At Labour's National Policy Forum last weekend the party reckoned with a disappointing result in Boris Johnson's former seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, a defeat that Keir Starmer blamed on a Labour policy: the expansion of the London Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez), which will charge owners of more polluting vehicles £12.50 per day to drive in any London borough from 29 August. Starmer said Labour was "doing something very wrong if policies put forward by the Labour Party end up on each and every Tory leaflet". Labour insiders have complained to the Guardian that the Tory campaign used "dirty tricks" to give voters "the mistaken impression that they would lose the right to use their cars". But it is ...

With parliament now in recess, it’s worth looking at how the government’s immigration policy stands at the end of term. Last Monday (16 July) the Home Office released a "Statement of Changes to Immigration Rules" which relaxed visa restrictions for jobs experiencing shortage issues, such as bricklayers and carpenters. This comes just months after the Home Office announced tighter restrictions on student visas to “substantially cut net migration” by stopping international students from bringing their family or using their studies as a “backdoor” route to working in the UK. Though conflicted, these policies seem in line with the thinking of Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who reinforced the UK’s need to be “sensible and pragmatic” about immigration. The Chancellor maintains ...

After the trio of by-elections last Thursday (20 July), the headlines and bulletins called the results a “score draw” or “one all”. Like most Westminster narratives, this one was way off the money. Labour’s inability to win Uxbridge and South Ruislip received attention for all of the wrong reasons – in terms of the next general election, it’s a poor guide. In this west London seat, Labour was in a deeply peculiar position for an opposition party – it was effectively a quasi-incumbent. The Conservatives successfully made the election into something which by-elections are often supposed to be but rarely are: a genuinely local contest; a referendum on a loathed local policy. It tells us little beyond the politics of outer London, ...

Since 2015 Spanish elections have usually come in pairs. One party wins, but cannot or will not form a government with the numbers in parliament. They go back to the voters, and we get a repeat that, hopefully, produces a more decisive result. This is again the most likely outcome from Spain’s elections on 23 July. Without a clear path to a majority on either side, no one is sure who will govern the country. As was expected before the elections, Alberto Núñez Feijóo and his centre-right People's Party (PP) finished first overall. But with 136 seats in the Congress of Deputies, the lower house of Spain’s parliament, it has nowhere near the 176 required to win a majority. Short of ...

Since Labour lost the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election to the Conservatives on 20 July, it has been in turmoil over Ulez. The Ultra Low Emission Zone, which imposes a £12.50 daily charge on the most polluting vehicles, is about to be expanded by Sadiq Khan across Greater London. The Labour leadership fears this policy will colour voters’ opinions about how it would act in office, given the Mayor of London is a rare, high-profile example of a Labour politician in power. It’s unlikely Ulez will be reversed, I’ve heard. Transport for London, which has been drained of resources by the increase in home-working and hard-balled by successive Conservative administrations, needs the money. But there’s a reason beyond finances why a U-turn ...

Global warming will dominate the government’s policy over the next few decades. The UK is legally bound to decarbonise the economy by 2050 – a Herculean feat that will require billions of pounds of investment. Yet it rarely dominates political debate. Much like foreign policy, it’s an issue around which the two main parties broadly coalesce. Both commit to net zero. Both want to see renewables assume a greater place in our energy system. As Anoosh notes, Boris Johnson was the London mayor who introduced the Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) in the first place. Labour’s approach is more ambitious, of course. But moderate, uneven progress on emissions has been an unacknowledged merit of the past 13 years of Tory ...

“Mate. Mate. Have you heard the news, mate?” “What mate? You mean about the outsourced migrant workers who clean for Ogilvy UK, which identifies as an ‘anti-racist’ ad company, going on strike last month over their low wages and lack of decent sick pay?” “Nah mate. Ogilvy has done a campaign for Sadiq Khan, to get men to call each other out on sexism and misogyny. They even got that geezer Romesh Ranganathan to do a stand-up set about it. If your mates are doing or saying sexist stuff, you need to ‘say maaate to a mate’.” Sorry for that. But it should be emphasised how strange and awful this new anti-misogyny campaign from Sadiq Khan’s office is. As well as stand-up, it ...

The people of Uxbridge and South Ruislip should have a Labour MP representing them today, and the country should feel more confident that the Tories will be firmly shown the door at the next election. Perhaps more importantly, policies such as the Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) should be winning broad support but aren't. That a progressive candidate and a big progressive idea lost is in large part due to the fact Keir Starmer and Ed Davey would rather compete than cooperate. The tragedy of Uxbridge, and almost certainly the next general election, is that the Tories will keep on winning in places where the progressive vote is bigger than theirs but splits let them through. Why did the Liberal Democrats stand ...