Nick Thomas-Symonds says party would not reduce number of hours of government-funded childcare in England

Labour would keep the government’s expanded childcare hours, a shadow minister has insisted, after suggestions the party would review the scheme.

Nick Thomas-Symonds said Labour would not reduce the number of hours of government-funded childcare that working parents would be entitled to in England.

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Concerns grow over how new legislation will be policed and how it might affect freedom of speech

Enforcing Scotland’s new Hate Crime Act will “certainly” reduce public trust in the police, according to the general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation.

David Kennedy told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the law, which came into force on Monday and requires officers to assess “emotive” subjects such as online misgendering, “will cause havoc with trust in police in Scotland, it certainly will reduce that”,

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Fantasies about British exceptionalism have brought the UK to the brink of collapse. We need a new, realistic vision

Britain’s economic and social challenges are now so monumental that they require a response on a transformational scale. Addressing a failing capitalism and a society grossly disfigured by inequality and collapsing public services rests, above all, on a repudiation of the laissez-faire economics of the past 45 years. But the most serious failure of Conservatism is the despair it has created about Britain’s future. Without a feasible, inspiring vision of our future, we cannot reach first base – a revival of sustained growth.

The prerequisite for growth is investment that drives productivity. That is a truism. Britain does not invest sufficiently. But no business invests in a wider economic, social and political vacuum. Nor, indeed, does government. The heart of the right’s failure is that it has no plausible story to fill this gaping vacuum. The right, with its vision of Britain’s exceptionalism, rooted in lost 19th-century glories of free trade, empire and victory in two world wars, is grotesquely out of kilter with what Britain now is, how contemporary capitalism works and what vision might inspire most of our entrepreneurs and people.

Will Hutton writes for the Observer and is co-chair of the Purposeful Company

This Time No Mistakes by Will Hutton is published by Head of Zeus (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

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Exclusive: Visas created hastily to solve labour shortages expose people to ‘hyper-precarity’ and exploitation

Visas created hastily to solve labour shortages as a result of Brexit have put workers at greater risk of modern slavery and exploitation, research has found.

Strict conditions on agricultural and care visas created after Britain left the EU expose workers to “hyper-precarity” and increase their vulnerability to exploitation, a study by a coalition of leading universities and charities has concluded. Since Brexit, farm workers and care home workers have had a route to Britain on time-limited visas with stringent conditions.

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Five years after payment scheme launched, a former soldier says delays mean plan should be run independently

A former soldier who was a victim of the Windrush scandal has said he fears the government is “waiting for us to die off” before it pays compensation.

Conroy Downie, 67, and his daughter Katie Wilson-Downie have helped advise thousands of people affected by the Windrush scandal and have called for the compensation scheme to be run independently instead of by the Home Office.

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Labour says places have fallen by almost 40,000 since the Tories came to power in 2010, forcing parents to leave the workforce

Childcare places in England have fallen by nearly 40,000 since the Tories came to power in 2010, Labour research has found.

This includes a drop of 1,000 places between March and December last year, at a time when demand was anticipated to rise before new entitlements became available.

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Analysis suggests wealthiest would save millions and Sunak’s own family could benefit to tune of £250m

Conservative plans to abolish non-dom status are riddled with loopholes worth hundreds of millions of pounds for the wealthiest people in the country, Labour has claimed.

Analysis by the party found that the policy, announced by Jeremy Hunt in this month’s budget, could theoretically see Rishi Sunak’s family benefit from tax savings of nearly £250m.

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The inequalities that have grown up around housing are glaring. Abolishing no-fault evictions should be just the start

More than four years ago, the 2019 Conservative manifesto pledged to abolish no-fault evictions in England, in an effort to make tenancies more secure and remove the right of private landlords to evict people from their homes at will. In the past few years, a huge campaigning effort went into ensuring that this commitment would be kept. Last week, it became clear that it wouldn’t be. Jacob Young, a minister in Michael Gove’s levelling up department, revealed in a letter to Tory MPs that the government plans to amend the bill now making its way through parliament. The promised ban on no-fault evictions (also known as section 21 notices) will not be enacted until “the courts are ready” – at some unspecified future date.

This capitulation to landlords, dressed up as a reasonable compromise, is in reality a disgraceful betrayal. The renters reform bill has cross-party support. Ministers would have had no difficulty getting it through the House of Commons with the evictions ban intact – even if some of their own MPs, including a group involved in lobbying to water down the bill who are themselves landlords , had rebelled. Polling shows that the public recognises the severity of Britain’s housing affordability crisis , and particularly its impact on younger people’s lives. Putting the interests of landlords before those of renters is a political choice.

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Sir Keir Starmer is not a believer, but he is right to recognise the value of religious organisations’ commitment to the common good

Alastair Campbell never intended his famous assertion, “We don’t do God” to be taken as gospel for the Labour party. Though his intervention during a 2003 interview with Tony Blair has often been interpreted as a kind of secular edict, Mr Campbell has expressed personal sympathy for a “pro-faith atheist” position. As he seeks potential allies and partners to carry out his missions for national renewal, Sir Keir Starmer seems to be staking out a similar kind of territory.

Sir Keir, who has described himself as “loosely” from an Anglican background, is not religious. But he is rightly alive to what faith groups can offer to a future government committed to a different, more community-based way of doing politics. In a speech on civil society earlier this year, he pledged that Labour would work closely with faith leaders, praising their role in countering the “‘in it for yourself’ culture of the Conservatives”. Twenty Labour MPs have been appointed as “faith champions”, tasked with building on relationships between local authorities and religious groups which were forged during the pandemic and the cost of living crisis. Plans are also in train to link up government departments with faith and civil society leaders if Labour wins power.

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