challenge what the audit describes as continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling among local agencies". This, said Hardman, allows ministers to "claim they are taking grooming gangs as seriously as the row at the start of the year demanded".

But whether or not it counts as a U-turn is "beside the point", said The Independent. It has "been long apparent" that what has been achieved on this issue hasn't been enough. The country needs an "accurate and balanced accounting" for how these unspeakable crimes were committed just a few years ago, "almost in plain sight, with something like collusion in parts of local government and the police".

Perhaps "even more heartening" than the announcement of a new inquiry is Casey's recommendation for "a nationwide policing operation", led by the National Crime Agency rather than "sometimes discredited" local forces. This new model of investigating these gangs "will help prevent future shortcomings". The victims "deserve nothing less than this".

What next?

Cooper said the inquiry would take about three years, and that further action would be taken to implement the recommendations of Jay's previous inquiry.

Many victims will "welcome" Starmer's quick acceptance of Casey's audit, said Sky News. They will want the inquiry to "probe" into who the perpetrators were and how they were connected, as well as "clear accountability of the people and organisations who failed to act" when vulnerable girls reported their abuse.

But, said Hardman in The Spectator, "there will need to be quite a sustained storm to ensure there is real change in policy".

It remains to be seen if Starmer, Cooper and colleagues will ever be "given political credit", said The Independent. But they are "delivering a measure of justice and restitution". Britain is at last "doing the right thing by the victims".

Angela Rayner has said that she "never" wants to be leader of the Labour Party amid mounting speculation that she has ambitions to replace Keir Starmer.

The deputy prime minister's designs on party leadership have been the subject of much discussion after a memo was leaked to The Telegraph in which Rayner suggested tax rises as an alternative to Chancellor Rachel Reeves' planned spending cuts. Sources close to Rayner have strenuously denied she was behind the leak or has ambitions of challenging Starmer's leadership.

Speaking to Sky News' "Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips", Rayner sought to kill off the speculation. "I don't want to be leader of the Labour Party," she said. "My desire is to deliver for the people of this country who have given me opportunities beyond what I could have dreamed of." When asked by Phillips to say the word never, she replied: "Never."

What did the commentators say?

"Rayner is a consummate political actress," said Anne McElvoy in the i on Politics newsletter, "but even she could not easily pull off the poker-faced feint" during her televised repudiation of leadership aspirations. As one Starmerite supporter "acidly" told McElvoy: "She would like to be PM and chancellor – and she sees the moment to change the course of this government."

Indeed, the leaked memo shows that "the battle to succeed Sir Keir Starmer is already under way", positioning Rayner as "a champion for Labour MPs" frustrated by Reeves' cuts and "tax hikes", said the Daily Express. The memo sends a "clear signal" – "another way is possible".

"Inside the Labour Party, there may not be a vacancy but there is always a contest," said George Eaton in London's The Standard. Rayner nearly led a "union-backed coup" against Starmer in 2021. In the intervening years, her role has sometimes looked "precarious", but she is now in a "stronger position" than both her potential rivals, Reeves and Wes Streeting. Though linked to the "soft left", she can "bridge its warring factions" and is close to New Labour giants Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. It may seem early to debate Starmer's successor, but Labour is "an unusually unpopular government".

Rayner may have leadership ambitions, said Andrew Grice in The Independent, but "that doesn't mean she is plotting against him now". A "Momentum-style" grass-roots rebellion is also unlikely: "Labour MPs don't do regicide", and Starmer's allies "have a firm grip on the Labour machine".

Still, he "won't be prime minister for ever", said Kitty Donaldson in The i Paper. Like Punxsutawney Phil in the film "Groundhog Day", "Rayner's intervention is a politician poking her head out of her hole, sniffing around for signs of spring". She might go back into her hole for now, "but she won't be underground for ever".

What next?

Questions about Rayner’s leadership ambitions come amid "increasing unease over the direction of the party" among Labour's rank and file, said The Independent. This is particularly so over its "hard line on migration, upcoming welfare cuts and last year's decision to means-test winter fuel payments".

While Rayner may over the weekend have denied plans to run for leader, "senior" Labour MPs believe she’s "positioning herself as a 'credible' left-of-centre alternative", said The Times. And it would be "easy" for her "to say she had changed her mind at a later date".

Chronic staff shortages, low pay and demanding working conditions have long made it difficult to recruit care workers in Britain. For years, migrant workers have kept the sector afloat but now government immigration reforms could put further pressure on an already overstretched industry.

Social care providers will no longer be able to recruit staff from abroad on a Health and Care visa, under plans outlined in the government's immigration white paper. Instead, providers will have to employ domestic workers, immigrant care workers already here legally or immigrants on other visas. The government says these changes will reduce reliance on overseas workers, crack down on "rogue care providers" and cut immigration by 7,000 a year.

Care England, the body representing the adult social care sector, has described the plans as "a crushing blow to an already fragile sector."

How much do we rely on migrant care workers?

Migrant workers hold 32% of adult care worker roles in England, according to a 2024 Skills for Care report, with 26% coming from outside the EU and another 6% from an EU member state. Most foreign-born workers were recruited from Nigeria, India, Zimbabwe, Romania and Ghana.

In 2022, the Conservative government added care workers to the Health and Care visa list to allow overseas recruitment, following the twin shocks of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. By 2023, more Health and Care visas were being granted than any other skilled worker visa – over 336,000 in total – but, last year, numbers fell to 27,174, after successful applicants were no longer allowed to bring dependants with them and the government cracked down on abuse of the scheme.

How did it get this way?

The problems facing social care are "deep-rooted" said The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Austerity-era cuts from 2010 slashed council budgets, limiting funding for social care. And the challenges of the job – "stressful and sometimes exploitative conditions, a lack of career progression and high turnover" – have been cited in reports "as far back as 2015".

Health think tank The Nuffield Trust has also cited Brexit as "adding fuel to the fire of severe challenges" facing social care. "Shutting off the 'relief valve' of EU migration has put additional pressure" on staffing shortages in a system that "has relied heavily" on recruitment abroad and lacks an effective training and retention plan for British workers.

Yet workforce shortages aren't a recent problem, said the Centre for Health and the Public Interest. The NHS and the wider economy "have been dependent on migrant labour to fill job shortages for decades", with the root causes of staff shortages "deeply embedded into how we have chosen to run and organise" our healthcare sector.

Why do we struggle to recruit British carers?

Between 2022 and 2024, the number of British care sector employees dropped by 70,000. Even with over 100,000 immigrants filling care worker roles during that time, the sector's vacancy rate of 8.3% is still nearly three times higher than that in the wider economy, according to the Skills For Care report.

According to research published in Frontiers in Public Health, the sector struggles to recruit and retain workers for several reasons, including low pay, the prevalence of zero-hours contracts, limited opportunities for training and care progression, and the low social status of the work itself.

What does the future look like for the sector?

It's not a pretty picture, unless the government can solve the domestic recruitment crisis. Given Britain's ageing population, the demand for carers will only increase. Skills For Care estimates an additional 540,000 care jobs will be needed by 2040. But without urgent reform, including better pay, training and working conditions, few believe these roles will be filled domestically.

"International recruitment wasn't a silver bullet but it was a lifeline," said Care England's CEO Martin Green. "Taking it away now, with no warning, no funding and no alternative, is not just short-sighted; it's cruel."

The UK is in talks with "a number of countries" to set up "return hubs" for failed asylum seekers, Keir Starmer has said on his first official visit to Albania. But critics have accused the government of offering up a "watered-down" version of the previous Conservative government's failed Rwanda scheme.

Starmer did not comment on which countries might be involved in the return hub scheme but one thing appears certain: Albania will not be one of them. At a joint press conference with Starmer, focused on a separate raft of measures to tackle organised crime and illegal immigration, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama made it clear that his country was not interested in a migrant processing deal similar to its existing partnership with the Italian government.

"We have been asked by several countries if we were open to it, and we said no, because we are loyal to the marriage with Italy and the rest is just love," Rama said.

What did the commentators say?

Starmer was "at pains" to emphasise that this new plan is "not like Rwanda", said Steven Swinford in The Times. Labour has repeatedly dismissed that scheme as a "gimmick", and scrapping it was one of Starmer's first acts in office.

The new plans "would be different" because people would be moved to a third country only after failing in their asylum bid and after their routes of appeal were exhausted, said the Financial Times. Under the Rwanda plan, people would have been removed immediately after arriving in the UK. The return hubs scheme would see unsuccessful asylum seekers sent to processing centres, most likely in "co-operating Balkan countries", where arrangements would be made for their return to their country of origin.

These plans are Starmer just trying to reintroduce the Rwanda scheme in a "watered-down form", said The Telegraph's editorial board. And while they "would be an improvement on the status quo", they would be "at best a marginal deterrent to those crossing the Channel", as successful applicants who have made the journey would be permitted to stay. And given Britain had one of Europe's highest asylum grant rates in 2023, the "draw factor" to migrants would remain "considerable".

And the new scheme could end up facing similar challenges to that of the Rwanda scheme, as Italy has found out. Giorgia Meloni's government has built two return hubs in Albania "big enough to hold 36,000 people a year", yet both are "currently empty", said Sky News' Tamara Cohen. "The courts in Rome say they can't be used until the European Court of Justice rules them safe." Yet, in a "boost" to UK government plans, the UN's refugee agency has "backed the principle of return hubs, if they meet human rights standards".

Even if the UK can persuade other countries to participate, the scheme will still come at "significant cost to the taxpayer", and there is no guarantee that the government can "overcome the formidable legal hurdles", said The Times' Swinford. "Labour long criticised the Rwanda scheme, not just as impractical, but also as a waste of money. If Starmer is not careful, the boot could soon be on the other foot."

What next?

Starmer has stressed that the proposed return hubs are "no silver bullet" and shouldn't be seen in isolation. He described the initiative as an "important innovation" that would "add to our armoury" in tackling illegal migration. Yet there has been little detail so far on how the hubs will function in practice, what it would cost, and where those removed from the UK would be housed.

Further talks are expected at today's European Political Community summit, where it's thought the UK will try to gauge the interest of countries such as Serbia, North Macedonia, and Montenegro. The UK will also host a Western Balkans summit in London in the autumn.

British voters have heard many politicians over the past two decades vow to "take back control of our borders". Unveiling the government's long-awaited white paper on immigration on Monday, Keir Starmer became the latest PM to promise the UK's "broken system" will be fixed, enforcement will be "tougher than ever", and net migration numbers will tumble.

"It's a sign of the times," said Anne McElvoy in The i Paper, that a party led by human rights lawyers and confirmed centrists is "about to undertake a U-turn which is going to make it sound like it has adopted the Fortress Britain vision it once disdained as parochial or even subliminally racist".

What did the commentators say?

There's "just one problem" with the government's new approach, said Jonathan Walker in the Daily Express. "Labour and their lefty friends" have spent years branding opposition politicians who raised concerns about immigration as "horrible, xenophobic and racist". Starmer and his colleagues are "massive hypocrites".

British voters will be "sceptical" of Starmer's new-found hardline stance on immigration, said Martin Ivens on Bloomberg. "They've heard it all before when it comes to pledges to make the borders less porous." For two decades, "politicians of all stripes" have pledged to reduce net migration, only to produce "half-hearted, ineffective or muddled" measures, even when "promises to curb the influx played a large part in the pledges that got them elected in the first place".

Many proposals – training Britons rather than importing unskilled foreign workers, and raising education levels and standards of English for those applying for skilled work visas – sound "pretty familiar", said The Independent in an editorial. But a proposed change giving clearer guidance to judges on the application of human rights provisions "could have a quantifiable effect, as well as helping to reassure that doubting public".

Starmer's warning that "we risk becoming an island of strangers" has already resulted in the PM being accused of "pandering to the populist right", said The Guardian. Some MPs on the left claimed that his words echo Enoch Powell's notorious 1968 "rivers of blood" speech, which imagined a future multicultural Britain where the white population "found themselves made strangers in their own country". But while this rhetoric may put off some progressives, Labour HQ will be more than happy if this message cuts through to up-for-grabs voters in red wall constituencies.

What next?

With Reform UK surging ahead in the polls and surveys showing immigration emerging as the number one issue for voters, it is clear why Labour feels the need to talk tough. "Whether voters will believe Sir Keir really means what he's saying remains to be seen", said Walker in the Express.

"Fury with the failure of successive governments to honour their effusive promises to 'take control' will mean that nothing short of Trump-style mass deportations will be enough" to mollify some voters, said The Independent. But a "first impression" of the government's proposals is that "their bark may be worse than their bite, and deliberately so".

Starmer has avoided setting any targets, other than bringing about a "substantial reduction" in net migration. But successive governments' failure to tackle the issue has "turned the voters against the political class", said Ivens on Bloomberg. "Now Starmer needs to own the change – not just mouth the slogans."

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK emerged as the biggest winner of the first major polls since Labour swept into government last year. The right-wing populist party won its fifth seat in Parliament in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, as well as two mayoralities and hundreds of local council seats.

The results mean the party, seen until recently as an underdog in British politics, has now arrived as a serious force. But it has many progressives asking: where is a serious left-wing populist alternative?

Keir Starmer's welcoming of the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman revealed that he "doesn't fear the left", said UnHerd. Rather, he is adopting a "defensive position out of fear of the populist right – and specifically Reform UK". Starmer could lean so far in that direction that he alienates Labour's "anti-populist supporters". But his "tricky balancing act is made much easier by one of the most underrated features of British politics: the sheer weakness of the left-wing opposition to Labour".

As Labour’s leadership "shifts rightwards", a few alternative left-wing movements "are beginning to fill the void left behind", said Brian McDaid for Yorkshire Bylines. The Green Party, the most significant of these alternative left movements, gained 43 seats in the local elections. Its platform, which is focused on tackling climate change, social justice and the redistribution of wealth, "aligns closely with the left-wing populism that Labour abandoned under Starmer".

"The Greens have the potential to be a real threat,” one Labour MP, whose nearest rival at the last election was a Green candidate, told Politico.

John McTernan, a political strategist who served as a key aide to Tony Blair, warned that Labour would ignore its progressive voters "at its peril", arguing that the party needs to "deliver change to every single part of the country that voted for it, and create a new coalition of voters to support it for the next election".

Yet when it comes to economic policy it is Reform, surprisingly, which appears to be most in tune with left-leaning voters, said James Kirkup in The Spectator. More than two-thirds of Reform UK voters support the public ownership of the water, rail and energy sectors, Almost 70% believe foreign ownership of British firms is bad for the country, and 68% agree that big companies don't pay enough tax. Indeed, Reform voters are "further left on those questions than the typical British voter". "An economic cocktail of Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn might sound unlikely, but it's notable that Farage is happy to praise both men as he sketches out Reform's new economic agenda."

What next?

"What should be taken from the results? That the electoral contest is now all about change – that was Labour's slogan last year and is also the message implicit in the name of Farage's party," said McTernan. "But change to what? Reform is clear – being pro-worker and pro-nationalisation, a sort of Labour-lite. That's a fight Labour can win if it remembers who the party is for."

For the left as a whole, the "choice is obvious", said politics lecturer David Jeffery on The Conversation. It should "resist the urge to ape the populist radical right" and instead adapt to a political landscape where its existence is "a problem to be managed". But openly ignoring the issues Reform campaigns on "will not work".

"Once again, Tony Blair has demonstrated his impeccable political timing," said The Telegraph.

Just days before tricky local elections for the Labour government, Blair, writing in a report by the Tony Blair Institute, said his former party needed to take a different approach to reaching net zero targets. Voters, he said, are likely to recognise the expanding "credibility gap" between being "asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle" knowing that their "impact on global emissions is minimal".

The Tony Blair Institute eventually issued a statement clarifying that the former PM’s position is that the government’s direction on climate is the "right one". Furious government insiders, however, told The Guardian that Blair had undermined Keir Starmer on a key issue, at a crucial moment. One said: "Tony fucked up." Another said: "He has completely lost his touch."

Speculation over the timing of the comments has gone into overdrive in Westminster. Was this "just another scrap in [Blair's] polite but long-running tussle with Ed Miliband over the future of Labour?", asked The Telegraph. After all, the relationship between Blair and Miliband "is a very British acrimony, a tale not of all-out war but of passive-aggressive disagreement stretching back two decades".

Miliband's 'self-destructive goal'

The comments only heighten pressure on the government and Miliband over their net zero plans. "Rumours persist" that the energy secretary could even be "shunted out of his role" in the next cabinet shuffle, said Christian May at City A.M. Starmer could use the "perfect excuse", that the "world has changed", to depose Miliband, who is "doubling down" on the "arbitrary and self-destructive goal" of net zero.

Critics are arguing that "the pace of change" is the problem, not the "long-term necessity", said The Telegraph in an editorial. But Miliband has been "unprepared to countenance any suggestion" that it may be "reckless" to push forward with his current targets.

Former Labour leader Miliband has become an easy "target" for right-wing critics, and is often "undermined by his own side", said Andy Beckett in The Guardian. He has spent much of his 10 months as energy secretary "trying to justify the government’s climate compromises" and critics on each side are asking "when he will resign – or why he hasn’t already".

But while he is "hardly a perfect politician", the ire directed at him is really a "displacement activity", as it is "much easier to think about the end of Miliband than the end of the world".

Blair's 'tantrum'

The "anger in the Labour ranks was palpable" following Blair's comments, said Politico, particularly coming ahead of local elections in England. One insider said it was "the tantrum of 'someone struggling for influence'" and had given all sides "fodder to attack Labour".

In "a sign of the acrimony swilling around this debate within Labour", said the BBC's chief political correspondent Henry Zeffman, one government source told him that Blair's comments "may have been affected by the Tony Blair Institute having received funding from oil rich Saudi Arabia".

The government, for now, is standing by its net zero plans, viewing it as not just a "moral issue" but an "economic" one as well, said Rob Stait on LBC. But Blair’s critique "speaks to this new phase of the net zero culture wars; one in which net zero is becoming as politically totemic as Brexit", said The New Statesman's Megan Kenyon.

In the 1951 general election Labour and the Conservatives between them secured 98% of the vote. By 2024 that had dropped to 59%, and polling suggests support for the two main parties has continued to fall over the past year, driven in large part by the rise of Reform UK.

What this reveals is that UK politics has been "slowly but steadily unwinding from a two-party to a multi-party system for decades", said Byline Times. But "just like going bankrupt, things in politics change gradually and then very quickly".

What did the commentators say?

With Reform, Labour and the Conservatives roughly tied nationally and the Lib Dems slowly gaining ground in the south, "British politics is heading towards a place it was never designed to go, with a fractured four-way split", said The Economist. "Call it 20-20-20-20 vision."

This is because "politics is no longer one-dimensional," polling expert Sir John Curtice told the Financial Times. The old left-right divide no longer explains British politics; cultural issues are now a key factor.

With both Labour and the Tories shedding votes, "the conditions are there for the biggest challenge to the political conventions of British politics since the 1920s".

Seizing this opportunity is Farage's insurgent party, which "is proving adept at adapting itself to the ideologically fluid political positions of its target voters, for whom the distinction between left and right in politics is not set in stone", said the FT.

The "story of polarisation" – when "working-class" and "middle-class" had clear meanings and strong party affiliations – "holds the key to understanding the threat to the Labour-Tory dominance", said pollster Peter Kellner in Prospect. He described the condition of Britain's two-party system as "chronic".

"We shall of course see fluctuations in party support" but with issues like "Ukraine, slow growth, weak public finances and Donald Trump's presidency" all presenting "tough challenges for years to come" there is "no obvious reason why today's mainstream total, Labour plus Tory, should return to sustained dominance of the electorate".

What next?

This "unprecedented fragmentation puts the electorate on a collision course with the electoral system", said Robert Ford, professor of political science at Manchester University, in The Guardian. "First past the post is an amplifier: the winner takes all, everyone else gets nothing. But when voters divide evenly between multiple choices, this is a recipe for chaos."

This means "once unviable strategies" – like putting up a celebrity candidate with little experience but huge name recognition – "can work", said The Economist. Tactical voting, "the grease that keeps British democracy turning, becomes close to impossible".

Many agree that a new electoral system is needed to better reflect this new multi-party political reality. But neither Labour (who won two-thirds of seats at the last election on a third of the vote) or the Conservatives, nor it seems Reform, appear interested in this – at least for now.

"That doesn't mean that events like another pandemic, war or a climate catastrophe won't squeeze voters back into the two-party fold," said Byline Times. "But it won't be willing and will therefore only ever be temporary."

"A woman is an adult female, and the court has made that absolutely clear." Those were the words of Keir Starmer on Parliament's first day back after Easter, following the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling that a woman is defined by biological sex under equality law.

The "casual observer" may remember that as recently as 2022 the prime minister insisted "trans women are women", said The Times.

But with the law "now clarified" by the Supreme Court, Starmer "has set out the position he and his party slowly moved towards as last year's election came into view – that biological sex is what matters".

What did the commentators say?

It is an "embarrassing" attempt to "rewrite history", said Hannah Barnes in The New Statesman. It was Starmer who dismissed the then Labour MP Rosie Duffield's statement that "only women have a cervix" as "something that shouldn't be said".

"What a difference three years make," said Tom Slater in The Telegraph. While I welcome Starmer's realisation that "you cannot have sex-based rights if you don't believe in sex", his "volte-face" on this issue only reveals that he is an "anti-conviction politician". He is "an empty, slabheaded receptacle into which any mad idea can be poured, only to be jettisoned when it is politically expedient".

Many Labour MPs will be "uneasy" with this new position, said Henry Zeffman on the BBC. They "believe that trans women are women, and that to be treated with dignity and respect they ought to be able to use the toilets they believe match their gender identity". A "backlash" may now be "brewing".

That may have already begun with WhatsApp messages leaked to the Mail on Sunday allegedly including the Home Office minister Dame Angela Eagle writing "the ruling is not as catastrophic as it seems but the EHRC [Equality and Human Rights Commission] guidance might be & there are already signs that some public bodies are overreacting".

Government sources told Sky News "these messages are hardly evidence of any kind of plot or mass revolt against the Supreme Court's ruling". But the broadcaster added it still raises "uncomfortable questions".

What next?

Politicians who have campaigned in support of trans rights point towards commitments in Labour's general election manifesto to introduce a "trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices" and to "modernise, simplify, and reform" gender recognition law. Those are "still Labour Party policies", added the BBC's Zeffman and "any sign of backsliding on that, and this debate may again become a tense one within Labour's ranks".

The Labour government's Employment Rights Bill will amount to a "banter ban" if it's allowed to go ahead, critics have said.

A particular passage of the bill, which addresses "harassment by third parties", is being seen in some quarters as an effective ban on "discussion of sensitive subjects such as religion or views on transgender rights", said Jessica Elgot in The Guardian.

The government says that particular clause is designed to protect workers from sexual harassment by customers. But, there are concerns that pub customers could be asked to leave or bar staff could begin to launch tribunals if an overheard conversation is taken as offensive.

'Pubs will no longer be a safe haven'

Trade Unions have urged the government to continue with the bill without amendments, at the same time the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has said that the government should provide "guidance for employers not to overinterpret the legislation".

The EHRC also warned that without guidance, employers could face "complexity", which could lead to "excessive limitations on debate", something that critics, like Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, claim "could lead to the end of pub banter", said Elgot.

The pub has always been the "one place" people "felt free to speak our minds" away from home, and "although these ancient freedoms still exist", the impending bill will mean "pubs will no longer be a safe haven", said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail.

A "bartender with big ears" who overhears a "lively discussion in a pub about religion or abortion or transgender issues" could "demand that the pub landlord take action". Or, if no action is taken, take things to an "employment tribunal". It's not so "far-fetched", Glover wrote, with the term "harassment" now "very broad" in "modern Britain".

The bill is still making its way through Parliament, with some peers in the House of Lords warning of an "attempt to block" the "crackdown on pub banter" in its next reading, said Amy Gibbons at The Telegraph. Those Lords, including Conservative peer and Free Speech Union founder Toby Young, are demanding that certain "venues are excluded" from the bill, including pubs and universities. Young claimed that the bill meant "woke activists" at universities "could block certain speakers" over claims of harassment.

'Banter is a tiresome noise'

"Any sane proponent of Britain’s liberal democratic values should be angry", said Zoe Strimpel in The Spectator, as the bill could "equate to a clampdown on normal back-and-forth between human beings". But while the bill should "not threaten conversation", would it be such a bad thing if it were able to "outlaw banter full stop"?

Banter is a "tiresome noise" and "often a synonym for sexual inquisition" in which there is "no place for the sensitive or thinking person" and "certainly not women", she wrote. So while it is positive that "British freedoms are being throatily defended", there will be little regret in ensuring "the boys" have to "think twice before letting loose with their noisy banter".

The bill is now with the House of Lords and it is as yet unclear whether it will return to the Commons with amendments. If critics are able to push through the amendments, then landlords "won’t have to worry about protecting bar staff from the opinions (or even jokes) of their customers", said Christian May at CityAM. But if they do not, it will be a clear example of Keir Starmer extending "the power and reach of the state", he said.

The bill's clause will still mean people are "able to talk freely in pubs" and will ensure "employers take reasonable steps to protect workers from aggressive customers", said TUC general secretary Paul Nowak. Critics like Nigel Farage have "no plan for workers" and are only "promising the same broken status quo".

Government officials trying desperately to save British Steel believe there was "a plot to sabotage" its Scunthorpe plant by its Chinese owners, said The Independent.

The government took control of the company on Saturday, kicking off a "frantic hunt" to secure the essential raw materials needed to keep the plant's blast furnaces operational. Jingye, the Chinese firm that owns British Steel, had threatened to turn off the furnaces, after which it would be "practically impossible" to bring them back into action.

Some civil servants, union bosses and China critics have suggested that Jingye deliberately let the raw materials run out, with the aim of "shuttering the blast furnaces and making the UK reliant on Chinese exports of so-called virgin steel".

What did the commentators say?

It's "no surprise that a Chinese company – Jingye – is involved in all of this", said Iain Duncan Smith in The Telegraph. By shutting down the blast furnaces in the UK, it "knows that we will have to buy slab steel from China". That is "not a coincidence; it is all part of the plan".

Jingye is run by a former Chinese Communist Party official, said Duncan Smith, "and it is high time that we finally called that out". The UK should "not accept the pretence that this company is private or in any way detached from its government; a regime that is an ideological enemy of the West and a clear security threat to Western countries".

British Steel's Scunthorpe plant, which employs 2,700 people, "is the last plant in the UK producing virgin steel, which is used in major construction projects like buildings and railways", said the BBC. If Scunthorpe were to close "the UK would be the only member of the G7 group of leading economies without the ability to make" virgin steel.

Speaking to the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds stopped short of saying that there was deliberate "sabotage", suggesting the problem "might be neglect". But, he said, "the conscious decision not just to not order raw materials but to sell existing supplies of raw materials is the significant change that required the government to step in".

Reynolds said there was now a "high trust bar" for the British government dealing with Chinese companies and indicated that firms with links to Beijing should be excluded from "very sensitive" industries in the UK.

Workers at Scunthorpe, who prevented attempts by Chinese executives to access the site, had been "legitimately" concerned, said Gary Smith, the general secretary of the GMB union, also speaking to Kuenssberg on Sunday. "We were worried about industrial vandalism, and there was a worry about sabotage of the site, quite frankly… people on the site are furious at the Chinese owners," he said.

What next?

Reynolds has so far not elaborated on which industries China may be excluded from in the future, although steel is likely to be one of them. "I personally wouldn't bring a Chinese company into our steel sector," he said, calling it "a very sensitive area".

A spokesperson for China's foreign ministry urged the UK to "avoid politicising trade cooperation or linking it to security issues", warning that doing so could "impact the confidence of Chinese enterprises in going to the UK for normal investment".

In the meantime, Reynolds said he could not guarantee British Steel would be able to secure enough raw materials in time to keep the blast furnaces at Scunthorpe going. Emergency measures "are being explored, and more than a dozen other businesses have contacted British Steel to offer support in securing raw materials", said The Times.

The government has announced a £33 million plan to smash the "vile people-smuggling gangs" behind unauthorised migration.

The policy was announced by the Home Office ahead of a landmark summit in the UK today, where more than 40 countries are discussing ways to tackle illegal immigration.

Writing in the Mail on Sunday ahead of the summit, Keir Starmer said he was "shocked" by the "most extraordinary disconnect" between policing, Border Force and intelligence agencies. He pledged to adopt the counter-terrorism approach he used while leading the Crown Prosecution Service to dismantle organised smuggling operations.

Most of the money, £30 million, will support the newly established Border Security Command to target supply chains, financial networks and trafficking routes spanning Europe, the Balkans, Asia and Africa, said the government. An additional £3 million will bolster the CPS' capacity to handle smuggling cases.

What did the commentators say?

Immigration is a "key issue" for this government, with both the Conservatives and Reform UK "accusing Labour of failing to get a grip" on it, said the BBC.

Starmer is keen for the UK to be seen as leading the global response to "irregular immigration" into the UK, especially through small boat crossings, but with more than 6,000 people crossing the Channel so far in 2025, it is already "a record start to a year".

The PM and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper have highlighted the "deep complexities" involved in "interrupting supply chains, financial sanctions on gangs" and "blocking social media content advertising routes to the UK", said Sky News. But with public patience "wearing dangerously thin" on this issue after "endless promises" from the Tories and Labour, the PM will be aware he has "very little time to persuade the public he can deliver". Yet if Starmer can succeed in reducing the number of small boat crossings before the next general election, the creeping electoral danger posed by Reform UK "may not prove to be as lethal" as first thought.

The government's plans are not enough, said The Telegraph in an editorial. "Tighter borders, international agreements and the rest were all tried by the last government." Labour's promises to do the same things but "better" look "threadbare".

The government has said what matters in tackling the gangs is "practical things not gimmicks" – a reference to the Tories' now-abandoned Rwanda deportation scheme. Yet, "until people prepared to make a perilous crossing know they face swift deportation or removal to another country what is there to stop them?"

What next?

Ministers hope small boat crossings will decrease with the deployment of a UK-funded specialist policing unit off the French coast, said The Times.

But there are fears that migrants are "increasingly using the UK’s visa system as a back door to claiming asylum". Last year, 40,000 asylum claims came from visa holders; more than the 35,000 from small boat arrivals. Of these, 40% were on study visas, 29% on work visas, 24% on visitor visas, while 7% of claims came from people with other forms of leave.

The government will also be expanding right-to-work checks to cover gig economy workers by making amendments to the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill. Businesses that do not carry out the checks could be fined up to £60,000, or face closures, director disqualifications and up to five years in prison for those responsible.

After winning a landslide election victory last summer, Keir Starmer will be hoping his years in power aren't marred by the infighting and factionalism that dogged the final years of Conservative rule.

Yet arriving in Downing Street as he has with swathes of ambitious MPs, both new and party veterans, means it will be a challenge to keep them all happy.

The Labour Party has a history "crammed with bitter bust-ups", said the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg, and tensions are already rising just months into the new Labour government. The looming "squeeze" on benefits, backlash over winter fuel payment changes, and divisive immigration plans mean Starmer may soon be spending more time on party management than running the country.

The 'old' left

"The Labour Party has never been a socialist party," influential left-wing grandee Tony Benn said in 2006, "but it’s always had socialists in it." That sentiment remains nominally true today, even as Starmer's new Labour Party has actively tried to sideline the Corbynite left of the party.

The left's opposition to the direction of the party under Starmer and his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney is now seen as a "badge of pride" in the PM's inner circle, one government aide told The Spectator. Once hugely influential in the party under Jeremy Corbyn, factions such as the Socialist Campaign Group have been pushed to the margins and are down to just 24 MPs.

But as discontent over benefits cuts and disability support grows in the parliamentary party, some on the left have spied an opportunity to expand their influence once again, potentially working with those on the "soft" left of the party who don't want to see a return to the type of cuts seen under the Conservatives. "The challenge for us on the left is to work with those people – then we'll have a sizeable rebellion," one left-wing MP told Kuenssberg.

The 'soft' left

Members of the soft left have long been dismissed as "political invertebrates" and "fence-sitters" by both Labour’s left and right. And until recently they have largely avoided outright confrontation with the party leadership, said The Times.

But tensions over foreign aid cuts have pushed some into open dissent. Anneliese Dodds resigned as international development minister over Starmer’s decision to prioritise defence spending – and it proved something of a turning point.

"Aid matters viscerally and emotionally to the Labour tribe," said Andrew Marr in The New Statesman, and they are unlikely to stay silent over further cuts or reforms. And Dodds' departure only "sharpens the coming battle between Starmer Central and the soft left", he said.

The unruly new recruits

Of Labour's 406 MPs, 243 are newcomers – and they're proving more independently minded than expected. Their first act of defiance came over the assisted dying bill, with some party insiders warning that the Labour leadership has underestimated the potential for resistance from this group. "There are areas where blind allegiance is expected, and I think they’ll be surprised when say, 'Hang on here, I don't agree with that',” a veteran MP told PoliticsHome.

Members of the new intake appear to have understood their own power as "the biggest non-party group in Parliament". One whip has described the newcomers as a "nightmare" who "won't do as they're told".

The Starmer loyalists

Among the newcomers are the particularly ambitious MPs who have been quick to align themselves with Starmer’s leadership, earning the somewhat unflattering nickname of "toadies", said Kuenssberg. They have actively championed the government's tougher policy stances on welfare, defence and economic reform, often acting as vocal cheerleaders in public letters and media appearances. One MP has wryly described them as "pop-up pressure groups", happy to call for Starmer's reforms to go further.

Of all the groups, these loyalists are the least likely to cause Starmer any headaches, but as the party settles into government, having fought off the Tories and the hard left of his party, he'll need to make it clear to his loyalists "what the party is united on now".

The City of London is being "stalked" by fears of a recession as official figures show the UK economy shrank by 0.1% in January in a blow to Labour's growth ambitions.

The unexpected contraction, reported by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), is a "sharp turnaround" after the "robust" 0.4% growth seen in December, said London's The Standard.

It comes just weeks before Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivers her Spring Statement, which is expected to include further cuts in public spending to keep within her fiscal rules.

What did the commentators say?

Responding to the new figures, Reeves said Britain was "feeling the consequences" of global events, widely interpreted as a reference to Donald Trump's imposition of trading tariffs and the ongoing Ukraine peace negotiations.

But "worryingly" the ONS data covers a period before Trump "unleashed turmoil" on world stock markets with his punitive tariffs, said The Standard. Rather, "big slumps" in output from the UK manufacturing sector and North Sea oil and gas production appear "largely to blame for the drop".

Tariffs might be disrupting the world economy, "but let’s not rewrite history here", said Camilla Tominey in The Telegraph. Economists "all seem to agree" that the reason for Britain's sluggish growth is that the government is "taxing the living daylights out of businesses". Bosses are having to contend with "costly employment measures they can ill afford", including an increase in employer National Insurance contributions and a hike in the minimum wage. But expect "more of this 'world forces beyond our control' rhetoric", said Tominey. "Reeves knows that if the UK does go into recession, as is increasingly being predicted, then she'll face legitimate calls to resign."

And a further slowdown in hiring could suggest the UK is heading towards a recession, said The Resolution Foundation. The think tank calculated that the 0.5% drop in employment in the year to January is consistent with a slowdown "only seen during a recession".

That's further bad news for Reeves' financial wiggle room. A slowing labour market "reduces tax revenues for the government" and means the chancellor could break her own fiscal rules to the tune of £4.4 billion when the latest estimates are released at the end of March, said The Times.

What next?

While the ONS figures do not "appear to point to a recession" yet, UK companies are operating against a "weak backdrop" while also wrestling with the "uncertainty created by the White House's on-off tariffs policies", said The Guardian.

But in a further blow to Labour's plan to kickstart the economy, the OECD has downgraded Britain's growth prospects. It now forecasts the UK’s economy to grow by 1.4% this year and then just 1.2% next year, compared to the 1.7% and 1.3% it had previously estimated. The OECD does see Britain still growing, said The Spectator, "albeit painfully slowly", but the downgrade will only add to fears that we could soon be "heading for recession".

"It was the day Britain finally put Brexit behind it and assumed its new role in Europe," said The Telegraph's Europe editor James Crisp.

On Sunday Keir Starmer hosted European leaders in London – with "nothing less than the security of the continent at stake". The prime minister proposed a "coalition of the willing", led by France and the UK, Europe's two nuclear and major military powers, and Germany, to protect Ukraine after a peace deal.

In the painful aftermath of Brexit, Britain "went missing from the world stage". Now in Europe a "new world order is being built before our eyes", and Britain is "leading the pack".

'Back in the international diplomacy game'

Starmer's first months in Downing Street have been "unsteady to say the least", said Politico's Esther Webber. Domestically, he has taken a "hammering in the polls". But internationally, Starmer has played an "increasingly visible and assured role in transatlantic diplomacy". One of his "supposed weaknesses" – a "lack of ideological conviction" – might make him "a suitable broker between players with wildly different outlooks".

Starmer's first meeting with Donald Trump actually "contained some wins" – "even if the biggest prize, American security guarantees for a Ukraine peace deal, remained elusive". Labour insiders and European allies are "asking if his moment has arrived".

Analysts agree that Starmer has "put the UK firmly back in the international diplomacy game", said Agence France-Presse. "Post-Brexit we've really struggled to find our identity," said Evie Aspinall, director of the British Foreign Policy Group think-tank. Starmer hasn't had much foreign policy experience – but he has shown that he can "really step up on the world stage", she told AFP.

"We are never going to be the big world power that we once were," she added. But this is a "sign of us finding our feet and finding where we potentially could lead".

'The purest wishful thinking'

Starmer deserves praise for "taking a leading role in Europe" after Trump's "betrayal", said The Independent's John Rentoul. Some Labour figures thought this could be his "Falklands moment": as when Margaret Thatcher reversed her unpopularity by being "resolute in an international crisis". But that was the "purest wishful thinking". Trump and J.D. Vance's "ambush" of Zelenskyy – a "televised punishment beating" the Brits didn't see coming – "wiped out" any "gains" from Starmer's meeting with Trump. If Starmer thought he was a "bridge between Trump and European leaders", Trump has "blown it up".

Let's not forget William Gladstone's dictum, said The Times: the first principle of foreign policy is "good government at home". Starmer should remember that voters have "more prosaic matters" on their minds than "international plaudits". He will be judged on his domestic agenda: growing the economy and improving public services. His pledge to "ramp up defence spending" leaves an already cash-strapped government facing "unpalatable choices".

International affairs are rightly consuming much of Starmer's attention, but the "risk remains that a prime minister ­distracted by Ukraine will fail to drive forward the change this country needs".