Starmer ‘completely rejects’ suggestion he echoed Enoch Powell in immigration speech, No 10 says – as it happened

This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here

David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has just started taking questions in the Commons. In response to the first question, Hamish Falconer, minister for the Middle East, said the UK has joined calls for an urgent meeting of the UN security council this afternoon to discuss the situation in Gaza.

After Foreign Office questions, Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, is asking an urgent question about the Mansion House accord – a deal with pension companies intended to get them to invest more in UK firms.

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Conservative party is fighting for its life, says former Tory cabinet minister

Simon Clarke says ‘pipeline of future voters is dead’ as party figures warn Kemi Badenoch her job as leader is in danger

The Conservative party is fighting to justify its existence amid concerns that its pipeline of future voters is “completely dead”, a former cabinet minister and leading thinktank director has said.

Simon Clarke, an ally of Boris Johnson who backed Kemi Badenoch for the leadership last year, was among a string of former Tory ministers and serving MPs to tell the Guardian she faced removal by her party if she did not turn its fortunes around by next year’s local elections.

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Tuesday briefing: The levers Labour might pull to counter a growing threat from Reform

In today’s newsletter: Can a partial U-turn on the winter fuel allowance help the party set a new agenda – and keep support for Nigel Farage at bay?

Good morning. After Reform UK’s resounding success in last week’s local elections, Keir Starmer has faced relentless questions over how Labour will change tack to deal with the problem. Now, we may have the beginning of an answer.

On the front page of today’s Guardian, Pippa Crerar and Jessica Elgot report that Downing Street is seriously rethinking the cuts to the winter fuel payment – the policy that above all others summarised Starmer and Rachel Reeves’s shaky start to life in government. While a full reversal is not on the cards, No 10 sources say that the £11,500 threshold over which pensioners are no longer eligible for the allowance could be increased in the autumn.

Israel-Gaza war | Israel is to expand its military operations in Gaza in the coming weeks, with the aim of “conquering” and establishing a “sustained presence” in the Palestinian territory, Israeli officials have said.

Film | Donald Trump’s threat to impose 100% tariffs on movies made outside the US could wipe out the UK film industry, ministers have been warned, as they came under immediate pressure to prioritise the issue in trade talks with the White House.

Charities | Macmillan Cancer Support is to scrap its £14m-a-year specialist advice service, which helps tens of thousands of people every year, in what has been described as a betrayal of vulnerable patients. With the charity’s income falling behind its expenditure, it said that the service was no longer sustainable.

Wildfires | After the warmest start to May on record, a wildfire has destroyed about 5,000 hectares (12,500 acres) of moorland on Dartmoor in Devon. Emergency services were called to the blaze at about 2.25pm on Sunday, and firefighters spent almost 24 hours at the scene before it was extinguished on Monday.

VE Day | The UK marked the 80th anniversary of VE Day with military pomp before large crowds who had gathered in central London. The royal family and war veterans were among the attendees at a 1,300-strong military procession while street parties were held around the UK.

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Reform UK to resist housing asylum seekers in its council areas, chair says

Echoing comments by Nigel Farage, Zia Yusuf says judicial reviews, injunctions and planning laws will be used

Reform UK has vowed to use “every instrument of power” to resist housing people seeking asylum in areas where it now controls councils, its chair has confirmed.

Zia Yusuf, the party chair and a major donor, acknowledged Reform may not be able to stop people seeking asylum being put up in hotels where the Home Office has contracts with accommodation providers.

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UK politics: New Reform mayor suggests 10% cut to council workforce – as it happened

Andrea Jenkyns says she wants a ‘lean, mean local government’ and says she is ‘up for a fight’ with unions

The Conservatives will come back from their poor results in the local elections but it will have to be a “slow and steady” effort, party leader Kemi Badenoch has said, PA reports.

She told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme: “I am sorry to all of those councillors who’ve lost their seat”.

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Now Farage not Starmer is feeding public’s appetite for change

The Reform UK leader has somehow dodged responsibility for the economic damage of Brexit and is winning over disaffected Labour voters

There was a time when any election campaign featuring the name Nigel Farage would have featured the word “Brexit” just as prominently.

And yet, almost a decade after Farage orchestrated Britain’s great EU schism, and with the Reform leader emerging as a bigger political threat than ever, at this week’s local elections Brexit was not a word on the lips of voters.

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Anti-immigrant Reform UK makes broad gains in English local elections

Labour-Conservative dominance challenged by Nigel Farage’s Trump-aligned party, which has control of at least six county councils

Britain’s anti-immigrant and Trump-aligned Reform UK party has made sweeping gains in English local elections, challenging the traditional political dominance of the country’s two main parties, Labour and the Conservatives.

Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, claimed his party had overtaken the Tories as the UK’s main opposition after Reform won control of at least six county councils, one mayoralty, and narrowly defeated the governing Labour party in a parliamentary byelection in what had been considered a safe seat.

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Reform UK’s victories are just the latest chapter of political fragmentation

Farage’s party has benefited this time as voters flee the main parties, but there are faultlines within its own coalition too

Fragmentation in British politics is not new. Disillusionment with the choices on offer is not new. The two-party share of the vote has been below 70% in four of the last six elections. Six months before the 2019 general election the Brexit party topped the EU election results with the Liberal Democrats in second. The 2024 general election had the lowest two-party share in the modern-party system.

What is driving this change? Political scientists talk about the demand and supply sides of electoral politics. The voters are the demand side, what types of parties and positions they want to vote for. They do not always get their wish. Who appears on the ballot paper is the supply side of the electoral equation. Increasingly, it is everyone.

Professor Paula Surridge is deputy director at UK in a Changing Europe and professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol

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Farage has declared a new dawn before, but this time things could really be different

Slicker presentation, a shift away from two-party politics and now hundreds of new councillors mean Reform is likely here to stay

In May 2014, Nigel Farage stood in front of the television cameras and declared his party’s victory in the European elections was “about the most extraordinary result that has been seen in British politics for 100 years”.

A year later, the Conservatives won an unexpected majority at the general election, restricting Ukip to just a single seat, with Farage failing in his attempt to win South Thanet.

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Is Nigel Farage’s quest to rid Reform of ‘amateurism’ paying off?

Runcorn win was much bigger than polls implied, suggesting overall effectiveness of ground campaign

For the last few months, Nigel Farage has been promising to professionalise his Reform UK party, saying its general election result of five seats had been hampered by the party’s “amateurism”.

Friday’s narrow victory in the Runcorn and Helsby byelection suggests his strategy is starting to bear fruit. Not only did the party win a seat in which it came a distant third less than a year ago, but it did so with a much bigger swing than implied by the national polls – demonstrating the effectiveness of the party’s ground campaign.

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Reform wins Runcorn byelection by just six votes in blow to Labour

Result will heighten government’s fears it could lose scores of MPs to Nigel Farage’s party at next general election

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has dramatically won the Runcorn and Helsby byelection by just six votes in a blow to Keir Starmer’s premiership.

The hard-right party narrowly overturned Labour’s 14,700-vote majority in the first full-scale electoral test of Starmer’s government and set a new record for the smallest majority at a parliamentary by-election since the end of the second world war.

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Starmer claims voters being ‘conned’ by Tories and Reform UK as parties are planning a coalition – as it happened

PM says supporters of both groups are being misled and a tie-up would be a ‘disaster’ for Britain. This live blog is closed

Downing Street has described the alleged comments by the band Kneecap in the ‘kill MP’ footage (see 12.10pm) as “completely unacceptable”.

At the morning lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson described the comments as “completely unacceptable”.

We do not think individuals expressing those views should be receiving government funding.

That’s up to the group, but clearly the PM rejects the views expressed … does not shy away from condemning them.

I don’t want to see strike action, I don’t think anybody wants to see strike action.

And certainly here we are in a healthcare environment with all the staff working really hard. The last thing they want to do is to go into dispute again.

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Reform UK challenged to give details on donations after £2m mailshot campaign

Exclusive: Liberal Democrats say voters need to know sources of funding for Nigel Farage’s party before local elections

The Liberal Democrats have publicly challenged Nigel Farage to give details of his party’s donations after calculating that Reform UK spent more than £2m on personalised letters to postal voters before the local elections.

In a letter to Farage, Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem deputy leader, said people needed to know the source of the money before Thursday’s elections, given that Reform received only £281,000 in donations in the last set of publicly available figures, for the final quarter of 2024.

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For political parties judging this year’s local election results it’s all about the baseline

The polls will be first electoral test for Labour government, while Reform is standing candidates in almost every contest

It’s all about the bass – well at least the baseline. With all political parties likely to win in some places it can be hard to judge what a good night looks like for any party when it comes to local elections.

One way to judge this is to compare with how parties did the last time these contests took place: the baseline. For the seats up for election next week that was 2021 – though many of the places that voted then will not be doing so in 2025. Those elections included places where elections were held over from 2020 because of Covid restrictions; these seats returned to their normal schedule last year.

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For political parties judging this year’s local election results it’s all about the baseline

The polls will be first electoral test for Labour government, while Reform is standing candidates in almost every contest

It’s all about the bass – well at least the baseline. With all political parties likely to win in some places it can be hard to judge what a good night looks like for any party when it comes to local elections.

One way to judge this is to compare with how parties did the last time these contests took place: the baseline. For the seats up for election next week that was 2021 – though many of the places that voted then will not be doing so in 2025. Those elections included places where elections were held over from 2020 because of Covid restrictions; these seats returned to their normal schedule last year.

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Tories urged not to ‘panic’ into uniting with Reform or removing Badenoch

Former ministers warn that leader must not be ‘pushed off course’ as Conservatives expect disastrous local elections

Senior Conservatives have warned colleagues against “bloody panic”, urging them not to consider doing deals with Reform or removing Kemi Badenoch as leader, as the party braces for a disastrous set of local election results.

Two former cabinet ministers warned against changing direction regardless of the result next Friday, with Andrew Mitchell saying “talk of deals with Reform is misplaced” and John Glen arguing Badenoch must not be “pushed off course”.

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UK politics: Reform UK on course to win in two mayoral contests – as it happened

Polling predicts victory for party in Greater Lincolnshire and Hull/East Yorkshire with the Greens possibly taking West of England

There are six mayoral elections next week. Two of them are for single-authority mayors (Doncaster and North Tyneside), but the others are for combined-authority mayors (or regional mayors – like metro mayors, but not just covering city regions). Today YouGov has released polling covering all four of these contests and it suggests Reform UK is on course to win two of them easily. And the Green party is narrowly ahead in a third, the poll suggests.

Here are the polling figures.

In theory the Tories should be winning in Lincolnshire as they hold most of the parliamentary seats in the area and have dominated local politics forever. But it’s also the most Reform-friendly part of the country. It contains Richard Tice’s constituency and numerous seats in which they came second. Plus their candidate is a former Tory MP – Andrea Jenkyns, famous for her Boris Johnson obsession and making a middle finger gesture at a crowd outside Downing Street. She is, by all accounts, quite a few sandwiches short of a picnic but, nevertheless, is strong favourite to win. Large chunks of local Conservative parties, including several councillors, have already defected.

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Farage claims doctors ‘massively over-diagnosing’ children with Send and mental health conditions – UK politics live

Reform UK leader claims he is ‘not being heartless, I’m being frank’ as he states rising number of diagnoses is a ‘massive problem’

John Swinney, the first minister of Scotland, is attending the funeral of the Pope on Saturday, the Scottish government has announced. In a statement Swinney said:

His Holiness Pope Francis was a voice for peace, tolerance and reconciliation who had a natural ability to connect with people of all ages, nationalities and beliefs.

On behalf of the people of Scotland, I am deeply honoured to attend the funeral of Pope Francis in Rome to express my sorrow, thanks and deep respect for the compassion, assurance and hope that he brought to so many.

Eating the Tories for breakfast. @Keir_Starmer

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Badenoch declines to criticise Jenrick over Reform coalition comments – as it happened

Spokesperson for Tory leader says she agrees with colleague that ‘we need to bring centre-right voters together’. This blog is closed

Rosie Duffield, the independent MP who left Labour after the election in part because she felt her gender critical views made her unwelcome in the party (although her resignation letter focused on welfare issues), has claimed that Keir Starmer no longer arguing a trans woman is a woman shows he is a “manager rather than a leader”.

Speaking on LBC, Duffield said:

It’s just another sign of the prime minister’s lack of leadership skills. I’m bound to say that, he’s a manager rather than a leader. He responds and reacts rather than leads from the front, and this is what we’re seeing again from him.

Nigel Farage is peddling a dangerous fantasy by claiming the UK can be self-sufficient in gas.

After sixty years of drilling, the truth is the UK has already burned most of its gas. That’s down to geology, not politics, and no amount of hot air from Farage will change that.

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Some British MPs spending equivalent of a day a week doing second jobs

Guardian analysis finds seven MPs have worked at least 300 hours since July in outside employment

A total of seven MPs have spent on average one working day a week on second jobs since the start of the 2024 parliament, with additional gigs as TV presenters, lawyers and consultants.

A Guardian analysis of self-declared working hours found the seven had worked at least 300 hours since July – the equivalent of eight hours a week, in outside employment averaged across the parliament – totalling more than 3,000 hours between them. A further seven MPs had worked at least five hours a week on a second job.

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