When she spoke on BBC Radio 4 at 9:30am on 17 July, Diane Abbott was a Labour party member of over 40 years, a political veteran and the Mother of the House of Commons. By the evening of the same day, she had been suspended from the party and had been forced into a defensive crouch, saying it “is obvious this Labour leadership wants me out”. Somewhere in the middle, we have an argument about race, racism and hierarchies of racism. Not for the first time in recent years, a debate once relegated to academic sociology departments has rocked British public life. On the radio, Abbott doubled down on a letter she wrote to the Observer in 2023 which distinguished the ...

They call them the sticky iPad kids. Raised on Fortnite, Subway Surfers and MrBeast, Labour’s new revisions to the suffrage mean that current pre-teens born in 2013 will be eligible to vote by the next election. The oldest members of Gen Z got their latest taste of political independence in 2024, turning out (with some post-adolescent reluctance) for Keir Starmer. But as the Gen Z curtain closed in 2012, the Gen Alpha era began. Very soon, they’ll be participating in our democracy. The assumption might be that this extension of the vote to 16 and 17-year olds will bolster Labour’s vote at the next election. The 2024 election saw a large majority of the 18-24 demographic turn out for Starmer, with ...

It has been over two years since Diane Abbott sent that letter to the Observer, in which she argued that while Irish, Jewish and Traveller people could experience “prejudice”, “they are not all their lives subject to racism”, comparing the impact on their lives to the prejudice faced by “redheads”. At the time, it looked as though that letter might have ended her political career. Having spent the first years of his Labour leadership attempting to purge the party of the anti-Semitism that had plagued it under his predecessor, Keir Starmer’s response was swift. Abbott immediately had the Labour whip suspended – a suspension which lasted almost until the 2024 election, raising questions about whether she would even be allowed to stand again ...

Keir Starmer’s premiership began with discord, not harmony. Just three weeks after Labour’s landslide victory, seven MPs had the whip suspended for voting in favour of a SNP amendment backing the abolition of the two-child benefit cap (something Starmer has since described in private as his personal priority).  Almost exactly a year on, and in the aftermath of the mass welfare revolt, Starmer has enacted new reprisals. Four Labour MPs – Neil Duncan-Jordan, Chris Hinchcliff, Brian Leishman and Rachael Maskell – have had the whip removed for “repeated breaches of party discipline” while an additional three – Rosena Allin-Khan, Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Mohammad Yasin – have lost their trade envoy posts (all seven were among the 47 Labour MPs who voted ...

If Westminster watchers were hoping to end the parliamentary session with a bang, PMQs was once again a massive anti-climax. Coming 24 hours after the jaw-dropping reports of the Afghan data breach and two-year super-injunction broke, it was always going to be one of those sparring matches marked by the disconnect between the news of the day and what the leader of the opposition chose to ask about. Kemi Badenoch, after all, was unlikely to hammer Keir Starmer with questions about a scandal which took place while she was in government. Still, it is rarely a good sign when the headline revelation comes after the session itself. In the post-PMQs huddle, a No 10 spokesperson disclosed that while Badenoch only learned of ...

This is an edited transcript of the remarks Streeting made to the New Statesman summer reception. The question that the New Statesman’s interview with Keir posed is “What is this Labour government for?” I think it’s a question that Keir has answered many times and he answered again last week at the away day we had in Chequers. The story of this government is very much reflected in our leader and Prime Minister, the team he’s assembled, who we are, what we represent, and what we want to do for people from backgrounds like ours. We have a prime minister who has reached the heights of not just one but two professions that are really hard to crack into for people from ...

After last night’s Mansion House speech, in which Rachel Reeves promised an audience of City financiers that she would reduce regulation of financial services and encourage risk-taking by investors, the Public Accounts Committee has released a report this morning which suggests the state isn’t doing the greatest job of taxing the wealthiest in society. “HMRC does not know how many billionaires pay tax in the UK or how much they contribute overall,” the report finds. This sounds bad. It will certainly lead to even louder calls for a wealth tax from the left of the Labour Party and groups such as Patriotic Millionaires. But does HMRC need to know who’s a billionaire? Campaigners will doubtless be incensed by the revelation that “HMRC has no ...

In Britain, checking the weather forecast is second nature. We obsessively consult our favourite weather app, ready to adapt our day based on whether sunshine or showers are predicted. But we understand that weather forecasts become less reliable the further out they go. If someone claimed it would rain at exactly 10:13am two Tuesdays from now, would we believe them? We might pack a brolly. But we certainly wouldn’t rearrange our life around that precise time. We understand that weather forecasts are informed guesses. They deal in probabilities, not guarantees – and culturally, we use them with that understanding. But when it comes to economic forecasts, we seem to forget this common sense entirely. Take this year’s spring forecast from the Office ...