Keir Starmer to woo voters and MPs with new year plan to cut cost of living

Keir Starmer will attempt to rescue his relationship with disillusioned voters and his own fractious MPs in a new year push to reduce the cost of living.The prime minister will give a speech in the coming days focusing on how his government is bringing down living costs, highlighting recent cuts to energy bills and interest rates and the end of the two-child benefit cap.He will reinforce the message with a series of new year drinks receptions for Labour MPs at Chequers as he hopes to dispel angst about local and devolved elections in 2026, at which the party is expecting heavy losses.In his new year message, the prime minister said voters would begin to see their lives improving in 2026 in what his chief adviser, Morgan McSweeney, has called “the year of proof”.Starmer said: “In 2026, the choices we’ve made will mean more people will begin to feel positive change in your bills, your communities and your health service

UK ministers accused of ‘embarrassing failures’ in Abd el-Fattah case

The government could have avoided “embarrassing failures” in the case of Alaa Abd el-Fattah by having a special envoy deal with complex cases involving Britons detained abroad, Emily Thornberry has said.The chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee criticised “serious shortcomings” in information sharing, which she said could have been resolved by having a dedicated official carry out background checks.Former foreign secretary David Lammy said in 2024 that the government would appoint an envoy to deal with “complex detention cases” involving Britons abroad but no such figure has been named.In a letter to the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, Thornberry said: “Had an envoy been established [in 2024] … it is clear to me that such embarrassing failures of due diligence and information sharing would have been avoided.“It would have been firmly within the envoy’s remit to carry out appropriate background and social media checks

Greens’ Polanski prepared to work with Burnham but not Starmer ‘to stop Reform’

The Green party leader, Zack Polanski, has said he would refuse to work with Keir Starmer but could work with Andy Burnham, Starmer’s potential rival for the Labour leadership, to keep Reform out of power.Polanski said he would not enter a political partnership with Labour under the current prime minister, but would consider it if the mayor of Greater Manchester took the helm.He told the Financial Times: “I could see the potential to work with Andy Burnham to stop Reform and to challenge the rise of the far right. I would rule it out with Keir Starmer, but I wouldn’t rule it out with Burnham.”A coalition would require the Greens getting an adequate number of seats at the next general election to make the party useful to Labour, and would also need Burnham to once again gain a seat as an MP

Zack Polanski offering voters fantasy solutions, says head of Fabian Society

The Green party leader, Zack Polanski, is offering voters “unicorns” and Labour must confront his “fantasy” solutions such as the idea that a wealth tax would fix the public finances, according to the Fabian Society’s general secretary, Joe Dromey.Much of the government’s fire is trained on Nigel Farage. But in an end-of-year interview, the head of Labour’s internal thinktank urges his party to take on the “twin populisms” of Reform and Polanski.“We’ve got the populism of the left in Polanski. And the populism of the right in Farage

Alaa Abd el-Fattah ‘will not be stripped of British citizenship’ over past tweets

The Home Office will not strip the British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah of his citizenship because his “abhorrent” past social media posts do not meet the legal bar for such a sanction, government sources have said.Abd el-Fattah, who landed in London from Egypt on Boxing Day, has been at the centre of a political storm over social media posts he published more than a decade ago, including tweets in which he called for Zionists to be killed.Keir Starmer said he was “delighted” by Abd el-Fattah’s arrival on Friday after the British government helped secure the activist’s release from years in an Egyptian jail. However, the prime minister has since condemned the tweets and said he was unaware of them.Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, has also launched a review looking into “serious information failures” around the case, after successive Tory and Labour governments had lobbied for Abd el-Fattah’s release as a political prisoner

Nigel de Gruchy obituary

The trade union leader Nigel de Gruchy, who has died aged 82, always insisted on putting the interests of the teachers he was elected to represent ahead of those of the pupils in the classrooms where they taught. While this approach was both logical and defensible for a trade unionist, it was also one that inevitably provoked controversy.Such an outcome did not normally deter De Gruchy, who relished the prospect of a public ding-dong, recognising that the resultant publicity might quite possibly enhance his chances of success in whatever cause he was then pursuing. It did not make him popular in Westminster or Whitehall, but he won some important political and legal battles that would significantly improve the lives of school teachers.These included, shortly after De Gruchy became general secretary in 1990 of the amalgamated National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT), helping to persuade John Major’s government to establish a teachers’ pay review body