News Round-Up

• “Mahmood and Cooper ‘call for Starmer to quit’… alongside 70 others” – Dozens of Labour MPs have called for the Prime Minister to resign after his last-ditch fightback speech failed to quell a mutiny that is now openly backed by Cabinet ministers, reports the Mail.
• “Starmer’s relaunch backfires as MPs call for him to quit” – Sir Keir Starmer’s last-ditch attempt to rescue his premiership has backfired spectacularly as dozens of Labour MPs publicly demand his resignation, reports the Telegraph.
• “Is Wes Streeting about to launch his leadership campaign?” – The list of Labour MPs who have publicly called for Sir Keir Starmer to go is growing by the hour, and allies of the Health Secretary believe this is his moment, says Steven Swinford in the Times.
• “Delaying Starmer’s departure will fail” – Labour MPs are queuing up to demand a timetable for his departure, but Gordon Rayner in the Telegraph argues that a long, drawn-out farewell would turn a lame duck into a dead one.
• “Same old Starmer, but with new feelings” – In the Telegraph, Ben Riley-Smith writes that the Prime Minister’s pitch to keep his job was spun as a step change, but promised nothing new.
• “Keir Starmer’s ‘reset’ was just more slop” – Despite Catherine West’s leadership challenge, Sir Keir Starmer is still ploughing on with the same tired ideas repackaged as something new, says Madeline Grant in the Spectator.
• “Sir Keir’s flying start congealed to formulaic fudge” – In the Mail, Quentin Letts writes that Sir Keir Starmer’s speech briefly warmed up like reheated gravy – before cooling just as fast into the same congealed blob of yesterday’s mess.
• “Markets fear Labour Left-wing ‘sh**show’ as PM tries to save himself” – Financial markets are rattling after Angela Rayner formed an alliance with Andy Burnham and laid out a manifesto of higher taxes, more handouts and nationalisation, reports the Mail.
• “Starmer opens door to rejoining EU single market” – Sir Keir Starmer has opened the door to rejoining the EU single market after the next election in a desperate attempt to shore up his position, says Politico.
• “Keir Starmer has opened the door for a decade of the Left in power” – By pivoting to the “heart of Europe”, Labour is courting potential coalition partners whose shared aim is blocking Reform – a strategy that could keep the Left in power long after Sir Keir Starmer himself has gone, warns James Kirkup in the Telegraph.
• “Starmer adviser accused of offering peerage to ousted council leader” – Baroness Harman is accused of offering a peerage to the former leader of Oldham Council after she lost control of the local authority last week, reports the Telegraph.
• “This is how the Tories win back the centrists” – With Labour in disarray, voters who reject both the Greens and Reform are there to be won over – and in the Telegraph, Charles Moore sets out the case for Kemi Badenoch to go after them.
• “Growing number of people receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes” – The number of people receiving more in benefits than they contribute in taxes could hit a record high under Labour, reports the Telegraph.
• “How to get tougher on the enemies within” – The King’s Speech is a golden opportunity to make Britain a genuinely hostile environment for extremists and hate-peddlers – the question is whether ministers have the stomach for it, says Paul Goodman in the Times.
• “GB News faces investigation over Donald Trump interview” – Ofcom is reviewing whether GB News’s Bev Turner failed to adequately challenge Donald Trump’s “astonishingly false” claims during a recent interview, reports the Telegraph.
• “‘Far-Right’ Americans face travel ban over UK nationalist rally” – “Far-Right agitators”, including two Americans, have been blocked from entering the UK for Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom, Unite the West” march this weekend, says Newsweek.
• “Restoring freedom of speech” – On Substack, Pimlico Journal sets out how successive laws have quietly stripped away free expression in Britain – and what a bill to restore them would look like.
• “The scrapped warship that makes a mockery of the British navy” – Four years of refit work and £100 million of taxpayers’ money later, HMS Iron Duke has ended up on the scrapheap – a sorry emblem of a navy that is a long, long way from world-leading, writes Colin Freeman in the Telegraph.
• “Good law goes offshore” – Good Law Project founder Jolyon Maugham has announced the transfer of the organisation’s ownership to a Jersey “purpose” trust – a move that raises questions about transparency, notes the Law Gazette.
• “Scottish Greens ‘will support’ new MSP Manivannan to renew visa” – The Scottish Greens have backed one of their new trans MSPs after questions were raised about whether he should have been allowed to stand as a candidate in the first place given that he’s not a UK citizen and doesn’t have a work visa, reports theTimes.
• “The big deportation question that exposes how extreme the US Left has become” – Bill Clinton signed tough illegal immigration legislation in 1996 – so why does the modern Left treat deportation as an extremist position? asks Simon Hankinson in the Telegraph.
• “How Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party roared to victory in Farrer” – In the Conservative Woman, Kathy Gyngell explains how Pauline Hanson’s party pulled off a stunning victory in Farrer, Australia – and what it signals for the broader global turn against establishment politics.
• “Australia’s bulwark against populism is cracking” – In her Substack, Rebekah Barnett reports that Right-wing populism has finally registered at the federal ballot box in Australia – and a collapsing Coalition is taking very careful notes.
• “WHO sides with Spain and ignores US hantavirus case in latest tally of cases – after Madrid dismissed American’s positive test” – Spain insists it took all necessary measures to prevent hantavirus spreading from the cruise ship – but the decision to exclude a confirmed US case from the official tally is raising eyebrows, says the Mail.
• “The surprising reason this country is facing a rise in hantavirus cases” – Argentina has seen a surge in hantavirus cases since last summer – and the reason is more unexpected than you might think, writes Ryan Prosser in the Metro.
• “Parents who refused to let their three children go outside their house for four years due to Covid fears, leaving them with extreme mental and physical conditions, are sentenced to prison” – The parents of three children rescued from a four-year Covid “lockdown” in a so-called Spanish “House of Horrors” have been jailed for nearly three years, reports the Mail.
• “A trans clinic is pumping my daughter full of testosterone against my wishes” – The NHS has banned cross-sex hormones for under-18s – so why are private clinics still administering them? asks a concerned parent in the Telegraph.
• “Barrie Drewitt-Barlow and the commodification of surrogacy” – In the Spectator, Julie Bindel draws on her own interview with Barrie Drewitt-Barlow – the man responsible for normalising gay male couples having babies via surrogacy – to argue that the surrogacy trade is inherently exploitative and that his case illustrates exactly why.
• “AI is not the miracle fix businesses might think it is” – Expecting large language models to improve productivity in firms is like expecting turkeys to fly, says Andrew Orlowski in the Telegraph.
• “AI turns evil after reading too much sci-fi” – A recent experiment led to Claude trying to blackmail its human operator – apparently after absorbing too much science-fiction, reports the Telegraph.
• “Britain’s Net Zero crusade is making it harder to sell your home” – Older properties are falling out of favour as banks and buyers prioritise green credentials, making life harder for the millions of homeowners who cannot afford an eco-retrofit, says the Telegraph.
• “Volkswagen face $1.7 billion fine for missing emissions targets” – Despite a strong push into electric vehicles, VW still isn’t moving fast enough to meet regulatory targets and faces up to $1.7 billion in fines, reports Paul Homewood in Watts Up With That?
• “Most apocalyptic climate scenario thrown out by experts” – Climate scientists no longer consider a catastrophic 4.5°C rise above pre-industrial levels by 2100 to be likely, with a maximum of 3.5°C now the consensus upper bound – which rather undermines a decade of doom-mongering, says the Times, finally running something on what is now quite an old story.
• “New York Times announces the end of the climate change hoax” – On Fox News, David Marcus argues that the NY Times’ advice to Democrats to drop climate as a campaign issue amounts to a tacit admission that 50 years of climate alarmism is finally cooling.
• “Trump administration gets strategic with offshore wind” – In the Manhattan Contrarian, Francis Menton argues that offshore wind is among the costliest and most intermittent ways to generate electricity ever devised – and that the Trump administration is now moving smartly to dismantle it.
• “Right, Washington Post, banning hamburger ads won’t stop climate change” – In Climate Realism, Linnea Lueken notes that even the Washington Post editorial board has called out Amsterdam’s ban on meat advertisements as authoritarian nonsense that will do nothing to improve the climate.
• “‘Environmental justice’ schemes fund activists to train activists to lobby for more funds” – Environmental Protection Agency chief Lee Zeldin says federal “environmental justice” spending perpetuates a wasteful and self-reinforcing cycle of activism that benefits campaigners far more than the environment, according to Breitbart.
• “New paleo research: modern ‘climate change’ has had no apparent impact on precipitation patterns” – New research drawing on palaeoclimate data has found no detectable impact of modern climate change on global precipitation patterns, writes Kenneth Richard on No Tricks Zone.
• “Why the question ‘Can women have a penis?’ really matters” – In the Spectator, Brendan O’Neill says the one word conspicuously absent from Bridget Phillipson’s answer to the question “Can women have a penis?” is the one any five year-old would gleefully supply: “No!”
• “The art of admitting our mistakes” – On his Substack, Andrew Doyle argues that the refusal to admit error has become one of the defining – and most corrosive – features of modern political life.
• “What has become of Britain?” – The Critic’s wide-ranging monthly podcast Outpost asks the uncomfortable question of what this country has become – and does not shy away from some deeply unsettling answers.
• “All those who think I should resign as Prime Minister, please leave” – The latest satirical Downfall meme set in Hitler’s bunker shows Herr Starmer confronting the reality of the local election results.

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