UK News

Former Labour minister Andrew Gwynne has announced he is standing down as an MP, paving the way for Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham to potentially run in a by-election in his Gorton and Denton constituency. In a statement, Gwynne said he had suffered “significant ill health” and had been advised by his GP that it wasn’t safe for him to ...

The minister responsible for council elections has confirmed that 29 English councils planning elections for May will now have these postponed. Local Government Secretary Steve Reed told the House of Commons he had approved delays until 2027, with a final application still under consideration due to it being submitted on Thursday morning. Opposition MPs have criticised the decision, saying delays ...

Keir Starmer has noticeably hardened his rhetoric towards Donald Trump, telling the Commons that the US president’s condemnation of the Chagos Islands deal with Mauritius was intended to weaken the UK’s resolve over Greenland. In a sometimes angry exchange with Kemi Badenoch at prime minister’s questions, Starmer denounced the Conservative leader’s use of Trump’s words to push back against the ...

The world would be a “better, more secure place” if America took over Greenland, Nigel Farage said at Davos, while insisting that he still believed in the sovereignty of nation states. During a panel at the World Economic Forum’s “America House” in the Swiss ski resort on Wednesday, the Reform UK leader said he had “no doubt” that the world ...

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will take to the Downing Street lectern this morning, after another extraordinary weekend of diplomatic turmoil prompted by US President Donald Trump. Sir Keir Starmer knows that people and businesses in the UK will expect him to respond, in front of the cameras, to the prospect of the UK and European allies being hammered by ...

Nigel Farage has insisted Reform UK will not become the Conservative Party 2.0 following the defection of former senior Tory Robert Jenrick. The party’s leader wrote in the Telegraph that Reform was “not a rescue charity for every panicky Tory MP” and any potential defectors would have to be prepared to admit publicly that the previous Conservative government “broke the ...

The Conservatives plan to intensify their attacks on Reform’s economic policy as they gear up for a fight to the death between the two big parties of the right, a battle brought to new levels of acrimony by Robert Jenrick’s defection. While Jenrick, the former shadow justice secretary, insisted he was “uniting the right” in signing up to Reform, Kemi ...

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has not ruled out banning British under-16-year-olds from social media, saying “all options are on the table”. He said more needed to be done to protect children from social media and that he was watching “what is happening in Australia” where a ban has been recently introduced. Privately, many Labour MPs and officials have said ...

More than a third of eligible councils in England have asked to postpone their elections due in May, affecting more than 2.5 million voters. The government is carrying out a major overhaul of local government structures. Twenty-four councils want to postpone their ballots to help deliver that reorganisation – but opposition parties say Labour is “running scared” of voters. Most ...

Keir Starmer has rejected the claim that his change of plan over digital IDs represents another U-turn, as the prime minister faced accusations from the Conservatives that his government had “no sense of direction”. Late on Tuesday it emerged that a key plank of the controversial plan for digital IDs was being rolled back, with the original plan to make ...