Category Archives: UK news

Starmer rejects Badenoch’s claim Labour is ‘clueless’ and urges Tories to apologise for the ‘mess they made’ – as it happened

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PM says he will not take lectures from previous government as Kemi Badenoch launches Tory leadership campaign

Kemi Badenoch is speaking now. She says she wants to talk about the future.

She was born in the UK, but “grew up under socialism”, she says (referring to her childhood in Nigeria).

Labour have no ideas. At best, they are announcing things we have already done, and at their worst, they are clueless, irresponsible and dishonest.

They are trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public about the state of Britain’s finances, placing political donors into civil service jobs, pretending that they have no plans to cut pensioner benefits before the election and then doing exactly that to cover the cost of pay rises for the unions with no promise of reform, But their model of spend, spend, spend is broken, and they don’t know what to do, and this will only lead to even more cynicism in politics.

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Hewlett Packard to pursue Mike Lynch’s estate for up to $4bn

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Tech company says it will follow legal proceedings ‘to their conclusion’ after tycoon’s death last month

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has confirmed it will push ahead with a high court lawsuit against the estate of the deceased tech tycoon Mike Lynch in which it is seeking damages of up to $4bn (£3bn).

The US company said in a statement it would follow the legal proceedings “through to their conclusion” despite Lynch’s death last month when his yacht sank off the coast of Italy.

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Pregnant women and older people in England offered RSV vaccine on NHS

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Programme for respiratory syncytial virus could prevent estimated 5,000 hospitalisations annually in infants

Pregnant women and older people across England will be routinely vaccinated against the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) for the first time, the NHS has said.

From 1 September the NHS will vaccinate pregnant women from 28 weeks onwards and adults turning 75. Adults aged 75 to 79 will be offered a catchup vaccine to make sure they are protected.

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Rochester prison given urgent notification after ‘systemic failure and decline’

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It is the first time such notification has been given to a category C prison focusing on training and resettlement

A Kent prison has become the first of its kind to be issued with an urgent notification after a decade of “systemic failure and decline”, the chief inspector of prisons has confirmed.

HMP Rochester is the seventh prison to have received such a notification since November 2022, but has become the first category C prison, which focuses on training and resettlement, to receive one. The urgent notification process was introduced in 2017 and is a means of raising immediate concerns following an inspection and requires a response and action plan from the secretary of state within 28 days.

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Kemi Badenoch to urge Conservatives to do more than criticise Labour

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Shadow minister will launch leadership campaign with call to think afresh and move on from landslide election defeat

Kemi Badenoch will say the Conservatives must do more than criticise Labour in order to win the next general election, as she launches her campaign to lead the party.

Potential dividing lines with her leadership rivals already appear to be forming, after Robert Jenrick said on Sunday he would oppose Labour’s “declaration of war on the middle classes”.

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Many patients leave GP appointment without discussing all worries, survey shows

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Ipsos poll found 40% of Britons thought there was not enough time to raise all concerns in 10-minute slot

Two-fifths of patients leave their GP appointment without discussing everything that is worrying them about their health, a survey has revealed.

The finding has prompted claims that older people often feel family doctors “want them out the door as soon as possible” rather than listening to all their concerns.

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Publish data on ride-hailing apps ‘to cut exploitation and emissions’, say campaigners

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Campaign group says firms such as Uber should reveal data on driver miles to help boost wages

Uber and other ride-hailing apps should be forced to publish data on drivers’ workloads so that regulators can tackle exploitation and cut carbon emissions, campaigners argue.

Analysis by the pressure group Worker Info Exchange suggests drivers for Uber and its smaller rivals may have missed out on more than £1.2bn in wages and costs last year because of the way they are compensated.

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Met Office issues more yellow thunderstorm warnings for parts of UK

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As much as 40mm of rain could fall in an hour in some places on Monday, forecasters say

Thunderstorm warnings are still in place in the UK, parts of which could see as much as three inches of rain on Monday.

The yellow warning began in the early hours of Sunday and will be in place until Tuesday, covering most of England, the east of Wales and the east of Scotland.

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‘Broken’ prison system sets inmates up to fail, top Scottish inspector says

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Lack of funding, resources and rehabilitation leads to ‘bored and angry’ prisoners, Wendy Sinclair-Gieben says

The prison system is “broken”, with inmates returning to the community “bored and angry” and “set up to fail”, according to Scotland’s outgoing chief inspector.

Wendy Sinclair-Gieben highlighted a succession of failings in a service she described as “the underdog of the criminal justice system”, as she stands down as HM chief inspector of prisons for Scotland at the end of August.

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Labour MP pushes for watchdog to assess PFI costs under budgets bill

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Stella Creasy says she wants to put school and hospital debts and impact of trade deals ‘on nation’s books’

A senior Labour backbencher is seeking to have liabilities from schools and hospitals built under private finance initiative (PFI) deals scrutinised under a new budget responsibility bill.

Stella Creasy, who has tabled two amendments to the bill, said this would help highlight the scale of debt incurred. She also wants trade deals such as the post-Brexit arrangement with the EU to fall under its remit, arguing these can have an even greater fiscal impact.

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Seven years after Grenfell disaster, thousands live in fear of cladding fire

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As the final report on the fatal London blaze looms, many developers have not begun safety work

• Rowan Moore: The Grenfell inquiry is exposing a culture of contempt that has run deep in Britain

Grenfell was an avoidable tragedy, the inquiry’s counsel said on the final day of hearings. Yet with the report into the blaze that claimed 72 lives due this week, residents of other tower blocks fear that not enough has been done to prevent another catastrophe.

One of them is Gemma Lindfield. The 45-year-old barrister is still waiting for flammable cladding to be removed from her eight-storey apartment block in east London. It took three years before anyone even realised there was a problem. The following four years have been mired in indecision and wrangling about exactly who will pay to fix it.

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‘They’re about two years behind’: fears for children born during lockdown as they start at school

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Covid’s world of masks and remote health visits has created a generation at risk of social and emotional difficulties

Babies born in 2020 started life in the strange world of lockdown in a small bubble of people with faces hidden behind masks. Social ­experiences, such as seeing extended family, trips to the playground or mother and baby groups, could not happen. And struggling public ­services meant infants were likely to miss out on face-to-face appointments with a health visitor who might have been able to spot developmental difficulties early.

Those babies are now four years old, and in England are arriving at school for the first time this week. Experts say teachers should be braced to encounter – and tackle – problems ranging from poor speech and language development to social and emotional difficulties.

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Ignore ‘vicious’ social media criticism, Blair tells Starmer

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Former UK prime minister praises Labour leader’s handling of riots and advises him not to put off the ‘hard decisions’

Tony Blair has urged Keir Starmer to ignore “vicious” social media platforms during his time as prime minister, saying that poring over the inevitable criticism that will rain down on him will trigger psychological problems.

“You know, you start scrolling through social media that’s written about you, it’s going to do your head in,” Blair says in an interview with the Observer’s chief political commentator, Andrew Rawnsley, about his new book, On Leadership, Lessons for the 21st century.

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‘Amazing’ Viking-age treasure travelled half the world to Scotland, analysis finds

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Lidded vessel is star object in rich Galloway Hoard and came from silver mine in what is now Iran

It is a star object of the Galloway Hoard, the richest collection of Viking-age objects ever found in Britain or Ireland, buried in AD900 and unearthed in a field in Scotland. Now a lidded silver vessel has been identified as being of west Asian origin, transported halfway around the world more than 1,000 years ago.

When it emerged from the ground a decade ago, the vessel was still wrapped in its ancient textiles, whose survival is extremely rare. Its surface could be seen only through X-ray scans. Since then, the textiles have been partially removed and preserved and the vessel has had laser cleaning to remove green corrosion over much of its silver surface. It has also undergone scientific analysis.

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‘My work sells for millions but only a fraction of that came to me,’ says Scottish painter

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Peter Doig says ‘crazy prices’ on the secondary market must be reined in to protect young artists

Peter Doig became the most expensive living painter in Europe in 2007, when White Canoe, his atmospheric painting of a a moonlit lagoon, sold for £5.7m.

The Scot then saw his auction record broken in 2017 and in 2021 respectively, when Rosedale, his depiction of a house in a snow storm, and Swamped, another enigmatic painting of a canoe, sold for the eye-watering prices of £21m and nearly £30m respectively.

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Oasis fans frustrated by technical issues in battle to nab reunion show tickets

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High demand crashes ticket-selling websites amid scramble to secure place on 14-date tour

Did Oasis sell out yesterday? Definitely in Dublin. Maybe in Manchester. It was hard to tell.

Fans struggled to buy the million or so tickets that went on sale at 9am yesterday morning for the Manchester band’s 17-date comeback tour. Tickets had been expected to be snapped up in minutes, but instead many waited in online queues for hours, frustration mounting, only to be kicked off booking websites.

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NHS queues mean most Britons expect to pay for healthcare, says report

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Joseph Rowntree Foundation points to ‘critical shift in expectations’ and says the public now budget for many routine services

Most people in the UK now believe they will have to spend their own money on private healthcare for routine services such as dentistry, physiotherapy and counselling because they won’t be able to get them quickly on the NHS, pioneering new research has found.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation says its findings, based on extensive focus group analysis, is evidence that Britons have undergone a “critical shift in expectations” about the health service’s capacity to meet their needs.

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Voters believe Labour on UK’s woes, but not on its proposed fixes

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Keir Starmer struggling to sell his remedies for the problems facing Britain after Tory mess

The prime minister is struggling to communicate how his government will address the significant problems facing the UK. While the public readily accepts that the last government left a mess, selling Labour’s remedies as necessary or fair is proving more challenging.

The incoming government’s first job was to assign blame for the country’s current woes. This proved relatively easy, given the last ­government’s unpopularity and the Conservatives’ poor campaign.

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Branded UK school uniforms cost more than double high-street prices, analysis reveals

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The Children’s Society urges schools and government to ensure ‘undue financial strain’ is not placed on families

Parents are routinely paying more than double the price for branded school uniforms compared with similar items offered by supermarkets and high-street stores, an analysis by the Observer reveals.

Despite government guidance to reduce costs, the analysis shows that parents who are required by state schools to buy clothing featuring official school logos are still paying significantly more than for unbranded blazers, jumpers, ties and sports kit.

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