Tories and Labour

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Britain's equalities watchdog has ruled out holding an investigation 'at this stage' into alleged Islamophobia in the Conservative Party. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said 'it would not be proportionate' to carry out its own inquiry after the Tories published details of an internal probe into discrimination and prejudice. The…

In the government’s handling of coronavirus, the UK has effectively set a model for every other foreign country to avoid. Boris Johnson’s speech on Sunday made things ever confusing. Despite trying desperately to show some semblance of a plan for the pandemic, it ended up confirming nothing but widespread fears.…

William Pitt the Younger. Getty ImagesA guide to reading in lockdownHere are ten political biographies, with a leavening of the classics, for those with time to kill in the present house arrest. The danger with such lists is that what has recently entered the memory becomes most prominent; so this…

Sir Keir Starmer said NHS staff and care workers were “underpaid and undervalued” and there would have to be a “reckoning” after the coronavirus crisis to reorder the UK’s economic priorities. The Labour leader said that a decade of austerity had left public services ill-equipped to deal with the pandemic during a ‘call…

Social distancing has made the British House of Commons feel a bit more like Dáil Éireann - a sparsely populated, echoing, business-like chamber in which the members are spread far and wide. This has drained it of the special atmosphere that normally makes Prime Minister's Questions a box office event…

Keir Starmer wants to be the man who can do both... The Labour leader's priority to date has been to be seen as a man willing to bring the country together at a time of national crisis. That was certainly the tone he struck with his opening remarks: congratulating Boris…

Politicians succeed by simplifying complexity. The world, Dominic Cummings declared in an online opus in 2013, is increasingly transitioning from small and primitive societies to ones that are too complex for leaders to control. But politicians don’t sell you that story. They succeed by offering a narrative that is easy…

Nick Thomas-Symonds is most at home in Labour's past. On his weekly commute to Westminster from Abersychan, a stilled cradle of heavy industry in the South Wales coalfield, the shadow home secretary drives past the childhood home of Roy Jenkins. No Welshman since Jenkins has run the Home Office in…

Bob Ferguson (Correspondence, 24 April) raises an important issue, which is that decisions over resuscitation status and how aggressively to pursue active versus palliative treatment should always be made on an individual rather than a blanket basis, and should involve discussion with each patient. There is, however, no contradiction between this…