Committee says Karen Kneller’s position no longer tenable in damning report on miscarriage of justice watchdog

The miscarriage of justice watchdog for England, Wales and Northern Ireland has continually failed to learn from its mistakes and its chief executive should follow the organisation’s chair out the door, MPs have said.

In a damning report on the leadership of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the House of Commons justice committee said Karen Kneller had provided it with unpersuasive evidence and her position was no longer tenable.

Conservationists say part of bill allowing developers to avoid environmental laws by paying into nature fund should be ditched

Leading wildlife charities are calling on Labour to scrap a significant section of the planning bill that they say is a “licence to kill nature”, as new data reveals bats and newts are not the main reason planning is delayed in England.

The RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts, whose membership is more than 2 million, said Labour had broken its promises on nature. They called for part three of the bill, which allows developers to avoid environmental laws at a site by paying into a national nature recovery fund to pay for environmental improvements elsewhere, to be ditched.

Other NHS staff decry their award, while teachers are angered part of their pay rise will come from school budget

Ministers are bracing themselves for a potential wave of NHS strikes in England after doctors denounced pay rises of up to 5.4% this year as “derisory” and threatened to take action in protest.

Teaching unions, after teachers were awarded a 4% increase, also responded angrily at the government’s refusal to fully fund the deal and warned that it would damage the quality of education that pupils received. The largest union said it planned to take the first step towards possible industrial action.

David Gauke said the suggestions in his review should solve the prison crisis. Here’s what he recommended

• Experts ‘would refuse to take part’ in mandatory castration for sex offenders

A series of “radical” proposed reforms to criminal sentencing have been submitted to ministers by the former justice secretary David Gauke, who has said that, if implemented, they should solve the UK’s prison overcrowding problem. The government has confirmed that most of his recommendations will be accepted. But what are they?

Shadow defence secretary attacks PM’s assertion that opponents of the deal were on the side of Russia and China. This blog is now closed. You can read our report here

The Conservatives are taking the credit for the near-50% fall in net migration. They say it is the changes to visa rules that they introduced that brought the numbers down.

This is from Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary.

Net migration has halved - dropped by 430,000 - in 2024 compared to 2023

This is thanks to measures put in place by the last Conservative Government

This drop is because of the visa rule changes that I put in place.

Labour will try to claim credit for these figures but they criticised me at the time, and have failed to fully implement the changes.

Starmer says there’s ‘no alternative’ and defends cost, saying it is ‘part and parcel of using Britain’s reach to keep us safe at home’

The UK has signed a £3.4bn agreement to cede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius after an 11th-hour legal challenge failed.

Keir Starmer told a press conference on Thursday afternoon he had signed the deal and that it was “one of the most significant contributions that we make to our security relationship with the United States”.

Office for National Statistics estimate shows fall from 860,000 in 2023 to 431,000 last year

• UK politics live – latest updates

Net migration to the UK has nearly halved over the year to 431,000, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has said, publishing figures that will bring some relief to Keir Starmer.

The drop from 860,000 in the year to December 2024 follows a series of policies implemented by the last Conservative government that have been continued by the present Labour government.

Labour’s pivot to welfare cuts and targeting of rightwing voters has backfired. If the party leadership won’t adapt, the public will move on

Sir Keir Starmer’s U-turn on winter fuel payments did not just represent a policy reversal. It was the moment when the prime minister, elected on promises of national renewal, was forced to confront the political reality that his strategy had refused to acknowledge. It may also prove to be the moment he lost control.

The original policy, hatched in the Treasury and defended for months, had cut winter fuel payments, worth up to £300 annually, to millions of pensioners. It was unpopular, and unnecessary. Local election losses and a looming backbench revolt over disability benefit cuts made it politically toxic. The result? On Wednesday, Sir Keir reversed course at the dispatch box – with his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, notably absent. Too little, too late: voters saw delay; activists cried betrayal.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Be it winter fuel, criminal justice, the EU or Chagos Islands, never miss a chance to try to rewrite Tory history

I fear for Kemi Badenoch’s sanity. She may need a little respite care. From herself. Little more than 24 hours after one of her by now customary car-crash outings at prime minister’s questions in which she didn’t appear to have noticed that Keir Starmer had U-turned on the winter fuel allowance, KemiKaze was emailing Tory party members to tell them the exciting news. She had had the prime minister on the rack and it was only down to her that Labour had done their reverse ferret.

Where do you even begin to start with this level of denial? Is it the assumption at Conservative party HQ that anyone left supporting the Tories must be technically brain dead so won’t have a clue what is going on? To be fair, that may not be a bad shout.

Our voters wanted change, not more austerity. Will the PM and his chancellor apologise for the anxiety and stress they’ve caused?

• Jon Trickett is the MP for Normanton and Hemsworth in West Yorkshire and former member of the shadow cabinet

On Wednesday, Keir Starmer indicated he may U-turn on last year’s winter fuel payments cuts. The prime minister announced in the Commons that he would look again at the £11,500 threshold over which pensioners are no longer eligible for the payment, meaning that more pensioners will again be eligible for the benefit. As a Labour MP who voted against the cut, I think the government should go further.

During the election, I promised I would defend the community I represent, fight for working-class people and stand by my principles. And so I could not in all conscience vote for the removal of the winter fuel payment from up to 10 million pensioners as one of the first actions of the new Labour government in September. Approximately 17,000 people in my constituency lost their winter fuel payment. Similar numbers can be seen in constituencies throughout the country.

Jon Trickett is the MP for Normanton and Hemsworth in West Yorkshire and former member of the shadow cabinet

The PM has little choice. Unless he brings the fractured nations together, none can move forward, and neither can he

A house divided against itself cannot stand, warned Abraham Lincoln. The United States’ later descent into civil war over slavery would prove Lincoln right. But is 21st-century Britain now also becoming, in its different way, an unsustainably divided house too? And have Britain’s economic divisions become so intractable that the UK state can no longer manage them? More than at any time in the postwar era, the answer to both questions looks increasingly like yes.

History shows that Britain’s capacity for pragmatic resilience in the face of internal and external threat is not to be underestimated. Wednesday’s partial climbdown on winter fuel payments was an example of that instinct for self-preservation at work. Yet the U-turn will not have restored the public’s lost trust in the ability of government to solve their problems.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Three decades on from Robert Putnam’s account of fraying social ties in the US, new research in Britain identifies similar dangers

Thirty years after writing Bowling Alone, the famous essay in which he diagnosed a dangerous crisis of social cohesion in the United States, Robert Putnam has a right to feel vindicated. In a lecture this spring, Prof Putnam, now 84, warned his audience that, amid levels of polarisation and distrust higher than at any time since the civil war, the US was “in danger of going to hell in a handcart”.

Britain is still, thankfully, a long way from the poisonous toxicity of Trump-era America, notwithstanding the ominous rise of Reform and Nigel Farage. But research published this week by the More in Common polling group paints a worrying portrait of communities in which there is a widespread sense of social disconnection, high levels of distrust among the young and a felt loss of shared spaces and rituals.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

The leader of the opposition missed the openest of open goals after Keir Starmer reversed cuts to winter fuel payments

Never change, Kemi, never change. We love you just the way you are. Look on the bright side: it could have been worse. KemiKaze could have used all six of her questions at prime minister’s questions to have re-examined the Tories’ very own rubbish Brexit deal. Just as she had for the previous two days. Mistakenly believing that this time – maybe, this time – she could find the killer line. It would have been too much to expect her to have realised there wasn’t one.

But no. Kemi chose to cut her losses. A triumph of sorts. Only the Tory leader then went on to snatch a humiliating defeat when all she had to do was tap the ball into the emptiest of nets.

This slash-and-burn approach is indefensible and would have been anathema to previous Labour governments

Ask any one of the 187 female Labour MPs whether they would have made it to the House of Commons without an education and you would probably get short shrift. Most would wax lyrical about their school days and the teachers who taught and inspired them.

Yet the government of which those women make up almost half the total number of MPs is now targeting spending on “education and gender” for cuts in the overseas aid budget. It is beyond depressing.

Larry Elliott is a Guardian columnist

Whoever leaked deputy PM’s memo to the Telegraph, some believe it will have helped her leadership chances

What is Angela Rayner up to? To every Labour MP reading the leaked memo in the Daily Telegraph setting out the deputy prime minister’s alternative tax-raising measures, it felt like firing the starting gun on a race to succeed Keir Starmer as leader.

It has infuriated Starmer loyalists because of long memories of the breakdown in relations after Labour lost the Hartlepool byelection just a year into Starmer’s leadership, when he considered quitting and allies of Rayner encouraged her to stand against him. Starmer then attempted to demote her, leading to a fierce standoff and Rayner emerging with a clutch of new job titles.

As pressure grows on chancellor to rethink constraints she imposed on herself, No 10 adds to her problems

• UK borrowing rises to £20.2bn
• Business live – latest updates

There is mounting pressure on Rachel Reeves to relax her budget rules and to prepare the ground by telling voters in the next few weeks.

The latest public borrowing figures for April, which show a rise above most City forecasts, indicate that the chancellor will struggle to stay within the constraints she imposed on herself at last year’s budget.

Shift in rhetoric follows tense meeting with Israel’s foreign minister and growing global alarm over Gaza Humanitarian Foundation plan

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The anger inside the Foreign Office over Israel’s blockade of aid into Gaza had been slowly building until – like an exploding pressure cooker – the foreign secretary, David Lammy, let loose his most damning criticism of Israeli since the Gaza conflict started in 2023.

Lammy’s innate ability to put the rhetorical burners on issues has had to be restrained as the UK’s leading diplomat, but once he entered the Commons chamber to condemn Israel’s blockade of aid, this was Lammy unleashed.

As Tory bigwigs compete to signal outrage over ‘great Brexit betrayal’, the party is polling worse than ever before

For Brexit aficionados the start of this week felt comfortingly familiar: late-night negotiations with Brussels over fishing quotas, and even complaints about betrayal. There was, however, one big difference: the Conservatives were united.

It is one of the great political paradoxes of recent years, that a party that repeatedly tore itself to pieces over Brexit is now speaking on the subject with one voice, while much of the rest of the country appear to have lost interest.