At the same time, European parliament president, Roberta Metsola, insists – not unreasonably – that “the constructive, pro-European centre has held”.

So are reports of a “populist right surge” overegged? 

Emmanuel Macron has undoubtedly emerged from the vote as one of the biggest losers. The rattled French president called a shock snap election last night after Marine Le Pen’s nationalist, anti-immigration National Rally party more than doubled the vote share of Macron’s centrist alliance. Walter Ellis writes today in Reaction that Macron is banking – optimistically – on the possibility that much of the French public has used the European elections as a protest vote. 

Results were even more bruising for Belgium’s Liberal Prime Minister, Alexander De Croo. Today, he resigned following a major electoral defeat in which his party earned just seven seats while two of the countries’ nationalist right wing parties secured 24 and 20 respectively. 

Meanwhile, German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, warned today that “no-one is advised to simply go back to business”, as he lamented the fact that Germany’s hard-right AfD party has snapped up 15 seats, coming second after Germany’s centre-right. Scholz’s own centre-left Social Democrats party suffered its worst post-Second World War result in a nationwide vote.

In stark contrast, his Italian counterpart, Giorgia Meloni emerged as one of the biggest winners of the European election results, with her Brothers of Italy party winning almost four times the vote share that it garnered in the last EU election in 2019, demonstrating her remarkable rise in popularity.

That said, major gains for Europe’s populist right is not the full picture. 

Denmark saw a surprise surge in support for the Socialist People’s party, which became the largest party with 17 per cent of the vote, while France’s Socialist party surged to 14 per cent of the vote.

Sweden proved to be one of the few European countries in which the hard-right is in retreat and the Greens surging while Spain’s centrist parties contained any major growth in votes for the anti-immigration Vox party: while Vox’s vote share rose to 9.6 per cent from 6.2 per cent in 2019, it fell back from last year’s national election, when it won 12.4 per cent.

When we look at the make-up of the European parliamentary groupings, we can also see that pro-European parties at the centre still command a majority, despite voters veering to the right. 

The “grand coalition” in the European Parliament between the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the liberal Renew Europe group and the centre-left Socialists and Democrats, did, in total, secure 403 seats – 56 per cent – in the 720-seat parliament.

As for the groups deemed “populist right”, they cohere in two blocs within the European Parliament. The Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group – which includes the likes of Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Poland’s Law and Justice – secured 73 seats in total while the Identity and Democracy – which is spear-headed by Le Pen’s National Rally – now has 58 seats. 

Yet lines between these so-called radical groups and the more centrist coalitions are not always so clearly defined, while unity within a group is often downright weak.

EU chief Ursula von der Leyen has, for instance, said that her centre-right EPP grouping could work with Meloni’s party. And Le Pen expelled all AfD lawmakers from the ID group in the European Parliament after the party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, told an Italian newspaper that not all members of the Nazis’ elite SS unit were war criminals. Like Meloni before her, Le Pen is attempting a re-brand, and distancing herself from her party’s fascist past, in a bid to court French moderates. 

At the same time, the rising popularity of figures like Le Pen puts pressure on centrist Macron-esque leaders to take tougher stance on issues such as immigration. Thus the line between the “hard right” and “moderate right” blurs further. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life 

In the Netherlands, the first EU country to vote for the next European Parliament, exit polls indicate sweeping gains for Dutch nationalist Geert Wilders‘s party.

While Dutch left-wing Labour and Green parties appear to maintain a slight lead, with a combined total of eight out of 31 available seats in the European Parliament, Wilders’ anti-immigration Freedom Party was closely trailing them with seven seats — a major turnaround from the zero seats it secured in 2019. 

EU elections are unfolding over four days, with results due late Sunday. Around 400 million people across the bloc’s 27 member states are eligible to vote for the next 720 members of European Parliament (MEPs). 

A much-cited report by the European Council on Foreign Relations predicts that the combined populist right will win roughly a quarter of the total number of seats in the new parliament.

Major gains are expected for both the ECR group – which includes Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Poland’s Law and Justice, as well as for the ID group, which includes both Wilders’ Freedom party in addition to French politician Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. 

Centre-left and green parties, meanwhile, are forecast to lose seats. 

In the past, the European Parliament has been led by a strong majority of centrist parties. What’s driving this major shift to the right? 

A backlash at the bloc’s immigration and environmental policies appear to be the two big identifiable factors. 

In agricultural communities, resentment has built up at the financial impact of the bloc’s green rules, as evidenced in EU-wide farmer protests unfolding over the past year. 

Meanwhile, the likes of 28-year-old sitting MEP Jordan Bardella, of Le Pen’s National Rally, have built up support by pushing for a “double border” policy, which would limit the free movement of migrants within the EU’s open Schengen area by reintroducing systematic checks at national land borders.

In Ireland too, dozens of anti-immigrant candidates are running, amid polls which suggest that almost two-thirds of voters want tougher controls on immigration. 

The typical profile of those voting for eurosceptic, anti-immigration candidates is also shifting. 

Under-30s seem poised to boost the populist right in the European Parliament. In France, a recent Ipsos survey found that 34 per cent of under-30s plan to vote for Bardella with the next most popular options being leftist party France Unbowed (14%), the center-left Socialist Party (12%) and the Greens (11%).

In the previous EU election in 2019, high youth turnout helped to drive huge gains for the Greens, with climate-focused parties winning a record 74 seats in the European parliament. 

This year, they are projected to suffer significant losses, with the number of Green seats forecast to fall to 41. Analysts say many voters across the bloc are finding it increasingly difficult to square prior support for green policies with their growing concerns about security and the cost of living.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life     

After a six-week trial in New York, Trump was convicted last night on all 34 counts of falsifying business records, in what’s become known as the “hush-money case”, relating to a $130,000 payment he made to porn star, Stormy Daniels, to cover up his alleged tryst with her. 

This is the first time in American history that a former or serving president has been found guilty of a crime.

Trump’s predecessors were missing a trick: within six hours of the guilty verdict being declared, his presidential campaign had raised $35 million from small-dollar donors. So overwhelmed with traffic was his fundraising site last night that it temporarily crashed. 

This afternoon, speaking from the golden Trump Towers in Manhattan, the one-time President denounced the trial once again as a “witch hunt”and insisted Americans are “living in a fascist state”, before celebrating doubling his single-day fundraising record. 

What now? 

New York Justice Juan Merchan will sentence Trump for his felony conviction on 11 July.

There is a genuine possibility that he could face time behind bars – especially if Merchan comes under pressure to demonstrate that no-one is above the law. 

Yet a more likely punishment, given that Trump has been convicted of the lowest-level felony, is a hefty fine, possibly paired with a stint of community service. 

Trump insisted today that he will appeal this unanimous verdict, which could delay the sentencing until after the 5 November US election. 

Curiously, while there are various prerequisites for running for president – such as a minimum age of 35 – a criminal record is not a dealbreaker. Meaning Trump will press on with his bid to return to the Oval Office.

Will a conviction affect his chances? 

Quite possibly, though perhaps not in the way one might expect. 

As the flurry of donation activity demonstrates, the verdict will galvanise his ardent supporters, who wholeheartedly buy into his criticism of a “kangaroo court.”

Yet what really matters is not how the trial will impact his dedicated fanbase, but rather, the effect it will have on undecided voters in swing states. 

Recent polls suggest this year’s election is set to be a razor-thin race, with the two candidates neck-and-neck at around 37 per cent each. But, crucially, in five of the six swing states that will decide the election, Trump maintains a slight edge over Biden.

There is a possibility that some of these undecided voters will feel a degree of sympathy for Trump, and agree that this is a politically motivated trial, with a biased judge and a jury led to a foregone conclusion. 

It may, however, come as somewhat of a relief to hear that there are still a fair few Americans hesitant to elect a convicted felon to lead their country. 

A survey conducted by ABC News back in April found that 16 per cent of individuals backing Trump would reconsider their support if he was found guilty. And another poll conducted by Bloomberg and Morning Consult earlier this year found that 53 per cent of voters in key swing states would refuse to vote for the Republicans if he were convicted.

Even if a few thousand voters who would otherwise have backed Trump in key states like Pennsylvania or Wisconsin decide to stay at home, this could make all the difference.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life 

Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, and shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, have given themselves five years – until the end of next parliament – to meet the NHS target that calls for at least 92 per cent of patients to begin their treatment within 18 weeks of referral. 

This is ambitious of Starmer and Streeting. The NHS target has not been hit since February 2016. And the waiting list currently stands at 7.5 million –  of which 3.2 million have been waiting over 18 weeks for treatment. 

The overall backlog is slightly down from the record 7.8 million who were waiting for treatment back in September, but it’s still 3 million above its level prior to the pandemic.

That’s despite Rishi Sunak making tackling the NHS backlog one of his own key priorities back in January 2023. 

How does a Labour government intend to see its pledge through? 

Starmer has promised to create 40,000 extra appointments, scans and operations a week during Labour’s first year, if he gains power. To meet this pledge, he will double the number of scanners in hospitals to diagnose patients earlier and tackle the bottleneck caused by long waits for test results. 

He has also promised to offer more Brits weekend and evening appointments. Which may seem like a sensible, indeed obvious, solution though it will depend on having enough staff to take on these extra shifts. 

In an additional effort to free up capacity, Streeting has dared to broach the politically loaded topic of NHS reform. Writing in The Telegraph, he has insisted that a Labour government will be even more radical than Tony Blair when it comes to making use of the private sector to take pressure off the national health service. 

All in all, Labour estimates that this push to clear the backlog will cost the party £1.3 billion in the first year, and it insists this can be paid for by clamping down on tax dodgers, and closing non-dom tax loopholes.

One elephant in the room that Streeting is yet to address is how a Labour government would put at end to the seemingly never-ending industrial dispute with junior doctors. 

Today, the BMA union announced that junior doctors are set to stage yet another set of strikes – the eleventh walkout since March last year – in the week leading up to the general election. 

This fresh major disruption to the health service is timed for maximum impact, to ensure the government’s failure to resolve the dispute will be fresh in the minds of every voter heading to the ballot box. 

The union said it was taking further action after the most recent set of talks with ministers, which began in mid-May, resulted in no credible pay offer. The BMA has not budged from its original demand of a 35 per cent pay rise, to make up for 15 years of “pay erosion”.

Sunak’s inability to resolve this dispute has compounded his failure to make proper inroads into the NHS backlog. NHS England research published in March suggested around 430,000 more patients could have been treated had there been no strikes.

Yet it may well prove equally tough for Streeting to put an end to the industrial action. He has already levelled with doctors, describing their 35 per cent pay rise as “unaffordable”. And his tough talk that the NHS won’t get any more money until it improves productivity has not gone down well with the uncompromising BMA union. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life     

Addressing an audience at a Rolls-Royce factory, the shadow chancellor – who labelled her party both “pro-worker and pro-business” – vowed that there would be “no additional tax rises” beyond those she has already set out if Labour wins the general election.

Reeves gleefully pointed to a letter published in The Times today, in which 121 business leaders have endorsed Labour’s economic plans. 

“It’s time for a change”, declare its signatories – including the JD Sports chairman, Wikipedia founder  and former CEOs of Heathrow, JP Morgan and Aston Martin – who warn that Britain is “in urgent need of a new outlook to break free from the stagnation of the last decade”.

“Labour has shown it has changed and wants to work with business,” the letter adds. 

Labour is borrowing from the Tory playbook. Ahead of the 2015 election, over 100 corporate leaders endorsed the Conservatives.

It is symbolic of an apparent shift in business mindset. Today’s letter contains one of the very same signatories from 2015: the former Tory donor and Iceland boss, Malcolm Walker, who, as recently as January 2023, had even toyed with the idea of standing as a Tory MP at the next general election. (At the time, Reaction’s ever-prescient Hound did ask if he had picked the right party). 

Labour’s shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, celebrated today’s endorsement from big business as “an extraordinary turnaround” and “a recognition of how Labour has changed” since the Corbyn era.

But is the list as impressive as he makes out? 

While the list contains some fairly big names, it is difficult to gauge just how representative this group of Labour backers are of business in general. 

In truth, behind closed doors, Labour may be somewhat disappointed that – despite the immense efforts of Starmer and Reeves to woo business leaders – no chief executives of the UK’s very largest FTSE 100 companies are among the signatories.

Why not? 

Labour’s plans to strengthen protections on workers’ rights – including curbing the use of zero-hours contracts – may have put some off signing. Or perhaps it is rather more due to an increased wariness among business leaders to take a partisan stance. In the lead up to Brexit, a number of high profile learnt that taking a political side in an election period alienates customers. 

Can we feel confident that a Labour government would do a better job than our current one in helping Britain “break free from the stagnation of the last decade”? And does her depiction of Labour as the “natural partner of business” feel convincing?

It is a little difficult to escape the conclusion that, at least in the more immediate term, Reeves is largely promising more of the same. Which helps to explain the uncharacteristically muted reaction of the markets to last week’s shock general election announcement. As Maggie Pagano wrote in Reaction last week, their reaction – or lack thereof – suggests it may well make marginal difference to the economy whether it is Labour or the Tories in power.

The shadow chancellor has been clear that the focus of a Labour government will be on investment rather than a Corbyn-style nationalisation. She is not promising a spending splurge nor is she promising to raise corporation tax (which she has pledged to cap at its current rate of 25%.)

And she mimics Liz Truss with her incessant emphasis on growth. Albeit with one key difference: Reeves insisted today that a Labour government will not hold a budget until the party has an accompanying independent forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility. She has learnt a salutary lesson from Britain’s 49-day Prime Minister. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life     

The 77th to join the exodus was Housing Secretary, Michael Gove. 

“There comes a moment when you know that it is time to leave”, said the long-time cabinet minister this evening, citing the toll that nearly 20 years as the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath had taken on his personal life. 

This is the biggest Tory exodus since the Second World War – even greater than the 72 who quit in the run-up to Tory Blair’s landslide victory in 1997. 

At the risk of stating the obvious, it doesn’t bode well for Rishi Sunak. 

This afternoon, Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, played down the significance of the fact such a large proportion of the 120 MPs standing down in total come from his own party. 

“There are, by definition, more MPs on the governing side,” he insisted, creating the “illusion” of an imbalance. 

Point taken. Yet it’s inconceivable to think that so many Tory MPs would be throwing in the towel if they weren’t anticipating a crushing defeat. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that Labour MPs represented, by a long way, the highest proportion of those quitting in 2010. 

Craig Mackinlay, the representative for South Thanet, was another Tory MP to confirm today that he will not be contesting the July 4 election. Mackinlay, who lost all four limbs to sepsis, received a standing ovation when he returned to parliament earlier this week after what he described as “eight months of hell”. The 57-year-old previously stated his intention to stand again but, this afternoon, he said that the timing of the election has come too soon for his recovery.

Veteran politicians also standing down include former cabinet ministers Dominic Raab and Ben Wallace, the chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee Graham Brady, COP26 president Sir Alok Sharma as well as former PM and MP for Maidenhead, Theresa May. Today, May, gave her valedictory speech in the House of Commons, urging her colleagues to “go out there and fight” in this election. 

Another reason why more aren’t hanging on in there to fight, according to Tim Bale, a historian of the Conservative party, is the expectation that it will take more than one election to regain power. 

If you look at the way UK politics has evolved over the last few decades, we have less back-and-forth between parties than in the 1960s and 1970s, says Bale. “We seem now to have a system which puts one party in power for 10 years-plus, and then the other party in power for 10 years-plus or even more than that.”

Which may explain why even some of the youthful 2019 Tory cohort are leaving after just one term, including 30 year-old Dehenna Davison, MP for Bishop Auckland, and 29-year-old Nicola Richards, MP for West Bromwich East. 

The departure of so many of his MPs is a major electoral headache for Sunak. 

Seats where sitting MPs step down have a history of underperforming for their party at the subsequent general election. And MPs who’ve represented a constituency for a long time have an advantage, for fairly self-explanatory reasons. They’re a familiar face, who will have spent years attempting to build up a personal vote among locals who may otherwise be lukewarm on their party.

For a government that already has an electoral mountain to climb, the Tory exodus hands Sunak an unwelcome extra vulnerability. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life     

The survey, released to mark the start of the London Defence Conference (LDC), coincides with the launch of a new government campaign offering practical information for households on how to prepare in the event of a natural disaster, cyber attack or a nuclear attack.

Brits must “embrace that spirit of national preparedness that we see elsewhere in the world,” says Dowden, speaking at the LDC. He points to Finland, which holds an annual national preparedness day on 7 February, to remind citizens how to prepare for crises. 

While emergency kit advice addresses small steps individual households can take to prepare for threats, the LDC – with its 2024 theme of deterrence – is addressing preparedness on a much larger scale: how can the UK strengthen defence and security in an increasingly dangerous global environment? 

Money might be tight but not spending on resilience is a false economy, insists Dowden: “This is spending to save”. Whether it’s a military threat or a biological one, such as a pandemic, every penny spent on resilience saves thousands when a crisis hits. 

That said, good preparation is not just about increased spending, it’s about spending wisely. 

“The debates about defence budgets are just the start of much harder debates about what we spend this money on,” says historian and LDC panelist, Professor Niall Ferguson. 

It’s a point reiterated by shadow defence secretary, John Healey. “We need to spend more on defence but how well we spend it counts just as much”, he tells the audience. But, when challenged by an audience member to highlight some specific areas where he would direct defence spending, Healey doesn’t give any concrete examples. He does insist, however, that a Labour government would match Sunak’s pledge to spend 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence. 

Another point reiterated, throughout the day, by panellists – ranging from Lt General Andrew Harrison to Labour’s shadow cabinet members – is that deterrence is about deepening alliances. 

“I worry about the state of our armed forces,” concedes Healey, “but, in the end, for Britain, our allies are our strategic strength.” 

He points to NATO, alliances like AUKUS and Britain’s partnerships in the Indo-Pacific. 

Shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, concurs. “When I came into parliament 24 years ago, our economy was bigger than China and India’s combined. That is not the case today.” The implication being: ”The UK is not in a position to do this alone.”  

As for the thorny question of nuclear deterrence, “Ukraine is a war fought in the shadows of nuclear power”, says Professor Marina Henke. “If Russia didn’t have nuclear weapons, this war would look very different.” In other words, the west would be a lot less fearful in its actions to assist Kyiv.

Of course, western powers have their own nuclear arsenal. But does this act as an affective deterrence? 

Deterrence, Ferguson stresses, is not just about having weapons. “It’s also about the capacity of leader to project a readiness to conceivably use them.”

Do the likes of Beijing and Moscow believe in western leaders’ willingness to use them? 

Panelists appear unconvinced. “It’s a very bad thing when you have a red line and then do nothing,” says Prof Margaret Macmillan. Obama made a big mistake, she adds, by redrawing his red line in Syria. His reluctance to punish Bashar al-Assad after the Syrian leader’s use of chemical weapons in the country’s civil war crossed Obama’s “red line” diminished America’s credibility. And the consequences are still being felt today. 

Supply kits at the ready. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life     

Arriving in London to deliver an annual economic health check, Kristalina Georgieva, the boss of the IMF – a UN agency often accused of being overly gloomy about the British economy – has bumped up the UK’s growth forecasts. 

This upgraded IMF projection of 0.7 per cent growth in 2024 – from its previous forecast of 0.5 per cent – followed by 1.5 per cent growth in 2025, will have been informed by the ONS recording Britain’s fastest rate of economic growth in two years at the start of this year. 

Between January and March, the economy grew by a larger-than-expected 0.6 per cent, meaning the UK has firmly emerged from the – albeit mild – recession it slipped into at the end of 2023. 

The IMF also noted that “CPI inflation has fallen faster than was envisaged last year,” adding that the Bank of England now has scope to cut interest rates up to three times this year.

While Hunt has hailed the IMF report as proof that “the UK economy really is turning a corner,” there are a couple of caveats. 

Firstly, these aforementioned growth forecasts don’t account for Britain’s significant population growth. When GDP is measured per head, it is still 0.7 per cent lower than a year ago, which helps to explain why many Brits won’t be feeling much better off despite this seemingly sunny economic news. 

Additionally, despite its broadly optimistic analysis, the IMF has firmly signalled its opposition to any more pre-election tax cuts, given the “significant pressures on public services” and the £30bn of either spending cuts or tax rises required to stabilise national debt.

As an improved growth picture emerges and inflation continues to fall, stabilising vast public sector debt is set to be the next big fiscal challenge.

In the UK, public sector debt now stands at just over 98 per cent of GDP – the highest level since the early 1960s.

As Ian Stewart wrote in Reaction recently, this is not an exclusively British challenge.  Levels of public sector indebtedness have also risen sharply in countries such as the US, Japan and France too. 

In America, public sector debt is forecast to rise from just under 100 per cent of GDP today to over 170 per cent in 30 years time. 

An ageing population, paired with increasing demands on defence in our dangerous geopolitical era, means spending pressures aren’t going away. Getting public sector debt down will be a long-term challenge. 

In the more immediate term, however, the latest IMF report does provide further space for optimism. 

We can expect growth to continue and inflation to fall further. And we can expect another burst of good news tommorrow, when a new set of inflation data lands. 

It’s expected to show a big drop, with the headline rate of inflation rate falling to the Bank’s long-awaited target of two per cent. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life     

After travelling to Rouen to inspect the fire-damaged synagogue, Paris’s Interior Minister, Gerald Darmanin, insisted his country is “determined to continue protecting all the Jews of France, wherever they are, who must practice their religion without fear”.

French police arrived at the scene early this morning after smoke was seen rising from the building in the historic city centre. The suspect is thought to have climbed onto a large waste bin and thrown a petrol bomb into the synagogue. He was still on the roof of the building when police arrived. According to prosecutors. he then jumped to the ground and ran at one of the officers with his knife raised, at which point they shot him dead. 

There appear to be no casualties other than the armed man, although the damage inside the synagogue has been described as significant, with walls and furniture left blackened by the fire. 

The suspected arsonist was a 29-year-old Algerian national who, according to local media reports, was in the process of appealing against an expulsion order from French authorities. Darmanin said today that he wasn’t flagged as a suspected extremist. 

The violent incident comes on the same week that a Paris Holocaust memorial, honouring the men and women who helped to rescue Jews in France during the country’s Nazi occupation, was defaced with red paint. 

Both incidents point to a worrying wider trend. Since Hamas’s attack on southern Israel last October, and Israel’s resulting bombardment of Gaza, France has experienced a record spike in anti-Semitism. 

Authorities registered 366 antisemitic attacks in the first three months of 2024, a 300 per cent increase over the same period last year, while the number of anti-Semitic acts recorded in 2023 was quadruple the figure for the year before. Nearly 60 per cent of these acts involved either physical violence, threatening words or menacing gestures.

France is not alone in experiencing an uptick in anti-Semitism. Spikes have been recorded too in the UK and Germany. But in a country which is home to Europe’s largest Jewish community – of around 440,000 – and the continent’s largest Muslim population – of roughly 6 million – the tensions are exacerbated.

After Hamas’s October 7 massacre, French President Emmanuel Macron made a powerful TV address, appealing for unity and warning of the risk to civil peace in France.

 “Let us not add national fractures to international fractures, and let us not tolerate any form of hatred,” the President said, urging citizens to refrain from “embarking on ideological adventures here out of imitation or projection.”

Macron was afraid that an enflamed Middle East would pose a major threat to France’s already fragile internal security and national unity. And his fears were well-founded. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life     

Speaking from Essex, at an event attended by his entire shadow cabinet, the Labour leader insisted this six-point plan was “fully funded and ready to go”.

Starmer pledged to cut NHS waiting lists by providing 40,000 more appointments each week – funded by tackling tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes – and to recruit 6,500 new teachers, paid for through ending tax breaks for private schools. He reiterated plans, announced last week, to create a new border security command to stop small boat crossings, promised to crack down on antisocial behaviour by putting 13,000 neighbourhood police on the streets and vowed to set up Great British Energy, paid for by a windfall tax on oil and gas giants. Underpinning all these plans was a final pledge to stabilise the economy by sticking to tough spending rules. 

Those struggling to get on the property ladder may be dismayed that there was no mention of “getting Britain building again”, while others worried about our dangerous geopolitical era will be concerned that defence wasn’t listed as a priority. And unions won’t be happy that there was no mention of Labour’s promised workers’ rights reform. 

These are Starmer’s six “first steps” for government – and they are a fair bit more modest than his “five missions” announced over a year ago, which included making Britain the fastest-growing major economy by the end of a first Labour term in government and achieving net zero by 2030.

But the Labour leader rejected accusations that his party has scaled back its ambitions, insisting Labour has a “big, bold plan” but “we need first steps”.

Paradoxically, Starmer appeared to be channelling his inner Tony Blair today and yet simultaneously wary of being compared to his election-winning predecessor. 

The Labour leader donned a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves and handed out pledge cards, just as Sir Tony did before his 1997 landslide election victory. 

At the same time, he made a point of distancing himself from Blair in an exercise of expectation management. “This is a very different moment to 1997, after the damage that’s been done in the last 14 years,” he cautioned. Today’s dire economic conditions mean his plans to change Britain will “take time”, he added. Up to ten years. 

The “decade of national renewal” being promised put a positive spin on this apparent inability to enact hard and fast change. 

Critics will say this lengthy timeframe speaks to a lack of ambition. And are those six promises really sufficient given the grave international situation and global challenges?

Supporters will say that Starmer aiming long on the domestic front is his most ambitious goal of all. 

To see through a decade of national renewal, the Labour leader will at least have to mimic Blair in one respect: that is, matching his ten-year tenure as Prime Minister. A tall order, if the timeline of Britain’s leaders of late are anything to go by. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life     

But why should we care? 

For many reasons, according to the Constitution Reform Group (CRG), which makes a compelling case in its new paper for the benefits that devolution could bring to England. 

Failure to devolve powers is entrenching England’s regional inequalities. By contrasting England’s governance with other comparable nations, academic analysis has identified a clear link between England’s uneven socioeconomic performance and the centralisation of its governance. 

Nor is devolution solely in the interests of those from deprived regions: everyone stands to gain, insists Prof John Denham, a former Labour minister and co-author of “The Local Governance of England”, who was speaking today at the Institute for Government, alongside both Sir David Lidington, co-author and former Tory minister, and Lord Salisbury, chairman of the CRG, who is also chairman of Reaction. Denham insisted that giving local authorities more powers, rather than having them constantly “pitching to Whitehall’s dragon’s den”, will mean public money is better spent, and better accounted for, improving the delivery of public services across England. 

Devolving power to local leaders will also rebuild trust in democracy, insists Lidington: “What we are offering will help to overcome a visible and deepening alienation from politicians”. 

Another hope, adds Lidington, is that devolution will free MPs up to focus on what they are actually elected to do: “Scrutinise legislation”. Much of his time as an MP for Aylesbury between 1992 and 2019, he recalls, was spent assisting his constituents with matters that should have been for a mayor or local councillors. “But many [constituents] didn’t even know who their local councillors were”. 

The CRG is hardly the first to acknowledge the value of devolving additional powers and resources to local leaders. Yet progress to date has been slow. Meaning the governance of England has been left largely unchanged since 1998, when a new UK constitutional settlement established devolved governments in Wales and Scotland, an elected Mayor and Assembly of London and devolved institutions for Northern Ireland. 

Why would the CRG’s efforts to reform the national governance of England be any more successful than other recent attempts?

The group has identified both the achievements of devolution policy to date – as well as the obstacles preventing more radical change. 

The popularity of some regional mayors is the first example that springs to mind for many in England, when asked to point to an achievement of devolution policy to date. Denham and Lidington agree that some of England’s mayors have been very effective, and have become well-recognised advocates for their regions. However the mayoral model is generally working better in city regions than in rural areas, with free-standing towns and smaller cities.

Which points to a larger problem with devolving powers. Directly elected mayors often cover very diverse communities, from small cities to deeply rural locations. The term “devolution” is used widely and loosely, creating uncertainties over devolved geographies and how big an authority needs to be. In England, says Denham “it’s hard to construct a set of regional authorities that reflects a real, local, regional identity”.

A challenge, then, for devolution policy is to demonstrate that it can deliver the right powers and resources to the appropriate level, from the very local to the regional. To meet this challenge, the CRG proposes creating legislation that would give local and combined authorities the legal powers to further devolve their own responsibilities. Combined Local Authorities and Upper-Tier Authorities would have a legal duty to set out how they would devolve their own responsibilities to the lowest possible level including, district, town and parish councils. Allowing them to further devolve their responsibilities would address the limitations of relying on a single model of local devolution for the diversity of rural, small town and larger urban areas of England. 

Constitutional reform is also at the heart of the CRG’s vision. At present, London aside, English local government doesn’t have a clear constitutional status and it has no formal role in shaping devolution policy. In other words, central government alone determines which powers and resources might be the subject of devolution. The CRG proposes creating a new statutory body to represent England’s system of devolved local government. Representatives of local government would then work alongside central government to shape devolution, giving local authorities more of a say in how the policies they will be affected by are developed. 

The fact that many of the attempts to devolve powers in England in recent years have been largely unfruitful isn’t a reason to abandon the project. On the contrary, says Denham, it’s a reason to push for a devolution project that is much more ambitious in scale. 

To date, too few powers or resources have been devolved to make a real difference. 

Which brings us to the critical question of funding. As the CRG points out, English local government has experienced a long period of deep austerity, government grants have been significantly reduced and, in the early 2020s, a rising number of local authorities have warned of impending severe financial difficulties. Devolution will not succeed, argues the CRG, unless local and combined authorities can rely on sufficient, predictable and consistent funding to underpin their autonomy.

That said, according to the CRG, devolution is, in principle, desirable whatever the level of funding available since it strengthens accountability for the use of public money (by making it clearer where responsibility for policy outcomes lies) and it improves the effectiveness with which public money is spent.  

If we apply this logic, then one could go even further and argue that devolution becomes more important the less money that is available.

The CRG is placing an emphasis on allowing local areas to make their own choices. It is thus inevitable that some will make better choices than others. But the hope, says Lidington, is that areas performing less well will soon learn from their counterparts doing better. Allowing for local innovation will provide a basis of evidence that, ultimately, could drive improvements everywhere.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life 

Ominous reports emerged this morning that Russian forces had broken through Ukraine’s defensive line and advanced into the northeastern city. Within hours, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry announced that Kyiv had successfully repelled the attacks, Ukraine’s reserve troops had been moved into the area and fierce fighting now rages along the frontline. 

Kharkiv’s regional head, Oleh Syniehubov, was adamant: “Not a single metre has been lost.”

Even so, the military development will intensify pre-existing speculation that capturing the regional capital of Kharkiv is the number one aim of Moscow’s anticipated summer offensive.

Located less than thirty kilometres from the Russian border, firmly on the frontline, Kharkiv is Ukraine’s most vulnerable major city. 

After Putin first launched his full-scale invasion over two years ago, there was a mass exodus from Kharkiv. Within a few weeks, the population of a once bustling city, known for its many universities and robust industrial economy, fell from two million to around 300,000. 

However, in the Autumn of 2022, after the Ukrainians drove the Russians out of Kharkiv in one of its key counter-offensive victories, more than a million civilians returned. 

In recent months, residents have found themselves once again under daily bombardment. Since January, more missiles have struck Kharkiv than at any time since the first few months of the war, as Moscow seeks to exploit Ukraine’s dwindling air defenses.

Some civilians, exhausted by Russia’s relentless aerial attacks, are now fleeing their homes for a second time and heading westward. And those who refuse to do so have come to epitomise the dogged determination widely associated with Ukrainians. 

Moscow has destroyed all three of the city’s major power stations yet residents continue to live and work with only a few, unpredictable hours of electricity each day. Over 100 schools have been shelled but thousands of pupils still attend in-person classes, at five of the city’s metro stations which have been converted into underground schools, with teachers, psychologists, and medical staff on site. 

If Moscow were to capture Kharkiv, it would deliver a decisive blow to Ukrainian resistance, and morale. But it is no small task. As Maria Avdeeva, a Kharkiv-based Ukrainian security analyst, writes, attempting to do so “would represent by far the Kremlin’s most ambitious undertaking since losing the Battle of Kyiv in early 2022.”

Admittedly, Russia is buoyed up by its recent victories in the smaller, nearby cities of Bakhmut and Avdiivka. Yet even capturing the small eastern city of Avdiivka required some 80,000 Russian troops and months of bloody fighting. Kharkiv is on a different scale altogether. 

There are, however, real questions about how much longer residents of Kharkiv can hold on without some much more robust air defenses. And that’s where Kyiv’s allies can do their bit. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life 

Speaking at the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre in London, the Foreign Secretary urged the West not to allow its adversaries – Russia, China, Iran and North Korea – to “write our future for us”.

As for Britain’s position on the global stage, his message was a nuanced one. On the one hand, the foreign secretary was quick to label the UK “Europe’s foremast military power”, and to remind the audience that Britain has the fifth largest economy in the world. On the other, his words were humbling. The UK must “suffer no illusions” about its global influence, he warned. “We are not a country like the US, whose every decision we make changes the world.”

What does overcoming these illusions mean in practice? It means “building coalitions to get things done”, according to Cameron, who referenced the efforts the UK has made alongside allies to support Kyiv. Which brings up back to his earlier plea that the 2.5 per cent figure should be the benchmark for defence spending. 

While Cameron is pushing for the alliance to adopt a more ambitious target, it’s important to note that the majority of NATO members are yet to even meet the 2 per cent target, set by Barack Obama at NATO Cardiff summit all the way back in 2014. 

Britain is one of 11 member states to hit the target but the average for NATO countries in Europe is estimated at 1.74 per cent. And, as Sir Michael Fallon – who will be speaking at the London Defence Conference in a fortnight – wrote recently in Reaction, “half the alliance, mainly the wealthier half, doesn’t even spend 1.5 per cent.” 

Unsurprisingly, it’s the countries on the front line – the Baltic States, Romania, Poland and Finland – which have found the money to spend more on defence. Poland spent 4 per cent of its GDP on it in 2023, over double the amount it had spent the year before.

The UK government has made much of Sunak’s new pledge to boost defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030, which amounts to an additional 75 billion pounds over the next six years. But, “the brutal reality”, according to Iain Martin, “is that 2.5 per cent can only be a start”. 

Historical context is key. At the height of the Cold War, the UK spent 4.8 per cent of its GDP on defence. In 1992, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was still spending 3.8 per cent. And, even at the height of the “peace dividend” when Labour came to power in 1997, the number was still at 2.7 per cent. Admittedly, the country was drowning in a lot less debt back then. But, as Iain wrote recently in Reaction, “the world is clearly far more dangerous now than it was a quarter of a century ago.”

And then, of course, there is perhaps the biggest elephant in the room of all: the extent to which European security is underwritten by the American taxpayer.

The US has been spending around 3.5 per cent of GDP on defence for the last decade and, last year, its GDP was equal to to every other NATO member state combined. Which means Washington alone is responsible for providing over two thirds of the alliance’s overall budget.

The prospect of a re-elected Trump pulling out of NATO entirely is a very stark one indeed. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life 

A moment of hope that the seven month long war in Gaza might finally be coming to an end – after Hamas announced it had accepted a three-phase ceasefire proposal yesterday evening – turned out to be short-lived. 

Within hours of the Hamas leadership making the surprise announcement, Netanyahu had rejected the deal. According to the Israeli PM, the proposal – drafted by Egyptian mediators and formulated alongside the US – is “far from meeting” Israel’s “core demands”.

Now, the prospect of an impending military offensive in Rafah looms once again. Overnight, the IDF launched further strikes on the city, in which it claims to have killed 20 Hamas fighters. Palestinians have been fleeing the eastern part of Rafah today after Israel ordered around 100,000 civilians to evacuate to Khan Younis and al-Mawasi ahead of its military operation. 

But might there still be time to reach a deal to prevent a full offensive of Rafah from going ahead? 

While Netanyahu was quick to reject the deal currently on the table, he has sent an Israeli delegation to Cairo today to see if it can negotiate some “new answers”. And Hamas officials are also heading for the Egyptian capital.

Israel wasn’t directly involved in the truce talks in Cairo prior to this and Israeli officials have made it known that they were caught off guard yesterday by Hamas’s acceptance of the latest proposal.

Neither Hamas nor the mediators have disclosed the full details of this proposal – including, crucially, what it says about the prospect of a permanent cessation of military operations in Gaza. 

However, an Israeli official revealed today that there are several aspects of the document that Tel Aviv objects to, including the fact that, if 33 living hostages cannot be found for the first phase of deal, then bodies can be substituted instead, and the fact that the deal would oblige Israel to release an agreed number of prisoners from a list that Hamas will provide, with no power of veto for any individual case. 

The fact that the Israeli delegation arriving in Cairo only consists of mid-level envoys – and doesn’t include senior officials from the intelligence services Mossad and Shin Bet – suggests that Israel isn’t expecting these new negotiations to lead to a breakthrough.

Another big question is what exactly Washington makes of the deal currently on the table. 

“Hamas has before it a proposal that is extraordinarily generous on the part of Israel,” said US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, speaking from Cairo last week, as he urged the group to accept the latest ceasefire deal, drawn up by Egyptian mediators. CIA chief William Burns was reportedly also in Cairo for last week’s talks, before heading to Doha to put pressure on the Hamas political leadership to accept the terms, via Qatari mediators there. 

We cannot be sure that the proposal accepted by Hamas last night was the exact same “generous” proposal mentioned by Blinken last week, since we don’t have details of the contents from either party. Even so, US diplomatic activity in Cairo last week provides a strong indication that it would have hailed yesterday evening’s announcement from Hamas as major progress. 

Which begs the question, what does Washington make of Netanyahu’s swift rejection of the proposal? And will it pile pressure on Israel to accept a deal in the coming days? So far, the White House has been very cautious and avoided directly addressing Monday’s announcement from the Hamas leadership. The only decisive statement it has made since is that it continues to oppose any large-scale military operation in Rafah. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life 

“We’re looking at certainly one of the worst, if not the worst, Conservative performance in local government elections for the last 40 years,” declared polling guru John Curtice today. 

While final declarations are not expected until Sunday, overnight counts indicate that the Tories have lost around half of the council seats they were defending. 

Meanwhile, Labour has regained control of many of its key council targets, including Redditch, Thurrock, Hartlepool and Rushmoor. The latter two hold particular significance. Hartlepool was where Starmer suffered a bruising by-election defeat at the last local elections three years ago. And a victory in Rushmoor, which has been Tory-controlled for 24 years and is home to the British Army, suggests Starmer’s attempt to rebrand Labour as the “true party of patriotism” is paying off.

Labour has also won the Blackpool by-election with a swing of 26.3 per cent from the Conservatives – the third biggest swing to Labour at a by-election since the Second World War. Equally worrying for the Tories is the fact they only narrowly scraped second place in Blackpool, withjust  177 votes more than Nigel Farage’s Reform party. Reform secured 17 per cent of the vote share – the party’s best result yet in a by-election. 

“We’re becoming the real opposition in the north to the Labour,” Reform’s leader Richard Tice confidently deduced from the outcome. These local elections will also understate the scale of the threat Reform poses at the general election since the party didn’t have a big presence in the locals. It only stood in one in six wards. 

Amid these calamitous losses, one man has offered Sunak a lifeline: Tory mayor Ben Houchen. The high-profile Tees Valley mayor has secured a third term in power, albeit with a reduced majority. 

The Conservatives are clinging onto this one good news story, unsurprisingly. If even Houchen had lost power, it would have been the most damning indictment of all. The charismatic northerner has become a poster boy for the government’s levelling up agenda and secured a stonking victory of over 72 per cent under a Boris-led Conservative government in 2021. 

Yet the Conservative party’s attempts to claim credit for his victory is unconvincing. Houchen’s win is a testament to his personal popularity and efforts to improve Teesside’s economy. As The Hound writes today, he has not been re-elected because of Sunak’s Tory Party but, rather, in spite of it. 

The same is almost certainly true for West Midlands mayor Andy Street. Like Houchen, he too appeared to tactically distance himself from the Tory party during his campaign. We are still waiting on the results of this mayoral election but preliminary evidence suggests Street will narrowly retain power. 

There are a couple of caveats to Labour’s successes in the locals. There is some evidence of its stance on Gaza hurting the party in pockets with a large Muslim population. In Oldham, where two Labour councillors quit the party over Gaza earlier this year, Labour lost control of the council. And, on average, the party’s support is down by eight points since last year in wards where over 10 per cent of the population identify as Muslim.

What’s more, an interesting and seemingly contradictory forecast has emerged this afternoon from Sky News elections analyst, Prof Michael Thrasher. From looking at local elections results so far, it projects that Starmer’s Labour is on course to be the largest party in parliament but, it could fall short of a Commons majority by 32 seats.

It feels safe to say that the Tories are heading for opposition. But it may still be too soon to feel confident of a landslide Labour victory. 

Nonetheless, Starmer has reason to feel jubilant today. The last time local elections were held in 2021, a bruising set of results for Labour had Keir Starmer contemplating resignation for having failed to revive his party’s electoral fortunes. Three years is a long time in politics. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life 

Over 2,600 council seats are being contested across 107 areas, with Labour and the Conservatives defending almost 1,000 seats each.

Aside from local councillor roles, the Mayor of London and 10 mayoral positions outside of the capital are up for grabs. Police and crime commissioners will also be chosen across England and Wales.

The last time these contests were held, in 2021, a Boris-led Tory government – riding on a high from the UK’s Covid vaccine rollout – made significant gains, a rare feat for an incumbent government in local elections. The Conservatives gained over 200 council seats and won the Hartlepool by-election, while Labour emerged 327 seats down. 

This year, things are set to be more bruising for the incumbent government. Back in May 2021, the Tories commanded a six-point lead over Labour in the polls. Today, they are trailing Labour by roughly 19 points. 

While local election results cannot be mapped directly onto national ones, they are thought to provide an accurate indication of party preference for around 80 per cent of voters. 

A projection from local election experts, Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, predicts that the Tories could lose up to half of the just under 1,000 council seats they will be defending. 

That’s despite Starmer’s fiscally tough message during his local elections launch last month. When quizzed on how Labour would sort England’s council funding crisis – in which one in five local authorities have declared themselves at risk of bankruptcy – the Labour leader refused to pledge any extra funds, insisting “There is no magic money tree”.

While the raft of local council elections are significant, the stakes at mayoral elections are perhaps even higher. Or at least, at two particular contests. 

The most prominent mayoral contest, owing to its scale, is the one happening in London. But this won’t be the race keeping everyone on their toes. Labour’s Sadiq Khan is on course to easily win a third term. 

In the two mayoralties currently held by the Tories, however, everything is to play for. 

Sunak will be highly anxious about the fate of high-profile Conservative mayors Andy Street and Ben Houchen, both deemed likeable figures.

According to YouGov polling, Andy Street, the mayor of the West Midlands, which covers the Black Country, Birmingham, Solihull and Coventry, is on 41 per-cent, just two percentage points ahead of his Labour rival. 

Ben Houchen, meanwhile, the mayor of Tees Valley, which covers North Yorkshire and County Durham, is seven points ahead of his Labour rival, according to one poll, and neck and neck with him, according to another. If it weren’t for Reform choosing not to stand a candidate there, things might look even more dangerous for the Tories – a luxury the party won’t be afforded at the general election.

Back in 2017, when Houchen was first elected as mayor in the red-wall area of Tees Valley, it came as a devastating shock to Labour. A shock that presaged the Conservatives’ triumphant sweep across other traditionally Labour-voting areas in the north in the 2019 election. 

When Houchen was re-elected with a whopping 73 per cent of the vote in 2021, it served as an apparent testament to his popularity and his efforts to improve Teesside’s economy. Houchen was elevated to the House of Lords in Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list and has become a poster boy for the government’s levelling up agenda. 

If even Houchen were to lose on Thursday,  it would feel highly symbolic that the tide of public opinion has well and truly shifted against the Tories. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life 

This morning, Humza Yousaf scrapped the three year long power-sharing deal between the SNP and the independence-supporting Scottish Greens, confirming that his party will return to minority rule with “immediate effect”.

The risky decision could result in him being forced to quit as first minister next week.

Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross has said that he will hold a no-confidence vote in the SNP leader and, in a major blow to Yousaf, the furious Greens confirmed this afternoon that they will back this motion, due to be voted on next week. 

The SNP-Green coalition is “worth it’s weight in gold,” gushed none other than Humza Yousaf back in February 2023, speaking to The National during the SNP leadership election. “A minority government, I think, would be disastrous,” he added. 

This is the same Yousaf who, this morning, summoned Green co-leaders Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater to Bute House to announce that he was turfing them out of government. 

An SNP cabinet meeting swiftly followed. According to a Scottish government spokesperson, cabinet members “enthusiastically endorsed this position” and were banging tables in support of the collapse of the coalition.

The Scottish Greens, meanwhile, have not minced their words. “The first minister has decided to capitulate to the most reactionary, backward-looking forces within the SNP,” fumed Harvie. 

Slater, meanwhile, when asked whether the decision to scrap the coalition was solely the first minister’s, insisted “This was his decision.”

Yet others will view this as Yousaf getting in there first – and ditching the Greens before they had a chance to ditch the SNP. 

It’s no secret that relations have been rocky between the two parties recently. These tensions came to a head last week when, in a major U-turn, the Scottish government ditched its legally binding target to cut carbon emissions by 75 per cent by 2030, admitting the goal was “out of reach”. 

Writing in Reaction, Giga Watt says Yousaf was set up to fail by his performative predecessor, who had no understanding of the scale of the commitment required to meet this ambitious net zero targets when she announced it. But the Scottish Greens, needless to say, weren’t quite so understanding. 

What now? 

A no-confidence vote in Yousaf could be held as early as Thursday next week. 

The Greens’ decision to vote against him, rather than abstain, puts Yousaf in a dangerous position. If all opposition MSPs join forces against the first minister, he will lose the vote. The SNP has 63 MSPs, its opponents have 65. Meaning the first minister’s fate hangs on just a single opposition MSP switching sides. 

Strictly speaking, the vote is not binding but politically, Yousaf would more or less be obliged to stand down if he loses it. 

Despite the restraints of returning to a majority government, Fergus Ewing, the SNP member for Inverness and Nairn and a long-time critic of the coalition, declared today a “happy day.”

The SNP, he added, “has undergone a kind of late adolescence where we fell in with the wrong crowd. But just as teenage years come to an end, so the dreadful, damaging association with the Greens has today terminated.”

Farewell Greens. And – quite possibly – farewell in advance, Yousaf.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life 

They could have a long night ahead of them. Conservative MP Tim Loughton told the BBC he had a “sleeping bag ready” as he prepared for the prolonged debate between the Lords and the Commons.

Sunak headed into the session insisting that flights carrying asylum seekers to Rwanda will set off in “10 to 12 weeks”. 

It’s now over two years since a Johnson-led government announced its plan to put asylum seekers who enter Britain via illegal routes on a one-way flight to Rwanda. The first plane was scheduled to leave in June 2022, but was cancelled following a legal challenge. These challenges have persisted. 

Most recent was the unanimous Supreme Court ruling back in November that the scheme was unlawful since Rwanda is not a “safe” country. The court provided documented evidence about human rights breaches in Rwanda’s asylum system to back up its position. 

But the PM was not about to give up – hence the creation of the Safety of Rwanda Bill, which MPs and Lords are debating at the time of writing.  

This revamped Bill aims to address the reasons why the scheme was deemed unlawful by the Supreme Court. Crucially, the government has since agreed a treaty with Rwanda which provides a binding assurance from Kigali that asylum seekers sent to Rwanda will not later be returned to their home country if doing so would endanger them. 

More contentiously, the new bill also seeks to set out in UK law that Rwanda is a safe country. In other words, the government has introduced legislation that gives Parliament the powers to rule by itself that Rwanda is conclusively safe – and to ban British judges from intervening to say otherwise. 

The Safety of Rwanda Bill was supposed to be “emergency legislation”. But, over four months since its creation, it is yet to pass, thanks to tough resistance from the House of Lords. 

Peers have repeatedly voted to amend the legislation, resulting in endless back-and-forths between the Lords and Commons. 

Tonight, MPs are considering the Lords’ final outstanding amendments.

The general consensus seems to be that, irrespective of whether MPs accept these amendments, the Bill is now likely to pass, even if it takes all night.

Peers have repeatedly voted to amend the Rwanda legislation, but MPs have consistently overturned their desired changes. Again, in the last hour, two of the Lords’ biggest remaining amendments have been voted down. These included their demand that anyone who worked with UK forces overseas – particularly Afghans who helped British troops – should be made exempt from being sent to Rwanda. The other was a request that ministers create an independent monitoring committee to regularly assess whether Rwanda is safe.

The controversial Rwanda Bill serves as a reminder that there is only so much peers can do to protest a piece of legislation they dislike.

Once upon a time, the House of Lords was more powerful than the House of Commons, and had the powers to block outright a bill passed by the latter. But the passing of the Parliament Act in 1911 saw its powers significantly reduced. Now, all it can do is delay and encourage MPs to reconsider. Peers cannot block legislation from going through, and even their amendments may well, ultimately, be ignored. 

The revamped Rwanda Bill has already passed back and forth between the Lords and the Commons several times. But ministers seem confident that this game of parliamentary ping-pong is coming to a close. 

That said, given the heavy resistance that this much-delayed policy has already endured, it’s unsurprising that Sunak is refusing to be too specific about flight dates. Instead, the PM insisted today that the Rwanda plan is about instating a “regular rhythm of flights…multiple a month through summer and beyond.”

And, he added, these flights will continue “until the boats have stopped”. In that case, there is certainly no end to the flights in sight. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life

Foremost amongst Sunak’s solutions to tackle the rapidly rising rates of economic inactivity is a government plan to strip GPs of their right to issue sick notes. Speaking at the Centre for Social Justice, the PM insisted that doctors are too readily writing people off as unfit for work.

“We have wiped out decades of progress,” said the PM, as he noted the huge rise in long-term sickness since the pandemic. The number of people in Britain off work with long-term sickness currently stands at a record high of 2.8 million, with almost a third of working age adults now economically inactive. Sickness benefits for people of working age cost £49 billion last year and this figure is projected to rise by another £20 billion before the end of the decade.

Another pattern the PM labelled both “tragic” and “an enormous waste and loss of human potential” is that the increase in those claiming sickness benefits is disproportionately concentrated in the young. 

“It is a sign of progress that people can talk openly about mental health conditions in a way that only a few years ago would’ve been unthinkable,” said the PM. Yet he went on to cite the fact that over 50 per cent of the long-term sick are not working due to mental health problems as evidence that we are “over-medicalising common anxieties”. 

Unsurprisingly, the comments have caused a backlash, with mental health charity Mind accusing the Prime Minister of “continuing a trend in recent ­rhetoric which conjures up the image of a ‘mental health culture’ that has ‘gone too far’”. 

“I know people will probably accuse me of lacking compassion,” the PM himself conceded. But work, he insisted, “is a source of dignity, purpose, hope,” and “it contributes to a sense of belonging and self-worth.”

The PM acknowledged that some are simply too unwell to work. Others, he insisted, with milder mental health illnesses and less severe mobility issues, for instance, could be encouraged back to work “if their employers made reasonable adjustments.” He did not specify what form these adjustments would take beyond offering employees the option of working from home. 

Aside from helping the sick to get back to work, he vowed to crack down on those lodging claims in bad faith. A new fraud bill, soon to be announced in full soon, “will treat benefit fraud like tax fraud”, giving the DWP similar powers to HMRC to punish benefit “fraudsters”.

Why do we need to crackdown on those “exploiting the compassion of British people”?  Because, said Sunak, “when people see others gaming the system that their taxes pay for, it erodes support for the whole welfare system”.

The government is planning to launch a consultation on toughening up the eligibility criteria for PIP, formerly known as Disability Living Allowance, by demanding “greater medical evidence” about the type and severity of mental health conditions. According to the PM, this will also mean changing who is responsible for issuing “fit notes”.

A “fit note” certifies a patient is sick, confirming a valid reason for staying off work and eligibility for sick pay.

“We are going to test shifting the responsibility for assessment from GPs and giving it to specialist work and health professionals who have the ­dedicated time to provide an objective assessment of someone’s ability to work and the tailored support they need to do so,” said the PM.

Will reallocating this task make any difference? 

While the suggestion that GPs are incapable of making “objective” assessments might cause some offence, overstretched doctors may well be all too happy to shift the responsibility for handling sick notes onto another trained professional.

But we are lacking details on who exactly these “specialist work and health professionals” would be – how they would be recruited, how they would be trained and the accompanying price tag.

And how would they assess patients differently? The severity of a mental illness is not an easy thing to quantify.

Sunak’s speech has shone a light today on the scale of sick-note Britain – a trend anyone, of any political persuasion, can agree is deeply worrying. 

He has made a convincing case for why we need to help individuals get back to work. But details on how exactly he will exercise his plan are still lacking.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life

According to ONS stats released today, CPI inflation slowed to 3.2 per cent in March, down from 3.4 per cent the month before. Core inflation – which strips out volatile energy and food prices – fell to 4.2 per cent in March from 4.5 per cent in February. 

There is a slight caveat to this encouraging data. These drops were smaller than forecast. CPI and core inflation had been expected to drop to 3.1 and 4.1 per cent respectively. The fall in food prices last month was offset by a rise in the cost of fuel. 

Even so, the situation is far improved compared to a year ago when especially sticky inflation in the UK was beginning to make Britain look like a global outlier. 

In late June 2023, as I wrote in Reaction at the time, things were looking especially dire. UK headline inflation, coming in at 8.7 per cent, was the highest among G7 economies. And the latest release of monthly data confirmed that this figure had, once again, refused to budge. 

At the time, Britain’s central bankers must have envied their American counterparts who appeared to be storming ahead in their battle to tame the inflationary beast, with the US headline rate running at 4 per cent. 

A year on, a different picture is emerging. While UK and Eurozone inflation is continuing to fall steadily, it is proving stickier across the Atlantic. 

The rate of US inflation actually rose last month, according to last week’s data, spooking markets and prompting fears of a delay to interest rate cuts in the US and elsewhere. 

Fed chairman Jerome Powell stoked these fears today, at least for those inside America. Powell insisted that the Fed would need greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably towards its 2 per cent target before it started cutting rates, adding that, “the recent data has clearly not given us greater confidence”.

Yet central bankers on this side of the Atlantic appear undeterred so far by the Fed – and are indicating that they could press on ahead with rate cuts without it. 

President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, has twice hinted in recent days that the ECB is still planning on imposing a cut as early as June. 

And Bank of England boss, Andrew Bailey, appears confident too about the possibility of diverging from the Fed. 

Speaking at the IMF event in Washington last night, Bailey insisted that there is “strong evidence” of price pressures easing up in the UK, adding that, “the dynamics for inflation are rather different now between Europe — I mean Europe geographically now — and in the US. 

So when can we expect UK borrowing rates currently languishing at their 16-year high – of 5.25 per cent – to start coming down? 

It’s not entirely clear. Bailey’s confidence hasn’t quite translated into market confidence. 

Today’s smaller-than-expected fall in inflation – paired with a gloomier US outlook – means markets are offering more cautious predictions about the likely pace of rate cuts. 

Last week, many investors were factoring in a first cut in August. Now, the expectation is increasingly skewed towards a first cut in September, with the gloomier forecasts predicting it could come in November. After April’s inflation data, there is likely to be a clearer consensus. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life