Keir Starmer launched his campaign bus on Saturday with his senior shadow cabinet members, but Tory ‘big beasts’ appeared to have deserted the PM in Redcar
We may be in an era when elections are fought with TikTok memes and Instagram reels, but one thing has stubbornly refused to give way in the digital age: the good old battle of the campaign buses. On Saturday, Rishi Sunak unveiled the Conservatives’ bus that will tour the country during the 2024 election, emblazoned with the slogan: “Clear plan. Bold action. Secure future.”
It is – arguably – a slightly snappier version of John Major’s bus in 1997, which bore the words: “You can only be sure with the Conservatives.”
Outdoor campaign events, so often fraught with peril, proved the undoing of Rishi Sunak and Ed Davey this week
It has been tough for Rishi Sunak, so it’s nice that he still has some cheerleaders. A visibly tricky encounter with some cones during a football training session may have resulted in him being mocked mercilessly on TikTok, but one loyal newspaper described his troubling manoeuvre as a Cruyff turn, a move named after the beguiling Dutch great. Not since Kim Jong-il scored 11 holes in one in his first ever round of golf has a leader’s sporting prowess had such an unlikely upgrade.
Group behind New Labour’s 1997 anthem say they don’t want song used again – and they are not alone
The pop group behind Labour’s 1997 victory anthem Things Can Only Get Better has joined many other artists in requesting political parties refrain from using their songs.
Former Australian prime minister issues warning that young men’s thinking on the issue is going backward
Former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has said global progress on gender equality is “really glacial and slow” as she warned that it is going backwards among young people.
Gillard cited recent polling by King’s College London’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, which showed that 51% of respondents believe that men are doing too much to support gender equality, while 46% think that men are now discriminated against.
New poll gives Labour its biggest lead since Liz Truss meltdown as ‘Tory towns’ gain most from new funds
The Tory general election campaign hit more trouble on Saturday as Rishi Sunak faced accusations of using levelling up funds to win votes and Labour opened its biggest poll lead since the disastrous premiership of Liz Truss.
As Sunak tried to fire up his party’s campaign before the first crucial TV debate with Keir Starmer on Tuesday, it emerged that more than half of the 30 towns each promised £20m of regeneration funding on Saturday were in constituencies won by Tory MPs at the last election.
The Tories and Labour are forking out more than ever on social media ads, but going viral isn’t easy. We speak to influencers and strategists about the messages and memes
Why would you hold an election in November? The question came from digital marketing guru Mike Harris and was asked in a message to his friend, Labour’s campaign manager, Morgan McSweeney, earlier this year. Digital advertising is more expensive in October and November because the internet is swamped with ads for Christmas and Black Friday, said Harris, the founder of communications agency 89up. Why not pick a cheaper time of year?
Teflon Don has become Felon Don, but the US constitution has no objection to him holding the highest office
It was the moment America, or at least America’s politicians and media, had been waiting for. It was the day justice finally caught up with Donald Trump. The former president’s manipulation of the 2016 election, by hushing up a sex scandal that threatened his chances, and his attempts to discredit a criminal justice system intent on punishing him, was famously thwarted. It was an all-time presidential and judicial first, a historic result that transformed Teflon Don into Felon Don, thanks to a jury of 12 ordinary men and women and a brave prosecutor, Alvin Bragg.
Looked at another way, however, last week’s much anticipated dramatic denouement of the criminal trial of the New York playboy, billionaire and presumptive 2024 Republican presidential candidate may turn out to be less pivotal than anticipated. According to the US networks, most Americans tuned out weeks ago, not least because cameras were barred from the Manhattan courtroom. One not untypical public survey found that 67% of respondents said a conviction would make no difference to how they voted this autumn. The 34 guilty verdicts were an overnight sensation. But they may not significantly shift the political dial.
US representative and failed contender for president says Kathy Hochul should grant pardon ‘for the good of the country’
The outgoing Democratic US representative who failed in his presidential primary challenge against Joe Biden called on the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, to pardon Donald Trump over his criminal conviction for hush-money payments to influence the 2016 election “for the good of the country”.
Minnesota representative Dean Phillips, who was the first Democrat to call on fellow party member Henry Cuellar to resign following bribery charges against the Texas representative, urged for the pardon on Friday in a post on X.
Former Tory minister admits at festival that he felt a fraud due to need to give the impression he was in three places at once
Former Conservative MP Rory Stewart found being a politician “very yucky” and felt like a fraud, he told an audience at Hay festival on Saturday.
Asked whether he would consider going back into politics, he said that he found being a politician “personally very, very unpleasant” and “didn’t like it”, adding: “I feel like a fraud all the time, in a whole series of ways.”
Senior adviser who worked for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown says there is an ‘urgent imperative’ for a new government to address wealth inequality in Britain
A key New Labour adviser who worked for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in Downing Street says there is an “overwhelming economic and ethical case” for Keir Starmer’s party to impose higher taxes on wealth if it wins the general election.
Writing in the Observer Patrick Diamond, professor of public policy at Queen Mary University of London, and his colleague Colm Murphy, a lecturer in British politics, say a Labour government will need to look at radical ways to raise money, not least because the plans for higher economic growth that the party is relying on may never materialise.
The Brown-era adage ‘Prudence with a purpose’ could be the way to obtain the economic stability that has eluded every UK government since the 2008 financial crisis
Keir Starmer appears destined for Downing Street. Even so, as the election campaign rumbles on, his party will be challenged to articulate a compelling platform that secures not only the keys to Number 10 but also the economic stability that has eluded every UK government since the 2008 financial crisis. That will demand fiscal discipline delivered not only through a prudent approach to public spending but also fundamental reform of our tax system.
In headline policy, Labour is committed to fiscal rules on spending and debt. Rachel Reeves promises to move towards balanced current spending and to secure a falling debt-to-GDP ratio by the fifth year of the forecast. As her speech on Tuesday argues, Labour believes such rules will underpin “stability” and “growth”.
ITV News on Friday night reported on a “severe mental health crisis” at Wethersfield in Essex, with many incidents of suicide and self-harm including five to 10 suicide attempts and 10 of self-harm in January this year alone – the highest level since the site opened.
Both Labour and Conservative are pledging to look after the older voter while Gen Z is being ignored
Baby boomers are being courted with financial inducements from both main political parties. Millennials and Gen Z, not so much. Here we assess the intergenerational impact of the election so far.
Sharing digitally altered “deepfake” pornographic images will attract a penalty of six years’ jail, or seven years for those who also created them, under proposed new national laws to go before federal parliament next week.
The attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, is expected to introduce legislation on Wednesday to create a new criminal offence of sharing, without consent, sexually explicit images that have been digitally created using artificial intelligence or other forms of technology.
The prime minister said if Starmer was elected then he would also pander to the left in power
SNP leader John Swinney has urged people to take part in a “Scottish national service” by using the general election to vote Tory MPs out of office, PA Media reports.
Scotland’s first minister said his party could “remove the remaining rump of Tory MPs”.
Party says policy is costly, unnecessary and part of a Tory war on the younger generation
The Liberal Democrats are to call for the abolition of voter ID at polling stations, describing the policy as part of a “Tory war on the younger generation”.
The Lib Dems will say in their election manifesto that they will “lead the charge” to ditch the policy in the next parliament because it is costly, unnecessary, is addressing a problem that does not exist, and makes it harder for young people to vote.
Rishi Sunak was confronted by a student who asked him why he “hates young people so much”.
Henry Hassell, a 16-year-old singer-songwriter, who lives in west Devon, posed the question on Wednesday while the prime minister was on a campaign visit to a local pub.
Migrants seek redress for ‘immense distress’ from deportations now thrown into chaos by election announcement
Asylum seekers detained by the Home Office and threatened with deportation to Rwanda are set to take legal action against the government after Rishi Sunak admitted that no flights will take place before the general election.
The Home Office started raiding accommodation and detaining people who arrived at routine immigration-reporting appointments on 29 April in a nationwide push codenamed Operation Vector.
Trump and his Republican allies sow distrust in US judicial system as analysts warn backlash could tear at social fabric in already volatile election year
A shameful day in American history. A sham show trial. A kangaroo court. A total witch-hunt. Worthy of a banana republic.
These were the reactions from senior elected Republicans, who once claimed the mantle of the party of law and order, to the news that Donald Trump had become the first former US president convicted of a crime.
Justices to address abortion, guns, social media – and whether Donald Trump can be prosecuted for role in January 6 insurrection
The US supreme court is poised to deliver a raft of politically sensitive decisions as it ends its judicial term, addressing tumultuous issues including whether Donald Trump can be prosecuted for his role in the January 6 insurrection in 2021, abortion access for millions of women and the basic functioning of the federal government.
With the court entering its traditional June climax, observers are bracing themselves for yet another potentially seismic four weeks that could radically reshape American public life. Matters before the court include a possible loosening of gun laws in a country with already exceptionally lax controls, and new guardrails on how social media platforms deal with misinformation.
Keir Starmer will need broad support to undertake a ‘decade of renewal’ in office. This sordid episode suggests he won’t have it
It’s not every day that you see Keir Starmer’s increasingly ruthless electoral machine in a state of confusion and disarray. But its chaotic approach this week to the question of whether Diane Abbott, a Labour MP for the past 37 years with one of the biggest majorities in the country, could stand in the general election – a question seemingly finally resolved on Friday by Starmer saying that she was “free to go forward as a Labour candidate” – has been very revealing about the condition of the party and of our wider politics.
The whole messy episode could be significant in the election, but also in the longer story of the Labour party and its fractious but pivotal relationships with the left, London and Black Britain. If those relationships with three of Labour’s traditionally strongest bases of support break down– and this week considerable damage has been done – then it may become much harder for it to gain and hold on to power, and for these millions of voters to be properly represented in parliament. Abbott’s ordeal, and her apparent survival of it, matter to many more people than her angry, baffled and now relieved constituents in Hackney North and Stoke Newington.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist. His book on Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left since the 1960s, The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies, is out now
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After week of campaign missteps, ‘reset’ is attempt to firm up base and beat back Reform UK, say observers
Rishi Sunak is heading to north-east England for a rare foray into the “red wall” after a campaign that has so far focused on shoring up the Conservatives’ older, more affluent southern base.
The prime minister has spent much of the first week of the general election campaign speaking to voters in the south of England who are considering Reform UK, targeting them with a range of policy announcements including the return of national service and tax breaks for pensioners.
With the Tories’ chances at near zero, Labour is concentrating on fighting an ideological ground war with itself
It’s just over a week since Rishi Sunak got soaked in the rain as he called the general election. Since then he has forgotten that Wales didn’t qualify for the Euros, paid a visit to Belfast’s Titanic quarter and been photographed under an exit sign. Richard Holden, the Tory party chair AKA Baldrick impersonator, has insisted that the campaign has been going exactly as planned. God knows what might have happened if it hadn’t. Then the Conservatives started pumping out policies as if there’s no tomorrow. National service, the pension triple lock, a ban on Mickey Mouse degrees, and driving penalty points for flytippers. If they’re all such good ideas, it makes you wonder why the Tories didn’t do any of them in the last 14 years.
Not that any of them are likely to happen, because the chances of the Conservatives winning the election are currently near zero. A sign of how bad Rish! thinks things are is that almost all his campaign visits have been to what used to be Tory strongholds, to try to shore up the vote. Meanwhile, Labour figures have been touring the country shouting “change” and not much more. They think it’s enough just not to be the Tories. So far that appears to be working. The polls have barely shifted in the last 10 days. It’s all been sound and fury, signifying nothing, and most people will end the week talking of little more than the Donald Trump verdicts. But here are the highlights you may have missed.
Robinson, who moved to White House when Barack Obama won presidency, helped to care for granddaughters Malia and Sasha
Marian Shields Robinson, the mother of Michelle Obama, who moved with the first family to the White House when son-in-law Barack Obama was elected president, has died. She was 86.
Robinson’s death was announced in an online tribute by Michelle Obama, and included details of the time Robinson spent living in the White House, as an informal first grandmother to the Obama children.
The former president’s rambling tirade at Trump Tower contained a number of questionable assertions
Donald Trump delivered a rambling, incoherent speech laden with falsehoods and conspiracy theories from the atrium of Trump Tower, a day after the former president was convicted of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in his hush-money criminal trial.
Here is a fact check of some of the things he said on Friday – and why they weren’t true.
D:Ream members regret association with Tony Blair and do not want song played at July general election
The pop group that sing Things Can Only Get Better – which became an anthem for Labour at the 1997 general election victory – will deny any request from Keir Starmer to use the track at this year’s election.
D:Ream’s founding members Peter Cunnah and Alan Mackenzie said they were dismayed to hear their song play through a loudspeaker as the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, called a 4 July general election on a wet afternoon in Downing Street.
Rishi Sunak says the money, paid over 10 years, would help regenerate areas such as Mansfield, Rotherham and Hartlepool
The Conservatives have promised to give another 30 towns in the UK £20m each in levelling up funding over the next decade if they win the election.
Rishi Sunak said the 30 would be added to the government’s long-term plan for towns, which is intended to pay for the regeneration of underfunded areas.
Emily Baden says after a disagreement over political lawn signs with the US supreme court justice’s wife, a black car began parking at her mother’s home
Neighbors of Samuel Alito and his wife described how a disagreement over political lawn signs put up in the wake of the 2020 presidential election quickly devolved into “unhinged behavior towards a complete stranger” by the supreme court justice’s wife.
Emily Baden says she never intended to get into a fight with Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann, her powerful neighbors who live on the same suburban cul-de-sac as her mother outside Washington DC.
The prosecution and the guilty verdicts are unprecedented. But making history is not the same as shifting election outcomes
Guilty. The New York jury’s unanimous verdicts on 34 counts mean that Donald Trump is not only the first sitting or former US president to be prosecuted in a criminal trial, but the first to be convicted.
Trump was found to have falsified business records to hide $130,000 of hush money paid to cover up a sex scandal he feared might hinder his run in 2016. Before his entry into politics, it would have been taken for granted that such charges would kill a campaign. Yet Trump is running for the White House as a convicted criminal. If he is jailed when he is sentenced in July – which most experts think unlikely – it is assumed that he would continue. If anything, the prospect of such a sentence spurs him on.
Years of work and my connection to the community have been brushed aside. But after months of being isolated and bullied, I should have known this was coming
On Wednesday night I was removed, via email, from being the Labour parliamentary candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green. I live and grew up here, and this battle means so much to me personally.
I was asked to attend a sham 45-minute online meeting via email just hours before my deselection, with three members of the National Executive Committee – one of whom never put his camera on or said a word – and my fate was decided. More than four years’ work thrown in the bin. My connection to my community brushed aside. My deep and utter commitment dismissed. And the desires of thousands in my constituency disregarded.
Faiza Shaheen was the Labour parliamentary candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green in 2019, and teaches at the London School of Economics
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Labour leader says it was ‘most efficient form of transport’ from Wales and party has offset the carbon
Keir Starmer has admitted he used a private jet to travel to a campaign rally in Scotland where he promised to create “tens of thousands” of clean energy jobs with a new publicly owned energy company in the country.
Responding to media questions after speaking to activists in Greenock, Inverclyde, Starmer said: “We did use a private jet because we did need to get very quickly to Scotland from Wales yesterday and it was the most efficient form of transport in the middle of a very busy general election campaign.”
Revisited: Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland speaks to Sam Levine about how Donald Trump became the first US president, sitting or former, to become a convicted criminal
Today, we are sharing Politics Weekly America’s latest episode with Today in Focus listeners.
Donald Trump has made history again, becoming the first US president, sitting or former, to be a convicted criminal. Late on Thursday a New York jury found him guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal. Within minutes of leaving the courtroom, Trump said he would appeal.
Media groups claimed act criminalised investigative journalism and meant no one could say Jimmy Savile was a paedophile
A Northern Ireland law banning the naming of suspected sex offenders until they are charged has been revoked in a court judgment hailed as a victory for press freedom.
The law, which came into effect last year, granted anonymity for life and 25 years after death to anyone suspected of sexual offences who had not been charged.
Joe Biden warned on Friday that it was reckless and “dangerous” for anyone to claim Donald Trump’s criminal conviction was the result of a rigged trial, as the former president hit out at the verdict against him and Republicans maligned the integrity of America’s justice system.
Donald Trump hit out furiously on Friday morning at the new status of “felon” conferred on him by a New York jury, whose guilty verdict made him the first former US president ever to become a convicted criminal.
During the Jeremy Corbyn era, some of the leftwing leader’s fiercest critics gave up and left the Labour party: not so Luke Akehurst.
Behind the scenes, Akehurst was doing what he has been doing since he was a 16-year-old political activist – organising to get his wing of Labour back on the front foot and later to help cement Keir Starmer’s control over the party.
Alum Rock in Ladywood has become a protest hub – with local people saying poverty and other issues will also dictate vote
On a Wednesday afternoon, despite the pouring rain, Alum Rock Road is buzzing with activity. The busy thoroughfare in Birmingham is clogged with cars, and families flit in and out of shops that are selling bowls of fruit, colourful fabrics and sizzling kebabs.
Every few metres a Palestinian flag is pinned in a shop window or draped off a lamp-post.
Veteran MP had party whip restored this week, but it was suggested she might be ‘barred’ from running
Diane Abbott is “free to stand” as a Labour candidate in the general election, Keir Starmer has said.
The Labour leader had spent three days insisting her candidacy was not in his power, and it was a matter for the party’s ruling national executive committee (NEC), but the row was increasingly distracting from Labour’s election campaign.
The Conservative party has announced plans for fly-tippers to get points on their driving licences. The party also pledged to pass a law that would allow tenants to be kicked out of social housing after three proven instances of antisocial behaviour.
PA Media reports it said the moves are part of the party’s “plan to stamp out antisocial behaviour across the board to restore pride in place, improve people’s quality of life and boost community cohesion”.
The president said ‘Donald Trump was given every opportunity to defend himself’ and ‘no one is above the law’
While Donald Trump and his team argued for a change of venue for the New York hush money trial because Manhattan was so heavily Democrat, New York was where Trump made his name. The 58-storey Trump Tower has been a part of the skyline since 1983. His hit reality show, The Apprentice, took place here.
After the verdict was read yesterday, New Yorkers reacted with both jubilation and horror.
Radio presenter says he will not ‘suffer death by 1,000 cuts’ over clip in which he said he did not like living in Kent town
The radio presenter Iain Dale has withdrawn his bid to be the Conservative candidate for Tunbridge Wells after he was found to have said he did not like the town.
Dale, a longstanding Tory supporter, had resigned from his job on LBC to stand as a candidate in the Kent seat but said he was “not willing to suffer death by 1,000 cuts” over his comments.
Labour’s purge of Faiza Shaheen and Diane Abbott increases my fear about how it will behave in office
Purging women of colour on spurious grounds while handing safe parliamentary seats to apparatchiks like sweets: Keir Starmer’s Labour is high on hubris and telling us precisely how it will govern. As Tony Blair’s former director of political operations John McTernan put it, the sham investigation process into Diane Abbott, Britain’s first Black female MP, was designed to “humiliate”.
The same goes for Faiza Shaheen, Labour’s former candidate in Chingford and Woodford Green. Shaheen is a Muslim woman of colour and the daughter of a mechanic, who defied the odds to become a successful academic and won the overwhelming backing of her local party. Starmer previously described her as a “fantastic” and a “fabulous candidate”, praising her “passion, expert understanding and insight on inequality”. Yesterday, while canvassing with enthusiastic volunteers and carrying her newborn baby, she discovered via the Times newspaper that she was to be purged. Her offence? Tweets going back ten years, one of which, she said, was about her “experience of Islamophobia in the party”. Another related to text above a clip of the American Jewish comedian Jon Stewart on the Daily Show satirising how criticism of Israel leads to online dogpiling by the country’s defenders: text that had a caption about the “Israel lobby”, which she concedes “plays into a trope,” adding: “I absolutely don’t agree with that and I’m sorry about that”.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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A joint US and UK air raid on Houthi missile launchers in Yemen has killed 16 people and injured more than 40, according to the Houthi health ministry.
There is no independent way of confirming the death toll, but if accurate it would represent the single largest loss of life since the US and UK started their campaign to degrade the Houthi military in January.
Campaign groups in 127 cities demand urgent climate action amid fears of far-right gains
Activists across Europe are holding three days of protests to protect democracy and cut pollution as they struggle to push green issues back up the agenda before the European elections next week.
Last year was the hottest on record, and the urgency of the climate crisis is pressing. However, polls are predicting wins for far-right parties seeking to scrap green rules, and there have been significant recent rollbacks of environment policy. The fate of a proposed law to restore nature – the subject of fierce attacks even from centre-right parties that had championed the green deal – still appears to be hanging in the balance.
This must be a day to reflect that in just one decade it has become realistically possible for a multiple felon to lead the free world
No rest for political cartographers. It turns out that what lay beyond America’s uncharted waters was some more uncharted waters. The unanimous verdict in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial found the former president guilty, making him the first US president to be convicted of a crime. Forgive me: 34 crimes. A potential bar to security clearance, voting and owning a gun – but not, apparently, a bar to running for president. “I am a political prisoner,” ran an instant campaign fundraising message from Trump, probably typed on the same gold toilet he once pretty much ran the world off.
And might well again. Previous polls have indicated some Trump voters would switch in the event of a guilty verdict, but this morning the betting markets had Trump’s chances above 50% for the first time. On the other hand, if criminal trial verdicts going the wrong way for you is such great news, how come Trump is trying so hard to stall the other three cases he’s facing? By way of a reminder, those involve mishandling classified documents, trying to change the outcome of the election, and fomenting the 6 January attack on the US Capitol. He’s already been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in another trial last year, and impeached twice. Take in his thousands of business-related court cases and he’s a one-man law degree.
The Liberal Democrats would extend free school meals to all primary schoolchildren, starting with those in poverty, Ed Davey has said in a challenge to Labour to match the pledge.
Speaking in his first newspaper interview of the general election campaign, the Lib Dem leader announced a manifesto policy aimed at nearly 1 million more children living in poverty in England and their families.
In a divided world that can’t seem to agree on a single fact, we now have one that is impossible to argue with: Trump is a felon
For decades, he skated. Nothing seemed to stick to the Teflon-coated businessman-turned-president. The guy who didn’t pay his bills, who constantly lied, who mocked a disabled journalist, who insulted a Gold Star family, who bragged about grabbing women by their private parts, who praised dictators, who urged a violent mob to overturn an election, who was unperturbed as his own vice-president was threatened with hanging.
Yes, he skated – through two impeachments, through countless investigations and accusations, and through so much chaos that responsible US citizens became almost numb and hopeless.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
The desire to see the back of the Tories seems to outweigh any considerations of policy – or whether Labour will actually deliver much positive change
“Nothing has changed”: those were the ill-fated words during Theresa May’s 2017 campaign. Things certainly did change, though – a large polling lead almost evaporated by polling day and a hung parliament was returned.
In 2024, Rishi Sunak desperately needs a similar shift. But so far the British public seem unmoved. Voting intention, as measured by the opinion polls, remains much as it was when the election was called. Those intentions would see Sunak falling to something ranging between a significant and a historic defeat.
The party needs to move its campaign on from stories about factionalist infighting over seats – and get on with winning
Whatever your view of Diane Abbott, or your view of Keir Starmer, there has plainly been a serious blunder in Labour’s campaign when her treatment ends up leading the BBC news coverage and splashed across most front pages. Quite apart from the bad look, Labour’s big NHS day was blown away by a story on the fate of one MP.
First, remember this. Starmer has pulled off the near-impossible in a remarkably short time: returning Labour to electability after its worst crash in living memory. This miraculous recovery has required unflinching severity in dealing with antisemitism and a resolute “Labour has changed” message after Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. It was risky to expel the former leader – but he was extraordinarily lucky that Corbyn, with characteristic obstinacy, chose to rule himself out by refusing to accept the overall verdict of the independent Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). Had he accepted its judgment and offered a sufficient apology, he would probably still be a thorn-in-the-side Labour MP. If he wins as an independent, that’s a very minor embarrassment as Labour sweeps to power.
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