Labour byelection win shows ‘SNP’s balloon has burst’, says Anas Sarwar
Scottish Labour’s surprise byelection win proves “the SNP’s balloon has burst”, a jubilant Anas Sarwar has said, after the popular local candidate, Davy Russell, defied predictions to beat the incumbent Scottish National party and fight off Reform UK’s “racist” campaigning in the central Scotland seat of Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse.The Scottish Labour leader told a victory rally in Hamilton town centre on Friday morning that his party had proved everyone wrong following speculation that Reform UK might push it into third place, as the rightwing populist party gained ground in Scotland for the first time.“The reality is we proved the pollsters, the pundits, the political commentators and the bookies all wrong, and they are not understanding what is happening on the ground,” Sarwar said.“On the ground, people believe the SNP are done.The balloon has burst, people think they are a busted flush and they want them out.
”The byelection result proved to people across Scotland that only Scottish Labour could beat the SNP in 2026, he added, as he praised the results of “the most significant and best ground operation in any constituency in the history of the Scottish Labour party”.Sarwar said: “Reform can make the noise.The Tories aren’t even at the races.It’s a straight choice between the SNP and Scottish Labour.”While continuing to condemn Reform’s “dirty campaign” – which involved increasingly personal attacks on him by Nigel Farage that were condemned cross-party as racist – Sarwar also attacked “the spin, nonsense, and misinformation from the SNP”.
Their attempts to present the contest as a two-horse race between SNP and Reform had risked pushing voters towards the rightwing populists, he said.Swinney denied this, saying the SNP’s campaign messaging was informed by what voters were saying.“People were telling us on doorsteps of their anger and frustration at the Labour party because of things like winter fuel payments,” he told reporters at party headquarters in Edinburgh.“But also on the same sessions on the doorsteps [we heard] that people were planning to vote Reform.The confluence of those two things meant that I had to say our message for the SNP could stop Reform.
I certainly don’t want the poisonous politics of Farage to be imported into the Scottish parliament,”Swinney claimed his party had made progress in the byelection,“It’s not as much as I would like us to have made, but we’ve made progress against the backdrop of a really damaging [general] election last summer,”Although Reform came in third place, the party gained 26% of the vote share – a significant success for a party that still has minimal, though expanding, infrastructure north of the border and no dedicated Scottish leader,This mirrored levels of support it has enjoyed in recent central belt council byelections.
Many of its votes appear to have come from a collapse in Conservative support, down from 18% in 2021 to 6% yesterday, but the SNP also lost almost 17% of its vote share while Labour was down 2%.Sarwar suggested that three blocks of voters had moved to Reform – former Conservatives, those making a protest vote against both Westminster and Holyrood incumbents, and some who believed “the frankly ludicrous campaign that this was a straight choice between Reform and the SNP”.At the rally, the Scottish Labour deputy leader, Dame Jackie Baillie, said the contest was a vindication of the party’s strategy, demonstrating that “talking to people and doing to work on the doorstep is absolutely vital to how we win”.Other Labour figures pointed out that the party had made a conscious decision to focus on the ground campaign, which is largely invisible to the national media but secured victory in the end.That ground campaign also paid off in terms of countering the dissatisfaction with the decision-making of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves that some voters were expressing on the doorstep.
Labour politicians who were helping canvas described local people as having “a lot to get off their chests” and the need for lengthy engagement on the thinking behind unpopular Westminster decisions, which appears to have won over many voters.
NatWest apologises to millions of customers locked out of app
NatWest has apologised to millions of customers locked out of its app in the latest IT outage to hit a major UK bank.The high street bank said it was investigating a problem caused by an update to the app that was rolled out late on Thursday, leaving customers unable to access their accounts through the app since shortly after 9am on Friday.It will be disruptive to the more than 10 million customers who use the NatWest banking app to access their account every day.The lender said its other services – including card payments, in-branch, online and telephone banking – were operating as normal.A NatWest spokesperson said: “We are aware that customers are experiencing difficulties accessing the NatWest mobile banking app
Hedge fund orders London-based analysts back to office five days a week
Man Group has ordered its London-based analysts to return temporarily to the office five days a week, as the world’s biggest listed hedge fund seeks to recover from a period of poor performance amid Donald Trump’s tariff war.Quantitative analysts working at Man AHL, the company’s computer-run fund that aims to identify and follow momentum in markets, have been told they are expected to be in its offices daily until the end of July as part of an “all hands on deck” project.The edict applies to about 150 staff in London, just under 10% of the overall group’s 1,700 global employees, the Financial Times reported.“Man AHL has asked its staff in London to work in the office five days a week for a three-month period to support an ‘all hands on deck’ cross-team research project,” the company said. “While these cross-team initiatives are infrequent, experience has shown that a period of highly focused, in-person collaboration allows significant research progress to be made in a relatively short amount of time
UK house prices fall by more than expected amid economic uncertainty
UK house prices suffered a steeper than expected fall last month and the biggest quarterly drop in value in almost a year, as economic uncertainty continued to affect the property market.The average property price fell by 0.4% month on month in May to £296,648, a much steeper fall than the 0.1% decline City economists had expected.Figures published by Halifax on Friday showed that the cost of a typical UK property has fallen in three of the past four months, with the drop in May following a 0
Sports Direct pricing practices ‘may be breaking the law’, Which? says
Sports Direct could be breaking the law by misleading shoppers into thinking they are getting a good deal, a consumer body has claimed, after it looked at prices of items ranging from trainers to hoodies.Which? said it had reported the retailer to the Competition and Markets Authority after uncovering what it claimed were “some questionable and dodgy pricing tactics” on its website.The organisation said it had found products being sold on SportsDirect.com with recommended retail prices (RRPs) “that appear to be misleading”, as its researchers could not find the products sold at that RRP price anywhere else online.It meant people may be being misled “into thinking they are getting a better deal than they really are”
Bonuses banned for 10 English water bosses over sewage pollution
Bonuses for 10 water company executives in England, including the boss of Thames Water, will be banned with immediate effect over serious sewage pollution, as part of new powers brought in by the Labour government.The top executives of six water companies who have overseen the most serious pollution events will not receive performance rewards this year, the environment secretary, Steve Reed, said.The companies – Thames Water, Anglian Water, Southern Water, United Utilities, Wessex Water and Yorkshire Water – are responsible for the most serious category of sewage pollution into rivers and seas, all of which are, or have been, under criminal investigation by the Environment Agency.Under powers in Labour’s Water (Special Measures) Act 2025, the regulator, Ofwat, is now able to ban bonuses for water executives where a company fails to meet key standards on environmental and financial performance, or is convicted of a criminal offence.In the past 10 years, executives at the nine main water and sewerage companies have been paid £112m in bonuses while sewage pollution increased to a record last year of 2,487 events
Wise goes to the US. Will its founder’s supercharged voting rights follow? | Nils Pratley
Back in 2021, the arrival on the London stock market of Wise, a rapidly expanding money transfer company, generated a feelgood factor at a useful moment.It came a month after overhyped Deliveroo flopped on debut. And, since Wise was a pure fintech business, as opposed to a pizza delivery outfit with an app, there was reason to think the UK might be getting its act together in the sector that politicians swoon over. Shoreditch’s finest, and its Estonian founders, would show the way in UK fintech. Wise sported a £9bn valuation
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