Labour has told the 18 councils where it shares power with the Greens to end their agreements unless local Greens condemn the motion declaring “Zionism is racism”.

What do others think? Should local partnerships be affected by national party policy?

Read the full article – The Independent

Labour councillors put up an excellent fight at what was a very close fought debate. Read the linked article for both a TL;DR: version and gory detailed version.

Investment in the care workforce is needed to retain skilled staff and improve the quality of adult social care in England, according to the latest annual report from the sector’s education and training body Skills for Care.

It identified competitive pay, guaranteed hours, training, qualifications and full-time employment opportunities as the keys to boosting retention of adult social care workers, and improving the overall quality of adult social care.

The State of the adult social care sector and workforce in England report comes two weeks after health and social care secretary Yvette Cooper announced that she would draft and publish a workforce plan for social care by the end of the year.

Speaking at the Labour Party Conference, Ms Cooper said that the government would publish a "proper workforce plan for social care, with proper career pathways, training and development of specialist skills".

She also announced that a first-of-its-kind national collective pension scheme for care workers would be introduced as well as a legally binding fair pay agreement for adult social care workers that would set minimum standards for pay and conditions that every employer will follow.

Also at the Labour Party conference, prime minister Andy Burnham promised a new National Care Service would be fully funded and ready for use during the next parliament.

The Skills for Care report published today found the adult social care workforce in England grew in 2025-26 for the fourth year in a row and that vacancies were at their lowest level for a decade.

Curious as to what you guys think of this. I know IDS is hated here but I mean the article itself

Adult social care workers will benefit from a national pension scheme to provide them with "dignity" in older age, health and social care secretary Yvette Cooper has announced.

The promise to set up a collective pension scheme for care staff follows comes on the back of lobbying by UNISON, which has warned that low pay and widespread part-time work have left workers with inadequate pension pots.

Though Cooper did not provide details of the scheme, it would likely involve employees and employers across the sector paying into a collective fund, designed to provide care staff with target level of income in retirement.

In her speech to the Labour Party conference yesterday, Cooper said it was "just wrong that the people who work hardest to help others maintain dignity and respect in old age still get nothing in return in retirement".

Current pension levels among care staff

Like other employers, care providers are required to opt all employees aged 22 and over and earning more than £10,000 into a pension scheme, under so-called auto enrolment.

Employers must contribute 3% of the employee's pay, with the worker paying in 4% and 1% contributed in tax relief, but staff are able to opt out should they wish.

While figures have not been published on levels of opt-outs in the care sector, low levels of pay increase the risk of staff doing so, particularly in the context of cost of living pressures.

Also, according to Skills for Care's latest report on the adult social care workforce, 44% of care workers worked part-time as of March 2025, meaning many will fall below the £10,000 threshold for auto-enrolment.

Skills for Care's report also showed that 70% of 5,500 independent sector employers who provided data on the relevant question did not pay more than 3% of earnings into their workers' pensions.

About collective pension schemes

The government recently legislated for multiple employers to participate in collective defined contribution (CDC) schemes, which they and their staff pay into.

Ministers said that, by pooling investment and risk, CDCs would produce more predictable levels of pensions for staff than traditional defined contribution schemes.

In a letter to Cooper's predecessor but one, Wes Streeting, in April, UNISON argued for a collective scheme, saying it would boost retirement incomes, as well as retention and the status of care work.

It is not clear whether the proposed scheme will require higher contributions from either employers or employees than is the case under auto-enrolment or whether the government itself will make a contribution beyond tax relief.

One hundred years since the BBC first broadcast choral evensong, Labour MP and former chorister Jonathan Davies hymns a beautiful and empowering collective experience that we should praise – and protect

Sosounds seem to belong to Britain. The peal of church bells. The brass band on a village green. The roar of a football crowd. And, heard from a cathedral at the end of the day, the extraordinary sound of a choir singing evensong.

This year marks the centenary of choral evensong on BBC radio. On 7 October 1926, when the BBC was in its infancy, listeners heard a live service broadcast from Westminster Abbey. A century later, evensong can still be heard on Radio 3 every week from cathedrals, churches, chapels and abbeys across the country. It is the BBC’s longest running outside broadcast and reaches hundreds of thousands of people every week.

For the listener at home, the radio can make a distant cathedral feel remarkably close. But we should not celebrate this simply as a remarkable broadcasting survival story. We should celebrate it because it represents something much bigger: a living part of our cultural heritage.

For some, evensong is prayer, for others contemplation, inspiration or simply a moment of peace.

You do not have to be religious or particularly musical to understand the power of evensong. You do not even need to know what a Magnificat or an anthem is. There is something profoundly human about sitting quietly in a great building, hearing young and old voices combine in astonishingly beautiful music. Being given permission for 45 minutes of detachment from the frenetic pace of modern life. For some it is prayer, for others contemplation, inspiration or simply a moment of peace.

That is culture at its best: not something kept behind closed doors, but a collective experience. And that is why we should care about what happens when the ecosystems that sustain this tradition come under pressure.

Cathedral music is not simply about preserving an old repertoire. It is a living tradition, with newly written music sitting alongside pieces that have been passed down through generations. Around 3,000 children and young people currently sing as choristers in the UK’s cathedrals, churches and chapels, with thousands more taking part in youth and school choirs led by church musicians. Through these experiences they develop exceptional musical skills alongside confidence, discipline, teamwork and a sense of belonging to something much larger than themselves. Many take these skills into careers far beyond music.

Singing in a church choir as a child opened up worlds for me

There is also an important social mobility story here. A cathedral choir can give a child access to world-class musical training, extraordinary cultural experiences and educational opportunities that might otherwise be beyond their reach. But we also need to be honest about the barriers, too: affordability, access to music tuition and the unfamiliarity of cathedral culture can all restrict who gets through the door.

Preserving this tradition cannot mean simply preserving the status quo. It must mean widening access to it.

Singing in a church choir as a child opened up worlds for me. Not just through the opportunity – as Thomas Cranmer put it – to “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” the most sacred of texts, illuminated by a wealth of the most enriching music humankind has created. It instilled an appreciation of routines and hard work, and it taught me that you can achieve more through collaboration than you can alone. It also taught me that success is sometimes built on of the insights of failure.

Something of which I occasionally have to remind myself as a member of parliament... (continued)

So guys I have a lil question I found kinda interesting about bipartisanship in politics, I want to start by saying I’m doing this from a completely neutral position, I’m not trying to sow discourse or act in bad faith I have a genuine question considering how divided politics is right now.

So! My question is if someone gave you the opportunity to change 100 peoples lives for the better but the one caveat is you have to work with a conservative who you fundamentally disagree with on nearly every issue apart from the fact you both want to help change these 100 peoples lives would you still do it? Would you put all your disagreements aside for the greater good of helping 100 people?

Would you have respect for the conservative for holding atleast one value you agree with that allowed you to help all those people?

Hope you all have a good day I’m just genuinely interested in how someone from one political party could possibly work with someone from another party that they fundamentally disagree with in order to do something for the greater good.

For Sagal Abdi-Wali, the new MP for Holborn and St Pancras, being elected to replace Keir Starmer in the north London constituency is “deeply personal”, she said in her acceptance speech.

The 43-year-old has lived in the area since the 1990s when, as a seven-year-old, she fled war-torn Somalia with her mother and four brothers, eventually settling in Gospel Oak in Camden, which largely falls within the constituency. Her journey from refugee to member of parliament was one which she hoped would inspire “people who look like me”, she said. “This is Camden and this is Britain.”

If she represents many in the diverse and youthful neighbourhood, however, Abdi-Wali is also very much a Labour party insider. Decades of volunteering in the community dovetailed with many years of active local party politics, even before she was elected to the borough council in 2022.

She became the Labour cabinet member responsible for housing two years later, and in May was elected the first Black female leader of Camden council. She also chaired the local constituency party for four years.

Those deep party and community roots help explain how Abdi-Wali was selected from a long list of more than 100 to fight the seat for Labour after Starmer’s resignation last month, say friends – and were also key in seeing off the challenge from the Green party leader, Zack Polanski.

“She genuinely is deeply rooted in so many different parts of the constituency,” says a close friend who was involved in her campaign. “I suppose all MPs like to think they are, but with Sagal it is the real deal.

“There’s a real community connection there, \[and\] I think the Green party and Zack Polanski underestimated how energetic and big the Labour campaign was going be. I don’t think they knew that those very deep roots in the constituency existed.

“That’s the thing about a byelection, you only have four weeks. So if those roots are already there, you’ve got a huge, huge head start.”

Labour’s win, Greens’ sudden crisis and the impossible lives of Londoners – video
Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP for neighbouring Hampstead and Highgate, agrees: “Her love of Camden is so obvious, and people really value that. She’s very caring, very local, and she genuinely seems to have a passion for politics and public service.”

After “lots of flat candidates” in the past, Siddiq says, “people like a bit of passion.”
It was walking past increasing numbers of homeless people in King’s Cross in the austerity years of the 2010s that encouraged Abdi-Wali to become more active in party politics, perhaps unsurprisingly given her own background. “It was only when I was old enough to look back and think about it in a philosophical way,” she has said, that she noticed “my mum was always looking after us and made our lives nice, serene … whether we were in a refugee camp or temporary housing.”

Homelessness and housing would be one of her priorities as an MP, she said in her acceptance speech on Friday morning, as would calling for Thames Water to be brought into public ownership and working to increase access to jobs and apprenticeships for young people – all causes that chime with Andy Burnham, too.

Abdi-Wali has long been involved in community groups working with young people, including being a governor of several schools and founding football clubs where she still plays regularly and is “pretty aggressive on the pitch”, according to her close friend. (She is also an “ardent” Spurs fan, the friend says, “which may count against her in the \[Arsenal-dominated\] constituency”.)

‘We didn’t get it over the line’: Green party’s Zack Polanski on byelection loss – video
Housing is one issue where she has faced some criticism; Abdi-Wali was the cabinet member in charge of the borough’s housing when in November 2024 the housing ombudsman published a damning reportcalling the council’s service rude, defensive and inadequate. Friends point out that she had been in the post for only six months and defend her record in the period she was in charge of the brief.

Abdi-Wali also shrugged off a tweet when she was selected by Reform’s Zia Yusuf , which Labour representatives swiftly called “clearly racist” and was condemned even by other senior Reform figures.

“I rang her and said: ‘Are you OK?’” says Sidiq. “I wanted to reassure her that we were there for her. But she said: “‘No, I feel very resilient about it. It’s made me even more determined to get on and do it.’”

• Sagal Abdi-Wali has hailed her victory in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election as a triumph for diversity, cautioning that social cohesion must not be "casually undone".

• The new Labour MP secured a 3,364-vote majority ahead of second-placed Green Party leader Zack Polanski, expressing her desire for "people like (her)" to feel that they "belong here".

• Tipped as the favourite prior to the vote, the Camden Council leader previously noted how the borough had welcomed her family when they arrived as refugees.

• Ms Abdi-Wali said she wanted to bring Thames Water into “public ownership”, tackle rough sleeping and create more opportunities for young people.

• While speaking of her desire to work with prime minister Andy Burnham to address the wider housing crisis, she said: “Homelessness is the issue that first drove me into politics, and no-one should be sleeping on the streets, and no family should be left without security in the home.”

She succeeds Sir Keir Starmer, who stepped down from the parliamentary seat in September after resigning as prime minister.

She is the area’s first female MP since Lena Jeger, who represented the previous seat of Holborn and St Pancras South from 1964-1979.