Policing bill

If there is one thing worse than being talked about, it is not being talked about — and this is the fate beginning to befall Keir Starmer. He is at risk of becoming an irrelevance. After not even a year of being Labour leader, Starmer finds his personal ratings on the slide: a YouGov poll this week showed his rating at minus 13, down from plus 22 last summer. Just over half of voters think he doesn’t look like a PM-in-waiting and Labour itself is consistently trailing the Tories in the polls. It’s not clear yet what Starmer stands for, and he is running out of time to make an

MPs will continue debating the second reading of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill today, with a vote later. Last night’s debate gave us a pretty good idea of what the legislation’s progress through the Commons is going to look like: it is going to be far more partisan and noisy than anything Parliament has seen in the past year. There was a battle of interventions from Conservative and Labour backbenchers as their own sides set out their positions on the bill. Tory MPs had clearly come primed to argue that voting against the legislation would be a mistake for Labour, while Opposition MPs were busy pointing out that