Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
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.
The next leader should focus on building support among young people, families and precarious workers around urban centres
The candidate who secures the mandate of the Labour membership in April will require humility and subtlety. Humility, because the size of the Tory majority is formidable; subtlety, because the electorate is changing in ways that suggest there is no easy path to revive Labour’s vote share.
To win the most seats at the next election, let alone form a majority government, the new leader will need to engineer a breakthrough in several parts of the country simultaneously, from politically ambivalent Cornwall to the new SNP strongholds in Scotland. Along the way, of course, large chunks of support will need to be clawed back in the so-called “red wall” areas of the post-industrial north and Midlands, which turned so decisively blue in 2019.
Frontrunner on 53% ahead of Rebecca Long-Bailey on 31% and Lisa Nandy on 16%
Keir Starmer has been predicted to win the Labour leadership contest in the first round with more than 50% of the vote, according to a poll by YouGov and Sky News.
The frontrunner’s campaign was given a boost by the poll, which is the first to sample trade unionists and registered supporters as well as party members. It showed Starmer receiving 53% of the vote, ahead of Rebecca Long-Bailey on 31% and Lisa Nandy on 16%.
Labour leadership hustings saw frontrunner criticised for party’s ‘tone-deaf’ approach
The contenders to become Labour leader have clashed over Brexit and compulsory re-selection for MPs in an occasionally testy hustings event, with the race to succeed Jeremy Corbyn intensifying as party members start to cast their ballots.
At Tuesday night’s event in Manchester organised by the Guardian, frontrunner Sir Keir Starmer came under sustained fire from Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy over what the latter called Labour’s “tone deaf” approach to Brexit, which they said helped contribute to December’s crushing election loss.
Some Democratic observers fear their party is following the British left’s road to defeat
British politics rarely intrudes into a US presidential election. In 1988, Joe Biden was forced to abandon his first bid for the White House after it emerged that he had quoted without attribution a chunk of oratory from the then Labour party leader, Neil Kinnock. In 2016, Donald Trump deployed Nigel Farage as an occasional mascot on the stump, the Brexit victory in that year’s referendum deemed a happy omen that populists could defy the odds and win. In 2020, a third name has surfaced, offered as a cautionary tale to a Democratic party that this week confirmed a septuagenarian radical socialist and longtime backbench rebel as its frontrunner. That name is Jeremy Corbyn.
“I don’t want the Democratic party of the United States to be the Labour party of the United Kingdom,” James Carville, the victorious manager of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, told audiences on cable TV and in New Hampshire this week, warning that if Democrats nominate Bernie Sanders, they will almost certainly be following Corbyn’s Labour party to defeat.
Rolling coverage of the day’s political developments as they happen, including Boris Johnson chairing a meeting of the new cabinet and further government reshuffle developments
PCS union chief Mark Serwotka says party must not lose ‘radical anti-establishment, socialist message’
A key ally of Jeremy Corbyn has said failing to elect Rebecca Long-Bailey to be the Labour party’s next leader risks turning the clock back to 2015 and the leadership of Ed Miliband.
Mark Serwotka, head of the civil servants’ union PCS, said that the other candidates – Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry – would either struggle to maintain the radical policies of Jeremy Corbyn or have failed to realise that prevarication over the party’s Brexit policy was a key reason for the devastating 2019 defeat.
Emily Thornberry accuses Boris Johnson’s administration of ‘shameful betrayal’
Labour has condemned the government for praising Donald Trump’s vision for Middle East peace, with the shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, calling it a “shameful betrayal” of previous UK support for a viable two-state solution.
In an urgent Commons question on the plan, which has been condemned for granting Israel the bulk of its wishes but only offering a Palestinian state under severe restrictions, Thornberry called it “a monstrosity” and a guarantee of future violence.
Shadow Brexit secretary assured of place on final ballot after nomination by Usdaw
Sir Keir Starmer has guaranteed himself a place on the final ballot to become Labour’s next leader after becoming the first candidate to be backed by a second major trade union.
Usdaw, the retail union and Labour’s fourth largest affiliate, on Monday nominated the shadow Brexit secretary for leader and Angela Rayner for deputy leader.