Newscast Local Electioncast: The Reaction! (Part 3)
The Health Secretary Wes Streeting spoke to both Laura and Paddy to give the Labour view. Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, the Lib Dem leader Ed Davey and Reform UK chairman Zia Yusuf were all on Laura's Sunday show.
We also look at what party staffers are saying behind the scenes and how Zia Yusuf earned the cash that he's funding his party with.
You can now listen to Newscast on a smart speaker. If you want to listen, just say "Ask BBC Sounds to play Newscast'. It works on most smart speakers.
You can join our Newscast online community here: https://discord.gg/m3YPUGv9
New episodes released every day. If you're in the UK, for more News and Current Affairs podcasts from the BBC, listen on BBC Sounds: https://bit.ly/3ENLcS1
Newscast brings you daily analysis of the latest political news stories from the BBC. It was presented by Paddy O'Connell, Laura Kuenssberg and Henry Zeffman. It was made by Chris Flynn and Josh Jenkins. The technical producer was Ben Andrews. The assistant editor is Chris Gray. The editor is Sam Bonham.
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Spectator
9 minutes ago
- Spectator
What Baroness Debbonaire gets wrong about Clive of India
Baroness Debbonaire, addressing the Edinburgh International Book Festival, has called for the removal of the statue of Clive of India, Baron Clive of Plassey, the site of one of his most famous military victories, from its prominent place adjoining the Foreign Office, at the end of King Charles Street, looking out across St. James's Park from what are known as Clive Steps. Clive was a founder of British imperial power and control over India. Twice governor in the mid-18th century, he was a brilliant military commander, a determined administrator and an opponent of corruption, though he himself became rich on the profits of empire. He fought warlords by becoming one of them himself. Subjected to waves of criticism for the way he governed from both the conscious-struck and jealous, and subject himself to bouts of depression, he may have taken his own life in 1774. His statue was erected much later in 1912, and like Clive in his own lifetime, was controversial and contested. The statue of Edward Colston, the Bristol slave trader, was also erected just before the first world war and also commemorated someone who lived much earlier. It's relevant to this new, confected controversy over Clive because Debbonaire was a Labour MP for Bristol until the last election, a veteran of the rancorous debates in that city over the Colston monument until it was pulled down by a mob in 2020. We might have hoped that the Baroness would have learnt the obvious lesson that disputes of this type set communities against each other and undermine social cohesion. Nobody wins, and society loses, in a culture war. We might also have hoped that instead of demanding the removal of an artefact of which she disapproves, the noble baroness would have used her speech to call for a new work of public art beside the Foreign Office representing the values she holds dear. She could put herself at the head of a committee to raise funds for such a work. But speech-making, removal and perhaps destruction, are always easier (and more psychologically revealing) than working to win broad support for the commissioning of a new piece of art. This prominent corner of official London is a work in progress. On one side of Clive is the entrance to the Cabinet War Rooms, Churchill's headquarters in the Second World War that have been preserved for posterity. On the other side is a new monument to the victims of the Bali bombing of 2002. The area is rich with British history, its victories and tragedies, its heroes and villains. But the subtle and complex nature of the past is lost on Debbonaire who thinks it her right to judge for the rest of us. She complains that on Clive's statue, the frieze running around the base depicts 'tiny, tiny little Indians' as subservient. The common practice of sculpting, in miniature, key moments or themes in the life of those commemorated may be unknown to her. Does she also disdain the frieze running round the Albert Memorial, depicting great cultural figures, or the allegorical sculptures of Africa and Asia at its corners? Or the panels depicting the lives of ordinary people at the base of the statue known as The Meeting Place at St. Pancras Station where two lovers embrace high above scenes of everyday life, again captured in miniature? (The statue is disdained by our cultural elite, as it happens, but highly regarded by those same ordinary people.) Debbonaire's greatest mistake is to complain that Clive's statue taints and distorts our relationship with India today. Wrapped up in the cliches of contemporary anti-colonialism, she is unaware of India's profound interest in the British colonial past and respect for the legacies we left behind. She might spend some time reading the splendid essays by the Sri Lankan scholar Rohan Fernando, published by History Reclaimed, on the cultural and scientific inheritance from the Raj and its reception in contemporary India. The British founded dozens of museums across India; established scientific institutions such as the Indian Meteorological Department and the Archaeological Survey of India (whose Director, John Marshall, discovered the Indus Valley Civilisation exactly a century ago); mapped India's terrain and geology; built canals and railways. All of these achievements are acknowledged and celebrated by an authentic Indian culture which is ever more at ease with its British past. Debbonaire is not alone in her ignorance of these legacies, of course. University College, Oxford has decided to criticise its greatest son, Sir William Jones, who in the late eighteenth century first identified the family of Indo-European languages, wrote codes of Hindu and Muslim law, and began the study of Indian archaeology. A panel recently placed next to the great monument to him in the college chapel, sculpted by John Flaxman, confects a charge sheet of the usual offences. But Jones is revered by Indians as the founder of the study of their cultures: his grave in Calcutta is the site of regular commemorations and he even adorns a recent Indian postage stamp. An Oxford college dishonouring a great scholar dishonours only itself. Baroness Debbonaire does greater damage, pitching us all into unnecessary disputes based on faulty history and imagined grievances.
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
I got a bursary to a top private school. Labour's tax raid would've sealed my fate
I was incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to experience the high level of attention and care I received as I prepared for university, as were the other thousands of students around the country who received financial support. According to the Private Education Policy Forum, 34pc of private school pupils receive some form of financial aid. These aren't just the children of bankers and lawyers. Many bursary students come from single-parent households, carers, or families with fluctuating incomes who would otherwise never consider private education. This isn't just a personal story. Labour's decision to impose VAT on private school fees from the start of this year risks shutting out thousands of children from the kind of opportunities I enjoyed. Bursaries are one of the few tools that private schools have to support social mobility, giving bright children from all backgrounds a chance to thrive. Labour's tax raid is reshaping the landscape of private education. The VAT raid – a wealth tax by any other name – has hit working families, while the truly wealthy have been able to avoid the extra fees by paying, in some cases, for the entire cost of schooling up front.
BBC News
2 hours ago
- BBC News
North Koreans tell BBC they are sent to work 'like slaves' in Russia
Thousands of North Koreans are being sent to work in slave-like conditions in Russia to fill a huge labour shortage exacerbated by Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, the BBC has has repeatedly turned to Pyongyang to help it fight the war, using its missiles, artillery shells and its soldiers. Now, with many of Russia's men either killed or tied up fighting - or having fled the country - South Korean intelligence officials have told the BBC that Moscow is increasingly relying on North Korean interviewed six North Korean workers who have fled Russia since the start of the war, along with government officials, researchers and those helping to rescue the detailed how the men are subjected to "abysmal" working conditions, and how the North Korean authorities are tightening their control over the workers to stop them of the workers, Jin, told the BBC that when he landed in Russia's Far East, he was chaperoned from the airport to a construction site by a North Korean security agent, who ordered him not to talk to anyone or look at anything. "The outside world is our enemy," the agent told him. He was put straight to work building high-rise apartment blocks for 18 hours a day, he six workers we spoke to described the same punishing workdays – waking at 6am and being forced to build high-rise apartments until 2am the next morning, with just two days off a year. We have changed their names to protect them. "Waking up was terrifying, realising you had to repeat the same day over again," said another construction worker, Tae, who managed to escape Russia last year. Tae recalled how his hands would seize up in the morning, unable to open, paralysed from the previous day's work."Some people would leave their post to sleep in the day, or fall asleep standing up, but the supervisors would find them and beat them. It was truly like we were dying," said another of the workers, Chan."The conditions are truly abysmal," said Kang Dong-wan, a professor at South Korea's Dong-A University who has travelled to Russia multiple times to interview North Korean labourers. "The workers are exposed to very dangerous situations. At night the lights are turned out and they work in the dark, with little safety equipment."The escapees told us that the workers are confined to their construction sites day and night, where they are watched by agents from North Korea's state security department. They sleep in dirty, overcrowded shipping containers, infested with bugs, or on the floor of unfinished apartment blocks, with tarps pulled over the door frames to try to keep out the labourer, Nam, said he once fell four metres off his building site and "smashed up" his face, leaving him unable to work. Even then his supervisors would not let him leave the site to visit a hospital. In the past, tens of thousands of North Koreans worked in Russia earning millions of pounds a year for the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, and his cash-strapped regime. Then in 2019, the UN banned countries from using these workers in an attempt to cut off Kim's funds and stop him building nuclear weapons, meaning most were sent last year more than 10,000 labourers were sent to Russia, according to a South Korean intelligence official speaking to the BBC on the condition of anonymity. They told us that even more were expected to arrive this year, with Pyongyang possibly dispatching more than 50,000 workers in sudden influx means North Korean workers are now "everywhere in Russia," the official added. While most are working on large-scale construction projects, others have been assigned to clothing factories and IT centres, they said, in violation of the UN sanctions banning the use of North Korean government figures show that more than 13,000 North Koreans entered the country in 2024, a 12-fold increase from the previous year. Nearly 8,000 of them entered on student visas but, according to the intelligence official and experts, this is a tactic used by Russia to bypass the UN June, a senior Russian official, Sergei Shoigu, admitted for the first time that 5,000 North Koreans would be sent to rebuild Kursk, a Russian region seized by Ukrainian forces last year but who have since been pushed back. The South Korean official told us it was also "highly likely" some North Koreans would soon be deployed to work on reconstruction projects in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories."Russia is suffering a severe labour shortage right now and North Koreans offer the perfect solution. They are cheap, hard-working and don't get into trouble," said Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul and a renowned expert in North Korea-Russia relations. These overseas construction jobs are highly coveted in North Korea as they promise to pay better than the work at home. Most workers go hoping to escape poverty and be able to buy a house for their family or start a business when they return. Only the most trusted men are selected after being rigorously vetted, and they must leave their families the bulk of their earnings is sent straight to the North Korean state as "loyalty fees". The remaining fraction – usually between $100-200 (£74-£149) a month - is marked down on a ledger. The workers only receive this money when they return home – a recent tactic, experts say, to stop them running the men realise the reality of the harsh work and lack of pay, it can be shattering. Tae said he was "ashamed" when he learnt that other construction workers from central Asia were being paid five times more than him for a third of the work. "I felt like I was in a labour camp; a prison without bars," he labourer Jin still bristles when he remembers how the other workers would call them slaves. "You are not men, just machines that can speak," they jeered. At one point, Jin's manager told him he might not receive any money when he returned to North Korea because the state needed it instead. It was then he decided to risk his life to made the decision to defect after watching YouTube videos showing how much workers in South Korea were paid. One night, he packed his belongings into a bin liner, stuffed a blanket under his bed sheets to make it look as if he was still sleeping, and crept out of his construction site. He hailed a taxi and travelled thousands of kilometres across the country to meet a lawyer who helped arrange his journey on to recent years, a small number of workers have been able to orchestrate their escapes using forbidden second-hand smartphones, bought by saving the small daily allowance they received for cigarettes and alcohol. In an attempt to prevent these escapes, multiple sources have told us that the North Korean authorities are now cracking down on workers' already limited to Prof Kang from Dong-A University, one way the regime has tried to control the workers over the last year is by subjecting them to more frequent ideological training and self-criticism sessions, in which they are forced to declare their loyalty to Kim Jong Un and log their opportunities to leave construction sites have also been cut. "The workers used to go out in groups once a month, but recently these trips have reduced to almost zero," Prof Kang Seung-chul, a Seoul-based activist who helps rescue North Korean workers from Russia, said these outings were being more tightly controlled. "They used to be allowed to leave in pairs, but since 2023 they have had to travel in groups of five and are monitored more intensely."In this climate, fewer workers are managing to escape. The South Korean government told us the number of North Koreans making it out of Russia each year and arriving in Seoul had halved since 2022 - from around 20 a year to just Lankov, the expert in North Korea-Russia relations, said the crackdowns were likely in preparation for many more workers arriving."These workers will be the lasting legacy of Kim and Putin's wartime friendship," he said, arguing the workers would continue arriving long after the war had ended, and the deployment of soldiers and weapons had reporting by Jake Kwon and Hosu Lee
