Herts politicians talk to the BBC about their first year as MPs
'The absolute pleasure of my life'
David Taylor won the Hemel Hempstead seat from the Conservatives to become its first Labour MP since 2005.A year on he said it had been "the absolute privilege of my life" to represent an area where his grandparents had moved to after World War Two.He said it had been "really difficult" as a first-time MP as "you have the party machine behind you, but when you get elected you are on your own".He told the BBC one of the highlights of his first year had been a visit to Ukraine in March to deliver supplies and equipment and meet ministers and soldiers.As well as making concessions to the welfare bill, the government made a U-turn on winter fuel payments, but Taylor insisted his party was "heading in the right direction".He said he was "having to accept that politics was much more volatile than it had ever been" but added he thought "we had ended up with a better bill" as a result.He said the economy "was heading in the right direction and NHS waiting lists were coming down" but that Labour were "under a huge amount of pressure in terms of the broken country we had inherited from the Conservatives".
'Like having two different jobs'
Lewis Cocking retained Broxbourne for the Conservatives having replaced Sir Charles Walker after 19 years.Cocking said being an MP was "a bit like having two different jobs" as "you were in a Westminster bubble" in Parliament, but it was "completely different speaking to people on the streets and in surgeries".One of his election priorities had been to get more banking hubs in his constituency and he told the BBC he had put that request to Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner at Prime Minister's Questions in November.He said he "didn't really have a worst moment" since being elected, but admitted it was "long hours and hard work". He added: "I chose to do it and am really privileged to be able to do it and want to give 110% every day."Having lost power after 14 years, Cocking admitted the Conservatives had "come from a very bad place" where voters "told us loud and clear they did not want us in office any more".However, he said that "lots of people contact me now and say this is not the change they wanted".He added the party were now "looking at where it went wrong and what policies to implement to win back the trust of the British people".
'It has been a mad journey'
Victoria Collins won the Harpenden and Berkhamsted seat for the Liberal Democrats and described it as "a mad journey" since, as she dealt with the challenge of representing a brand new constituency.She said there was "a lot of work to do to build infrastructure to run the seat and find out what kind of MP I wanted to be".An election pledge for Collins had been to "stop sewage dumping in precious chalk streams and rivers" and she said "on the first day in Parliament that she had written to Thames Water about the Markyate sewage works" and added she had "not stopped campaigning on that".She admitted that "quite frankly we are still not where we want to be" and said that in March she wrote to the Environment Agency again but had not got a response.However she told the BBC a month later she had raised the issue in Parliament and "very shortly after" received a reply from the agency.She felt the last year had proven the Lib Dems were "being a real constructive opposition, whether it was pushing on social care, or holding the government to account on its international stance on defence".
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The Independent
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- The Independent
From primary challenges to stranded astronauts: How Elon Musk can hurt Donald Trump
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Through his vast wealth, his business empire, and his ability to martial a zealous online fanbase, he has plenty of ways to make life difficult for his erstwhile "buddy". So if the world's richest person really wants this fight, what punches could he throw? A money hose for Trump's opponents The first and most obvious weapon in Musk's arsenal is his vast wealth: an estimated $405 billion, according to Forbes. In the 2024 election, Musk plowed $295 million into supporting Republican candidates, chiefly Trump himself. That's a huge amount in American politics, but it's chump change for today's mega-rich. For context, across the whole of 2023 and 2024, the total amount of money raised by all presidential candidates was only $2 billion, according to the Federal Election Commission. Congressional candidates raised $3.8 billion, while PACs raised a more respectable $15.7 billion. 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Musk's cult of personality rivals Trump's own Musk's overall popularity may have dropped dramatically since the election. But his pull with Republican voters specifically was still very high as of early June. That's testament to his ability to build and maintain a fanatical fanbase. Like Trump, he has a knack for inspiring loyalty and whipping up his supporters against new targets, as well as a keen instinct for controversy. And also like Trump, he doesn't need to be popular with all Americans to cause trouble for his enemies. He only needs enough dedicated partisans on his side. 'Elon has wooed enough of Trump's supporters to be an actual threat politically,' Musk's old friend Philip Low told Politico. "[Trump] doesn't realize the battle that he has on his hands." Musk's ownership of X, formerly Twitter, will help him there. Having already turned the social network into a hub of the MAGA media universe — and reportedly tweaked its algorithms in favor of his own posts — he now has enormous control over the conservative information stream. Given how many Americans now essentially live in a parallel media universe, maintained by fake news entrepreneurs and skewed social media algorithms, that gives him influence over what Trump's base even believes to be reality. Granted, Trump remains the unquestioned ruler of the GOP. And when polls pit Musk against Trump directly, Republican voters largely side with the king. Yet Musk's combination of financial and social capital makes him a powerful ally to anyone within the party hoping to chart their own course. From fiscal hawks opposed to Trump's spending spree to centrists with one eye on their purple state majority, there are plenty of people in Congress who won't always back Trump 100 percent. 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Telegraph
an hour ago
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Britain's new Islamo-Leftist alliance won't last, but it might kill Labour first
Is there space for a new party on the Left, bringing together pro-Gaza activists, radical socialists and possibly Greens? Labour strategists are terrified by the prospect. They know that the only thing they have going for them is the split between the Conservatives and Reform. An equivalent split on the Left would remove that advantage. If you want to understand why Labour caved in so expensively to its rebels on benefits reform, look no further. The party was not prepared to take the Whip away from any more MPs for fear of pushing them into a Corbynite bloc. Luckily for Labour, the Leftist insurgency has so far been more gauche than sinister. Zarah Sultana, the MP for Coventry South who lost the Labour Whip last year, announced in a post on X late on Thursday night that she and Jeremy Corbyn were forming a new party, only for the Absolute Boy to mutter grumpily that he had agreed to no such thing. 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Most egregious of the Useful Idiots – perhaps Useless Idiot would be more accurate in his case – was Michel Foucault, the archetype of a Left-wing French intellectual, down to his polo-necks and cigarettes, a man whose anti-colonialism was so ferocious that he has escaped cancellation despite the revelation that he paid Arab boys as young as nine for sex. Foucault's dislike of organised religion did not prevent him praising the 'political spirituality' of the mullahs. The Iranian Revolution marked the birth of what the French call 'Islamo-gauchisme'. The ayatollahs had nothing in common with the Left beyond their hatred of monarchy. But they were anti-Western and, in the climate of the Cold War, that was what counted. Iran's Communists formed a tactical alliance with the ayatollahs, imagining that they would emerge as senior partners. Instead, they found themselves proscribed, arrested, tortured and, in 1988, shot in batches. It was an early lesson in where the balance of power lies in these Red-Green alliances. Socialism can exert a quasi-religious pull on its followers. But, alongside an actual religion, it gets squeezed. Which brings us back to Jezza and our opening question. Is there space for a new British party that brings together the various strands of the far-Left, fissiparous, cantankerous and envious as they are? Could the bearded Bolshevik unite conservative Islamists and revolutionary socialists around the one position which, for very different reasons, they share, namely hostility to the West in general and Israel in particular? On paper, the answer is no. The radical Left is already (to use a word Corbo likes) rammed. There is the Communist Party of Britain, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) and the Revolutionary Communist Party. There is the Socialist Party (England and Wales), the Socialist Party of Great Britain, the Socialist Workers' Party and the Socialist Equality Party. There's Left Unity and Transform and the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition and… oh, you get the picture. Then again, all this was just as true in 2015, when Corbyn, who had had dealings with most of these groups, swept to national prominence. Might the circumstances of that fevered, phantasmagoric year replicate themselves? It is still not easy to explain Corbyn's 2015 appeal. Similar candidates had contested previous Labour leadership contests: John McDonnell in 2007, Diane Abbott in 2010. Corbo himself had been an unnoticed MP for more than 30 years. Yet a series of factors somehow made the old boob a cult figure and, in 2017, came close to putting him in Downing Street. One of those factors was the radicalisation of the growing Muslim electorate. An extraordinary 85 per cent of British Muslims voted for Corbyn in 2017, and 86 per cent in 2019, though the Labour figure fell back in 2024 with the rise of the pro-Gaza independents. Sectarian voting is ugly, whomever it benefits. Those elections also saw massive swings to the Conservatives among Jewish and Hindu voters. Indeed, the sole Tory gain in 2024 was the strongly Hindu seat of Leicester East. The trouble is that confessional voting encourages complacency and corruption. When communities feel obliged to vote for 'their' team, candidates make less effort to convince on grounds of either ideology or competence. We are accustomed to the idea that British Muslims lean Left, but there is nothing inevitable about it. Many first-generation Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants were low-paid manual workers, often employed by the state. But that is less true today: British Muslims are likelier than the general population to be self-employed. In Muslim-majority democracies, the Left tends to be secular. The more religious parties, on top of being socially conservative, are the more prone to cut taxes and reduce regulations. This should not surprise us, for Islam is the only great religion founded by a businessman – a businessman who used his last sermon to preach the sanctity of property. Jesus said some hard things about wealth, and it was not until the sixteenth century that Christians stopped holding up poverty as their ideal. But Islam never had any problem with the idea that money, honestly acquired and put to good use, was a blessing. The Prophet, after all, had established tax-free markets and rejected calls for prices to be regulated. Across the Islamic wold, from Morocco to Malaysia, anti-Western feeling is stronger on the secular Left. But in Britain, Muslims were for a long time seen primarily, not as people who believed in the Oneness of God and the finality of the teachings of Mohammad, but as a non-white minority to be slotted into a victim role in an imagined hierarchy of oppression. That is why British Islamo-gauchism rests on anti-colonialism, and especially on the portrayal of Israel as the ultimate colonial oppressor. George Galloway understood earlier than most how the balance was shifting. Having once won awards from Stonewall, he began to describe himself as 'socially conservative', made sceptical noises about the portrayal of gay relationships and came out against abortion and euthanasia, while at the same time growing a beard, boasting that he did not drink and littering his speech with Islamic expressions. A challenger party that aims to get into double figures will, I suspect, lean more to Galloway's approach than Corbyn's. Which makes me wonder how many revolutionary socialists will go along with it. Let me suggest an early test. In Apsana Begum's Poplar and Limehouse constituency, 39 per cent of residents identify as Muslim and 24 per cent as Christian. If she is the next Labour MP to defect, it will tell us much about the likely orientation of the new party. The Red-Green coalition, which came together in the hideous mésalliance known as Stop the War, might hold for a bit longer. But, in time, omnicause Lefties will be squeezed out – though not, one assumes, thrown off buildings like their Iranian colleagues. The face of Britain is changing, and our parties are changing with it. Some Corbynites may live long enough to wonder, whether, in getting rid of something they disliked, they ended up enabling something worse.
