UK Politics

Andy Burnham has said Britain needs “wholesale change” in his biggest challenge yet to Sir Keir Starmer, warning the prime minister that he risks handing the keys to No 10 to Nigel Farage without a major change of course.The Greater Manchester mayor and former cabinet minister comes into the crucial Labour conference with supporters talking up his prospects as a leader and potential prime minister for the party.And his message, in an interview in The New Statesman, comes as Sir Keir continues to falter in the polls, with Labour MPs openly questioning whether he can continue if the party has another poor set of elections next May.Andy Burnham is a potential leadership candidate if he can get back into parliament More

Sir Sadiq Khan has dubbed Donald Trump “racist, sexist, misogynistic” and “Islamophobic” in the latest in a long-running war of words between the feuding pair. It came after Mr Trump branded Sir Sadiq a “terrible mayor” in a stinging attack over immigration and carbon-reduction policies.Addressing the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, the US president said: “I look at London, where you have a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been changed, it’s been so changed. “Now they want to go to sharia law. But you are in a different country, you can’t do that.”Khan: ‘I’m just thankful that we have record numbers of Americans coming to London’ More

The home secretary has ordered an urgent review into the use and cost of taxis ferrying asylum seekers between hotels and to and from medical appointments. Shabana Mahmood’s call follows an investigation into life inside asylum hotels, which found one migrant sent on a 250-mile journey to a GP appointment at a cost to the Home Office of £600. In other cases, migrants are transported hundreds of miles across the country via taxi when they are moved between hotels. An investigation found that one migrant was sent on a 250-mile journey to a GP appointment at a cost to the Home Office of £600 More

A top Labour minister has defended Sir Keir Starmer’s under-fire chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, amid mounting attacks over the failure to declare donations to his Labour Together think tank. The organisation, where Mr McSweeney was director before coming to work for Sir Keir, was fined by the elections watchdog over its handling of £740,000 donations in 2021. But the Tories claimed a leaked email from a lawyer to Mr McSweeney had sought to mislead the Electoral Commission.Work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden on Wednesday said the Conservatives were targeting Mr McSweeney because he is a “very talented man”.Pat McFadden said he had full confidence in Downing Street chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney More

A new political party, Advance UK, has had its inaugural launch event cancelled by a council-owned hotel in Newcastle.The party is led by former Reform deputy Ben Habib and backed by right-wing activist Tommy Robinson and billionaire Elon Musk. It was scheduled to hold a conference in the city on Saturday. While the venue was not initially disclosed, it was understood to be the Crowne Plaza Hotel in the city centre.Newcastle City Council confirmed the hotel management cancelled the booking “on health and safety grounds” following an online protest.When Advance UK announced the event in August, it said it had chosen Newcastle because it was “the symbolic heart of Brexit”. The party vowed to “fight unapologetically for sovereignty, free speech, and restoring pride in our nation”.Tommy Robinson speaks during the recent Unite the Kingdom march in London More

There is growing public support for a “super-digital identity card” which would allow people to access public services and report problems in their local area, a new report from Sir Tony Blair’s think tank suggests. The report, which surveyed more than 2,000 adults, saw 62 per cent of people say they favour introducing a form of digital ID alongside an app that would allow them to report things such as potholes and missed bin collections. Three-quarters of those polled supported the use of such an app to track the progress of applications made to local authorities, while some 69 per cent said they wanted it for voting or receiving official notifications, the Tony Blair Institute report showed. The Tony Blair Institute surveyed 2,000 people on digital ID More