Scottish Labour urges Keir Starmer to stay out of Holyrood campaign
Keir Starmer and senior ministers have been urged by Scottish Labour to “stay behind their doors” in Whitehall to avoid turning the next Holyrood election into a referendum on UK government failures.Anas Sarwar, the leader of Scottish Labour, said the prime minister’s policy failures and missteps had left voters “angry, frustrated and impatient”, leaving his party clear underdogs before May’s election.Asked during a speech in Edinburgh whether he wanted Starmer to campaign in Scotland, Sarwar said: “I would say the best thing that Keir Starmer and the UK Labour government can do is be behind their doors and in their departments getting things right and changing our outcomes.”Addressing a room packed with Labour parliamentarians, candidates and activists, Sarwar said the party had failed to communicate its achievements to voters – including raising wages and tackling NHS waiting lists – while making serious errors, such as cancelling the winter fuel payment.Scottish Labour’s leadership and strategists are privately furious about what they see as No 10’s policy and communication failures, believing they have squandered substantial polling leads, after resoundingly beating the Scottish National party in the 2024 general election and in two byelections.
Polling over the past three months shows the SNP comfortably ahead, hovering in the mid-30s, while Scottish Labour has slumped from similar levels in 2024 to the high teens, with Reform overtaking the party in some surveys.Sarwar said Scottish Labour was used to proving detractors wrong.In recent months, the party has built a £1m election war chest and delivered more than 1m campaign magazines to households.He said his central challenge was to prevent John Swinney, the SNP leader and first minister, from turning May’s Holyrood election into a protest vote against the UK government..
Instead, Labour would focus on domestic issues such as NHS waiting lists, education and the housing crisis.Sarwar also acknowledged that Reform UK posed the biggest electoral threat to Labour, with repeated opinion polls suggesting voters were using Nigel Farage’s party as an outlet for their discontent with the UK government.The SNP struck a less bullish but more optimistic tone at its campaign event in Glasgow’s west end on Monday morning.Prospective Holyrood candidates spoke of hope, a “year of opportunity” and “a positive vision for the future” – all anchored in Swinney’s insistence that an SNP majority in May would, by precedent, justify another independence referendum.Spending little time focusing on Scottish political rivals, Swinney instead contrasted this hopeful mood with what he described as a UK “lurching further and further to the right”, citing Brexit, austerity cuts and “disgraceful” language used around immigration and asylum.
“With each passing day, Westminster becomes ever more distant from offering solutions to Scotland’s challenges,” he said, pointing to recent polling suggesting a renewed voter confidence in his government’s running of public services,With independence “utterly central” to the SNP’s election campaign, Swinney said it was “a fundamentally basic democratic point, that the UK has always accepted, that the people of Scotland have the right to decided their own constitutional future … based on the precedent set out in 2011 [when the SNP won a majority of 69 seats at Holyrood and Alex Salmond went on to negotiate the 2014 referendum with David Cameron]”,While successive UK governments have refused to grant Holyrood the powers to hold another vote, Swinney later told reporters that, if faced with continued intransigence, he had “various tactics I could deploy when the time is right”, declining to elaborate,Also speaking to supporters in Edinburgh on Monday, the Scottish Conservative leader, Russell Findlay, said cost of living pressures would dominate this year’s elections,Support for his party has collapsed as Reform has gained ground in Scotland, with several defections to Farage’s party, which has yet to appoint a Scottish leader.
Full-blown agony: my battle against the mysterious pain of cluster headaches
They can hurt more than broken bones or pancreatitis. But with the right drugs and therapies, relief is possible from this debilitating and often misunderstood conditionIt was a dreary Monday morning in September 2016, and I was working as a teacher, trying to settle a new year 7 class, when a sharp pain bloomed behind my right eye. It was followed by quick jolts, like electric shocks. As each class came and went, the pain eased and then returned with greater intensity. Four times that day I left a teaching assistant with worksheets and ran to the school bathroom to douse my face with cold water
Brain injuries linked to cognitive issues in domestic violence survivors, Australian study finds
An Australian-first study has strengthened evidence that intimate partner violence can cause lasting brain injuries, leading to memory loss, learning changes and other long-term cognitive problems.A Monash University study published in the Journal of Neurotrauma found that survivors of domestic violence who experienced repeated head impacts or non-fatal strangulation were more likely to show behavioural and cognitive changes, including impaired memory.The impact of brain injuries has become widely recognised in professional sport, where repeated concussions have been linked to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and other neurodegenerative conditions. Guardian Australia has extensively reported on concussion in sport, coverage that contributed to a Senate inquiry and an AFL class action.Researchers and advocates said the study highlights a need for greater awareness of brain injury when screening and supporting survivors of intimate partner violence, so they can receive appropriate treatment
Starmer urged to scrap ‘outdated’ law limiting power to stop new gambling premises
Keir Starmer has been urged to abolish an “outdated” rule that limits the power of communities to prevent bookmakers and 24-hour slot machine shops from opening on high streets.In a letter to the prime minister, nearly 300 politicians and campaigners called for an end to the “aim to permit” policy, introduced when Tony Blair’s Labour government liberalised gambling laws in 2005.The rule places a legal obligation on licensing authorities such as councils or the Gambling Commission to err on the side of allowing new gambling premises.“Our high streets are being hollowed out by a surge of betting shops and 24/7 slot-machine venues, while local people are left powerless,” said the Labour MP Dawn Butler, who coordinated the letter.She said the aim to permit rule had left councils powerless to refuse licence applications, even in the face of local opposition
Guardian Hope appeal raises more than £800,000 for charities tackling division
Donations to the Guardian’s Hope appeal have passed the £800,000 mark as generous readers continue to support inspirational grassroots charities that promote tolerance and tackle division, racism and hatred.The 2025 Guardian appeal is raising funds for five charities: Citizens UK, the Linking Network, Locality, Hope Unlimited Charitable Trust and Who is Your Neighbour?The Hope appeal, which is entering its final few days, supports charities offering positivity and common purpose against an backdrop of extremist violence and harassment, anti-migrant rhetoric, and the re-emergence of “1970s-style racism”.One donor told us by email: “I support all efforts to rebuild community links and cohesion. With lived experience of racism (current and past), I never want it to stain our country again.“Hate and division are making our communities less safe for all of us
US to slash routine vaccine recommendations for children in major change experts say creates doubt
The Trump administration will slash routine vaccine recommendations during childhood from 17 to 11 jabs – the biggest change to vaccines yet under the purview of longtime vaccine critic Robert F Kennedy Jr.The changes, which US health officials announced on Monday afternoon and are effective immediately, will erode trust and reduce access to vaccines while allowing infectious diseases to spread, experts said.“The goal of this administration is to basically make vaccines optional,” said Paul Offit, an infectious diseases physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a former member of the advisory committee on vaccines for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). “And we’re paying the price.”The CDC will now recommend one dose of the HPV vaccine instead of two
Shortage of NHS stroke specialists resulting in thousands dead or disabled, say doctors
Thousands of people who have had a stroke are ending up severely disabled or dying because the NHS has too few specialists to treat them quickly enough, senior doctors are warning.A chronic shortage of stroke consultants across the NHS means that patients are suffering horrendous consequences because of delays in getting clot-busting drugs and surgery, they said.“People are either dying or living with disability unnecessarily because they’re not getting the correct evaluation and treatment by the right expert at the right time,” Prof David Werring, the past president of the British and Irish Association of Stroke Physicians (BIASP), told the Guardian.Many hospitals cannot urgently diagnose stroke patients and give them time-critical treatment to maximise their chances of a full recovery “because we haven’t got enough consultants”, Werring said. “The shortage means that when people have an acute stroke, they cannot be sure of receiving an expert consultant opinion to get the right diagnosis and the right treatment at the right time
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