Cllr Jonathan Moore

It's been fabulous to work alongside Tom over the last three years. From tomorrow, I will be Chair, which is an exciting moment for me and I'm greatly looking forward to the challenge of campaigning on behalf of the >20 million who are financially excluded.

Best case scenario: this forces Labour to find (and declare) some principles and actually deliver what people want and need.

Worst case scenario: this just further fragments the left-leaning vote and makes Reform even more likely to gain ground.

Time will tell.

It's worse than that - there was another circa 90m who looked at Trump and thought 'I don't have a strong enough opinion on Trump to bother voting'.

Circa three quarters of voting age Americans either voted for him, or at the very least facilitated him.

Taking from the disabled, rather than those most able to pay, or even from the mainstream via general income tax increases is cowardly, and a gross dereliction of duty.

It certainly doesn't have a Labour chancellor. Even Liz Truss would have thought Reeves a bit too right-wing to promote to that role.

Jeremy is right. This isn't what a Labour Government should be doing. Yes, more people need to be in work - so first of all, throw everything at that - it should have been cost-neutral initially.

This is first and foremost a cost-cutting measure, not a serious attempt at reform.

Starmer knows which side of the fence he'll have to land on (Europe) but he's playing for time. Europe isn't ready yet. Britain isn't either. This false construct that we can make other people (the world's poor) pay for our rearmament is palpable nonsense. The explanation of truth has yet to start.

With every disastrous situation, opportunity is created. Britain has a unique opportunity to provide European leadership in a way which perhaps distantly echoes the WW2 experience. If we get that right, we can return to a prominent place in Europe.

and leadership starts with the sentiments above.

Next time, let's add the Lib Dems to that list - a party that is already in office up and down the land at both national and local level, and is taking opposition seriously.

Quite frankly, this is pathetic and a total dereliction of duty from the PM. It fails to account for the fact that the world has moved on since 2016, not least with the tsunami of horror coming out of the US.

The PM is clearly a details man, but a Churchillian political leader, he is not.

At a time when his inner core are giving Nazi salutes, this isn't the time to be talking about something which could legitimise his regime. Maybe it will be needed, later, but let's see how this pans out for a year or two, first.

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

I do hope that any right-minded, normal, liberal, democracy-loving citizens who are on the verge of ordering a new Tesla think again. Nobody in the UK should be buying Teslas right now.

£300k by March and then what...? If the running costs are £2M a year and only £300k comes from central funds, that means another £1.7M in the next 12 months much be found. Will there be another similar dramatic appeal in April?

There needs to be a short, medium, and long term plan set out.

Exactly this. The way to counter the extreme right onslaught that is currently dominating headlines is to robustly push back.

When anger shouts (as it always does), reason and liberal values cannot whisper.

It is!

Yes, I'm sure they do. Virtually all flats and many houses in the UK are 'leasehold'. Somebody owns the freehold to the land and charges rent to the person who lives in the property and owns it on a very long lease. It's often a nightmare of a system.

Unfortunately the leases are at least 125 years, and some are 999 years less the time since they started (circa 40 years). Legislation will likely be needed to address this.

I think there are ways of doing it but it's likely to need national government to get involved. It is intrinsically unfair that some people can charge at 7p KW/h and then the rest will be at 10x more. We need to get more creative, and use legislation to enable it to happen.

Most of the homes are flats, with allocated parking some distance away. The houses are also separated from their garages and allocated parking . If they have a garage, it's on a shared supply, and the leases prohibit upgrades.

I'm not being negative. I'm a huge EV fan and have one myself. However, there is a gap in government thinking. On the one hand a mandate to increase the sales of EVs (rightly) but on the other hand, no real thought about those who can't easily transition (for a wide range of often complex issues).

It's a very variable position across the country though. In my ward, literally about 20 homes will have the capacity to install a personal low cost EV charger, out of over 10,000 residents. It's a massive challenge for us.

This is great news, but not the whole story. The transition only works if a) many of these are really fast (e.g. 100kw+) and b) they are suitable for occasional top-ups, but won't work for regular charging - too expensive. We need to resolve how people without drives access super low-cost charging.

The most important pledge Labour made before the election was that they would raise growth to the highest in the G7. From that, all their other pledges succeed or fail.

I'm yet to hear how they will do this. I strongly suspect they can't, and don't know how to, but they need to start explaining it.

I love the description of him that 'he used the presidency as a springboard to greater things'. The greatest message though is not any one individual thing that he did (good as they were), it is the example of a commitment to service that is so powerful.

I wish our 8 former PMs would follow it.

The headline is more or less clickbait, but there is interesting insight in the article about the state of the economy. There seems little doubt now that the employer NI rise is having a dampening effect on the economy, at a time when it is struggling anyway.

I'd very much like to see this become a big campaign for our party, and also for the related topics of how the media is used (and bought) by the rich and powerful.

We need to be a lot more robust in the defence of democracy, and that is going to involve taking the fight to those who want to destroy it for their own pernicious ends. It'll also involve significant regulation of social media.

It IS a long time ago - a different world. Those were the days when we all thought that George W Bush was as lunatic as an American president could possibly be....!

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Starmer needs to wake up to the risk that his lack-of-positive-narrative government is creating.