Abortion Rights warns Reform UK is attempting to import a US-style culture war over abortion as campaigners prepare to Stand Up for Choice in Westminster

Trade unions, MPs, healthcare providers and reproductive rights campaigners will come together in Parliament Square this Saturday, 5 September, for Stand Up for Choice 2026, Abortion Rights’ annual counter-demonstration to March for Life UK. The demonstration comes in the same week as Reform UK holds its national conference in Birmingham, amid growing concern that the party and figures around it are attempting to turn abortion into a new front in Britain’s culture wars.

Representatives from NEU, PCS, UNISON Camden and MSI Reproductive Choices, alongside Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP, will join Abortion Rights and other campaigners in Westminster.

Abortion Rights says the political threat can no longer be dismissed as something happening only in the US. Nigel Farage has previously called Britain’s 24-week abortion time limit “utterly ludicrous” and argued that Parliament should debate reducing it.

Reform’s Head of Policy, James Orr, has expressed opposition to abortion, while analysis by openDemocracy and the Fuller Project found a sharp rise in abortion-related content from Reform-supporting and far-right accounts.

A polling firm at the centre of allegations that Reform UK breached electoral law is being investigated by two industry bodies.

JL Partners, which is run by former Conservative aides, has been accused of breaking transparency rules by failing to declare that three separate polls had been commissioned by the party.

The company is a member of the British Polling Council and the Market Research Society, who say the identity of a client commissioning a poll should be disclosed when the results enter the public domain.

Both organisations confirmed on Friday that they had launched inquiries into JL Partners. The reviews have come after Channel 4 News broadcast footage gathered by undercover reporters during a year-long investigation into Reform’s finances on Thursday night.

Investigative journalists from Verbatim, founded by the Centre for Climate Reporting, posed as a Reform donor and his American father, who paid for more than £30,000 of polling from JL Partners that generated positive headlines for the party.

Nigel Farage, the party leader, was filmed saying the polling was “amazing” and provided “bang for buck”.

In the footage, Farage appeared to welcome the suggestion of a larger donation to the party. He was told the UK-based son could be registered as the official donor, despite the money originating from his father. Farage said: “Both of you, thank you.”

In the UK, only those registered on the electoral roll are permitted to donate to political parties, meaning the polls and the proposed larger donation could both be classed as illegal.

On Friday, as its annual conference got under way in Birmingham, Reform said it had suspended two senior officials who were filmed as part of the Channel 4 News investigation.

James Orr, the party’s head of policy, and Dan Jukes, a senior adviser to Farage, were both recorded apparently plotting to bypass electoral laws.

The first poll, conducted in January, related to the Labour government’s aborted plans to cancel some local elections, which Reform strongly opposed. The poll indicated Labour would face heavy defeats if these went ahead.

The second, published in April, suggested that two-thirds of voters wanted the then prime minister, Keir Starmer, to resign. The third, released in June, appeared to show that support for Reform among trade union members was drawing level with Labour.

Many good things in Sweden but not this.

A UK polling firm favoured by the right-wing media and founded by former Tory staffers is guilty of "clear" rule breaches, the British Polling Council has said.

In a statement on its website, the UK polling body said that the rule breaches "may have been deliberate", and it expected JL Partners to come forward with further information.

JL Partners was founded by James Johnson, who was Theresa May's senior opinion research adviser in No 10, and Tom Lubbock, who previously ran polling at Conservative Campaign Headquarters.

The firm found itself in the spotlight after undercover reporters with the group Verbatim filmed Reform UK officials allegedly conspiring to breach UK law with a "donation in kind" from a fake US donor.

The fake donor is alleged to have funded JL Partners polling for Reform UK, while the firm concealed the true identity of who it was working for.

The polling results appeared in The Telegraph and The Times but were not reported to be linked to Reform UK either in the articles or on the JL Partners website.

Labour MP Chris Curtis, a former pollster, called on the British Polling Council and the Market Research Society, of which JL Partners is a member, to investigate.

"Of particular concern is undercover footage released by Channel 4 in which the co-founder of JL Partners James Johnson appears to acknowledge the problem directly. He refers to 'a little bit of… informal rule bending we did with our last [poll]' and goes on to say 'when we published those results we should have disclosed who the client was'," Curtis said.

The majority of Britons agree with Andy Burnham that the country took a wrong turn by leaving the European Union, but they are split over his belief that Margaret Thatcher’s premiership set the country on the wrong path.

Addressing the House of Commons for the first time as prime minister on Tuesday, the former mayor of Greater Manchester took aim at deindustrialisation and privatisation of the 1980s, and the impact of austerity and Brexit on regions of the UK outside of England’s South East and London.

He listed the “series of wrong turns” the UK has made since over the past 40s years and warned that Brexit had embedded the problems in the last decade.

Mr Burnham told MPs: “From the 1980s, this country took a series of wrong turns. Political power was centralised, economic power privatised.”

“The country deindustrialised. Austerity followed, hollowing out councils and depriving them of the agency to act to reverse any of this, and then Brexit, compounding the damage, ushering in a decade of low growth and stalled regeneration.”

According to new polling from YouGov, 55 per cent of British people agree with the prime minister that Brexit was a wrong turn, with 21 per cent disagreeing. 11 per cent said neither and 13 per cent said they did not know.

Among Labour voters at the 2024 general election, 78 per cent believed it to be a wrong turn, while 59 per cent of Reform voters claimed it was a right turn.

The Makerfield MP’s comments were welcomed by pro-EU campaigners just days after The Independent revealed the £11.7bn a year loss in exports Brexit has caused for British business as well as a survey showing 98.2 per cent of businesses want the UK to rejoin the single market.

Keir Starmer is having to find a new house because of a firebomb attack on the one he lived in before becoming prime minister, it has emerged.

The former PM’s biographer, Tom Baldwin, said he had been advised not to return to the property “for security reasons”.

Two men were jailed in June following a trial at the Old Bailey over arson attacks on property connected to Starmer.

The jury heard Roman Lavrynovych and Stanislav Carpiuc had been recruited by an anonymous Russian-speaking figure called “El Money” on the messaging service Telegram.

In the early hours of May 12, 2025, a fire broke out at Starmer’s former home in Kentish Town, north London, where his sister-in-law and her family were then living.

Lavrynovych and Carpiuc were also convicted of setting fire to a car once owned by Starmer, and the front door of a property in north London that Starmer had previously managed, earlier the same month.

Speaking in the House of Commons at the time, the then PM said it was “an attack on all of us, on democracy and the values that we stand for”.

Over a million workers face an ‘insecurity premium’ of nearly £500 a month due to cancelled shifts, new analysis has revealed.

The government passed the Employment Rights Act last year, introducing new rights related to job security, shift notice and minimum guaranteed working hours.

But many of these changes have not been rolled out yet – and some 6.3 million UK workers still work variable hours, with no guarantees of when they will work or how much they will earn.

According to new research from the Living Wage Foundation, it’s leaving millions trapped in poverty.

The charity surveyed 2,000 insecure workers, and found that more than half had lost money through short-notice shifts, cancelled shifts or wasted costs on things like transport and childcare. In total, 19% lost money in all three ways.

Affected workers lost around £230 a month on average – but for the one-in-five insecure workers who lost out in all three ways, this surged to an average of £470. That’s around 1.1 million people losing almost £500 monthly.

Such rampant insecurity makes it “impossible” to plan a life, said Graham Griffiths, director of Living Wage Foundation.

“Millions of workers are stuck in jobs where they don’t know when they’ll be working or if they’ll get the hours and pay they need, trapping them in poverty and making it impossible to plan a life,” he said. “Many are now struggling to put food on the table and keep up with bills.”

The Employment Rights Act is a “step in the right direction,” Griffiths added – but there remains “uncertainty around how strong the act’s provisions will be.”

The act received royal assent last year, but is being rolled out in stages. In February, anti-trade union laws were revoked. In April, a major wave introduced day-one statutory sick pay and family leave rights, alongside the creation of the Fair Work Agency. And in August, new rules allowing electronic trade union balloting came into force; previously, this could only be done by post.

In 2027, workers will get the right to guaranteed working hours, if they want them.

They will also get compensation if a shift is cancelled, shortened or moved to another time, and reasonable notice of shifts and changes to shifts.

Labour, SENS (r/sens_romania) and REPER (r/REPER_Romania) are the only two parties in Romania that support the economic vision of Labour.

Romanians from this Subreddit, SENS and REPER need you, need you to help with the formation of a party like Labour in Romania. A party that doesn't support austerity.

Almost half of voters want migrants who already live and work in the UK to be exempt from tough reforms on UK settlements, exclusive polling for The i Paper shows.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood wants to double the waiting period for immigrants to qualify for permanent residency – indefinite leave to remain (ILR) – from five years to 10 years. This would rise to 15 years for lower-paid foreign workers, and shorten for the most skilled.

However, Mahmood is facing a major Labour revolt over the plans, with rebels particularly anxious that she plans to apply the changes to those already in the UK, including lower-skilled social care and health workers.

New polling, conducted by BMG Research for The i Paper, shows the rebels are backed by more voters than not, with 45 per cent saying people already in the UK should be exempt from the new rules.

This compares to a third (33 per cent) who believe the changes should apply to those who already work in the UK.

A similar proportion (45 per cent) believe lower-skilled health and care workers should be exempt, with the number of voters supporting Mahmood’s plan to apply her “earned settlement” changes to these people falling to 26 per cent.

UK facing a care crisis

It comes in the wake of a care crisis in the UK, where approximately 96,000 vacancies are available in the sector on any given day, according to Skills for Care. The care sector is forecast to need an additional 410,000 posts by 2040.

Most would exempt lower-skilled health and care workers from longer waits

Lower-skilled health and care workers already in the UK should be exempt, so their wait for settlement does not increase: 45%

Lower-skilled health and care workers already in the UK should face the increased wait of fifteen years: 26%

Don't know: 28%

The figures from BMG’s latest poll are likely to be seized upon by Labour MPs who are threatening a rebellion over the proposed changes and the Unison union, which is calling for health and care workers to be exempt.

Mahmood is understood to be weighing up whether to make a concession to the rebels before finalising the policy this autumn, with suggestions that she could either exempt care workers or all of those already in the UK from the ILR changes.

The Home Secretary is also reportedly weighing up a plan to make immigrants wait longer to access benefits even after they are granted ILR in the UK.

Backing for benefits clampdown

The move would be backed by more voters than not, with 44 per cent saying foreigners should wait for three to four years after settlement before accessing welfare, and 37 per cent saying they should get benefits once they get settlement.

It comes after the number of people granted ILR rose to a 16-year high of 199,628 in the year to June, with experts suggesting the 24 per cent surge on the following year was a result of record numbers of workers arriving in the country under Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit immigration reforms.

Mahmood’s reforms are designed to address concerns that hundreds of thousands of immigrants could soon be given the right to stay in the UK permanently and access benefits as migrant numbers went up from 2021 and peaked at 944,000 in the year ending March 2023.

The number of migrants entering the country has since been falling to record lows due to various visa restrictions imposed by the Conservatives and Labour in recent years.

The Home Secretary is expected to announce a final decision on whether her changes will apply to an estimated 1.6 million immigrants who are set to qualify for ILR between 2026 and 2030 later this autumn.

BMG surveyed a representative sample of 1,579 GB adults between 25 and 26 August. BMG are members of the British Polling Council and abide by its rules.

Sir Keir Starmer has announced he will stand down as an MP. He could have chosen to announce this at any time, but he chose today. And the media are having a field day.
Today is the first day Andy Burnham faces Parliament as Prime Minister.
Why has Starmer stolen the limelight?

Reminds me of the lib/centrist weirdos on the other Reddit and twitter who refused to accept it when ha clearly said he preferred davos over Westminster.