Around The House: Watch May 2025 programme
Thursday 15 May 2025 at 3:08pm Tom Sheldrick and guests (l-r: Luke Akehurst MP (Lab), Baroness McIntosh (Con) and Lord Beith (Lib Dem) Credit: The latest edition of Around The House is now available to watch on ITVX.
The Reform UK councillor, who will be the new leader of Durham County Council, says they will ll look into restricting the number of asylum seekers being housed in the county.
The latest edition of Around The House is available to watch now on ITVX:
Reform chose their new Durham leader last night, after winning control of the authority in the local elections.
Andrew Husband also played down Nigel Farage's suggestion that staff working in diversity and climate should "seek alternative careers".
The next edition of Around The House is on Thursday 19th June.
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New Statesman
2 days ago
- New Statesman
Labour's unlikely strategy for beating Reform
Photo by Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images It's April. It's a few weeks to the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. Organisers know it's tight. Activists know it's tight. Some estates and a few villages are looking good for Labour. Others are looking dreadful. The Labour campaign is searching for a winning strategy. Keir Starmer is not to be found. Labour threw a lot of strategies at the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. But one stays with me. As the activists piled in for their morning briefings before taking to the doors, the advice was simple, and surprising: 'Don't say Reform.' Instead, campaigners were encouraged to ask what voters on the doorsteps thought of Nigel Farage himself. But why elevate Farage, some wondered. Why even mention his name? Activists discarded the advice immediately, adamant they knew better. But others saw the sense. Counterintuitively, it's a sound strategy. And there is public data to talk about it. Reform is polling in the lead right now. And the local elections prove it: the party didn't just win the coastal region of Lincolnshire, or Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, it won in what were traditional Con-Lab battlegrounds. Projecting what these numbers would mean in a General Election is a fool's errand. First past the post is not made for four/five party politics. So Reform could win as few as 150 seats in the House of Commons. Or as many as 350. That's where we are right now. But Nigel Farage, who polls better than anyone for voter favourability, is floundering on one key metric. He trails as a prime minister in waiting. Britain needs Reform? Yes, say most voters. But does Britain need Farage? There is surprising reluctance. Survation and YouGov have both done the polling and while Reform has party poll leads, Keir Starmer still – somehow – leads the country as the public's preferred prime minister. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe This all exposes something critical: Farage struggles on the question of officialdom. He is the Wat Tyler of our time. He speaks for the many. He speaks for the rabble. But the many do not see him becoming one of the chosen few. Did the peasantry wish to elevate Mr Tyler to Kingship? Which brings us to the Labour strategy. Farage is both a strength and a curse for Reform. The more the voters and media take Reform and Farage seriously, the more the voters will have to give consideration to the rising reality that Reform and Farage may very well form the next government. This is a weak point for the party. 'Don't say Reform. Say Farage.' Reform is a sentiment. It arouses sympathy. Farage has his fans. But he has his detractors. Prompting him on the doorstep could concentrate voters' minds in a way 'it's us or Reform' doesn't. 'It's this government or reform' – the results write themselves. But 'it's us or Farage' – now that's a strategy. [See more: Nigel Farage chases the Welsh dragon] Related
Telegraph
01-06-2025
- Telegraph
C*A*U*G*H*T, review: tiring hostage comedy tries to hit too many targets
Shall we start with the title? C*A*U*G*H*T (ITVX) begs for attention through the medium of capitals and asterisks. Imagine if everyone made their show look like a finicky password. S/T\R/I!C\T/L\Y. ?QUESTION? ?TIME?. B@K£ ŒUF. It would get irritating in a heartbeat. C*A*U*G*H*T doesn't require typography to achieve that outcome. Originally scheduled to air in October 2023, but postponed in the wake of the October 7 attack, this is that trickiest of balancing acts: a no-holds-barred comedy about soldiers being taken hostage by the terrorist rebels of a small unrecognised nation. There are d--k pics and SMGs, cold-blooded slaughter and a man sucking out a bullet amusingly lodged in his wounded pal's anus. On the drawing board, the script no doubt throbbed and swaggered with hilarity. Most of the action is set on a tropical island of Behati-Prinsloo where four Aussie soldiers have been dropped on a black ops mission to wipe the phone of the island's princess. They are soon captured by indeterminately Asian freedom fighters and pleading for their lives. 'Killing Australian could be a public relations disaster for us,' reasons a rebel. 'Everybody loves Australians. Nobody knows why.' A geopolitical incident is soon the talk of the international airwaves. The joke is that the soldiers, seemingly in danger, really collaborate with their captors by making a fake hostage video. Then the US gets involved, rendering this a most strange Australian-American hybrid. Almost every male Aussie here – soldier, politician, broadcaster – is some form of idiot. The female characters are all feistier and, of necessity in this patriarchy of plonkers, cannier. The US is mainly represented by Sean Penn playing Sean Penn as a narcissistic bully who gets caught up in the hostages' story. It's an arms race of self-parody. In all this random oddness, there's even a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo for Susan Sarandon. Penn does deliver one extremely funny punchline about Madonna, to whom, once upon a time, he was married. But you have to slog through to the end of the fifth episode for this reward. And it jostles for attention in a dense thicket of chuck-in-anything, broad-brushstroke satire on masculinity, ethnicity, diplomacy, celebrity, news media, action movies, plus a whole anthology of Aussie in-jokes about a murderous dingo and a murdered koala, 'The Shark', 'The Thorpedo' and the defensible merits of early Mel Gibson. As for the plot, it hops along in six half-hour increments. Interest in the four hostages, as they once again barter to save their skins, wanes long before their fate is revealed. As the scriptwriters might put it, it's all ****.
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on Starmer's U-turn: change direction – or keep losing support
Sir Keir Starmer's U-turn on winter fuel payments did not just represent a policy reversal. It was the moment when the prime minister, elected on promises of national renewal, was forced to confront the political reality that his strategy had refused to acknowledge. It may also prove to be the moment he lost control. The original policy, hatched in the Treasury and defended for months, had cut winter fuel payments, worth up to £300 annually, to millions of pensioners. It was unpopular, and unnecessary. Local election losses and a looming backbench revolt over disability benefit cuts made it politically toxic. The result? On Wednesday, Sir Keir reversed course at the dispatch box – with his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, notably absent. Too little, too late: voters saw delay; activists cried betrayal. This wasn't just a policy slip. It was a strategic, ideological and sociological misfire. The Labour leadership had convinced itself that its electoral base was composed not of university-educated social liberals and younger renters – key to its election-winning coalition – but of Reform-curious, socially conservative voters yearning for fiscal discipline and border control. That misreading, fuelled by factional folklore and backed up by the Labour MP Luke Akehurst, a key figure among the party's centre and right, was always a mirage. Most Reform UK voters are not Labour's to win back. They are largely embedded within a 'right-Conservative' bloc, as noted by Manchester University's James David Griffiths. Chasing them means alienating Labour's base. That appears to be happening. Sir Keir recorded the lowest net favourability of his spell as Labour leader in May. And now, with U-turns piling up, the story has acquired another dimension: a cabinet revolt. A leak blew open the ideological rift between Ms Reeves and the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner. The latter's memo to Ms Reeves, proposing tax rises on the better-off instead of cuts to meet self-imposed fiscal rules, revealed the schism. This is not just about tax policy. It is a flashpoint in the struggle over Labour's identity. Ms Rayner represents a politics grounded in contemporary Britain: professional, socially liberal, economically redistributive. Ms Reeves represents a cautious centrist revivalism that imagines Britain as it was in 1997. But this isn't Blair's Britain any more. The electorate is more middle class, more educated and more diverse. The realignment is done. Labour's survival depends on recognising it. Labour's centrist power brokers are fighting the last war – not against the Tories, but against Jeremy Corbyn. The party risks joining Europe's centre-left casualties – triangulating through turbulence with a broken political compass. If Labour continues to ignore electoral bloc dynamics and strategic coalition-building, it will cede ground to both the left and the populist right. Meagre public sector pay awards suggest Labour won't budge – yet. But its economic strategy is running out of road. A pivot is possible: towards tax fairness, green investment, a new language on immigration, electoral reform, ending austerity and rebuilding trust with the young urban voters who put Labour in power. But it should be decisive. Sir Keir must lead a government of transformation, not Tory-lite continuity. If he won't shift course, 'stepping up' may soon look just like standing in the way. The winter fuel fiasco wasn't only a tactical error – it exposed Labour's flawed view of the electorate. And voters, inconveniently, noticed.
