Uk politics

What would the government’s immigration policy look like if Diane Abbott was Home Secretary? Abbott’s speech on the fringe of the Labour conference made it clear what it won’t be, even if what it will be is less certain. It won’t involve immigration detention centres, which Abbott has vowed to shut down. The shadow home secretary expressed her disbelief after her former opposite number Amber Rudd told her that places like Yarl’s Wood were necessary because some of those awaiting deportation were violent: ‘I said: ‘How can that be?’ ‘Even in the prison estate, the actual prison estate for actual prisoners, only a fraction of them have (been) convicted of

A lot of Labour’s energy at the moment seems to be spent on internal battles over which faction wins power on which committee, and whether it should be easier to deselect sitting MPs. A measure of whether its conference is a success is whether it manages to talk about what it wants to do in government. I understand that the leadership’s aim this week is to try to produce an analysis of where society has gone wrong. This sounds rather ‘Broken Britain’, though unsurprisingly the party won’t be using that line. Instead, the tag is ‘rebuilding Britain’, and Jeremy Corbyn and his colleagues will be talking about the impact of

It is the morning after the statement before. So, what happens now? That’s the question I attempt to answer in my Sun column this morning. Theresa May is trying to shock the EU into engaging with her Chequers plan by saying she really is serious about no deal. Her statement yesterday was meant to be a very public burning of her boats; a message that she won’t sign up to either of the options they’re trying to push her towards. But if we don’t get any sign from the EU in the next fortnight that they are prepared to be flexible, May will come under huge pressure from her Cabinet

This year’s Ukip conference in Birmingham has only just started but already trouble is breaking out. A row that has been bubbling within the party since it was first founded a generation ago is coming to the surface thanks to a clash between the party’s current leader, Gerard Batten, and its most famous one, Nigel Farage. Farage, no stranger to chucking rocks from the sidelines, has criticised the direction in which Ukip is now travelling. The former Ukip leader warned that the party risks ‘utter marginalisation’ if it cosies up to the far-right. The catalyst for his comments is Batten’s bid to recruit former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson. Farage’s assessment