Politics
DWP shadow Whately ignorantly attacked remote PIP assessments
Shadow Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) boss Helen Whately couldn’t help but get in the Tories’ punches on disabled people. On Tuesday 24 March, the latest DWP wet wipe (in a long line of DWP wet wipes) took to GB News to shit on those claiming Personal Independence Payment (PIP):
Government could save £2bn by bringing back face-to-face PIP assessments.
Ministers say they’re doing that, but the numbers tell a different story. So do the empty assessment centres.
Time to get a grip of the benefits bill. pic.twitter.com/ANMZWDBzAv
— Helen Whately MP (@Helen_Whately) March 23, 2026
The main thrust was that disabled people doing PIP assessments over the phone are just ‘faking it’, because of course it was.
DWP PIP: Whately on a warpath over remote assessments
Whately was referring to an ‘analysis’ the Tories hyped up in shitrag the Sun. Supposedly, this found that:
when a person is assessed face-to-face for PIP, 44 per cent end up getting the benefit.
But when it is done remotely the rate is far higher at 57 per cent.
Of course, the article is sparse on the actual detail of quite how the Tories came to these numbers. However, it does seem to chime with figures DWP minister Stephen Timms previously put out via an answer to a parliamentary written question.
Regardless, the analysis doesn’t actually prove what Whately wants it to. It went on to claim that:
It has led to an extra 259,000 successful claims a year on average — equal to a higher annual welfare bill of £1.8billion.
That remote assessments have higher success rates doesn’t evidence that people are “gaming the system” as she suggested. More likely, what it shows is that when disabled people are given assessments appropriate to their health circumstances, they’re better able to articulate their lived realities and resulting needs.
The fact is, the latest DWP statistics show that 65% of PIP decisions cleared at tribunal between October 2020 and September 2025 were overturned in the applicants’ favour. The DWP has also changed its decision and awarded PIP to 20% of people who made an appeal. In other words, the DWP is wrongly refusing PIP to disabled people who are eligible for it.
And disabled folks who’ve applied for PIP report plenty of terrible experiences with assessors.
The PIP assessment is not easy. People who should get it, don’t. The assessment is long and gruelling, and regularly degrading.
The analysis’s £1.8m savings claim is total nonsense — because there’s no proof those 259,000 people weren’t eligible.
But naturally, Whately and her colleagues — who aren’t medically trained — want to decide who’s ‘deserving’ and ‘disabled enough’ to get support.
Face-to-face assessments unsafe and inaccessible
Hilariously, DWP boss Pat McFadden and DWP minister Torsten Bell were both scoring political points on X:
The Tories reduced face to face appointments to almost zero when in power.
They then agreed new contracts embedding the reduction just months before the election.
Now they attack their own record and legacy while we sort out what they left behind. https://t.co/zYsCWfieMG
— Pat McFadden (@patmcfaddenmp) March 23, 2026
Sigh. Absolutely no shame. Of course it was the Tories that:
– dialled down face to face assessments
– signed contracts with providers to embed that decision post-covid
– now assume journalists won’t bother asking them basic questions when they attack their own record https://t.co/TQ2BIiBRCH— Torsten Bell (@TorstenBell) March 23, 2026
Of course, both were evidently loathe to mention that the former Conservative government brought in this shift to remote assessments because of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. A pandemic where repeated government mismanagement forced clinically vulnerable disabled people to ‘shield’ in lockdown long after their non-disabled peers.
A pandemic in which disabled people were up to 3 times more likely to die. In the early months of the pandemic, learning disabled people were 30 times more likely to die from it.
Props to the Tories for forgetting again that clinically vulnerable disabled people exist. Forcing face-to-face appointments will put many disabled people at risk. And this would also be a barrier for many disabled and chronically ill folks who either simply can’t travel to appointments, or risk worsening their health by doing so:
Disgusting. It can be difficult for people to travel to assessments, axing phone interviews will just mean people who genuinely need help will be unable to get it… and the face-to-face meetings are NOT more accurate, as I have experienced. The DWP needs major change now.
— Andrew Fisher (@merman1974) March 23, 2026
PIP success rates have plummeted
The rate of DWP approving applications for PIP has also actually plummeted:
Since face to face assessments have moved to mainly virtual ones, the success rate for PIP applications has plummeted from 52% to 35%. The idea that it is making it easier for “fakers” is so inaccurate and widespread that I have lost 3 stone from eye rolling alone. https://t.co/qfJHWInZJ7
— Spin Decoders (@leith1076) March 23, 2026
Specifically, successful awards sat at 55% in 2018-19 and decreased slightly to an average of 52% the following financial year.
By comparison, as Benefits and Work recently reported, this rate has continued to drop. For the quarter ending January 2026, the DWP approved just 35% of new claims. This was down from 43% the same quarter last year. In other words, a little over one in three applicants are actually getting awards of PIP. It’s also a decrease from the previous quarter that saw success rates reach just 38% (also a fall from 44% Q3 in 2024).
So contrary to the Tories’ rhetoric, no, the DWP isn’t handing out PIP more readily since the former Tory government implemented remote assessments.
DWP — more people should get PIP anyway
But why would Whately and co. let facts get in the way of a good vilifying soundbite?
When Whately bandies about her dubious figures, it’s the number of people claiming PIP she’s attacking. And of course, in this context, it’s easy to spin that PIP claims are spiralling. Because quite simply, more people are indeed applying for it.
It’s not rocket science to recognise that off the back of a disabling pandemic, more people will in fact be disabled.
What’s more, it’s also a good thing more disabled people are actually applying for it. As the Canary’s Rachel Charlton-Dailey recently highlighted:
There’s also the fact that just 3.9 million people claim PIP. The DWP and press make this sound like a huge number, but it’s only a fraction of how many disabled people there are in the country. 16.8 million people self-identify as disabled in the UK, so that’s less than a quarter of them claiming PIP.
There might be a huge uproar over ‘1 in 10 people claiming PIP’, but disabled people make up 25% of the population. It should be 1 in 4.
Instead then, it’s the above proportion figures that matter. Let’s not forget that PIP is to level the playing field for disabled people. It helps with the extra £1,095 a month costs disabled people incur.
However, the Tories would still have you believe it’s bullshit about the “bloated benefits bill”.
It didn’t go unnoticed either that Whately was banging on about this days after the Labour government announced its call for evidence for the Timms Review.
Ironically, the review should address all the above issues with the assessment system. As the Canary pointed out however, this is already shaping up to be a monumental stitch-up.
The simple fact of the matter is that to politicians on both sides of the House, disabled people are a convenient scapegoat to justify their austerity agendas. While these cronies of corporate capitalism run this country, disabled lives will only ever be a political football to kick to the sidelines.
Featured image via the Canary
Hezbollah’s cheap First-Person View (FPV) drones are penetrating Israel’s billion-dollar Iron Dome system.
BIG: Hezbollah FPV drone strikes target Israeli Iron Dome launchers and its crews at the Jal al-Allam site on the border area. pic.twitter.com/VLbTGxLq3a
— Clash Report (@clashreport) May 10, 2026
The drones, guided by a physical fibre optic cable, are immune to electronic jamming and pretty much invisible to radar systems, meaning Israel has no effective defence against them.
According to Al Jazeera:
Unlike traditional drones that rely on radio frequencies or satellite signals, these modified aircraft are tethered directly to the operator’s control station by a fibre optic thread. The cable can extend between 10–30km [6.2 to 18.6 miles], allowing the drone to reach distant targets.
Because there is no wireless signal to intercept, the drones are immune to Israel’s sophisticated electronic warfare (EW) jamming systems. Furthermore, the aircraft are constructed from lightweight fibreglass, meaning they emit almost no thermal or radar signature.
This means that Hezbollah can manually steer the drones toward specific targets, such as tanks, aided by high-resolution optical cameras that transmit uncompressed video via the cable.
This video shared recently by Hezbollah shows how relaxed the operator is while choosing the target and monitoring the scene for a second attack pic.twitter.com/DfrdUivFAY
— Ali Rida Sbeity (@AliRida_SB) May 3, 2026
Israel has admitted that there is not much it can do about the FPV drones, except “shoot at them”.
FPV bypassing the Iron Dome
Israel first deployed the Iron Dome in 2011. It is supposedly:
one of the most effective, battle-tested air defence systems in service today.
Except when it comes to Hezbollah’s drones.
CCTV in northern Israel captured a Hezbollah fibre-optic FPV drone flying past a building. Marks the first known use of FPV drones on targets outside IDF-occupied southern Lebanon. pic.twitter.com/gTIQ92izg8
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) May 10, 2026
The system is expensive, so it must be heartbreaking for Israel that cheap FPV drones can bypass it.
According to RMZ:
a complete system, including the radar, computer and three to four launchers – each containing up to 20 interceptors – costs around US$100 million to produce.
Israel has 10 such systems in operation, taking the estimated cost to $1bn.
Armed resistance
A United Nations General Assembly resolution states:
The General Assembly,
Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle;
Hezbollah’s resistance to Israeli occupation was instrumental in the IOF leaving Lebanon in 2000, after 18 years.
Since then, Israel has continued to illegally occupy both Gaza and the Syrian Golan Heights. Here’s what the UN says about it. Recently, Israel has also invaded Lebanon once again.
Of course, Israel and the West have labelled Hezbollah as a ‘terrorist group’ and called for their disarmament, when they’re only defending the land they are native to.
The West only proscribed Hezbollah because of intense pressure from the Israel Lobby.
The entire Jewish supremacist ethnostate literally runs and was founded on terrorism, yet we will never find any of its blood-thirsty components proscribed — not the IOF, not the Mossad, none of the trigger-happy, child-killing, rapist colonisers will be labeled as terrorists.
The IOF booby-trapped pagers, killing 42 and injuring thousands. If that isn’t an act of ‘terrorism’, I don’t know what is. On the contrary, we shield them and enable their crimes by proscribing everyone resisting them as terrorists.
Was it not us who gave Palestinian land to “zionist aspirations”?
Fuck around and find out.
So if Israel is going to keep fucking around, it’s going to keep finding out.
Hezbollah has published footage of multiple FPV strikes on the Iron Dome battery and its crew. https://t.co/wE6ukXbnPx pic.twitter.com/8ZOKmYrFik
— barry with the NED (@bonzerbarry) May 10, 2026
Hezbollah even managed to transform one drone into a suppository for one IOF soldier.
Hezbollah continues hunting down Israeli troops with its simple FPV drones.
Although the soldiers run away from them, the drones precisely hit them.
Just remembered when they were having fun sniping and hunting terrified, emaciated Gaza’s children. pic.twitter.com/IHnsD3zG6D
— Abubaker Abed (@AbubakerAbedW) May 9, 2026
At the end of the day, you can’t run from what was promised to you 3,000 years ago. And just maybe, that was a drone up the ass.
Feature image via X
By The Canary
Right before calling Iran’s response to the White House’s latest peace proposal “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE,” President Donald Trump lashed out at his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, for settling the tab for a Carter-era arms deal with the nation that fell through decades ago.
Taking to Truth Social on Sunday afternoon, the commander in chief fumed that “Iran has been playing games with the United States, and the rest of the World” since the fall of American-aligned Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979.
“DELAY, DELAY, DELAY!” he described Iran’s strategy with the US, while also claiming Tehran will be “laughing no longer” if his administration has the final word.
In his post, the president said Iran “finally hit ‘pay dirt’” with Obama, who negotiated the now-defunct Iran Nuclear Deal alongside China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the European Union in 2015.
MANDEL NGAN via Getty Images
“He was not only good to them, he was great, actually going to their side, jettisoning Israel, and all other Allies, and giving Iran a major and very powerful new lease on life,” Trump wrote.
The president falsely claimed the Obama administration forked over billions of dollars “in green cash” to Tehran on a “silver platter” back in 2016, referring to a massive transfer of funds which was part settlement for a $400 million arms deal halted by the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s and partially the release of Iranian-owned funds which were frozen due to international sanctions.
President Trump called the amounts so substantial “Iranian Thugs had no idea what to do with it” when it was offloaded from planes in “suitcases and satchels.”
Continuing to rail against Obama, he said Iran had “finally found the greatest SUCKER of them all, in the form of a weak and stupid American President.”
“He was a disaster as our ‘Leader,’ but not as bad as Sleepy Joe Biden!” Trump went on to add.
In his post, the president accused Iranian leaders of stringing the U.S. along for decades, “keeping us waiting, killing our people with their roadside bombs, destroying protests,” as well as “wiping out 42,000 innocent, unarmed protestors, and laughing at our now GREAT AGAIN Country.”
“They will be laughing no longer!” Trump concluded.
President Donald Trump made an outlandish claim about early childhood vaccine recommendations, lamenting that “beautiful little babies” were given a “vat … of stuff pumped into their bodies.”
In an interview with journalist Sharyl Attkisson on the Sunday episode of her show “Full Measure,” Trump defended Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saying, “People love him.”
Trump was then asked whether there should be a commission to scrutinise vaccine safety, as Kennedy has long advocated.
“I believe in vaccines, but I don’t believe that, you know, you have to have a mandate for all of them,” Trump said.
Then, he falsely claimed that children were required to receive more than 80 vaccines and argued for reducing the number of immunisations.
“I look at these beautiful little babies, and they get a vat, like a big glass, of stuff pumped into their bodies,” Trump said. “And I think it’s a very negative thing to do.”
As of early 2026, the CDC recommends, rather than mandates, that children under 10 be inoculated against 11 conditions, down from a previous recommendation of 17.
Trump also claimed that paring back the childhood vaccine schedule would lead to a “better result with the autism.”
Despite extensive scientific evidence debunking a link between childhood vaccines and autism spectrum disorder, Kennedy has continued to push the theory.
Last year, he personally directed the CDC to change its website to say that there was “not an evidence-based claim” to discredit the connection between vaccines and an autism diagnosis and that studies showing the contrary had been “ignored by health authorities.”
“The whole thing about ‘vaccines have been tested and there’s been this determination made’ is just a lie,” Kennedy told The New York Times in 2025.
Politics
Politics Home Article | Keir Starmer To Say “People Need Hope” As Calls For Resignation Grow
Prime Minister Keir Starmer will deliver a key speech tomorrow as he fights for his political survival amid growing calls from Labour MPs for his resignation. (Alamy)
3 min read
Prime Minister Keir Starmer is set to deliver a key speech tomorrow which he is widely expected to use as an attempt to push back against calls for his resignation from a growing number of Labour MPs.
Starmer, in what is likely to be one of the most important speeches of his political career, is expected to say “people need hope” – and that his government “will face up to the big challenges” and “will make the big arguments”, conceding “incremental change won’t cut it”.
At the heart of the speech will be Starmer’s bid to reset relations with the European Union, “by putting Britain at the heart of Europe” so that the UK is “stronger on the economy, on trade, on defence”.
Starmer is also expected to say a closer relationship with the EU will mean “standing shoulder to shoulder with the countries that most share our interests, our values and our enemies”.
However, despite Starmer’s hope for a better future on Monday, as well as his expected focus on “Labour values and Labour policies” to reconnect with the public, the speech will inevitably see the Prime Minister talk as much to his own party as to the public as he fights for his own political survival.
A devastating set of local election results for Labour, which saw the party lose the Senedd in Wales for the first time, as well as around 1,500 seats, means his speech will be delivered at the start of a challenging week – after a weekend which saw a growing number of Labour MPs express their desire for the Prime Minister to stand down.
Backbench Labour MP Catherine West on Saturday said she would challenge the Prime Minister on Monday if a cabinet minister did not do so, warning she had 10 MPs that would back her to do so.
“My preferred option is for the cabinet to do a reshuffle within itself, where there’s plenty of talent, and for Keir to be given a different role, which he might enjoy, perhaps an international role,” she told BBC Radio 4.
Labour MP Josh Simons, former boss of Labour Together, former Treasury minister and influential backbench MP also called on the Prime Minister to resign – writing in The Times on Sunday that Starmer “lost the country” and did not believe “the prime minister can rise to this moment”.
Meanwhile, former deputy prime minister and Labour deputy leader, Labour MP Angela Rayner stopped short of calling for Starmer to resign on Sunday – but criticised the direction of Labour’s government, warning what Labour had done so far “isn’t working” and that it may be the party’s “last chance” with the public.
Rayner said the party blocking Labour leadership hopeful Andy Burnham from standing as an MP “was a mistake”, alongside appointing Peter Mandelson as US ambassador and the party’s early attempt in government to cut Winter Fuel Allowance.
In his speech on Monday, Starmer is also expected to say the party will need to give a “bigger response than we anticipated in 2024 because these are not ordinary times”, as he attempts to persuade Labour MPs that Labour election losses were not a signal of terminal decline.
“Strength through fairness. It’s a core Labour argument,” Starmer will say.
“And you will see those values writ large in the King’s Speech. And you will see hope, urgency and exactly whose side we are on.”
The speech will also come after Starmer announced the appointment of former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a special envoy, as well as senior Labour peer Harriet Harman as an adviser against tackling women and girls in the aftermath of Thursday’s election results.
The move, like Starmer’s expected speech on Monday, has been widely recieved as an attempt to signal to mutinous Labour MPs the government is taking a change of direction.
The post Is the AI bubble about to burst? appeared first on spiked.
VININGS, Ga. — Brad Raffensperger is fighting to save his political future as MAGA takes hold of the Georgia GOP.
The secretary of state rose to national prominence by defying President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, but he is carefully trying to avoid the anti-Trump lane while he runs for governor.
Instead, he’s running an old-school campaign aimed at an old-school Republican Party: He’s holding low-key events compared with his GOP opponents’ flashier rallies, and he’s focusing on bread-and-butter issues, rather than harping on election security. At one Atlanta-area rotary club gathering in April, Raffensperger was all too happy to tout his business background and his pledge to cap property taxes. Everywhere he goes, he drops the word conservative.
“I have my own lane, and I feel good where we are,” Raffensperger told POLITICO after the event. “It’s the lane about being a Christian conservative businessman who’s built a business from scratch.”
At its core, Raffensperger’s candidacy is a test of whether the party’s non-MAGA guard can hold on in one of the nation’s premiere battleground states. He’s defied expectations before, fending off a Trump-backed candidate in 2022 to keep his current position. But 2026 poses a new challenge, as Georgia’s GOP has increasingly shunned its small government roots in favor of aligning with the populist right.
Raffensperger maintains he has a path to victory. Asked whether Trump’s grip on the party is complicating it, he deflected: “I’m doing just fine. I’m going to be in the run-off.”
But the reality is Raffensperger is still struggling to break through in the governor’s race, polling at a consistent third place behind Trump-backed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and billionaire Rick Jackson ahead of the May 19 primary. Republican strategists and officials in the state were widely skeptical of Raffensperger’s chances of success.
“This is the party of Trump today — like it or not, it is — and I find it very difficult to see someone being able to be anti-Trump in a Republican primary and be successful,” said Casey Cagle, a Republican who served as lieutenant governor from 2007 to 2019. He’s experienced the rise of the MAGA base firsthand and has since tacked further to the right.
“The base has grown far, far greater to the right than what it was in my day,” said Cagle, who is supporting Jones in the governor’s race. “The core of the Republican Party has moved far away from the Chamber of Commerce mindset.”
Before February of this year, Raffensperger seemed poised to draw enough support in the primary to keep Jones under the 50 percent threshold he needed to trigger a run-off election. Then Jackson upended the race with his bombastic spending and MAGA pandering, pushing Raffensperger further down in the polls.
Even if the secretary of state were to make a run-off against either Jones or Jackson, his chances of actually winning the nomination are still slim, said GOP strategist Jeremy Brand, who has worked on Gov. Brian Kemp-aligned committees and is unaffiliated in the governor’s race.
“It’d be incredibly tough,” Brand said. “The edge in a run-off where voters are traditionally more conservative, that are willing to come back out again, I think the odds go to the more conservative candidate.”
2020 election woes
Raffensperger has been battling his own party on various fronts since he first stood up to Trump.
A faction of the Georgia GOP tried to bar him from seeking office again on the Republican ticket. And local party leaders recently broke with precedent to allow the RNC to eschew its neutrality and spend resources on backing Jones in the primary. The MAGA base that failed to oust Raffensperger in 2022 is trying again to end his political career — along with others deemed insufficiently loyal to the president.
Attorney General Chris Carr, like Raffensperger, is also mounting a bid for governor and previously defeated a Trump-backed challenger in 2022. But he’s polling even lower than the secretary of state. And Gabriel Sterling, a former top Raffensperger lieutenant, is locked in a noisy primary in his bid for secretary of state as he faces off against a former Democrat-turned-MAGA acolyte and a GOP state representative who once served as Kemp’s top aide.
The 2020 election has continued to be a key litmus test in Georgia, especially as Trump continues to air his grievances over his loss. Several recounts and extensive litigation have only proven Raffensperger’s case that former President Joe Biden fairly defeated Trump in 2020. But many voters and candidates continue to question the truth of the results in a show of loyalty to the president, further isolating the secretary from the increasingly conservative Republican base.
“I voted for Trump. I wish he’d have won. I think he did win, I’m one of those people,” said Bruce Brooker, 72, outside a Jones campaign event in rural Atkinson County earlier this month.
An April POLITICO Poll found that most respondents who plan to vote for Republicans this midterm are still skeptical: Nearly 40 percent say the 2020 election was stolen, while 25 percent don’t believe it was but have questions about the election’s legitimacy. Just 25 percent say the election wasn’t stolen.
Raffensperger continues to defend his work and the integrity of Georgia’s elections at large — “I’m really proud because we made elections more secure” — and is quick to highlight the changes he and state Republicans made in their 2021 overhaul of how the state conducts elections, which drew ire from Democrats and the MLB alike.
Still, several Georgia Republicans say he’s struggling to play catch-up as the base shifts away from his technocratic approach to politics.
“Brad stands in stark conflict to a party that is at the activist level very much aligned with President Trump, when Raffensperger is anything but,” said one former longtime state GOP official, granted anonymity to speak openly about evolving party dynamics. “His candidacy will be and is a test to determine if that lane still exists in the Georgia Republican Party apparatus.”
Raffensperger’s path forward
On a recent afternoon, Raffensperger, clad in a navy suit and striped red tie, headlined the Vinings-Cumberland Rotary Club’s weekly meeting, shaking hands and chatting with voters before taking his place behind the lectern at the front of the room. The state’s legislative session had ended barely a week earlier.
“What I thought I’d do is tell you where we are right now. We just finished up my last session,” he told the audience, ticking through accomplishments: streamlining professional licensing processes, securing an agreement to have money returned to victims of a local Ponzi scheme, and improving systems to make Georgia elections “free, fair and fast.”
It wasn’t the kind of red meat fodder that Republican politics thrive on in the Trump era, but the type of accolades that resonate with the kind of voters at the meeting, held just over the border from Atlanta’s city limits in suburban Cobb County.
Cobb County is one of several former Republican bastions surrounding metro Atlanta that have flipped blue as the Trump-styled GOP turned off suburban voters. Once the homebase for conservative stalwart former Speaker Newt Gingrich, the county voted overwhelmingly for former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 despite her statewide loss to Trump.
It’s still home to plenty of business-focused Republican voters who are not keen on the president — then-Sen. Marco Rubio carried the county over Trump during the 2016 GOP primaries, and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley performed nearly twice as well in the county compared to her statewide returns against the president in 2024. These are the voters Raffensperger is focused on, content to let Jones and Jackson battle it out for the MAGA class.
Jason Shepherd, the former Cobb County Republican chair, said the low-key civic group events have “been the hallmark of Brad Raffensperger’s success” and an emblem of the party’s business-focused past. It’s in sharp contrast with the attention-grabbing rallies that have defined Trump’s dominance of Republican politics.
Raffensperger’s quieter approach has previously served him well, when he overcame a 2022 primary challenge from former Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) who ran with the president’s endorsement. This time is different: Then, he held the power of incumbency and benefited from Trump’s influence waning temporarily in the aftermath of Jan. 6 and his 2020 election defeat.
Now, Trump, back in power, has reaffirmed his iron grip on the party and Raffensperger is up against two MAGA candidates pining for the base’s attention. Add to that the fact he’s being massively outspent: His $4 million has been dwarfed by Jackson’s whopping $61 million and Jones’ $26 million in expenditures, according to an AdImpact analysis.
The Jones and Carr campaigns were quick to dismiss claims that the secretary of state had a path to the run-off and an eventual win. A spokesperson for Jackson did not respond to a request for comment.
If Raffensperger were to lose the primary, his loss would become another nail in the coffin for an old-school GOP that continues to resist MAGA. But his insistence that his lane — and version of the Republican Party — still exists is, for his closest allies, a testament to his persistence.
“Brad Raffensperger never really stopped from 2022 on,” said Sterling, the Raffensperger ally who’s running for secretary of state and has also faced MAGA’s ire for refusing to overturn election results. “He could have set up a foundation, gone around the country and just talked about democracy and he would have been applauded. Instead he chose to go into the battle and fight.”
Keir Starmer, left, former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner and Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, April 2026 (Paul Ellis/Pool Photo via AP)
4 min read
Former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has backed away from challenging Keir Starmer for the leadership herself – but called for Andy Burnham to be allowed back into the parliamentary party.
In a lengthy statement released on Sunday afternoon following a poor set of election results for Labour in England, Wales and Scotland, Rayner warned: “What we are doing isn’t working, and it needs to change. This may be our last chance.”
She added: “We are in danger of becoming a party of the well-off, not working people. The Peter Mandelson scandal showed a toxic culture of cronyism.”
Advising Labour to put “the common interest ahead of factionalism”, the Labour MP for Ashton-under-Lyne called on the leadership “to acknowledge that blocking Andy Burnham was a mistake”.
Rayner has not called directly for a leadership change, nor demanded that Starmer set out a timetable for his departure, as almost 40 Labour MPs have now done.
But her intervention is critical of the Prime Minister and will be interpreted by some as her rowing in behind a Burnham leadership bid.
“We must show we understand the scale of change the moment calls for – that means bringing our best players into Parliament – and embracing the type of agenda that has been successful at a local level, rather than reaching back to an agenda and politics that has failed people,” she said.
“These are the fights we need to have, and the change in direction we need to see. Policy tweaks will not fix the fundamental challenges facing our country. This government needs, at pace, to put measures in place that make people’s lives tangibly better, while fixing the foundations of a system rigged against them.
“The Prime Minister must now meet the moment and set out the change our country needs. Change our economic agenda to prioritise making people better off, change how we run our party so that all voices are listened to, and change how we do politics.
“Labour exists to make working people better off. That is not happening fast enough, and it needs to change – now.”
A Labour MP on the ‘soft left’ of the party told PoliticsHome: “She’s right but also wrong. The PM is a busted flush and needs to go. We need change but Keir Starmer cannot deliver it.”
They added: “I would read it like she is waiting for Burnham to come back.”
An MP on the Labour left said: “If Andy is blocked by the timetable, things will shift. The spanner is Ed Miliband and I’m unclear how that will play out. If Tribune back Ed, she’ll struggle.”
A different ‘soft left’ Labour MP, who backs Burnham, said: “She is keeping her powder dry at the moment. I suspect she will move if Wes does.”
They also described Starmer’s expressed desire in a new Observer interview to continue as PM for 10 years as “a sure sign that it’s over”, adding: “We’ve entered the delusional phase.”
Although Health Secretary Wes Streeting was reported by the Telegraph today as having told Starmer that he is preparing his case to be the next prime minister, a source close to Streeting told PoliticsHome that this relates to an old report about him making preparations in case Starmer’s premiership fell apart.
While neither Rayner nor Streeting have so far made their move, north London MP and former minister Catherine West has reiterated her willingness to launch a leadership challenge if the Cabinet does not take action on Monday.
She told the BBC on Sunday morning: “I will hear what the Prime Minister’s got to say tomorrow and, then if I’m still dissatisfied, I will put out my email to the Parliamentary Labour Party, asking for names.”
Starmer backers are pinning their hopes on a speech by the Prime Minister on Monday to turn things around. PoliticsHome understands that other outwardly loyal Labour MPs are waiting to see what is said and how it lands before voicing their own views on the future of the leadership.
On Sunday Josh Simons, a former minister who previously led Starmerite organisation Labour Together, added his name to the list of MPs calling on Starmer to be replaced.
“I do not believe the Prime Minister can rise to this moment. He has lost the country. He should take control of the situation by overseeing an orderly transition to a new prime minister,” Simons said.
In the statement, Rayner set out her priorities for government, including immediate action to cut costs for households, more sectoral bargaining, a plan to end freehold for good, enhanced devolution and further planning reforms.
Angela Rayner has criticised what she calls a “toxic culture of cronyism” in a 1000-word statement issued after this week’s local elections.
Rayner, who resigned as deputy prime minister in September 2025, has called on the Labour Party to “live up to our name: we must be the party of working people.”
She further warned that Labour was in danger of “becoming a party of the well-off, not working people.”
Rayner argued that the Peter Mandelson vetting debacle had exposed a “toxic culture of cronyism”.
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She called on the prime minister to “meet the moment and set out the change our country needs.”
The former deputy prime minister also described the decision to block Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election as a “mistake.”
Read Rayner’s statement in full below.
Our party has suffered a historic defeat.
Many good Labour colleagues have lost their seats despite working hard for those they represented. We have lost good Labour administrations and lost the chance for more.
What we are doing isn’t working, and it needs to change. This may be our last chance.
The Labour Party must now live up to our name: we must be the party of working people.
We’ve heard the same on the doorstep as we’ve seen in the polls – the cost of living is the top issue for voters of all parties. People have turned to populists and nationalists because we have not done enough to fix it.
Living standards are barely higher than they were a decade and a half ago. People feel hopeless – that the cost of living crisis will never end, and now they see oil and gas companies use global instability to post record profits.
Once again, ordinary people are paying the price for decisions they didn’t make. It’s no wonder that across the UK, working people feel the system is rigged against them.
Things can be so much better than this. Countries including Spain and Canada have shown that economies can grow and people can thrive when governments stay true to labour and social democratic values and put people first. We need to learn from that.
In London, we lost young people who fear they will never afford a home. In my patch and across the north, we lost working people whose wages are too low and costs too high. In Scotland and Wales, people do not currently see Labour as the answer.
We are in danger of becoming a party of the well-off, not working people.
The Peter Mandelson scandal showed a toxic culture of cronyism.
Decisions like cutting winter fuel allowance just weren’t what people expected from a Labour government.
For too long, successive governments have allowed wealth and power to concentrate at the top without a plan to ensure the benefits of economic growth are shared fairly. The result is an economy that does not work for the majority, with wealth concentrated in too few hands. This level of inequality, alongside squeezed living standards, is the outcome of a model built on deregulation, privatisation, and trickle-down economics.
But we have the chance to fix this.
We need immediate action to cut costs for households and put money back into the everyday economy. This can be done within the current fiscal rules, by ensuring those who benefit from the crisis contribute more so that everyone can thrive.
Our Employment Rights Act was just the first step in our plan to Make Work Pay. Now is the time to take the next steps, starting with a Fair Pay Agreement in social care – but not ending there. A rising minimum wage must go alongside our programme to get young people into work.
The investment we secured in social and affordable housing should now unleash a building boom that benefits British business and workers. We must double down on renters’ reform and show leaseholders our action on tackling ground rents and charges was just a first step to ending freehold for good.
Our devolution revolution has begun, but is nowhere near done.
Giving mayors powers to transform planning and licensing can boost local business and good growth, in the interests of local people. They must go alongside economic powers and public services.
Boosting community ownership and stopping the sell-off of local assets from pubs to playgrounds will put power back in local hands, helping restore the pride they feel in the places they live.
We must go further on planning reforms, to build the schools, hospitals, roads and infrastructure the country needs to grow.
We should be unafraid to promote new forms of public, community and cooperative ownership across the board. Buses and trains being brought back into public hands can now operate for the public good, at prices passengers can afford.
Thames Water is an iconic failure of privatisation, which resonates for the same reasons. People are rightly sick of bonuses for bosses who deliver nothing but higher bills. We must face down demands that the public pay the price of private failure.
We must create good jobs that pay decent wages by ensuring defence investment includes a secure manufacturing base. Use our house building programme to boost construction, invest in the green economy, backing SMEs by reforming business rates and increasing support to revive our high streets and local economies, raise the minimum wage and get young people into work.
And then there is politics itself, putting power back into people’s hands so that they are shaping the decisions that impact them. We must tackle the inflow of dodgy money in our politics – something that Nigel Farage, who took 5 million pounds in a secret personal gift from an offshore crypto baron, will never do. We must make politics work for ordinary people.
We can only prove we mean it by putting the common interest ahead of factionalism.
This is bigger than personalities, but it is time to acknowledge that blocking Andy Burnham was a mistake. We must show we understand the scale of change the moment calls for – that means bringing our best players into Parliament – and embracing the type of agenda that has been successful at a local level, rather than reaching back to an agenda and politics that has failed people.
These are the fights we need to have, and the change in direction we need to see. Policy tweaks will not fix the fundamental challenges facing our country. This government needs, at pace, to put measures in place that make people’s lives tangibly better, while fixing the foundations of a system rigged against them.
The Prime Minister must now meet the moment and set out the change our country needs.
Change our economic agenda to prioritise making people better off, change how we run our party so that all voices are listened to, and change how we do politics.
Labour exists to make working people better off. That is not happening fast enough, and it needs to change — now.
Angela Rayner has told Keir Starmer to “change now” as the prime minister faces the prospect of a leadership challenge within the next 24 hours.
In her first public comments since Labour’s catastrophic performance in last Thursday’s elections, Rayner also threw her weight behind Andy Burnham’s attempt to become an MP again.
She said: “What we are doing isn’t working, and it needs to change. This may be our last chance.”
Rayner, who was forced to resign last September over a tax scandal, condemned Starmer’s handling of the Peter Mandelson row, which she said “showed a toxic culture of cronyism” in the party.
She also said it had been “a mistake” to block Burnham from standing in February’s by-election in Gorton and Denton, which saw Labour lose to the Greens.
Rayner said the Greater Manchester mayor should be allowed to return to Westminster.
“This is bigger than personalities, but it is time to acknowledge that blocking Andy Burnham was a mistake,” she said.
“We must show we understand the scale of change the moment calls for – that means bringing our best players into parliament – and embracing the type of agenda that has been successful at a local level, rather than reaching back to an agenda and politics that has failed people.
“These are the fights we need to have, and the change in direction we need to see. Policy tweaks will not fix the fundamental challenges facing our country.
“This government needs, at pace, to put measures in place that make people’s lives tangibly better, while fixing the foundations of a system rigged against them.
“The prime minister must now meet the moment and set out the change our country needs.
“Change our economic agenda to prioritise making people better off, change how we run our party so that all voices are listened to, and change how we do politics.
“Labour exists to make working people better off. That is not happening fast enough, and it needs to change — now.”
Subscribe to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.
Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice is facing a mounting backlash after he failed to condemn one of the party’s new councillors who said Nigerans should be melted down to fill potholes”.
Tice was asked repeatedly in a series of interviews to disown the remarks by Glenn Gibbins, who was elected in the Hylton Castle ward in Sunderland in Thursday council elections.
In a post on social media in 2024, he said: “Can’t believe amount of Nigerians in town … should melt them all down and fill in the potholes.”
Reform has launched an investigation into Gibbins, but Tice dismissed the criticism of him as “smearing and sneering”.
On the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, Tice said: “I’m going later to a campaign against the scourge of anti-semitism, which is the greatest threat facing us, particularly in London but elsewhere across the UK. That’s what people are really concerned about. If people have said daft things, of course it’ll be looked at.”
Pressed on Gibbins’ remarks, he said: “Laura, this weekend we are celebrating our incredible successes. Like any party, you have internal processes to look at where people have said or done the wrong thing.”
Asked if he condemned them, Tice said: “I condemn anything that is wrong or inappropriate.”
But when asked if he condemned the councillor’s specific comments, he dodged the question and said: “The key thing is voters have heard all of this smearing and this sneering against all of us and they voted for more Reform because they want action, they want delivery. They’re sick of the failures of the Tories and Labour.”
A Labour spokesman said: “It’s utterly grotesque that Reform can’t even call out clear racism.
“It speaks volumes that Richard Tice tried to brush off these comments. And it speaks volumes that Nigel Farage refused to sack him as a candidate and is now happy to have him represent Reform as a councillor. They’re both a disgrace.
“Labour is the only party that will stand up to the division of Reform.”
Tice also faced a mounting backlash on social media, including from London mayor Sadiq Khan.
Subscribe to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.
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