Author: Fatimah Idera

Migrants will enter Britain more quickly despite Labour’s new asylum reforms, the Conservatives have claimed. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced plans for a fast-track appeals system to reduce long delays in asylum cases, arguing that it will speed up deportations and ease pressure on the asylum system. For Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said the reforms would have the opposite effect, with judges still using human rights laws to block removals. He warned the new tribunals would simply deliver faster rulings that allow migrants to stay. “These tweaks go nowhere near far enough,” he said. “The Government is…

Members of the parliament (MPs) have warned of a sharp rise in online harassment and threats linked to debates over immigration, with some saying the level of abuse is now worse than during the Brexit years. The concerns follow a weekend of protests at hotels housing asylum seekers, where 15 arrests were made. Demonstrations continued on Sunday, including at the Castle Bromwich Holiday Inn in Birmingham and outside the Britannia Hotel in Canary Wharf. One female MP said she had reported an online rape threat to police after speaking up for asylum seekers. Labour’s Anna Dixon, MP for Shipley, revealed…

Labour will abolish most prison sentences of under 12 months and bring in tougher community punishments under plans to ease the overcrowding crisis in England and Wales. A sentencing bill due next month will mark the biggest shake-up in three decades, with Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood warning prisons could run out of space again by summer. Thousands of inmates were released early after Labour took office last year to free up capacity. The reforms will end almost all short jail terms, which ministers say drive reoffending. Recent figures show 62% of offenders released from sentences of less than a year…

Protests over the use of hotels to house asylum seekers have continued, as Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced reforms aimed at clearing a huge backlog of appeals. Demonstrations took place on Sunday in Birmingham and London, a day after nationwide protests led to at least 15 arrests. Read also: Anti-migrant protests erupt across UK over asylum hotels Outside the Castle Bromwich Holiday Inn in Birmingham, protesters draped in St George’s flags gathered at the entrance, with one person climbing a ladder to hang a flag on a lamp post. At the Britannia Hotel in Canary Wharf, police officers and security…

Dame Annette Brooke, who has died aged 78, was the Liberal Democrat MP for Mid Dorset and North Poole from 2001 to 2015, becoming the party’s longest-serving female parliamentarian. A quietly effective figure at Westminster, she built her reputation on persistence rather than showmanship. In 2003, she helped secure recognition for veterans of the Suez campaign, leading a delegation that persuaded the Ministry of Defence to award them a medal. Her determined lobbying also ensured the final Harry Potter book was published in Braille on the same day as its print release – a landmark for disabled children’s access to…

A Labour MP has reported receiving death threats and online abuse after a Conservative colleague shared a video questioning her stance on a proposed inquiry into grooming gangs. Anna Dixon, Labour MP for Shipley in West Yorkshire, said police were investigating after she was targeted with violent and misogynistic messages. She accused Robbie Moore, the Conservative MP for Keighley and Ilkley, of spreading misinformation about her position on the issue. Moore posted a video on social media this week claiming that Dixon had misled her constituents about why she voted against a Conservative amendment calling for a national inquiry into…

More than 200,000 workers in the UK have moved to a four-day week since before the pandemic, signalling a significant shift in working patterns. Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that between October and December 2024, nearly 1.4 million people reported working full-time across four days up by more than 100,000 from the same period in 2019, when 1.29 million did so. Another 100,000 said they worked part-time over four days, pushing the total to 2.7 million, or 10.9% of the workforce, compared with 9.8% five years earlier. Meanwhile the data does not clarify whether workers have…

Angela Rayner has unveiled plans to prevent Sir Sadiq Khan from re-entering Parliament while serving as London Mayor, fuelling speculation she is seeking to sideline potential rivals for the Labour leadership. The Deputy Prime Minister is introducing legislation that would bar anyone from holding both a mayoralty and a parliamentary seat simultaneously. The change, contained in her forthcoming English Devolution Bill, would rewrite parts of the 1999 Greater London Authority Act and apply to mayors across England. Under the new law, “a person is disqualified from being the mayor if the person is an elected member of a legislature in…

Former Labour home secretary Lord Blunkett has called on Sir Keir Starmer’s government to consider temporarily suspending parts of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in order to accelerate the deportation of rejected asylum seekers. Speaking on BBC Radio 4, Blunkett said a radical step may be required to address growing public anger over the use of hotels to house more than 32,000 asylum seekers. He argued that suspending limited elements of the ECHR for a period of up to six months could help clear the mounting backlog of appeals. More than 50,000 migrants have lodged appeals against rejected…

Chancellor Rachel Reeves is considering extending the freeze on income tax thresholds as part of efforts to close a looming gap in the public finances, raising the prospect of higher tax bills for millions of workers. Treasury sources said the measure is among the leading options for Reeves’s second budget this autumn. The freeze, first introduced by the Conservatives in 2021 and due to end in 2028, means thresholds rise more slowly than wages and inflation. This so-called fiscal drag has already drawn tens of billions of pounds into Treasury coffers as pay growth pushes more people into higher tax…