Politics

To BBC Question Time, where the leader of the Green party made a rather interesting intervention on migration last night. Zack Polanski’s party preaches that billionaires, not Britain’s borders, are to blame for the country’s woes and their migration policy states that, if elected to government, they will ‘stop putting people in prison because of their immigration status’, ‘give all residents the right to vote’ and ‘treat all migrants as if they are citizens’. However Polanski’s comments about why Britain needs migrants have, er, rather raised eyebrows – to put it mildly. He remarked on the Beeb that: ‘One in five care workers are foreign nationals. Now, I don’t know

Nigel Farage keeps eclectic company. Reform is not a party of slick spin doctors or career politicians. Instead, it is staffed by people like George Cottrell, the minor aristocrat and former convict, who acts as Farage’s fixer. He is, according to Farage, ‘like a son to me’. I’m told that Cottrell is often seen in the Reform offices in Millbank helping the party, although he is still described by party staff as a simple ‘unpaid volunteer’.  Cottrell, 32, has always had an air of dodginess about him. In 2016 he spent eight months in an American maximum security prison for wire fraud relating to an international money laundering conspiracy. He

Tackling child poverty is this government’s ‘moral mission’, Keir Starmer insisted today. The Prime Minister has unveiled plans that he claims will lift some 550,000 children out of poverty by the end of the decade. The headline announcement of the government’s child poverty strategy came in last week’s Budget when Rachel Reeves announced that, after months of dithering, Labour would scrap the two-child benefit cap. While a number of the measures in today’s policy bundle have already been announced, there are a few new elements. These include the provision of upfront childcare support for parents on universal credit who are going back to work, £8 million to stop families being