Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Labour has a “mountain to climb” if it is to get back into power, according to a major review of the 2019 general election defeat, which paints a picture of dysfunctionality, toxicity and drift inside the party’s election-fighting machine.
Negative perceptions of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, doubts about the manifesto and the party’s ambivalent Brexit stance reinforced each other in a “snowballing” effect to deliver December’s catastrophic result, the 150-page report by the party group Labour Together argues.
As No 10 hopes to divide Labour on statues and TV archives, its leader has made practical demands on race inequality
Boris Johnson appeared to have had his say about the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests earlier this week, telling the nation in a carefully phrased article for the black newspaper the Voice: “I hear you.”
Yet on Friday morning, he dramatically returned to the fray, tweeting that taking down controversial statues was to “lie about our history” and warning would-be protesters: “The only responsible course of action is to stay away.”
Keir Starmer condemns ‘criminal damage’ but says we can’t have ‘a slaver on a statue’
The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, sparked unease among some on the left of his party on Monday, as he condemned as “completely wrong” the tearing down of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol at the weekend.
Starmer and the shadow home secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, said they shared the sense of injustice that had brought more than 100,000 people out on to the streets of the UK to join Black Lives Matter protests in recent days.
After ‘appalling scenes’ in US and Hong Kong, the shadow foreign secretary attacks UK policy for putting growth and trade ahead of human rights
Britain is “absenting itself from the world stage” by refusing to show leadership over Hong Kong residents, confront China or condemn President Trump over his handling of the fallout from George Floyd’s killing, the shadow foreign secretary has warned.
In her most stinging attack on Britain’s foreign policy, Lisa Nandy said that the government was now displaying “a pattern of behaviour that is becoming very, very troubling”, and that the UK’s actions were being noted by leaders around the world.
Tory government must act as exports are prohibited if used for internal repression, says Emily Thornberry
Labour has called on the UK to suspend the sale of riot control equipment to the United States and review whether any British-made teargas or crowd control guns were being used against demonstrators across the United States.
Emily Thornberry, the shadow international trade secretary, has written to her opposite number, Liz Truss, arguing it would “be a disgrace” if the UK supplied material that was used by US police or national guard during crisis sparked by the death in police hands of George Floyd.
In her letter the Labour MP said: “If this were any other leader, in any other country in the world, the suspension of any such exports is the least we could expect from the British government in response to their actions, and our historic alliance with the United States is no reason to shirk that responsibility now.”
Keir Starmer has accused Boris Johnson of causing a collapse in public confidence over the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, saying No 10 will be directly responsible if the infection rate starts to rise again.
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the Labour leader launched a stinging attack on the the prime minister, accusing him of “winging it” over the easing of the lockdown and making an already “difficult situation 10 times worse”.
Boris Johnson has been accused by Labour of not knowing the government’s advice on coronavirus after he told Keir Starmer at prime minister’s questions that it “wasn’t true” that the care home sector had been advised it was unlikely to face an outbreak.
In a tricky series of exchanges in the Commons, Starmer put Johnson under intense pressure to explain the extent of care home deaths.
Suspect in death of Harry Dunn who fled UK will not be extradited, says state department
The US Department of State has said the decision to refuse an extradition request for Harry Dunn’s alleged killer was final, after an Interpol red notice was issued for her arrest.
But the UK’s Labour party has signalled that they will be pressing for some form of parliamentary inquiry into the government’s “clear and repeated failings”.
Workers may refuse to turn up or stage walk-outs unless the government helps guarantee their safety, trade unions have warned amid anger over guidance designed to ease the lockdown.
As ministers prepare to urge the country back to return to work, Labour joined a string of trade unions in criticising draft guidelines for being vague, inadequate and putting staff at risk because employers can choose how closely to follow them.
Vaughan Gething heard decrying Labour colleague after leaving his audio live on video call
Wales’s health minister, Vaughan Gething, has learned the hard way about one of the risks of videoconferencing after he accidentally broadcast a sweary rant about one of his colleagues during a virtual session of Welsh assembly.
Having apparently left his microphone live after addressing the assembly, the minister could be heard loudly decrying his fellow Labour assembly member Jenny Rathbone.
With ministers warning that shortages of protective medical gear could continue, test rates remaining stubbornly low and the hospital death toll rising on Sunday to 16,060, some Conservative MPs have expressed private concern that Downing Street does not have a strong grip on the crisis.
The shadow defence secretary called on the government to do “everything it can” to protect the British armed forces from coronavirus – and make public the number of times service personnel have been tested for the disease.
John Healey wrote to the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, amid concerns about a lack of transparency with the British military and after serious outbreaks of the respiratory disease on US and French warships.
The government faces a chorus of cross-party calls on Sunday for the urgent recall of parliament in “virtual” form as MPs and peers demand the right to hold ministers to account over the escalating coronavirus crisis.
The demands from leaders of all main opposition parties, as well as senior Tories, came after the death toll from Covid-19 in the UK approached 10,000. Deaths from the virus rose by 917 on Saturday compared with Friday to a total of 9,875.
New Labour leader wins praise after setting out steps party would take to tackle issue
Keir Starmer has been praised by Jewish leaders for achieving “in four days more than his predecessor in four years” after he held a video conference to set out steps Labour would be taking to stamp out antisemitism.
Starmer, who replaced Jeremy Corbyn as party leader on Saturday, told the meeting that he had asked for all outstanding investigations into antisemitism within the party to be “on my desk at the end of the week”.
New leader brings in one former rival for key post but no role yet for Rebecca Long-Bailey
Keir Starmer has made Lisa Nandy, one of the candidates he defeated to become Labour leader, his shadow foreign secretary, and Anneliese Dodds, who became an MP only in 2017, his shadow chancellor.
Speaking before the first tranche of top appointments, the new Labour leader promised he would create a shadow cabinet balanced between the various wings of the party.
As Corbyn prepares to step down as leader, Alvarez says Labour failed to ‘pull together’
Laura Alvarez, the wife of Jeremy Corbyn, has said she regrets Labour failed to “pull together” to win elections, condemning the media and his opponents in the party on his last day as leader of the party.
In a rare public statement, Alvarez said it had been “incredibly hard” for her to watch her husband vilified by the media and even harder to watch him be attacked by his own party.
Labour’s four-month leadership election to replace Jeremy Corbyn has hampered the party’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to some of its MPs.
Critics said the party’s leadership has been sluggish in responding to the crisis and Corbyn, as outgoing leader, has failed to command authority.
Change of official line is first admission that Kremlin may have distorted UK elections
Ministers have been told they can no longer say there have been “no successful examples” of Russian disinformation affecting UK elections, after the apparent hacking of an NHS dossier seized on by Labour during the last campaign.
The dropping of the old line is the first official admission of the impact of Kremlin efforts to distort Britain’s political processes, and comes after three years of the government’s refusal to engage publicly with the threat.
Here are the main points from the press conference held by Boris Johnson. He was joined by Prof Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical adviser, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser.
We are now very close to the time, probably within the next 10 to 14 days, when the modelling would imply we should move to a situation where everybody with even minor respiratory tract infections or a fever should be self-isolating for a period of seven days.
It is absolutely critical in managing the spread of this virus that we take the right decisions at the right time based on the latest and the best evidence, so we mustn’t do things which have no or limited medical benefit, nor things which could turn out actually to be counter-productive.
We were all given an instruction not to shake hands and there’s a good reason for not shaking hands, which is that the behavioural psychologists say that if you don’t shake somebody’s hand then that sends an important message to them about the importance of washing your hands.
So there’s a subliminal cue there to everybody to wash your hands, which is, I think I’m right in saying ... far more important.
What you can’t do is suppress this thing completely, and what you shouldn’t do is suppress it completely because all that happens then is it pops up again later in the year when the NHS is at a more vulnerable stage in the winter and you end up with another problem.
This is what Boris Johnson said at the start of his press conference.
I want to stress the following things. First, we are doing everything we can to combat this outbreak based on the latest scientific and medical advice.
Second, we have a truly brilliant NHS where staff have responded with all the determination, compassion and skill that makes their service so revered across the world and they will continue to have this government’s full support, my support, in tackling this virus on the front line.