Land Rover was monitoring a dissident republican parade commemorating the 1916 Rising
The British and Irish governments have condemned petrol bomb attacks on police in Derry on the eve of Joe Biden’s visit to Northern Ireland.
A small crowd threw petrol bombs and other missiles at a police Land Rover during a parade by dissident republicans in the Creggan area of the city on Monday. The vehicle briefly caught fire and was withdrawn.
Continue reading...Warning comes on eve of England’s 61,000 junior doctors beginning four-day action
Junior doctors may keep striking for another year in their bitter pay dispute with the government, despite NHS leaders’ growing alarm about how the industrial action is disrupting patient care.
Trainee medics in England could even hold a week-long stoppage to escalate their campaign of industrial action to secure a 35% pay rise from the health secretary, Steve Barclay.
Continue reading...Callers wait so long that nearly one in five hang up, finds Liberal Democrat commissioned analysis
Patients contacting NHS 111 in England are having to wait so long for medical help that they are abandoning millions of calls, with 3.6m ditched in the past 12 months, official figures reveal.
The national helpline service is supposed to make it quicker and easier for patients to get the right advice or treatment they need, either for their physical or mental health. It is billed as being open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Continue reading...Party will continue to single out PM, after campaign ad last week that led to accusations of ‘dog-whistle’ politics
Keir Starmer will shift his aim this week on to Rishi Sunak’s role in presiding over the cost of living crisis after days of anger over Labour’s crime campaign.
The party will continue to single out the prime minister in the minds of voters, claiming “his fingerprints are all over their struggling household budgets”, as part of an attempt to hold Sunak – still seen by some as a change of the Tory old guard – personally accountable for 13 years of Conservative failures.
Continue reading...Messaging on law and order has racist undertones, say critics, and could scupper the party’s efforts to appear to offer a ‘fresh start’
The controversy surrounding Labour’s attack advert suggesting Rishi Sunak does not support jailing child abusers dominated the headlines over the Easter break, drawing furious criticism from both the left of the party and the Conservatives.
Labour officials have insisted that the shock tactic was helping their message to cut through, putting the Tories’ poor record on crime under the spotlight. But that was not the experience of candidates doing canvassing ahead of the local elections.
Continue reading...Force rebuffs claim home secretary said they should focus on ‘catching criminals’ after items taken from White Hart Inn in Grays
Essex police have denied being rebuked by Suella Braverman for seizing a collection of golliwog dolls that were on display in a pub.
Officers from the force took several dolls from the White Hart Inn in Grays, Essex, last week as part of an investigation into an alleged hate crime reported in February.
Continue reading...With real pay down 26% since 2008 and demoralised workplaces, medics are striking not out of militancy but from deep-rooted frustration
A four-day strike this week by junior doctors in England will pit angry medics keen to secure a 35% pay rise against government ministers who scorn their demands.
The walkout from Tuesday morning to Saturday morning will be the most disruptive in the 75-year history of the NHS.
Continue reading...PM says ‘work to be done’ to restore government at Stormont ahead of Biden meeting on Tuesday
The Good Friday agreement was “based on compromise”, which should be the defining message for the next chapter in Northern Ireland, Rishi Sunak has said on the peace deal’s 25th anniversary.
The prime minister said there was “work to be done” by a new generation of politicians to restore government at Stormont “as soon as possible”, as he and Ireland’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, prepare to intensify work to broker a way out of the deadlock.
Continue reading...Party leader says he will ‘make absolutely zero apologies for being blunt’ after facing widespread criticism over advert
Keir Starmer has said he will “make absolutely zero apologies for being blunt” in an article published after a row over a widely criticised Labour attack advert on child sexual assaults.
In a veiled message to critics within his own party, the Labour leader said he will “stand by every word Labour has said on this subject” and would continue to use the Conservatives’ record on crime as a legitimate criticism “no matter how squeamish it might make some feel”.
Continue reading...Dr Patrick Roach of NASUWT calls on education secretary Gillian Keegan to reopen pay talks
Ministers could avoid teachers’ strikes in England this summer if they make an improved pay offer as good as that made to NHS nurses, the leader of one teaching union has proposed.
Dr Patrick Roach, the general secretary of the NASUWT union, called on the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, to reopen talks to allow pay negotiations to continue, saying strikes were “not inevitable” if a better deal could be reached.
Continue reading...Experts insist successes of Brussels’ €95bn programme could never be replicated by a UK-only substitute
Leading UK scientists have dismissed government plans to provide a UK alternative to the EU’s €95bn research and innovation programme, Horizon, saying that being a member of a major international programme is essential to the country’s future.
Last week, in an attempt to reassure the science sector, the government announced plans to set up a £14bn post-Brexit alternative to the UK’s membership of Horizon, which would come into operation if ministers could not agree on the terms of an “associate membership” of the EU scheme with Brussels.
Continue reading...Consultants who refuse to do extra work threatened with having their pay docked as NHS trusts race to empty their wards
Hospital trusts are taking desperate measures to limit the predicted loss of life from this week’s NHS strikes – including threatening consultants who refuse to do extra work, and tempting junior doctors to cross picket lines by increasing locum pay – as fears grows that many wards could be left without medical cover.
NHS leaders and senior clinicians fear the four-day walkout by junior doctors – starting at 6.59am on Tuesday and continuing until 6.59am on Saturday – will lead to the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of operations and appointments, while putting seriously ill patients at greater risk.
Continue reading...Shadow home secretary was not consulted about the widely criticised advert that claims Rishi Sunak did not believe in jailing child abusers
The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, was not informed or consulted about the release of a widely criticised Labour advertisement that claims Rishi Sunak does not believe adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison, the Observer has been told.
As several senior party figures distanced themselves from the poster that has caused a huge row within the party, Labour sources said that Cooper “had nothing to do with it” – despite being in overall charge of crime policy for Labour.
Continue reading...Former first minister says she ‘will get on with her job’ in statement outside Glasgow home raided by police last week
Nicola Sturgeon has pledged to “fully cooperate” with police after the arrest of her husband, the SNP’s former chief executive, during an investigation into party finances.
Speaking publicly today for the first time since Peter Murrell’s arrest, the former first minister admitted that recent days had been “obviously difficult” in a brief statement outside the couple’s Glasgow home, which police had raided three days earlier.
Continue reading...Industry leaders fear new entry restrictions and the UK’s tarnished image among some Europeans have caused a decline in EU visitors
French and German tourists are beginning to avoid the UK, tourism leaders fear, because of post-Brexit restrictions on travelling with identity cards.
Since anti-Covid measures ended across Europe last year, tourism has started to recover, but there are growing signs that significant numbers of French and Germans – two of the largest markets for UK tourism – are staying away.
Continue reading...Shadow ministers privately say they feel ‘uncomfortable’ over ‘distasteful’ ad amid calls for Keir Starmer to apologise
Labour frontbenchers have been left uneasy by a “spectacularly misjudged” advert claiming that Rishi Sunak does not support jailing child abusers, but party strategists are preparing to double down on the aggressive campaign.
Keir Starmer faced calls to personally apologise and order the retraction of the ad, which, a campaign group warned, “poisons the water that we all must drink from”.
Continue reading...Labour is pouring resources into Rutherglen and Hamilton for expected contest that could be ‘tipping point in Scottish politics’
It was a small but deliberate act by Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s new first minister, a politician increasingly keen to distance himself from Nicola Sturgeon and one with a keen eye for symbolism.
On Thursday, for his first briefing with Holyrood’s political correspondents at Bute House, the first minister’s elegant Georgian townhouse in Edinburgh, settees had been placed in a circle in the drawing room. Gone were the regimented ranks of chairs used by Sturgeon; gone was her lectern facing the room. Yousaf provided Tunnock’s chocolate wafers, tea and coffee. This, reporters were told before they sank into the sofas, was a fireside chat.
Continue reading...Lucy Powell says ad ‘not to everyone’s taste’ and former shadow chancellor John McDonnell adds party is ‘better than this’
A Labour source has said the party has been advised to “fight as viciously as the Conservatives”, as a row continues over an social media advert featuring Rishi Sunak posted yesterday (see 9:42am)
HuffPostUK’s Kevin Schofield has spoken to an unnamed senior Labour staff member who is unrepentant about the advert and that it is start of a wider pattern going forward – picking up advice from the Australian Labour party and US Democrats.
Continue reading...Latest updates: publication of report into alleged Islamophobia finds it not possible to determine what Mark Spencer said to Tory MP Ghani
A brief foray into the area between politics and football as the Athletic, a subscription-only football website, has obtained government emails that showed the possible failure of a Saudi Arabian takeover of Newcastle United was flagged as an “immediate risk” to UK-Saudi relations [paywall].
The website’s reporter Adam Crafton has 59-pages of emails between government officials that shows the Foreign Office trying to boost the image of Saudi Arabia despite concerns about human rights abuses as the Premier League considered whether to approve the deal.
Continue reading...Shadow minister submits bill to curb spills as Environment Agency reveals sewage was dumped for almost 1m hours last year
Ministers have treated coastal communities as if they are “open sewers”, Labour has said, after a damaging analysis of Environment Agency (EA) data revealed sewage was dumped for almost a million hours last year.
In total, the data – which was analysed by the party – shows 141,777 sewage-dumping events occurred across 137 constituencies on the coasts of England and Wales in 2022.
Continue reading...