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British voters cast ballots Thursday in local and regional elections that could shake up the country’s politics and deliver a heavy blow to embattled Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Starmer’s center-left Labour Party is bracing for big losses in polls that will choose about 5,000 local councilors and a handful of mayors across England, as well as semiautonomous parliaments in Scotland ...

British voters will cast ballots Thursday in elections that could hasten the end of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s troubled term and confirm that an increasingly fractured United Kingdom has entered an era of messy multiparty politics. Starmer’s center-left Labour Party is expected to take a battering in elections for local authorities across England and for semiautonomous legislatures in Scotland and ...

More than 5,000 council seats will be up for grabs when voters in England go to the polls on Thursday. Local elections are taking place for 136 local authorities on 7 May, including some of the largest cities in the country and the whole of London. A mix of urban authorities and rural districts are also holding elections, along with ...

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday condemned the Iranian drone and missile strikes targeting the United Arab Emirates. Starmer called on Iran to engage in diplomacy to prevent further escalation in the Middle East, the prime minister’s office said. “We stand in solidarity with the UAE and will continue to support the defence of our partners in the Gulf. ...

Tree nurseries could be built at prisons, and military ranges could be turned into heathland or peat bogs as part of an ambitious plan to make government land more nature-friendly, the environment secretary has said. Speaking before elections this week in which Labour is under pressure from the Green party, Emma Reynolds said such projects showed the government’s intent in ...

Britain could be beset by levels of economic chaos last seen under Liz Truss if a Reform UK government were to fulfil its promise to strip renewable energy projects of subsidy contracts, according to the industry’s chief lobbyist. The anti-renewables policy put forward by Nigel Farage’s populist party would severely undermine investor confidence in the energy industry and across the ...

AI platforms are more likely to reference Nigel Farage than any other UK leader when prompted about British politics, according to an AI search analytics firm. “We are confident in saying that Reform are showing up significantly more than you would expect,” said Malte Landwehr, an expert at Peec AI, the firm that did the research. “So they’re doing something ...

Cabinet ministers have told mutinous Labour MPs that any attempt to oust Keir Starmer after a potentially disastrous set of election results this week would unleash chaos for the party that would not be easily overcome. Several, however, told that even with the prime minister’s determination to stay in Downing Street after Thursday’s vote, the mood on the backbenches was ...

Britain is set to enter talks to join the European Union’s 78 billion pound loan ($106 billion) to Ukraine, the government said on Sunday, in a further sign of deepening European defence ties under rising US pressure. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is expected on Monday to tell a summit in Armenia’s capital Yerevan of the European Political Community – a ...

Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in an interview broadcast on Saturday that banning some pro-Palestinian marches could be justified, especially when they call for the intifada to spread. Labour leader Starmer is under pressure to act after a spate of antisemitic incidents, including this week, when two men were stabbed in the north London suburb of Golders Green, which ...