Lucy Dunn

MPs didn’t manage to enjoy even a week of recess before being ordered back to Westminster. The Speaker announced this afternoon that both houses of parliament will be recalled on Saturday for a vote to nationalise British Steel after talks with the company’s Chinese owner appear to have hit a dead end. The UK government has spent much of this week in discussions with the Jingye group in a bid to prevent the closure of the company’s steel plant in Scunthorpe – which would put as many as 3,000 jobs at risk.  Sir Keir Starmer’s government had initially remained vague about the conversations taking place, with Whitehall insiders noting that ‘all options are on the table’.

As if Prime Minister Keir Starmer didn’t have enough to worry about overseas with Donald Trump’s tariffs, now old tensions are also threatening to cause problems closer to home. The British Medical Association has announced today that its junior doctors – now referred to as ‘residents’ – have re-entered a dispute with the government over delays to pay recommendations for the next financial year. What exactly does this mean? It means that more strikes could be on the horizon.

Another day, another poll that shows Reform could, from a standing start, pick up at least 14 seats at the 2026 Holyrood election. Nigel Farage's party is attracting supporters from all of Scotland’s main parties – 5 per cent of SNP voters are backing Reform while only six in ten Labour voters would get behind the reds again next year – but the Scottish Tories have the most to lose. As Farage’s lot witness a further surge in support north of the border, the Scottish Tories appear set to lose almost 50 per cent of their seats. In short, Scottish voters are opting to support a group with no parliamentary experience – or leader – over Scotland’s official opposition – and the Scottish Tories don’t seem to know what to do about it.

There is little over a year to go until the 2026 Holyrood election and Scottish party selection processes are underway. This morning, two of the biggest names yet have said they will stand down at next year’s election: Finance Secretary Shona Robison and Transport Secretary Fiona Hyslop have announced they’re off. ‘The decision to retire is entirely personal and I do it for positive reasons,’ Hyslop insisted to reporters today. It is unlikely that will convince cynics who suggest the pair have jumped before they were pushed. The Holyrood selection process is a chance for the SNP to sort the wheat from the chaff The duo joins a long list of nationalist politicians who have declared their intention to step down next year.

It was to a packed-out auditorium that Nigel Farage announced his party’s mayoral candidate for Hull and East Yorkshire on Thursday night. Reform pulled out all the stops for its reveal of former Olympic boxer and gold medallist Luke Campbell, from sparkler firework lights to a mocked-up boxing ring. ‘The set up is immense,’ one aide boasted. And judging by the crowd’s roars at the big unveiling, they thought so too.  Campbell is, in many ways, a perfect candidate for Reform. The 37-year-old Hull-born international boxer is an inspiration for other young men who have grown up without much, and is standing for office in an area he knows well. His selection marks a clear deviation from the party’s choice of paper candidates it fielded at the general election.

It’s allocation day for junior doctor jobs. Soon-to-be medical graduates across the UK find out what deanery they will work in upon finishing university. While it should be an exciting time for Britain’s future medics, recent changes to the system have sparked outrage as students hoping to work close to friends and family find out they have been sent halfway across the country instead. Criticism has long been directed at the way in which foundation programme jobs have been dished out. Foundation years 1 and 2 provide compulsory training to graduating doctors, completion of which leaves one a fully registered medic and able to progress further into training.

The SNP may be outperforming Scottish Labour in the polls, but the party of government still faces tough questions on its record as it approaches the 2026 Holyrood election. Today’s education attainment figures won’t help the nationalists’ argument that they deserve another chance in power – as the stats show the attainment gap between Scotland’s most and least deprived students has widened once again. The figures reveal that the number of school leavers heading to work, college or university in 2023/24 decreased from the previous year to 95.7 per cent. Despite John Swinney’s SNP government insisting it wants to eradicate child poverty and improve living conditions for the country’s poorest, the deprivation gap has widened from 3.7 percentage points in 2022/23 to 4.

It was in a plush central London office space lined with leafy wall plants that Reform UK chose to make its big economic announcement today. Attendees were warmly welcomed with a lavish spread of wraps, canapés and even beer on tap – before Nigel Farage and Richard Tice cut to their news: ‘We will scrap net stupid zero.’ Farage was quick to trumpet his party’s anti-establishment credentials, noting Westminster’s cross-party consensus on the environment. Not Reform – whose politicians are insistent they can ‘right some of the wrongs’ of the renewable sector. ‘Reform is serving notice on the industry,’ Tice told attendees. ‘We are going to win the next general election and things are going to change.

Embarking on the quest to lose weight can be a risky business. Yo-yo dieting, compulsive binging, muscle wasting and brain fog are just some of the many challenges that have waylaid dieters over the years. But now, thanks to the arrival of seductive weight loss drugs promising a quick fix, calorie counters are facing more contemporary health problems – from extreme discomfort, organ dysfunction and even death. Just this week, an inquest heard that Breeda O’Donoghue, a 66-year-old grandmother from Cork, Ireland passed away from multiple organ failure after taking Ozempic for diabetes and weight loss. But she’s far from the only person who has experienced devastating – and fatal – complications from the drug.

As Rachel Reeves attempts to woo investors at Davos, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury has stayed behind in London as work gets underway on Labour's comprehensive spending review. Darren Jones also found time to set out his thinking in a keynote speech at the Institute for Government’s 2025 conference, where he laid out stricter funding requirements for government departments and plans for Treasury reform in a bid to impose tighter controls over spending.  Jones batted off attempts to pin him down on government controversies playing out elsewhere – using, as Keir Starmer did in PMQs on Wednesday, the ‘speculation’ excuse to avoid commenting on plans to install a third runway at Heathrow Airport, a move that he had previously labelled ‘unconscionable’.

Five years ago, Reform UK had no presence in Scotland. Its Facebook and Twitter pages emerged during the latter half of the pandemic and despite briefly experiencing four months in Holyrood courtesy of a Tory defector, the group has since then remained very much out of sight and mind. Nigel Farage neglected Scotland during last year’s general election campaign, his deputy Richard Tice visited just once and the group still lacks a Scottish leader. Despite all that, however, Reform is shaping up to become kingmaker in the 2026 Holyrood election.  ‘Everywhere I went, people were talking about Reform. And I thought: there’s something really going on here.