Conservatives continue to suffer heavy defeats as Labour, Lib Dems and Greens make gains
Prof Rob Ford, an elections specialist, has written an article for the Guardian trying to assess what would be a good result and a bad result for the political parties in the local election. You can read it here:
Results from more than 60 councils are expected overnight with the remainder expected to trickle in throughout the day on Friday.
Continue reading...Find out the scale of Conservative losses and the gains made by Labour, the Lib Dems and the Green party
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On 4 May, 230 English councils are holding elections with more than 8,000 seats being contested. Some are for metropolitan boroughs such as Liverpool city council and others for unitary authorities such as Herefordshire or North Somerset. Both structures are single-tier authorities with responsibility for the whole range of council services, including education, social care, rubbish collection and parks.
Continue reading...Opposition leader hails ‘very, very good’ outcome of local elections after his party takes control of key councils
Keir Starmer has said the Labour party is on track to win the next general election, after taking control of key councils in the English local elections, including Medway, Plymouth and Stoke-on-Trent.
Based on results counted early on Friday morning, the Labour leader said the party was heading for a result that if repeated across the country at a general election would give it an eight-point lead over the Conservatives.
Continue reading...With polls closing at 10pm, more than 8,000 council seats in England are up for grabs
Here is a comment from a reader.
Just been to the polling station: tellers outside were turning people without ID away instead of sending them in to be recorded for the so called evaluation. Numbers will be meaningless if this is widespread.
Continue reading...‘No major issues’ reported so far, as most voters in Leicester say they were made well aware of change
Despite warnings that the introduction of new voter ID requirements might lead to disruption at polling stations across England on Thursday, by lunchtime there were few reports of problems.
In Leicester, the city council said things were “so far, running smoothly”.
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James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, has also been giving interviews this morning. He told Sky News that Keir Starmer would have “some serious questions to answer” if today’s Cabinet Office report says she started talks about taking a job with Labour while still working with the civil service team giving advice to the privileges committee in relation to its inquiry into Boris Johnson and Partygate.
Labour sources have told the Telegraph that Gray was not involved in the Cabinet Office propriety and ethics team’s (PET’s) work with the privileges committee while she was in contact with Labour.
Continue reading...Leader pledges a radical, reforming Labour government with aid to first-time buyers and a revamp of tuition fees among the party’s targets
• Read more: ‘I want Labour to be the party of home ownership,’ says Starmer
Keir Starmer today pledges to lead a radical, reforming Labour government that is bolder than Tony Blair’s on public service reform, as he announces plans to accelerate housing building and get more young people on to the property ladder.
In an interview with the Observer before Thursday’s local elections, the Labour leader insists he will more than match Blair for radical ideas on overhauling public services including the NHS. “This will be a bold and reforming Labour government bringing about real change that I hope will be felt through the generations,” Starmer said.
Continue reading...With local polls on Thursday, the Labour leader must convince voters his party can fix the Tories’ mistakes – and make bold, eye-catching pledges
• Read more: ‘I’ll be bolder than Blair on public service reform,’ says Starmer
Keir Starmer is being shown around the Royal Crown Derby factory in the east Midlands city, and the reasons for choosing the venue are clear. We are days away from crucial local elections on Thursday and the coronation of King Charles III will take place two days later.
The visit has been carefully choreographed to convey messages about respect for tradition, and how Labour has changed. A big party media team is up from London and their attention to detail is impressive – reminiscent of New Labour before the 1997 general election.
Continue reading...Opinium poll shows slump in personal ratings of Rishi Sunak, with 26% approving of his performance and 44% disapproving
Labour’s lead over the Conservatives stands at a commanding 18 points, according to the last Opinium poll for the Observer before a huge set of local elections.
With more than 8,000 council seats across 230 authorities in England up for election on Thursday, the Tories had been hoping that polls would tighten as they attempt to avoid heavy losses in both the red wall of old Labour seats and the blue all – south-eastern seats where, traditionally, they have been strong.
Continue reading...Health secretary defends court action as Pat Cullen says government decision could make nurses more determined to vote for further strike action
Maclean tells MPs that the last Labour government required photo ID for voting in Northern Ireland. She claims fears that this would lead to people being disfranchised did not materialise.
Earlier, in response to opposition claims that the policy was all about voter suppression (reducing the chance of non-Tories voting), she said Labour required party members to provide photo ID when they turned up to vote to select a Labour candidate.
Continue reading...If Tory MPs vote down opposition day motion, Labour can accuse them of thwarting attempts to clean up rivers, beaches and chalk streams
Labour is planing to use the same Commons procedure that helped remove Liz Truss from Downing Street to force Conservative MPs into a politically embarrassing vote about whether to toughen up rules on sewage discharges.
The party plans to use its regular opposition day motion on Tuesday to push a binding motion, which would oblige the government to set aside Commons time next week for a debate and vote on a Labour bill to impose tougher penalties for sewage spills.
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PMQs is starting in five minutes.
The Cabinet Office has just published the revised list of ministers’ interests. This is the document that is supposed get updated every six months, but which has not been updated for around a year – partly because it’s the job of the No 10 independent adviser on ministes’ interests (aka, the ethics adviser), and for months the post was empty because two of Boris Johnson’s resigned, and then he gave up trying to find a replacement.
The prime minister’s wife is a venture capital investor. She owns a venture capital investment company, Catamaran Ventures UK Limited, and a number of direct shareholdings.
As the prime minister set out in his letter to the chair of the liaison committee on 4 April 2023, this includes the minority shareholding that his wife has in relation to the company, Koru Kids. The guide to the categories of interest (section 7, pages 4-6) sets out the independent adviser’s approach to the inclusion of interests declared in relation to spouses, partners and close family members within the list. The prime minister’s letter of 4 April is available at https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/38992/documents/191876/default/
Continue reading...Posters attacking Rishi Sunak on crime made Britons feel less favourable about both main parties, Opinium finds
Labour’s controversial “attack ad” accusing Rishi Sunak of failing to put paedophiles in prison has caused more voters to think negatively of Keir Starmer’s party than a Conservative poster that accused the Labour leader of being soft on crime, according to an Opinium poll for the Observer.
The striking result, when people were asked to react to the two posters, comes after 10 days of internal Labour ructions over its sudden switch to hyper-aggressive and personalised online campaigning.
Continue reading...Chair says party could lose 1,000 English seats on 4 May, despite voters finding Rishi Sunak more palatable than his predecessors
Even by the standards of political expectations management, Greg Hands’ message in his Sunday morning interviews was stark: the Conservative party, which he chairs, should expect to lose more than 1,000 councillors in next month’s local elections.
When party bigwigs make such predictions they usually do so against a context of significant wins the last time the seats were contested. But in May 2019, Theresa May was weeks away from announcing her departure, and the Tories lost more than 1,300 seats.
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Nurses in England are preparing to go on strike until Christmas after members of the country’s biggest nursing union voted against the government’s pay deal, the Guardian has learned.
The Royal College of Nursing will announce that members have rejected the government’s offer and will at the same time announce a new ballot for more aggressive strikes likely to last for the next six months.
The vote has closed and the figures are being verified. There is no result until that point. We will make an announcement later today and tell our members first.
Members of the GMB union at the company’s Coventry fulfilment centre will walk out on Sunday for three days.
Further strikes are planned from April 21 to 23.
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...Latest updates: Labour leader to launch campaign for local elections with tax pledge that Conservatives have criticised as worthless
The Commons standards committee says Margaret Ferrier should be suspended for 30 days for breaches of Commons rules related to the incident where she travelled by train from London to Scotland after testing positive for Covid in 2020.
Last year a court sentenced her to 270 hours of unpaid work in relation to the offence, but the standards commmittee says a further sanction by the Commons is required.
The threshold for a breach of paragraph 17 of the code [which says MPs should “never undertake any action which would cause significant damage to the reputation and integrity of the House of Commons as a whole”] is necessarily high. However, any finding that a member’s actions have brought the house into disrepute must be considered to be a serious breach. The 2019 Code states that “members have a duty to uphold the law”; something the public rightly expect. If Ms Ferrier had been a public sector employee in a position of trust or leadership, she could have faced severe disciplinary consequences, potentially including dismissal, for these or similar actions.
We therefore recommend that Ms Ferrier is suspended from the service of the house for 30 days.
Labour’s announcement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. They have no plan to introduce this if elected. They’re taking the British people for fools.
If Labour were serious about cutting council tax Labour councils would be doing it now.
Continue reading...In today’s newsletter: Why a purported solution to concerns about voter fraud may create a whole set of new problems instead. An electoral systems expert explains how
Good morning. It’s a simple enough proposition: ask people to show photo ID if they want to vote. The government says that a new law coming into effect next year will ensure the integrity of elections, and reinforce public trust in British democracy. But others say the reality is a lot more complicated than that.
The strongest critics of the Elections Act argue that, far from being an attempt to secure the voting system, it is a “shameless voter-suppression bill” – and, given there was only one conviction for voter impersonation at the 2017 election, totally unnecessary in any case.
Health | Researchers have hailed a new era of Alzheimer’s therapies after a clinical trial confirmed that a drug slows cognitive decline in patients with early stages of the disease. Read Ian Sample’s recent feature on why lecanemab could lead to drugs that offer better and better control of Alzheimer’s.
Census | Census results revealing that England is no longer a majority-Christian country have sparked calls for an end to the church’s role in parliament and schools, while Leicester and Birmingham became the first UK cities with “minority majorities”.
Local government | A Tory-led council has admitted a series of disastrous investments caused it to run up an unprecedented deficit of nearly £500m and brought it to the brink of bankruptcy. Thurrock has appealed to the government for an emergency bailout and warned that it will have to push through a drastic programme of cuts.
Channel crossings | A man has been arrested in the UK in connection with the deaths of at least 27 people who drowned while trying to cross the Channel in a dinghy a year ago. Harem Ahmed Abwbaker, 32, is accused of being a member of an organised crime gang behind the disastrous crossing in November 2021.
China | China has sent university students home as part of an attempt to disperse protesters angry at zero-Covid policies, as the country’s top security body called for a crackdown on “hostile forces”. Authorities also announced plans to step up vaccination of older people.
Continue reading...Leader Mary Lou McDonald raises issue of unification as nationalists become biggest party in Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland has slipped into political crisis after Sinn Féin’s triumph in the assembly election triggered calls for a referendum on a united Ireland and the Democratic Unionist party vowed to block the formation of a new power-sharing executive at Stormont.
Jubilant Sinn Féin supporters celebrated across the region on Saturday when final vote counts confirmed a historic victory that turned the former IRA mouthpiece into the biggest party, with the right to nominate the first minister.
Continue reading...With Sinn Féin set to become the biggest party at Stormont for the first time, O’Neill says the results mark a ‘new era’ for ‘our politics and for our people’
The elections to the Northern Ireland assembly are quite different to most UK elections. Members of the assembly are elected to 18 multi-member constituencies by single transferable vote.
Each constituency has five representatives, totalling 90 overall. Voters assign preferences to candidates on a ballot slip. If a candidate gets enough first-preference votes, they win a seat, and if not, second and then third preferences – and so on – are counted until all seats are filled.
Because of this, multiple counts are needed in each constituency, which means results can take a while to compile. It is possible for the first count not to result in the award of a seat. Another consequence is that it is not clear whether a party has increased or decreased its total seats in a constituency or overall, until all seats have been awarded.
By the terms of the Good Friday agreement the government of Northern Ireland is shared between the two main communities: nationalists, who favour closer ties with the Republic of Ireland, and unionists, for whom Northern Ireland’s position in the UK is more important. The largest party in the assembly appoints the first minister, and the largest party from the other community appoints the deputy first minister.
Some parties with cross-community support or whose supporters do not identify strongly with either community think this arrangement perpetuates divisions, but in practice since 1998 the largest party has always been from the unionist community and the second-largest from the nationalist.
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