Politics | kieransbrookholmes.claims

From the US midterms to the hard right in Britain, empathy has become a dirty word in politics | John Harris

In his capacity as Reform's Treasury spokesman, his task was to big up its plans to cut 25% of so-called welfare spending by 2030, and thereby tackle what he called the state's "suicidal empathy". Straight away, I…

Law behind Bonfire Night among records sent from parliament to National Archives

The 1605 Thanksgiving Act was passed by James I after Guy Fawkes's failure to assassinate the king, the Lords and the Commons, at the opening of parliament that year. Celebrating the "miraculous and gracious deliverance"…

UK MPs could undergo criminal record checks to stop violence against women

The UK parliament will on Tuesday become the first legislature in the world to receive what is known as White Ribbon accreditation, a commitment to culture change which originated in Canada. After a cross-party campaign…

Halloween’s over. But we still have a zombie Government

This is the problem with changing prime ministers so regularly: you lose a year, sometimes more, due to the learning curve. The three years Burnham has before the election are just enough to pass a difficult law and get…

Peter Franklin: Is it time for Kemi to change strategy?

Let’s take a look at where the polls stand now compared to twelve months ago. The good news is that the gap between the Conservatives and Reform has narrowed to almost nothing — or indeed less than nothing. According to…

Albie Amankona: Kemi Badenoch must avoid Andy Burnham’s Brexit trap

The Conservative Party is currently trapped between two equally delusional political fantasies on Europe. On one side, the blinkered ideologues of Reform UK continue to peddle the absurd fiction that Brexit has been a…

Festus Akinbusoye: London’s man-made housing crisis can be fixed

London has already shown us how to build high-density neighbourhoods that endure and Maida Vale is proof of this. My ambition is to make six-storey, family-friendly mansion blocks a normal form of development on suitable…

Widening inequality, stagnant pay – Britain urgently needs Labour’s hard-won workers’ rights | Polly Toynbee

The British Social Attitudes survey , the nation's long-running annual pulse-taker, finds growing job dissatisfaction in its report, published today. People complain of a lack of flexibility in working hours, a lack of…

Poland’s court fight boils over

So, what now? On today’s show, Zoya Sheftalovich and Kathryn Carlson unpack Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s efforts to undo judicial appointments made under the previous right-wing Law and Justice government. Tusk’s…

UK and European peacekeepers in Ukraine would be allowed to fire back at Russians

The Anglo-French led stabilisation force would also not rely on US systems or technology, such as Elon Musk's Starlink, and is expected to be almost exclusively European if deployed. "Clearly we will protect our forces…