Author: James Carter

Business confidence in hiring has fallen to its lowest point in 15 years as the combined pressures of the Middle East conflict and political turmoil within the Labour government push employers toward temporary contracts and away from permanent recruitment, new figures show. Permanent staff hiring fell at its sharpest pace in ten months in May, according to a closely watched survey by accountants KPMG and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation — with employers responding to the uncertainty by turning to temporary workers instead, who saw a sharp rise in demand. KPMG boss Jon Holt said the figures reflected a growing…

Oil prices surged toward $100 a barrel on Monday after Israel defied Donald Trump’s calls for restraint and launched revenge strikes on Iranian military targets — including a petrochemical plant — in the most dangerous escalation of the Middle East conflict since a ceasefire was brokered in April. Brent crude futures jumped $3.20, or 3.39 per cent, to $96.24 a barrel just after 4.30am UK time on Monday 8 June, according to the Express, while US crude futures rose $2.87, or 3.17 per cent, to $93.41 per barrel. The price surge erased Friday’s losses, which had come on hopes of…

Labour left 98 per cent of victims in the dark when 179 criminals were mistakenly released from prison, new data has revealed — with only three people notified despite the Justice Secretary’s “unequivocal apology” over the scandal, which critics say was “not worth the paper it was written on.” The figures, obtained by the Conservatives under Freedom of Information laws, show that of the 179 cases of inmates freed in error between April last year and March, just three victims were told about the blunder. Of the 14 victims who were part of the Probation Service’s Victim Contact Scheme —…

Senior Democrats are standing by scandal-plagued US Senate candidate Graham Platner despite a string of allegations of emotional abuse, physical intimidation and sexting — with one ally claiming the behaviour “didn’t come as a surprise to a lot of the folks in Maine.” California Congressman Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat who campaigned alongside Platner in Maine on Friday despite the mounting controversy, defended his decision to continue backing him in an appearance on CBS Face the Nation on Sunday. He acknowledged the allegations were serious while stopping short of withdrawing support. “His actions were misogynistic, they were shameful, they were…

Zack Polanski, the Jewish leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, has sparked fierce controversy after being photographed wearing a “Free Marwan Barghouti” T-shirt during celebrations of the party’s record-breaking local election results — with Jewish and pro-Israel voices condemning the move as glorifying terrorism while Polanski doubled down defiantly on social media. The photographs surfaced on Sunday evening as the Greens celebrated their most successful local election performance in the party’s history, having won hundreds of new council seats, taken control of several councils including Norwich, Hastings and parts of London, and secured the party’s first-ever elected…

The Bank of England decided to remove Winston Churchill, Alan Turing and Jane Austen from British banknotes after commissioned research told officials the figures were “elitist and divisive” — with one focus group participant even describing the celebrated Bletchley Park codebreaker as “imperialistic,” newly obtained documents reveal. A market research study conducted by Savanta in October 2025, reported by The Telegraph, gathered views from 119 focus group participants and concluded that depicting historical figures on currency was “potentially divisive, elitist and disconnected from their own experiences.” Researchers advised the Bank that such portraits presented “a backward-looking vision of the UK…

David Lammy has refused to take the knee for Henry Nowak, the teenager stabbed to death in Southampton after his killer falsely accused him of racism — in comments that have exposed a striking contradiction with his own passionate defence of the same gesture when it was adopted in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. Asked directly on LBC’s Nick Ferrari programme on Thursday whether he would take the knee for Henry Nowak, the Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary declined, saying the 18-year-old’s family wanted “genuine common sense policing and a reduction in knife crime” rather…

David Lammy has dismissed a formal intervention from the Trump administration over Henry Nowak’s murder as a “caricature” of British policing — as the Liberal Democrats called on Sir Keir Starmer to summon the US ambassador over what they described as “flagrant foreign interference.” The US State Department posted on X late on Thursday: “Ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilizational decline. They must be rejected across the West. The United States sends our condolences to the family of Henry Nowak and the people of the United Kingdom at this troubling time.” The post marked a significant…

Yvette Cooper has been accused of lacking the backbone to confront China over its human rights record, support for Russia and the imprisonment of British citizen Jimmy Lai — as the Foreign Secretary arrived in Beijing for Labour’s latest diplomatic push to warm relations with the world’s second-largest economy. Cooper’s visit, her first to China as Foreign Secretary, follows Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s own trip to Beijing in January and a three-day visit by Chancellor Rachel Reeves last year — a pattern of engagement that critics have repeatedly condemned given China’s backing for Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, its…

A pioneering underground eco-home that featured on Grand Designs and became England’s first certified Passivhaus property has gone on sale for £3.25 million — with the extraordinary selling point that its running costs amount to little more than £300 a year in logs and the occasional filter replacement. Underhill House in the Cotswolds was built by architect couple Helen and Chris Seymour-Smith between 2008 and 2010, after they devised an audacious solution to appease sceptical planning officials in the protected countryside on the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire borders: restore a 300-year-old Cotswold stone barn on the site and hide the family…