UK politics

UK politics

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

On Saturday, Your Party cofounder Zarah Sultana said she would skip the first day of the newly formed group's inaugural two-day conference following a serious disagreement over who could attend. After the UK's last general election in 2024, which the Labour Party won in a landslide following 14 years of Conservative Party rule, Corbyn and four other left-leaning independents Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Ayoub Khan and Iqbal Mohamed formed the Independent Alliance,

Back then he spoke to a party scarred by infighting, just over a year away from a historic defeat in the 2019 general election. As he stepped on stage to address his start-up political party on Saturday, much had changed. Not only is Corbyn no longer the Labour leader, he has been kicked out of the party an event that set him on the path to founding Your Party.

When Cara Hunter, the Irish politician, looks back on the moment she found out she had been deepfaked, she says it is like watching a horror movie. The setting is her grandmother's rural home in the west of Tyrone on her 90th birthday, April 2022. Everyone was there, she says. I was sitting with all my closest family members and family friends when I got a notification through Facebook Messenger.

Cash ISA deposits to banks and building societies increased by 29% month on month to £4.2bn nationally. It's also higher year-on-year by 13%, despite interest rates being lower. Plum's own data shows that Cash ISA account opens are up by 42% last week compared to the previous week. The speculation about the reduction to the Cash ISA allowance is likely to have been a driving factor behind this, with many wanting to take advantage of the £20k allowance while it's still there.

By delivering a big, bold long-term plan, not a set of quick fixes, we will renew Britain. We must become again a serious people, with a serious government, capable together of doing difficult things to regain control of our future. By having a clear mission to renew our economy, our communities and our state we will deliver the change we promised and then be judged on it at the next election.

The crisis over special educational needs and disabilities in England is not just a question of cash. Children and parents spend months and years battling for support to which the law entitles them, schools lack the funding to meet needs, and specialist provision is inadequate. An adversarial system shunts families towards tribunals that councils almost invariably lose. Tory reforms created obligations for local authorities but did not adequately fund them allowing ministers to duck responsibility.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office's (FCDO) migration and conflict directorate, which employs about 100 civil servants, is being abolished at the end of this year and its work subsumed by the rest of the department. The directorate provides advice and technical support to governments and civil society groups in trouble spots, including Syria, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Yemen and the Philippines.

Brent Council has revealed it spends more than 30,000 a year cleaning up pavements and buildings stained with a reddish-brown substance left behind by people spitting out a stimulant called paan. Chewing paan is common in parts of north-west London, particularly around Wembley, where a rust-coloured mix of saliva and paan can be seen spattered in many places, including on telephone boxes and in flower-beds.

We are deeply concerned that our extensive experience is simply being ignored. As is the well-known and troubling reality that judicial decisions lack the disparity of 12 jurors.

Nathan Law, a former Hong Kong politician who arrived in the UK in 2020 and has a bounty on his head, said that the government should reflect on its moral obligations when enacting its increase of the standard qualifying period for permanent residence to a decade. He said the proposed change in asylum laws was creating fresh anxiety and uncertainty for Hongkongers forced to flee their homes.

At the first Budget, she said there was a £22bn black hole. With £40bn of tax rises, she said that was sorted, so she wouldn't come back for more. Now, the black hole is £34bn so taxes are going up again. People work hard to make their lives better and all she's doing is coming back for more and more tax.

would be determined by what the system looks like, and that can only really be measured after the consultation has been closed and analyzed.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has cast doubt on claims Rachel Reeves dropped plans to raise income tax in this week's budget because of rosier forecasts, pointing out she knew about these well before the change of heart. In a move likely to exacerbate tensions with the Treasury, the OBR chair, Richard Hughes, has taken what he acknowledged was the unusual step of writing to the Treasury select committee to explain how its forecast evolved, given the circumstances in this case.