Question: When is a child not a child in the eyes of the Labour Party?
Answer: When Sir Keir Starmer thinks there might be votes in it.
Labour’s manifesto committed to giving 16 and 17-year-olds the vote supposedly to ‘increase the engagement of young people in our vibrant democracy.
This will bring UK-wide elections in line with Scotland and Wales and will usher in the biggest change to UK democracy in a generation’.
Yet it seems the party that has been unable to define a ‘woman’ is having a similar problem with deciding whether or not teenagers are responsible adults. In response to a recent parliamentary question, Home Office minister Sarah Jones admitted last month: ‘This Government has no plans to lower the legal age for purchasing alcohol from 18 in England and Wales. ‘This is consistent with the Licensing Act 2003 objective of protecting children from harm.’
Labour’s manifesto committed to giving 16 and 17-year-olds the vote supposedly to ‘increase the engagement of young people in our vibrant democracy
Ah-ha! So 16 and 17-year-olds are children, not ‘young people’, after all. Until, that is, Labour wants to buy their votes.
n Is nothing sacred anymore? Shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel says Sir Keir Starmer is so desperate to unpick Brexit, ‘he’s now looking to rename British marmalade to align with the EU’. When Labour negotiates, Britain loses big time.
As a child in Surrey, Dame Sarah Mullally, the newly installed first woman Archbishop of Canterbury, loved to play football.
But, by all accounts, she played the local boys’ shins more than the ball. It’s a practice which might stand her in good stead in the cloisters of the Church of England.
Dame Sarah Mullally, the newly installed first woman Archbishop of Canterbury
A poll has shown most Britons think Morgan McSweeney faked the theft of his phone to hide messages between him and Peter Mandelson. Sir Vernon Bogdanor, former don at Oxford University, is rather more generous: ‘There were students who explained [that] a gust of wind had blown [their] essay into the Thames. I always believed them.’
Burly Communications Workers Union boss Dave Ward and his fellow bruiser Martin Walsh turned up at the trade select committee last month with natty little manbags. Union leaders of the 1970s never carried anything more than a grudge.
Ex-Tory minister Lord Redwood says Labour has taken us all for April Fools. ‘Surely we are not banning our own oil and gas so we import… giving away Chagos with a dowry… paying French police to watch the gangs make money?’
HMS Dragon set sail to defend Cyprus last month. Yet when she finally arrived, one of her iconic red emblems was missing. I’m told, such was the panic to get her ready within six days, workers didn’t have time to restore the dragon to the starboard side. That’s the ‘big bad Royal Navy’ for you, as US war secretary Pete Hegseth mocked last week.
Margaret Thatcher would not have been surprised to hear a new musical, The Iron Lady Sings, is coming to London. After seeing Evita a year before she became PM, she told speechwriter Ronnie Millar: ‘If the Peronists can do that… then we should provide quite good material for an opera called ‘Margaret’.’ Four decades later, she’s been proved correct. Again.
Margaret Thatcher would not have been surprised to hear a new musical, The Iron Lady Sings, is coming to London
Armed Met police officers tasked with protecting Sadiq Khan mistakenly left a bag of guns outside his home last week.
As Mayor of London, his predecessor Boris Johnson was one of the country’s most recognisable politicians. Yet he insisted on travelling around the capital on his bicycle or on public transport with no security.
Khan clearly thinks more of himself. Former London Labour MP Baroness Hoey wrote on X: ‘Absolutely no need for such an expensive security team. Signs of grandeur rather than necessity!’
