Politics

Theresa May did not hold back in her Commons statement on the Salisbury spy attack, warning Russia it has until midnight tonight to explain why a Russian nerve agent was used in the incident. The Sun praises her reaction as ‘admirably tough’. But there is criticism for the Labour leader: ‘Never has the gulf between her and Jeremy Corbyn seemed wider’, according to the Sun. While Theresa May was right to rebuke Russia and ‘trust (that) the civilised world will unite behind us’, Corbyn misjudged the mood ‘hideously’. Instead, the Labour leader chose this ‘sombre national moment to advance Labour’s interests’. He started by ranting about ‘Russians “funding the Tory

Theresa May did a good job in uniting the House of Commons today, but someone who did an even better job in bringing together MPs to praise the Prime Minister was Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour leader’s partisan response to May’s statement on the poisoning of Sergei Skripal so antagonised Conservative MPs and so disappointed many on his own side that much of the session was about the failings of the Opposition, rather than the questions for the Government. He criticised Tom Tugendhat’s earlier comments about Russian aggression, telling MPs that ‘we need to continue seeking a robust dialogue with Russia on all the issues – both domestic and international –

Marina Litvinenko: ‘Lessons have not been learned’ The case of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, who has been hospitalised alongside his daughter after a suspected attempt on his life, has been dominating news headlines since it happened. Marina Litvinenko, the widow of the one-time Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who is believed to have been killed on the orders of Vladimir Putin in 2006, told Andrew Marr that she did not think enough was being done by the British authorities to protect former Russian agents now resident in the UK: AM: Your husband was murdered 12 years ago, and then you fought very hard for public enquiry, and after that

The moment that has defined my approach to politics came when my mother told me the proudest moment of her life: buying her council house.  Growing up in Consett, a former steel town in the north east, that house seemed to be like any of the other identikit terraced properties in the area. But to my mother, it was an asset she now owned and was able to pass on to me and my siblings. Later in life, I realised that Right to Buy had opened up new avenues for my mother, beyond having a roof over her head: it gave her choice, security, and a sense of achievement and

How did it come to this? Here we are, in 2018, in modern, democratic, fair-minded Britain, and what happens when it turns out the leader of the Labour Party was a member of a secret Facebook group awash with anti-Semitic comments? Not a lot really. As the political editor of the Jewish Chronicle, I have been writing about Jeremy Corbyn’s associations with anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers and radical clerics since long before he became leader of the opposition. I have also lost count of the number of stories I have written on Labour MPs, councillors, activists and supporters linked to Jew-hate since the summer of 2015. When I saw the work