Afternoon summary
The suspect in the Golders Green double stabbing was referred to Prevent, the official counter-extremism scheme, in 2020. As Vikram Dodd reports, the Guardian understands his case was closed within six weeks by the deradicalisation scheme, which has faced previous criticism.
The Green party leader, Zack Polanski, has been criticised for retweeting a post on X suggesting that the police used excessive force when they arrested the suspect in the Golders Green attack. (See 4.36pm.)
Labour has called on Robert Jenrick to give up almost £40,000 donated to his campaign to be Conservative leader in 2024 following allegations that the sum came from an impermissible foreign donor now convicted of fraud.
For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.
The fact that Zack Polanski is being criticised for a post on social media (see 4.36pm) won’t surprise the Economist. In an article about him this week, it describes him as “a politician who could be described as Britain’s first digital-native party leader”. It says:
Mr Polanski has liked a post on Bluesky every day since April 1st 2025—nearly 35,000 times in total (see chart). On a typical day, Mr Polanski likes his first Bluesky post at around 8.30am. His favourite times to scroll are between noon and 1pm, and from 6pm to 7pm. His last like of the day tends to happen at around 11.15pm. After that, presumably, it’s bedtime.
The content of the posts Mr Polanski likes vary but there are some recurring themes. Around a third of the posts include his name. They tend to be adoring.
The article also says: “With so many likes to his name, perhaps it is no surprise that Mr Polanski’s thumbs are working faster than his judgment.”
SNP criticises Starmer over reported plan to allow around some hereditary peers to return to Lords as life peers
The SNP has criticised Keir Starmer over reports that he is planning to allow around quarter of the hereditary peers who have just been removed from the House of Lords to return by giving them life peerages. (See 2.27pm.) The SNP issued a statement from Jenni Minto, a minister in the Scottish government, saying:
In the middle of a cost-of-living emergency, the Labour Party is focused on saving hereditary Lords – they deserve the electoral drubbing voters will give them next week.
It is a disgrace that a UK Labour government, that has failed to lift a finger to help people with their energy bills, has instead been spending its time striking a deal to save hereditary Lords.
It will be very telling if Anas Sarwar fails to condemn this move – with speculation growing that he is lining up a place in the Lords for himself after being projected to lead Labour to their worst ever result in Scotland.
Zack Polanski strongly criticised for retweeting post suggesting police arresting Golders Greens suspect used excessive force
The Green party leader, Zack Polanski, has been criticised for retweeting a post on X suggesting that the police used excessive force when they arrested the suspect in the Golders Green attack.
Polanski, a profilic user of social media, reposted without comment a tweet which, referring to Mark Rowley, the Met police commissioner, contained the message message: “So essentially his officers were repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head when he was already incapacitated by a Taser.”
Mike Tapp, a Home Office minister, responded by saying:
I’m disgusted that anyone with this view is leading any political party. The Green Party has hit a new low.
A spokesperson for the Jewish Labour Movement said:
The Jewish community is hugely grateful to the police for apprehending a knife-wielding terrorist before he stabbed more Jews.
If a terrorist won’t drop the knife used to stab two Jews, then any sensible person would expect the police to use force. It’s shocking Zack Polanski and his ‘comrades’ are soft on terrorists.
On Wednesday, after the attack happened, the Green party issued a statement saying:
This was an appalling act of antisemitic violence. Jewish people deserve safety and belonging wherever they live and we stand in solidarity with the British Jewish community. Our hearts go out to the victims and their loved ones and we pay tribute to the emergency services, including Hatzola, for their swift response.
Polanski, who is Jewish, has faced criticism during the local election campaigns for not doing more to deal with antisemitism in his party. The Greens are strongly pro-Gaza, but Labour has accused them of also accepting as members people who were expelled from Keir Starmer’s party over antisemitism.
Today it was revealed that two Green candidates in Lambeth have been arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred over alleged antisemitic social media posts. (See 4.01pm.)
Asked about the Golders Green retweet, a Green party source told HuffPost UK:
Zack has seen the video like everyone else, and doesn’t know the full picture and knows it was a very difficult situation for the authorities, but we do need to understand more about the response.
Two Green Party candidates arrested over alleged antisemitic online posts
Two Green party candidates standing in the upcoming local elections have been arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred over alleged antisemitic social media posts, the Press Association reports. PA says:
Saiqa Ali, a Lambeth Green candidate for Streatham St Leonard’s ward, and Sabine Mairey, standing in Lambeth’s Clapham Town, were detained by Metropolitan police officers on Thursday, according to The Telegraph.
Zack Polanski’s Green party did not deny the two women had been arrested, as it declined to comment and said it was a matter for the police.
The Met said in a statement: “Police have arrested two women, aged 57 and 54, on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred online, an offence under section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986. They remain in police custody.
“The arrests follow an investigation launched after concerns were reported to police on Tuesday 21 April about antisemitic material that had been posted online.”
The newspaper reported it was understood Ali, whose Instagram account is set to private, posted an image of an armed man wearing a headband of the proscribed Islamist militant group Hamas alongside the slogan “resistance is freedom”.
Mairey shared the text “ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism, it’s revenge” on the platform, The Telegraph said.
A Green party spokesperson told the Press Association: “This now a police matter. We won’t be commenting at this stage.”
Ali does not appear to be listed as a candidate for Streatham St Leonards, and Mairey does not feature as a Clapham Town candidate on the Lambeth Green party’s website candidate.
Earlier this month, Ali apologised “for any offence or distress caused to anyone by my social media posts” after the Lambeth Labour group accused her of sharing antisemitic posts that “repeat harmful tropes about Jewish people”.
Mark Park, chair of the Liberal Democrats’ campaign committee, was holding a briefing on the local elections today. In a post for a Lib Dem Substack blog, he said there is already evidence from the campaign that the Lib Dems are stronger at grassroots level than they have been in the past. He says:
The percentage of vacancies contested by Lib Dem candidates is up by seven percentage points this time around compared with four years ago (the most comparable previous year in the cycle). That includes the best local election candidate showing in London since 1986. There’s still more work to do to match and exceed other parties, but that’s significant progress.
A different sign of the health of grassroots campaigning is the volume of canvassing, which so far this year is up 27% compared with four years ago. (Although four years ago there were no Scottish parliament or Welsh Senedd elections, there were all-out local government elections in both countries.)
Even after the 2024 general election, there simply aren’t enough held and target parliamentary seats for that sort of volume and growth of activity to be coming simply from them. It is a sign of broader grassroots strength
John Swinney criticised for 'stop Farage at border' comment
Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.
John Swinney, the Scottish National party leader, has been criticised for presenting the Holyrood election as a chance to “stop Nigel Farage at the border’ – in an unusual reversal of the contested territory of border control.
After repeatedly lambasting Reform UK for its desired crack down on who gets to enter Britain, Swinney has described next week’s Holyrood election as a symbolic chance for Scottish voters to ban the Reform UK leader from crossing the English border.
On a visit to Stranraer in south west Scotland, where ferries to and from Northern Ireland sail, Swinney said voters had a chance to cut the cost of food and bus travel, and increase child support. He went on:
That is the choice on the ballot paper one week from today – and by uniting behind the SNP, people in Scotland can stop Nigel Farage at the border.
The SNP is the only party strong enough to beat Reform here in the south of Scotland and right across the country – and we will never do a grubby deal with Nigel Farage and Lord Offord.
Malcolm Offord, Reform’s Scottish leader, originally from Greenock on the Clyde, questioned Swinney’s choice of language. A substantial proportion of Reform’s Scottish candidates are Scottish; up to 20% of Scottish voters back the party. He said:
Glad that some of the media are now calling out his language because it works both ways. I don’t think that is in any way temperate language. The reality is that Reform UK is a good thing for Scotland.
Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, said he wanted Reform to get “humped” by the electorate on 7 May but said Swinney was using the rightwing party’s threat as a distraction from defending the SNP’s record in government.
Speaking in Edinburgh, he said:
You can ask the SNP about their own press releases and their own comments. I think clearly they don’t want to talk about their record, they don’t want to talk about what they’ve have got wrong in the last 20 years.
They want to make this election about anyone else or anything else. I’m going to focus on making this election about the great people of Scotland.
Updated
Eluned Morgan accidentally tells people to vote Plaid Cymru in Welsh language gaffe
Eluned Morgan, the Labour Welsh first minister, accidentally told members to “vote Plaid Cymru” in an election campaign gaffe, the Press Association reports. PA says:
Morgan, the leader of Welsh Labour, misspoke while addressing a crowd of supporters at a week-to-go campaign event in Barry Island.
Ending her speech, Morgan said: “One week to go, let’s open that new chapter for Wales, let’s have fairness you can feel, let’s vote Welsh Labour in the election next week.”
“Pleidleisiwch Plaid Cymru,” she added in Welsh, before quickly correcting herself to say “Plaid Lafur [Labour Party]”.
The error was met with laughter from her audience, who clapped and cheered at the end of her speech.
Speaking to ITV Wales, Morgan said: “We’re all a little bit exhausted, once you switch into Welsh the word ‘Cymru’ comes off your lips.
“Obviously I’m very, very keen for people to vote Welsh Labour in this election.
“You know where you stand, waiting lists are coming down, nine months in succession.
“The plan is working – don’t put it at risk.”
Yesterday, when parliament prorogued, it marked the final time that people would be sitting in the House of Lords just by virtue of having a hereditary peerage. There were 92 places left in the Lords for hereditary peers after most of them were removed in 1999 when Tony Blair was PM.
But some of those forced out yesterday will be coming back, Aubrey Allegretti reports for the Times. He says:
Keir Starmer set to announce dozens of peerages before the King’s Speech - in a deal to give a quarter of heredities back their spots in the Lords.
15 Tories who lost their hereditary status on Wednesday will return as lifers, along with two Labour peers and around 9 cross-benchers.
They’ve had to go through due diligence checks with HOLAC [House of Lords appointments commission]- and may have to take up new titles.
Some hereditary peers have already had an upgrade (or downgrade, depending on how you look at it) to additional life peerage status, allowing them to stay. Three of them were given life peerages in an honours list in December.
Reform UK claims it would renegotiate Brexit deal to stop resident foreign students accessing UK student loan system
Suella Braverman, Reform UK’s education spokesperson, was giving interviews this morning (see 11.57am) because she has a policy to announce. As she explains in this video, she says Reform UK would stop foreign students who are resident in the UK accessing student loans.
In recent years universities have become increasingly dependent on foreign students. They can charge them much higher fees, and the income from foreign students helps to fund the teaching for students from Britain, whose fees are capped.
The Reform UK policy would not affect these foreign students – because they cannot access the UK student loan system anyway.
Instead, the policy would apply to resident foreign students – including EU nationals with settled status (permission to live in the UK granted as part of the Brexit settlement, because they were here before) and foreigners with indefinite leave to remain in the UK.
Explaining the policy, Reform UK said:
Currently, 270,000 - 300,000 resident foreign nationals access £4bn worth of taxpayer-backed student loans each year, many of which are unlikely ever to be repaid. At the same time, British graduates face long-term debt and rising living costs. This measure will save approximately £2bn annually.
The party said resident foreign students from Hong Kong and Ukraine would not be covered by this policy.
Braverman said:
Too many of our universities are selling immigration, not education. That ends under Reform UK.
The university system has prioritised mass immigration and low standards over quality and the national interest and too many universities have become little more than visa factories. Too many offer lower entry requirements to foreign students and British students are penalised by the system.
British taxpayer funded student loans to foreign students end under Reform UK. This will save us £2bn per year. We will stop subsidising the rest of the world while young people in Britain struggle with debt and poor job prospects.
As the party acknowledges in its news release, stopping people with EU settled status from accessing the UK student loan system would require a renegotiation of the UK’s Brexit deal with the EU. The EU would not give up this concession lightly, and any attempt to renege on the agreement could lead to Brussels imposing retaliatory measures of its own.
Malcolm Offord defends 'six homes' boast, saying voters want to live in Scotland where people can make money
Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent.
Malcolm Offord, Reform UK’s leader in Scotland, has refused to confirm he’d publish his tax return after SNP leader John Swinney challenged all party leaders to do so ahead of the election.
Swinney’s challenge came yesterday as he dismissed the Reform leader as “tone deaf” after he boasted in a televised election debate about owning six houses, five cars and six boats.
Offord told journalists today that he would publish everything “I’m legally required to” if elected – which doesn’t include tax returns. But did confirm that he is a top-rate taxpayer.
He also denied he’d encountered any backlash since the remarks. He said.
All I’ve heard from people is ‘well done for raising this issue’. The question I’m challenging Scotland with is: do you want to be in a Scotland where people make money or not?
Labour mayor Kim McGuinness says Starmer could even survive losing 2,000 seats in local elections - but change would be essential
In an interview with Times Radio, Kim McGuinness, the Labour mayor for the north-east of England, was asked if it would be impossible for Keir Starmer to survive even if he lost as many as 2,000 seats in the local elections next week. Robert Hayward is saying he is likely to lose 1,850 seats (see 9.06am) and other projections for Labour losses are even higher (see 10.05am). As this Guardian analysis explains, losses on this scale would be the worst in modern times for any governing party.
McGuinness replied:
I don’t think it’s impossible [for Starmer to stay on], but I do think he has got to take it as a wake-up call, and the turnaround has to happen. There has to be a real recognition that people do not feel listened to, do not feel understood, [do not feel] like the government is delivering on their priorities, and that has to change. I think there’s that awareness, I think they know that, but now it has to happen.
McGuinness also said that she thought Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, would make “a great prime minister” but she said that, because he was not an MP, and because there was no contest, talk of supporting him for the job now was hypothetical.
There has been some speculation as to how many seats Labour would have to lose for Starmer’s position to be untenable. In truth, trying to work out in advance what the threshold is in a situation like this is a bit of a mug’s game – because politics is never quite that rational or predicatable – but nevertheless it is a big talking point in Westminster circles. In a much-quoted Sunday Times article at the weekend, Lara Spirit suggested 1,500 is the key number.
Just how steep the losses would need to be on 7 May for cabinet ministers to move against the prime minister – with any “magic number” having long been a source of mystery – is now coming into view. One cabinet minister said anywhere north of 1,500 losses in council seats would be the doomsday scenario which could trigger a cabinet revolt. “That would be the cutoff for a collective nervous breakdown among cabinet colleagues,” they said.
Suella Braverman claims Farage did not need to declare £5m donation because it was 'private'
Suella Braverman, the former Tory home secretary who is now Reform UK’s education spokesperson, has defended Nigel Farage’s decision not to declare the £5m donation that he received from Christopher Harborne.
In an interview with Sky News, Braverman said the donation did not need to be declared because it was a “private” matter. She explained:
There’s a very big distinction between what’s your public duty, your public role, and your private. And before he was an MP for many years, Nigel Farage has carried a high risk to his personal safety.
It’s entirely reasonable for him to take steps. It’s very regrettable, actually, that the state has not stepped in to protect him.
Under the Commons code of conduct, and the rules that go with it, donations do not have to be declared if they “could not reasonably be thought by others to be related to membership of the house or to the member’s parliamentary or political activities”.
But the rules also say:
Both the possible motive of the giver and the use to which the gift is to be put should be considered. If there is any doubt, the benefit should be registered.
Number of households in temporary accommodation falls for 1st time in three years, figures show
The number of households in temporary accommodation in England has fallen slightly for the first time in three years, the Press Association reports. PA says:
Temporary accommodation is a form of homelessness and can include hostels, refuges and bed and breakfasts.
There were 134,210 households in such accommodation at the end of December, down from 134,700 at the end of September 2025, according to official data.
Publishing the figures today, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, said: “While this shift is small, this is the first quarter that the number of households in temporary accommodation has fallen since 2022.”
The last quarterly fall was at the end of March 2022 when the number of households stood at 95,000, down from 96,280 at the end of December 2021.
Since then the figure has increased every quarter.
But while the latest number has dropped slightly below the previous record levels, it is still 5.0% higher than the figure for the end of December 2024 which was 127,820.
The number of children in temporary accommodation has however continued to rise, standing at 176,130 at the end of December, up from 175,930 at the end of September.
The number is up 6% year on year, from 165,450 at the end of December 2024.
Of all households in temporary accommodation at the end of December, 12,550 were living in bed and breakfasts (B&Bs).
Badenoch claims Farage getting £5m gift from donor shows he can't claim to be in touch with ordinary people
On BBC Radio Merseyside the presenter, Tony Snell, put it to Kemi Badenoch that Merseyside was a lost cause for the Tories. He said that Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, had been on the programme yesterday. He said that Farage argued that Scousers were down to earth and the Tories they were seen as “aloof and remote”.
Badenoch said no one had ever described her as aloof and remote. When it was put to her that Farage was talking about the party, she said the Tories were the party of working people. Labour were only interested in welfare, she claimed.
She also claimed that the revelation yesterday that Nigel Farage had received a £5m gift showed that he was not down to earth.
Nigel Farage can say as much as he wants that he’s the one who’s down to earth. Someone just gave him a £5m gift to the other day. I don’t know what’s down to earth about that.
Who gets £5m is a gift. If I got £50,000 as a gift, I think people would raise their eyebrows. That’s a hundred times that. And he forgot to register it. He forgot that he’d been given £5m. I don’t think that’s down to earth. So I’m not going to be taking any lessons from Nigel Farage.
Updated
On BBC Radio Sussex, the presenter, Sarah Gorrell, put it to Kemi Badenoch that councils were struggling because of the funding record left by the last Conservative government. Badenoch refused to engage with this point, and instead argued that Conservative-run councils were better managed than councils run by other parties.
Gorrell reminded Badenoch that she was a student at the University of Sussex, and said the leftwing students she encountered there helped to make her a rightwinger. She said Badenoch had described students there as “spoilt, entitled, privileged, metropolitan elite in training”. Would that apply to the ones there now, Gorrell asked.
Badenoch said she did not know the students there now. But she said the “silly things” she had encountered in student politics she was now seeing in the Labour government.
Updated
Badenoch told BBC Radio London that the Conservatives were committed to keeping council tax “as low as possible”. She said, unlike Reform UK, the Tories were not promising to cut council tax. Reform did that, but could not deliver, she said.
In an interview on BBC Radio London, asked what would be a good result for the Conservatives in London, Kemi Badenoch said she wanted to win as many seats as possible. And she said she would like to win back councils the party had lost, citing Westminster as an example. But she refused to set a target for how many seats she expected to win.
Kemi Badenoch is doing a round of interviews on local radio this morning. She started on BBC Radio Leeds where, at one point, she said that people should vote for Conservative councillors because they were “not drama queens” and “not playing games”. At that point the presenter, Gayle Lofthouse, put it to her that that was exactly what she had been doing in Westminster this week, with the vote on the privileges committee inquiry. Lofthouse also said that BBC reporters were being told the voters in West Yorkshire weren’t interested in this.
In response, Badenoch said she had spent much of the past month focusing on energy policy and petrol prices. But she quickly reverted to defending the vote on Tuesday. She said:
It’s not a TV show, this is real life. Having a prime minister who appointed someone who is a national security risk affects your residents, your listeners.
It is a problem if we cannot defend our country because someone who had links to Russian companies that were closely linked to the Kremlin was appointed American ambassador.
Although Badenoch has repeatedly claimed that Peter Mandelson was a national security risk when he was ambassador, not a shred of evidence has emerged to show that he did anything while he was in that job to jeopardise national security. He was sacked because Keir Starmer concluded he had lied to No 10 about the depth of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, and because the extent of that relationship made it impossible to defend Mandelson having an ongoing role in public life.
Robert Hayward’s forecasts for the English local elections (see 9.06am) are broadly in line with the equivalent figures produced by other experts.
Here are projections from Stephen Fisher, an Oxford politics professor who is part of the team led by John Curtice that produces general election exit polls for the BBC and others. He published this in a post on his Elections Etc blog last month.
And here are projections from Sam Freedman, the political commentator, in a post on his Comment is Freed Substack blog.
Updated
More Send inclusive schools ‘actively penalised in Ofsted grades’, union says
Lower grades in parts of a watchdog’s new report cards “actively penalise” schools more inclusive to pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (Send), a headteachers’ union has said. The Press Association reports:
Analysis by the NAHT headteachers’ union of Ofsted inspections under the report card system found one in five (20%) schools with above average numbers of pupils with Send were judged “needs attention” – the second lowest grade – in the report card’s attendance and behaviour area.
This is compared with one in 10 (9%) schools with below average numbers of pupils with Send, the NAHT said.
It comes after the Government unveiled sweeping reforms to the Send system intended to make the system and schools more inclusive.
NAHT general secretary Paul Whiteman said the findings should “ring serious alarm bells” for the government’s ambitions for more pupils with Send to learn in mainstream schools.
The Guardian’s data experts have also been looking at Labour’s prospects in the elections, and they say Labour’s vote-share could fall to historic lows across elections for councils in England and devolved parliaments in Wales and Scotland on 7 May, with big gains for Reform, the Greens and nationalist parties, according to recent polling. This is from Alex Clark and Ashley Kirk.
Robert Hayward has also given his predictions for the Scottish parliament and Welsh Senedd elections. He says:
Scotland- SNP to be just short of a majority
Wales- Plaid to be the largest party in terms of both votes and seats
But there is much more interest in what Hayward, and other psephologists, are forecasting for the English local elections because they are hard to poll. By contrast, there is a lot polling available for the Holyrood and Senedd elections. One source of seat projections based on this polling is Nowcast UK.
Local election campaigning enters final week as forecaster warns Labour could lose 1,850 English seats
Good morning. We are now into the final week of campaigning for the Scottish parliament, Welsh Senedd and English local elections. Keir Starmer had been planning a big speech today, but he, and other political leaders, are today focusing on their response to the Golders Green stabbing and the antisemitism threat facing Britain’s Jewish community – described as a “national security emergency” by Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terror legislation. Here is our overnight story. And here is our live blog by Taz Ali.
Taz will be covering most of the political reaction to that story, and so that won’t be something I will be covering here. (And because criminal proceedings are active, comments relating to the attack won’t be allowed below the line, I’m afraid.)
Instead, let’s start with the elections, and a member of the House of Lords called Robert Hayward. Hayward is a Conservative and former MP but at Westminster he is best known as an elections specialist who produces detailed forecasts ahead of elections. They are not always perfect – no forecast is – but they are well-informed, and politically neutral, and Hayward is one of the very few people doing forecasting of this kind whose views are taken seriously by the main political parties. He won’t necessarily tell you exactly what will happen; but he is worth reading if you want to know what the politicos expect to happen (which is useful intelligence because often election results are assessed by how they match up against expectations).
Last night Hayward revealed his forecast for the English local elections on ITV’s Peston.
And this is how Hayward explains it in his summary.
England all figures given are net losses and gains
Labour will lose 1850 seats
The losses will be nationwide
What impact on Sir Keir’s role? Given S Times comment re 1500 losses and ‘nervous breakdown’ this is bad news for Sir Keir and Labour.
Reform will be biggest gainer from both Labour and Conservatives, overwhelmingly outside London. They will gain 1550 seats
Will their national equivalent vote be lower than last year? I believe it will be
Conservatives will lose 600 seats many in councils deferred from last year. These seats were previously contested in the vaccine bounce year of 2021.
Do they gain any notable councils or stop Reform from taking control of target councils? Yes
Have they improved on the national equivalent vote last year? About static
Greens will gain 500 seats in London and middle class areas of other cities
Can they take any mayoralties or control any councils? Yes definitely mayoralty possibly a council or two
Lib Dems will gain 150 seats but will need to gain councils to be involved ‘in the conversation’.
Will national equivalent vote share reflect decline in poll position. Yes
Have they lost their position as part of the protest parties? Up to a point.
Independents will gain 250 seats
Many of these will be in east London, Birmingham and Lancs
Other forecasts are available too. I will post more on those soon.
Parliament is not sitting today, and there is not much in the diary. But we won’t be short of politics.
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