Frustration is growing in Labour circles at the media campaign for the shadow health secretary Wes Streeting’s new book while other frontbenchers try to set out the party's policy agenda. Streeting's memoir, One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up, was published last month and 18 TV, radio and podcast appearances were included in the party's media schedule over two weeks to allow him to promote it. This apparent special treatment alienated Labour sources, who said Streeting should “wind his neck in” while other shadow cabinet ministers, such as Rachel Reeves, Ed Miliband, Bridget Phillipson and Yvette Cooper, help Keir Starmer to set out the party’s five “missions” for government. [See also: “I’m feeling gently told off”: Wes Streeting and Dr Phil ...

I sat through the Prime Minister’s somnolent appearance in front of the Liaison Committee – parliament’s pre-eminent committee, made up of all the select committee chairs – on 4 July so you could do something more interesting. At the start, Bob Neil MP noted that he and his colleagues were leading an inquiry into how to make select committees effective. The following 90 minutes were a perfect example of what not to do. Chivvied on by an uncharacteristically laconic Bernard Jenkin, the committee chair, each questioner had no time to develop a proper line of questioning or even hear Sunak’s full reply. The PM’s microphone kept misfiring, twanging every few minutes like an impatient clock. With her allotted minutes, the chair of ...

Boris Johnson’s scandal-strewn premiership, combined with Labour’s dizzyingly high national poll lead, might suggest that Uxbridge and South Ruislip will be an easy by-election gain for Keir Starmer’s party. “On paper, we should win it,” said one Labour adviser of the west London constituency, which the former prime minister held with a majority of 7,210 until he resigned as an MP last month. The opposition has increased its electoral dominance of the capital in recent times, winning Tory fiefdoms such as Westminster and Wandsworth in local elections last year. But behind closed doors there are jitters over whether Labour’s Uxbridge candidate, Danny Beales, will prevail on 20 July. Sadiq Khan’s contentious expansion of London's Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) – designed to ...

In his speech at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, Donald Dewar said the new institution was “about who we are, how we carry ourselves”. On such a historic occasion, the inaugural first minister said, he heard romantic echoes from the past, including “the shout of the welder in the din of the great Clyde shipyards; the speak of the Mearns, with its soul in the land; the discourse of the Enlightenment, when Edinburgh and Glasgow were a light held to the intellectual life of Europe”. Holyrood was intended to be a parliament for all of Scotland, a counter to a distant and often ignorant Westminster, a democracy that was concerned with and knowledgeable about the nation in all ...

There are many exploitative and harmful companies in fast fashion, but few move quite as fast as Shein. The Chinese retailer, launched in 2008, has rapidly gained popularity in the Western world over the last few years. It is unique for its suspiciously low price tags and chillingly rapid output, outpacing both Asos and FashionNova in the production of new items (creating roughly 60,000 fresh designs a month, compared with 20,000 and 4,000 respectively). Last year it became the world’s most popular fast fashion retailer by Google searches, overtaking Zara. This pace of production has caused Shein – amid stiff competition – to become especially notorious for its environmental impact. The cheapness of the brand’s clothes, both in price and quality (some ...

“Do ministers want us to change the chart so the public won’t be able to see how much the cuts hurt them?” That was the rhetorical question I asked my boss as a young economist working in the Treasury in 2015. The Conservatives had just won a majority and, being an Ed Miliband fan, I was nursing a broken heart. George Osborne’s first act as chancellor after the 2015 general election would turn out to be massive social security cuts for working parents. The “chart” part of my job was distributional analysis, showing the public how much people would gain (or more likely lose) from the taxation and social security cuts in that summer's Budget. Had we produced the chart, which ...

The New Conservatives are nothing new. Another grouping of Tory MPs launched its inaugural report yesterday (3 July), into reducing net migration. One of its recommendations, for instance, was scrapping worker visa eligibility for care workers. The new caucus of mostly 2019-intake MPs is largely an amalgam of the National Conservatives and the anti-woke Common Sense Group. It says it wants to reawaken the alignment brought about by Brexit and the 2019 general election that saw the Red Wall turn blue. You can file them under the communitarian, migration-sceptic form of politics that Michael Gove has flirted with since Boris Johnson’s defenestration. This politics has been bubbling around for a while. It simply has a new name. But the group could still ...

Keir Starmer proclaimed that Labour was the party of home ownership at an awkward, tetchy Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday. Three hours earlier, in Manchester, the shadow housing and levelling-up secretary Lisa Nandy delivered a speech setting out the broad principles that underpin the party’s housing policy. Nandy doesn’t believe there’s a single solution to the housing crisis and identifies different interventions for different sectors of the market, whether renting, development or council housing. But the overarching idea, I’m told, is to tilt the balance of power from land speculators to councils and developers. How will the Labour party do that? One policy is to scrap the requirement for councils to pay a premium on land to account for the value added ...