Closing summary
This blog will be closing shortly. Thank you for reading the updates. More of the Guardian’s UK politics coverage can be found here.
Below is a summary from today’s live blog:
Kemi Badenoch has apologised for the “bloodbath” of the local elections in an op-ed piece on Saturday for the Telegraph. The Conservative party leader wrote: “I’m deeply sorry to see so many capable, hard-working Conservative councillors lose their seats. They didn’t deserve it – and they weren’t the reason we lost.” She added that the local election results had shown “the scale of the work needed to rebuild trust in the Conservative party”.
Reform UK will find out there are “no simple answers” to local public finances and have to make “difficult choices” after the party surged in local elections, a senior Tory MP said. Speaking to GB News, Richard Fuller, shadow chief treasury secretary, said it was now up to Nigel Farage’s party to see if they could deliver in the areas where they had won council seats and mayoral polls.
Keir Starmer has said he wants “national renewal” and that “change on that scale will take time”, in a Saturday op-ed for the Times. The prime minister insisted there was “tangible proof that things are finally beginning to go in the right direction”, although he said he was not satisfied with where the country was. Starmer said he was “acutely aware that people aren’t yet feeling the benefits”.
Nigel Farage hailed his party’s “unprecedented” results in the local elections. In a post on X on Saturday, the Reform UK leader wrote: “In postwar Britain, no one has ever beaten both Labour and the Tories in a local election before. These results are unprecedented.”
Labour MP Rachael Maskell has urged her party to scrap winter fuel and welfare policies that she said are pushing voters away. Maskell suggested that voters shunned her party in local elections because it had failed to live up to the values the public expects from a Labour government. The York Central MP told BBC Breakfast: “People went cold last winter and that’s not what a Labour government should be doing.”
Assisted dying is about the “human cost” and not pounds and pence, Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP behind the bill, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. An impact assessment into the terminally ill adults (end of life) bill was published on Friday, exactly a fortnight before the next Commons debate on the proposed new law. It set out estimates for how many people might apply and go on to have an assisted death, as well as potential costs of the service and reduced end-of-life care costs. Leadbeater said the bill would provide the “most robust piece of legislation in this area in the world”.
The MSP behind the bill to legalise assisted dying is dropping proposals to allow 16 and 17-year-olds to end their lives with medical assistance. Liam McArthur said he would raise the minimum age in the assisted dying for terminally ill adults (Scotland) bill to 18.
Shadow chief treasury secretary Richard Fuller insisted Kemi Badenoch would still be the party’s leader in a year’s time after the Conservatives lost more than 600 councillors in local elections. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Fuller also ruled out a future pact with Reform UK on a national level.
Keir Starmer congratulated Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese on his election victory on Saturday. In a statement shared on X, Starmer said: “Congratulations to Anthony Albanese on your election win. The UK and Australia are as close as ever – which goes to show that long-distance friendships can be the strongest.”
A newly elected Reform UK councillor said Durham county council would be “getting the auditors in” right away to slash spending in areas like net zero and green initiatives. “We’re getting the auditors in to see … actually what those jobs are, and if they’re good value for money, and if they’re not, well, the answer is, ‘Yeah, goodbye’,” Darren Grimes, a Durham councillor and former GB News presenter told the BBC’s Today programme. It followed comments made yesterday by Farage in which he warned council staff working on diversity or climate change initiatives to seek “alternative careers”.
Ed Davey said that the Conservatives were “on their last innings”, as he joined Wiltshire Lib Dem group leader councillor Ian Thorn, local councillors and campaigners at the Harnham recreation ground in Salisbury to play cricket. The Lib Dem leader was celebrating his party becoming the largest on Wiltshire council in the local elections.
The cramped conditions of Victorian prisons in England and Wales are limiting the rehabilitation opportunities for thousands of offenders, an official watchdog has said. As the Guardian launches a visual investigation into the state of Victorian prisons in inner cities and towns, the chief inspector of prisons, Charlie Taylor, said 19th century jails could also be “incredibly noisy and distressing” for autistic people.
Football matches and concerts have better security than some jails, the national chair of the Prison Officers’ Association (POA) told the Times. Staff who are faced with inmates obtaining illicit items have to deal with prison bosses who are “not up for the fight”, Mark Fairhurst said. Overcrowding and violence were among his key concerns, he said.
Headteachers are taking legal action against Ofsted, England’s schools watchdog, over fears that its new inspection regime is “even worse than before” and likely to harm the mental health of school leaders. The National Association of Head Teachers said it had lodged a claim for a judicial review against Ofsted “over the potential impact of their inspection proposals” and for inadequate consultation over its new system of grading schools.
A Syrian grandmother who is dying of cancer has been given permission to come to the UK to spend her final days with the grandchildren she has never met, after a Home Office U-turn. The government had wanted to bar Soaad Al Shawa, who has liver cancer and has been given just weeks to live by doctors, from travelling to spend her last days with her daughter Ola Al Hamwi, son-in-law Mostafa Amonajid and their three children aged seven, five and one. Al Shawa has only been able to communicate with her grandchildren on video calls.
Updated
For 13 years, Tell Mama has been the government-funded not-for-profit tasked with recording anti-Muslim hate crime and helping victims get justice.
For its pains, staff faced death threats from the far right, a risk so serious it necessitated an office change at the height of the hate. There have been critics too within Britain’s Muslim community, who, according to the Tell Mama leadership, were intolerant of the organisation’s tolerance.
“Throughout the 13 years, people have been kind of making up what Tell Mama does,” said Iman Atta, who has been the organisation’s director since 2016. “They claim that we’re Zionists because we work with Jewish communities, or we’re promoting pedophilia because we work with LGBT groups,” she added.
Most recently, questions have been raised about how the organisation spent public money, collated its data, and whether it had become too close to the previous Conservative government, which signed off on its funding.
This latest challenge has been existential.
On 1 April, Atta wrote to Wajid Khan, the new Labour minister for faith, to reject a further six months of funding from the government, citing a strained relationship with his department and the stress caused to staff by “malicious campaigns” some of which “emanated from individuals and organisations” chasing the funding that Tell Mama has enjoyed.
It means that, at a time of soaring bigotry, there is now no government-funded group carrying out anti-Muslim hate monitoring in the UK and this is expected to be the case into the summer.
Atta said Tell Mama would continue to do its work and look for funds from elsewhere but it fully expects to pare back its services.
