Reform-run Kent council accused of blocking scrutiny of claim it saved £40m

Reform-run Kent council has been accused of trying to block scrutiny after it refused, for more than five months, to produce evidence that it had saved more than £40m by cancelling two environmental projects that did not exist yet.Polly Billington, a Labour MP in Kent, first requested background to the claim via a freedom of information (FoI) request in July. She said the subsequent delay had not been explained and seemed to show the council was embarrassed at what the documents would show.Kent county council said it rejected any suggestion of a cover-up, and that it planned to release the information to Billington, the East Thanet MP, later this week.The saga began when the Kent leader, Linden Kemkaran, told a council meeting on 10 July that the authority had saved £32m by scrapping a programme to make properties more environmentally friendly, and £7

Reform candidate who told Lammy to ‘go home’ questioned other MPs’ loyalty to UK

A Reform UK mayoral candidate who said David Lammy should “go home to the Caribbean” has suggested that at least eight other politicians from minority ethnic backgrounds do not have a primary loyalty towards the UK.Nigel Farage’s party has so far refused to condemn Chris Parry, a retired naval rear admiral who has been picked to contest the now-postponed Hampshire and the Solent mayoral election for the party, over his comment about Lammy, the deputy prime minister.In a post in February, referring to a news story about the UK government supposedly considering talks about reparations for slavery – which ministers have in fact rejected – Parry is said to have written: “Lammy must go home to the Caribbean where his loyalty lies.”Labour said the emergence of the other comments, all made since May this year, showed Reform had to act swiftly, saying he was “dragging his party further into the gutter”.The bulk of the comments by Parry, all made on X, involve him quote-retweeting posts by others about the politicians, some originating from far-right or openly anti-Islam accounts

Lib Dems call for inquiry into hostile foreign state interference to include US

An inquiry into interference by hostile foreign states in the UK should be extended to cover the actions of Donald Trump’s US, the Liberal Democrats have said.In a letter to the communities secretary, Steve Reed, whose department is leading on the independent review, the Lib Dems said the US government’s explicit support for far-right nationalist parties in Europe amounted to outside interference.The US national security strategy, set out this month, said Europe faces “civilisational erasure” due to migration and EU integration, and that Washington should “cultivate resistance” within the continent.The document used language echoing the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, saying several countries risked becoming “majority non-European”, and praised the “growing influence of patriotic European parties”.The inquiry into the effect of financial influence and other interference is expected to primarily focus on Russia and similar hostile states

Farage avoids police investigation over alleged electoral law breach

Nigel Farage has avoided investigation over claims his general election campaign breached electoral law last year – in part because too much time has passed since the alleged offences.The Reform UK leader was told on Thursday that Essex police could not open an investigation because it was now time-barred, more than a year having passed since any alleged offence. The Electoral Commission, which had been asked to open a separate inquiry into other elements, said it had not identified any undeclared spending that should have been reported.“We have assessed a report relating to an allegation around misreported expenditure by a political candidate in connection with the general election in July 2024,” Essex police said.It said the report had been made on 5 December

From Keir as Eliot Ness to Radon Liz on YouTube – the 2025 alternative politics awards

You can hear the sighs of relief. Not from the MPs who are packing up to slope back to their constituencies for the Christmas recess, but from the rest of the country. Finally, the year is coming to an end and there will be few chances for our politicians to do any further damage before they return to Westminster in January.The psychodrama is finally done. We can all go to bed vaguely hopeful that the world won’t have taken a further turn for the worse by the time we wake up

Angela Rayner to publish memoir amid talk of potential Labour leadership challenge

Angela Rayner is writing a memoir about her rise to become deputy prime minister and her subsequent fall from grace, the Guardian can confirm, in a move that will be seen as an attempt to set the narrative ahead of any leadership contest.The book, which will detail the Labour politician’s life story from her impoverished childhood and leaving school at 16 while pregnant through the union movement and the Labour party to the second highest office in the land, is to be published in the second half of 2026.Rayner has kept a relatively low profile since quitting as deputy prime minister in September after failing to pay stamp duty on a flat. She has only intervened publicly on policy issues close to her heart, such as workers’ rights, on which she warned the government not to “blink or buckle” on the bill.Often considered a potential successor to Keir Starmer, she declined to rule out running for the leadership or returning to frontline politics in her first public comments after stepping down, saying she had “not gone away”