Tomorrow is the 9th of July. That will be three years out from the last possible date for the dissolution of the current Parliament under Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022. The present Parliament first met on 9 July 2024…
Unless dissolved earlier, it automatically dissolves at the beginning of 9 July 2029, five years after its first meeting. A general election then follows under the statutory 25-working-day election timetable, producing a latest polling date of Thursday 16 August 2029. Countdown to freedom…
Team Burnham is mulling major changes to governance and taxation, including:
He will struggle to implement even the beginning of the so-called ‘biggest council house building programme since the post-war period.’ A huge number of councils are in no place to manage the construction of properties compared even to the 1980s. There is a lack of expertise across the whole sector. Labour is currently falling massively behind on its own 2024 manifesto housebuilding targets – a manifesto Burnham is signed up to…
Burnham does not have enough time to get even a small number of these changes across the line – he also has no mandate. The prospect of dissolving parliament earlier than 9 July 2029 looms…
Statement by Paul Dacre, Editor-in-Chief of Associated Newspapers Limited, following Harry’s loss in court today:
“Prince Harry wrote a sad book which boasted about his killing of 25 Taliban, his drug-taking and, in cringe-making detail, how he lost his virginity. There isn’t a laundry in the cosmos big enough to wash all the dirty linen he has aired about his own family. For him, to complain about HIS privacy being invaded takes, not just the biscuit, but the whole tin. Poor Harry. I feel sorry for the way a confused and angry young man has been drawn into this case. The bitter irony is that his mother, Diana, liked the Mail. We were her paper. We took her side in her acrimonious break up with Charles. She and I would speak and meet. The Mail’s superb royal reporter was her friend and confidante. The truth is that this trumped-up action – which has cost well over £50 million and wasted a huge amount of valuable court time – should never have been brought to trial. That it did, raises profoundly disturbing questions about the conduct of elements of the legal profession. Today’s verdict is not just a victory for Associated’s magnificent journalists – several of whom have had a terrible toll imposed on their health and lives – but a free press generally. Make no mistake. This was a conspiracy, supported by Hacked Off, to destroy a paper. Financed by the orgy-loving, racist Max Mosley and involving the actor Hugh Grant, it was also a sinister bid to resuscitate Leveson Two and impose statutory regulation on the press which, even now, is rearing its ugly head in Labour’s Media Green Paper.”