Politics

‘Nurse! Nurse! He’s out again!’ That’s right, Sir Keir had escaped his handlers and was mingling with the public once more. This time he was ruining the coffee break of some workers at McLaren to talk about apprenticeships. Presumably he takes any opportunity he can to avoid the company of his own MPs at the moment, morale being about the same as it was on HMS Bounty a minute or two before the mutiny. Sir Keir was introduced by Pat McFadden, the cadaverous figure whom Labour trot out when things are going particularly badly. It was like having Nosferatu as your warm-up act. Yet even with this inauspicious intro, Sir Keir still

Scotland’s NHS is in crisis and Scotland’s government is in denial. A new study by the former head of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow presents a grim diagnosis of the nation’s health and the services tasked with tending to it. Much of the reporting is focused on a steep increase in the time patients spend waiting for calls to be answered by NHS 24, the Scottish equivalent of NHS 111. The median phone waiting time has climbed from nine seconds in 2014 to 22.5 minutes today. Mike McKirdy, whose review was commissioned by Scottish Labour, describes that rise as ‘astonishing’. But other findings are, if anything, more alarming. McKirdy found

Plans for a national inquiry into grooming gangs are underway, but will the inquiry actually happen? The Labour-led probe has not yet started and has almost been derailed by survivors on the victim liaison panel dropping out, complaints about transparency and concerns about the scope of the inquiry. Today, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch set out her party’s preferred terms of reference for the inquiry – a move she insisted was not party political, but one that she hopes Labour will act on. Labour needs to show it has listened – even if that means taking recommendations from its political opponents The Tories want a judge-led inquiry which has a hard