Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Friday

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

The local election results hold few crumbs of comfort for Sunak

Given the universal forecasts of the Tories taking a proper pasting in yesterday’s elections, it is quite something for Rishi Sunak’s party to have done worse than expected. But a truly dismal result in the Blackpool South parliamentary by-election, coupled with early council results indicating the party could end up losing half of the thousand or so seats it was defending, show that Sunak has managed to do just that. In Blackpool, the Conservatives picked up just 3,218 votes, compared to 16,247 at the 2019 general election. Labour took the seat with 10,825 votes, compared to the 12,557 it lost with in 2019. Is it a crumb of comfort that

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Tories are ‘socialists’, claims Tice

It’s only the beginning of a long weekend of election results, but so far so bad for Rishi Sunak’s Tory party. Even the veteran Tory commentator Tim Montgomerie has had enough, telling the BBC that the ‘results are so bad’ that Sunak ‘should go’. Meanwhile polling guru John Curtice predicts this weekend’s results will be ‘one of the worst, if not the worst, Conservative performances in local government elections for the last 40 years’. Ouch. And now, to add insult to injury, the Tories came a distant second to Labour in Blackpool South’s constituency by-election — only 117 votes ahead of Reform UK. Talk about being hit where it hurts…

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Who won the local elections? Results in maps and charts

Counting is nearly complete across England and Wales and the picture in the local elections is clear: Tory losses and a red wave. Thursday saw 103 English councils go to the polls with ten mayoral races and dozens of police and crime commissioner positions up for grabs too. The by-election in Blackpool saw a huge swing to Labour but the real story of the night is Reform coming within 100 votes of the Conservatives. Here’s the national picture so far: It's notoriously difficult to extrapolate a national result from local elections but Professor John Curtice has had a go for the BBC. They estimate that had the whole country gone

Steerpike Steerpike

‘You’d be toast’: Ashworth taunts Gullis over elections

Oh dear. As local election results start to trickle in, it’s not looking good for the Conservatives, with Rishi Sunak’s party losing councillors in Leave-voting areas like Hartlepool and Thurrock. And from the early morning media appearances, it sounds like some of the Starmer army are really rather enjoying revelling in today’s Tory misfortune… Appearing on the BBC early this morning was Jonathan Ashworth, the Shadow Paymaster General, who was sporting a new pair of Ronnie Corbett-style spectacles. He was up against his Conservative counterpart Jonathan Gullis, the Tory attack dog who sits for Stoke-on-Trent-North. With Labour boasting a 16 per cent swing, Gullis and his majority of just 6,286

Coffee House

Local elections 2024: Labour win over 730 seats

Labour has won the Blackpool by-election as the Tory party also performed badly in local election results overnight, losing 280 seats so far. Here are the results: Labour: 736 seats (+115) Tories: 283 seats (-280) Liberal Democrats: 242 seats (+43) Green: 77 seats (+35) Reform: 0 seats Some Tories will be breathing a sigh of relief not to have beaten into third place in Blackpool by Richard Tice’s party. Ben Houchen’s re-election for a third term as Tees Valley mayor will also have calmed some nerves. But there are few other glimmers of hope. Keir Starmer has won key bellwether councils, such as Redditch, Thurrock and Hartlepool suggesting that Labour is

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Labour triumphs in Blackpool as Tories suffer heavy losses

Keir Starmer is celebrating significant gains in the local elections as the Tories attempt to put a gloss on a night of tricky losses. The prediction – that the Tories will lose about half of the council seats they’re defending – looks on track so far. Labour comfortably won the Blackpool South by-election with a 26 per cent swing and it has also taken several key councils, including Rushmoor which has been Tory-run for the last 24 years. A Gaza backlash has seen Labour lose Oldham while the Conservatives have suffered a string of council losses, coming within 120 votes being beaten by Reform in Blackpool. This may be a

Thursday

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Boris Johnson forgets his ID to vote

With millions of voters heading to the polls today, how many will forget to bring along suitable photo ID? One of the more noteworthy, it seems, is, er, Boris Johnson who was reportedly turned away from a polling station earlier today after failing to bring acceptable identification. According to Sky News, which broke the story: Polling station staff were forced to turn the former prime minister away after he initially failed to comply with legislation he introduced while he was in Downing Street. Mr Johnson, who introduced the Elections Act requiring photo ID in 2022, was attempting to cast his ballot in South Oxfordshire, where a police and crime commissioner

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Survival plan: is Rishi ready for the rebels?

34 min listen

This week: Survival plan: is Rishi ready for the rebels? Ever since his election, Rishi Sunak has been preparing for this weekend – where the most likely scenario is that dire local election results are slow-released, leaving him at a moment of maximum vulnerability. He has his defences ready against his regicidal party, says Katy Balls: the Rwanda plan, a welfare reform agenda and a 4p NI cut (with hints of 2p more to come). And while the rebels have a (published) agenda they do not – yet – have a candidate. Katy joins the podcast alongside Stephen Bush, associate editor of the Financial Times. (02:12) Next: Lara and Gus take

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Holyrood needs Kate Forbes

There are a number of very good reasons that Kate Forbes is not standing for SNP leader. Chief amongst them is that she’d lose again. John Swinney is not Humza Yousaf. He has been an MP or MSP continuously since 1997, led the party through four difficult years in the early 2000s, and spent seven years as Alex Salmond’s right-hand man then eight at the side of Nicola Sturgeon. He is liked across the factions and respected for his decades of service to the party. There is probably no one who could beat him. Another calculation that Forbes will have considered is that her party is careening towards a general

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Von der Leyen can’t buy her way out of the migrant crisis

Elections have a wonderful way of focusing a politician’s mind. So it is with Rishi Sunak and the Tories, who are hoping their Rwanda Bill will be their salvation come the general election. In Brussels, the EU also knows that the migrant crisis will be a significant factor in deciding the outcome of Europe’s elections next month. The omens, or rather, the polls aren’t good. The EU is bracing itself for what it describes as a ‘sharp right turn’ next month The EU is bracing itself for what it describes as a ‘sharp right turn’ next month. Certainly, the polls in France and Holland, to name but two of the

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Japan won’t forgive Joe Biden for his xenophobia gaffe

Joe Biden just threw a particularly nasty insult the way of Japan, a close ally of the United States, at a campaign event. The president accused the Japanese, along with China, Russia, and India, of being ‘xenophobic’ in their reluctance to admit large numbers of immigrants, and of damaging their economies as a consequence: ‘Why is China stalling so badly economically, why is Japan having trouble, why is Russia, why is India, because they’re xenophobic. They don’t want immigrants. Immigrants are what make us strong,’ he told a Washington fundraiser on Wednesday. The insult is being especially keenly felt over here in Tokyo The insult is being especially keenly felt

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Wes Streeting should be ashamed of his white supremacist Tory jibe

Over the past few years Wes Streeting has established himself as one of the more open-minded and reasonable members of the shadow cabinet. Rather than nodding along with his party’s traditional worship of the NHS, and utilising the usual, false campaigning tool of trying to claim that the Tories have some secret plan to privatise the health service, he has been frank about its weaknesses. A tweet put out by Streeting yesterday afternoon, however, points in a rather different direction: blatant opportunism. He wrote: ‘A win for Susan Hall and the Conservatives is a win for racists, white supremacists and Islamophobes the world over. Susan Hall’s campaign has been fought

Euan McColm

The SNP’s ‘operation stop Kate Forbes’ has succeeded – for now

If you want to know how deep is the crisis in which the Scottish National Party currently finds itself, let this sink in: the next leader of the party will be a man who’s already had the job and made an absolute mess of it. In a remarkable turn of events following the resignation of Humza Yousaf on Monday, senior SNP figures quickly began urging John Swinney – who served as Nicola Sturgeon’s deputy when she was First Minister – to enter the contest to replace him. This morning, Swinney accepted their challenge and announced his candidacy to become SNP leader and, thus, Scotland’s seventh First Minister since the establishment

Steerpike Steerpike

Top Republican: Lammy ‘far preferable’ to Cameron

There’s a certain type of Tory who goes a bit gooey-eyed whenever David Cameron speaks. Since his Lordship’s return to the frontline of British politics last November, many a moderate can be heard gushing about the former leader’s mastery of communications. ‘At last’, they cry ‘The grown-ups are back in the room!’ The sentiment among a certain type of centrist was best summarised by the two-word text which Iain Dale received on reshuffle day from a Tory MP. It read simply: ‘Daddy’s home.’ But seven months on, with Labour’s poll lead only continuing to grow, is the return of Lord Cameron really all it was cracked up to be? The

Sam Dumitriu

Why Britain is building the world’s most expensive nuclear plant

For over 20 years, Britain effectively gave up on building new nuclear power stations. But that’s changed now Hinkley Point C in Somerset is under construction. When completed it will provide around 7 per cent of the UK’s electricity. Hinkley Point C is set to be the most expensive nuclear power station ever built. In fact, it is more than four times more expensive on a pound-for-megawatt basis than the average nuclear power plant built in South Korea. Even Flamanville 3, a French plant that uses the same reactor (EPR-1750) and built by the same company (EDF), is set to cost at least 25 per cent less. Why has Hinkley Point C

Iain Macwhirter

John Swinney will lead the SNP into oblivion

The coronation of John Swinney, a 60-year-old yesterday’s man, as SNP leader is bleak news for the independence movement. When Swinney – a three-time loser if ever there was one – was last leader, he took the SNP to 20 per cent in the 2003 European elections. In the 2004 general election the next year, the SNP was left with only six MPs against Scottish Labour’s 41. That was his legacy. Swinney may say he is ‘no caretaker’ but he looks rather like the undertaker of the independence dream Today he announced his decision to stand again as SNP leader. What happens next seems to be a foregone conclusion. The

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Will Britain ever escape the low growth trap?

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) latest report, published this morning, downgrades Britain’s growth prospects this year: from 0.7 per cent (forecast in November last year) to 0.4 per cent. Based on the OECD’s Economic Outlook, Britain and Germany risk experiencing the least growth amongst advanced economies, with Germany coming last this year (with 0.2 per cent growth) and the UK coming last next year (with 1 per cent growth). In response to this morning’s downgrade, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has said that the ‘forecast is not particularly surprising given our priority for the last year has been to tackle inflation with higher interest rates’. This is a point

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John Swinney launches SNP leadership bid

Back to Scotland, where the SNP remains in a state of disarray. After hapless Humza Yousaf rather badly mishandled the ditching of the Greens from government, he was forced to announce his resignation when he realised he would lose a confidence vote in his leadership. And now, after a period of 72 hours in which almost all of Yousaf’s cabinet ruled themselves out of the running, one candidate has finally put themselves up for the top job: John Swinney. Deputy first minister under Nicola Sturgeon and onetime SNP leader himself while the party was in opposition, Swinney is quite the veteran Nat. A close confidant of Sturgeon, the current backbencher

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

What does the faith school shake-up mean for Anglicans?

Why do faith schools excite such passions? Obviously people care a lot about religion, and education, but there’s something else at work too. Schools are microcultures, bubbles, little versions of society, in which the secularism of our culture can be shut out, defied. It sounds like a strange exaggeration, but if a religion has its own schools, it has a small but vital link to the old era of its cultural dominance.  The shake-up overturns the current rule, that a new faith school can only select half of its pupils on religious grounds Is this why Roman Catholics like Melanie McDonagh are so happy with the government’s decision to allow

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Tory members prefer Farage to Sunak

Happy local elections day, one and all. As voters head to the polls across the country, the talk in Westminster is how bad the result is going to be for Rishi Sunak. His party is tipped to lose around 500 councillors, with mayors Andy Street and Ben Houchen among the potential casualties. Faced with the loss of so many seats, it is no surprise that Tory plotters are talking about a leadership challenge. So it is with exquisite timing then that new polling by FindOutNow for Labour Together offers little comfort to the Prime Minister, with his own party activists saying they would prefer a different leader. More than half