Politics

Good news is hard to come by on ITV's Tyne Tees channel. As industry is drained from the region the negative repercussions on communities in the area is there for all to see. Twenty-five years on from the closure of the last deep pit on the Durham coalfield many provincial towns have become shadows of their former selves, with more than half of the shops on Easington high street now closed. Cushioning a short film on the effects of deindustrialisation on...

Boris Johnson has decided he wants his own Brexit plane he can fly around the world to drum up new business. He feels the PM jet is never free to borrow and is a bit of a boring grey colour. Mr Johnson's comments come during his five-day tour of Latin America, hoping to drum up some post-brexit business Johnson said: “The taxpayers won’t want us to have some luxurious new plane, but I certainly think it’s striking that we don’t...

LBC’s James O’Brien has accused the government of creating a hostile environment for people who rely on welfare, just as they have done for immigrants. A welfare study today slammed the Tories’ welfare sanctions as disproportionately causing poverty and suffering, while failing to prove efficient at getting people into work. The study of welfare conditionality discovered that not only did the threat of sanctions, or the actual introduction of benefit cuts not help people get into work. It was more...

You might well think these comments have been made by any Labour party supporter, and probably a lot more besides, however in this case it was a senior Tory. Ruth Davidson, the Conservative leader in Scotland, has warned her own party that they need to, echoing the words of the ghost of PMs past, “chillax.” On Monday Ms Davidson said "Sometimes as Tories we just look a bit dour." "We look a bit joyless - is that fair? A bit...

GMB, Britain’s general union, has criticised the Government’s approach to Brexit after Mark Carney told MPs that the vote to leave the EU referendum has so far cost each UK household £900. The governor of the Bank of England made his remarks while giving evidence of a committee of MPs, stating his belief that the effects of the EU referendum in June 2016 had lowered the UK's GDP by 2%. Carney said: “If you look at where the economy is...

The M20 could be turned into a giant lorry park under proposals slipped out in a written parliamentary statement on “road haulage”. With customs delayed expected following Britain's exit from the European Union ministers are putting together contingency plans for delays and stoppages of cargo into and from the continent. Operation Stack, which has been used dozens of time when disruption has hit Channel ports, could become a mainstay solution in the South East of England, with a no-deal likely...

Mark Carney, governor of the bank of England has indicated that Brexit has already hit the UK economy and it hasn’t even happened yet. Carney said that Brexit has taken two per cent off the size of the economy in the UK and has left each household £900 worse off. He described this amount as “a lot of money.” The Bank of England boss has compared forecasts from before the referendum, assuming that remain had won the national vote. Carney...

More US schoolchildren have died this year than members of the country's military, The Washington Post has revealed. Following the deadly shooting in Houston on Friday new figures show that classrooms in the US are more dangerous than battlegrounds as the country comes to grips with a spiralling gun crisis. Ten children were killed at Santa Fe High School last week, bringing the total number of deaths to almost 30. A total of 22 school shootings have occurred so far this...

John Bercow is just 6/4 to step down as Speaker of the House of Commons this year and now priced at 16/1 to follow Ed Balls’ lead and switch politics for pirouettes by signing up for Strictly Come Dancing. Under fire for comments condemned as “completely unacceptable” by government ministers, Bercow’s future as speaker is on very thin ice and he could be looking for a new job by the time Parliament sits after their summer break in September. Bercow...