It started in Bristol’s Castle Park and this was fairly medieval – a big brawl between two sides drawn up to fight.
The counter-protesters were ready in their hundreds, chanting “fascists not welcome”.
On the other side a smaller crowd of right-wing protesters, some of whom had been at the football earlier, were shouting “we want our country back”.
Protests as they happened: Officers injured, looting and scores of arrests
The two groups were apart – until suddenly they weren’t and the running battle started.
The counter-protesters occupying the walls above, with the right-wingers on the mound below.
They started throwing bottles and then punches – my cameraman Chris and I both took beer bottles to our helmets.
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3:56
The violence in Bristol
The most violent part came as the protesters were pushed out of the park.
The police used dogs and horses to drive them back over the bridge. And this would be the ebb and flow for the evening.
Things were apparently calm until the two sides antagonised each other and the confrontation started again – all the way out of the city to a hotel housing asylum seekers.
That was – for now – the last face-to-face and things petered out, the final embers of a fiery night.
With both sides this determined, even if mismatched in numbers, it could easily be reignited.
Where riots broke out on Saturday
Saturday saw more disorder and violence across the UK, with far right and anti-immigrant groups seen attacking members of the public.
Here’s where riots and protests broke out on Saturday…
Hull – Four people have been arrested after three officers were hurt during a protest in which a group of people targeted a hotel which houses asylum seekers.
Bristol – Approximately 100 protesters were outnumbered around four to one by counter-protesters who chanted anti-fascist slogans, where missiles were thrown and police detained people.
Liverpool – Two police officers have been taken to hospital with a suspected broken jaw and broken nose. A wheelie bin was set on fire and youths threw objects at police. Six people, aged between 29 and 58, have been arrested on suspicion of offences. A Section 60 order is in place across Liverpool until 8.40pm on Sunday, giving officers extra powers to stop and search people suspected of carrying weapons or planning criminality.
Nottingham – At least three people were arrested as fighting broke out between opposing groups in the city’s Market Square. Chants of “England till I die” and “Tommy Robinson” were drowned out by boos from counter-protesters.
Belfast – Fireworks were thrown amid tense exchanges between an anti-Islamic group and an anti-racism rally in Belfast.
14 people arrested after ‘unacceptable’ scenes
Avon and Somerset Police said 14 people have been arrested following the disorder in Bristol.
Neighbourhood Chief Inspector Vicks Hayward-Melen said in a statement: “Some of the scenes we saw in Bristol tonight were completely unacceptable.
“We will always facilitate peaceful and lawful protests, however the behaviour from a minority of people tonight crossed the line.
“Fourteen people have been arrested for various offences and there will be further arrests over the coming days as we work to identify those responsible for this disorder.
“Make no mistake – they will face the full force of the law for their thuggery.
“I’d like to thank officers, including those who have come from other forces, for their commitment to protecting the public and also our partners for all their support.”
This week the leaders were selling their visions to voters as they launched their manifestos, and Sunak and Starmer went head to head in Grimbsy at the Sky News live election special The Battle For Number 10.
Watch their journeys in the latest week in our animated map below.
This campaign is being fought on new electoral boundaries, with many constituencies undergoing significant changes since 2019.
For the purposes of this analysis, we use notional results based on calculations by Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, Honorary Professors at the University of Exeter, which estimate the 2019 election seat results if they had taken place on the new constituency boundaries.
Manifesto week
We’re now more than halfway through the general election campaign and voting will soon be under way as postal ballots start to arrive through letterboxes.
In the final pushes to persuade the electorate, this week the parties have been releasing their manifestos.
The choices they’ve made about where to launch them reveal a narrative of safety.
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The prime minister chose Northamptonshire South in the East Midlands to launch the Conservative manifesto, where they have a 42.4% majority.
This is Andrea Leadsom’s old seat, one of the safer Conservative constituencies in that region. Boundaries have changed over time, but none of its predecessors have been Labour.
But it’s starting to look like there are no safe Tory seats. Recent Sky News/YouGov MRP polling suggests they could lose it, placing this seat as a “toss-up” Conservative hold, i.e. too close to call. If Labour won here, the required swing of 21.2 means they’d be well into decisive majority territory.
On Thursday Sir Keir Starmer chose Manchester Central as the launching pad for Labour’s manifesto. This is Lucy Powell’s seat and her majority is 44.4%.
This is home turf, and a rare venture into Labour heartlands for Starmer, who so far has only visited seats his party already hold three times in his 23 constituency tally – a safe choice for a safety first manifesto.
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Both location choices are key areas of support for the main parties. The Greens did the same in choosing to launch in Hove, the home of their first and only seat in the House of Commons, Brighton Pavilion.
Sir Ed Davey, who has been keeping everyone guessing throughout his campaign, made the curious choice of Hackney South & Shoreditch, a seat that has been Labour since its creation, represented by chair of The Public Accounts Committee Meg Hillier since 2005.
But he was soon back on the attack in Tory territory, following up with a visit to ride a rollercoaster at Thorpe Park in Surrey.
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4:47
Ultimate guide to the election
Where are the troops?
The prime minister has cut a lone figure on the campaign trail, rarely seen with senior members of his party or indeed visiting their seats.
As Sky News revealed earlier this week, his image and Conservative Party branding have often been absent on much of their campaign material. One man who did make an appearance on Andrea Jenkyns’ leaflets for Leeds South West was Reform leader Nigel Farage, and that’s indicative of Sunak’s problem.
In the first two weeks he was fighting on two fronts, but now it seems the new Reform leader has just opened a third. Sunak’s woeful week ended with a YouGov poll suggesting his party could have now even dropped into third place.
So which cabinet ministers in trouble have had a visit from Sunak to boost their chances?
This week, none of them, and since the start of the campaign, just two of them.
Those were Work an Pensions Secretary Mel Stride’s Devon Central in the first week of campaigning, and Michelle Donelan, Science, Innovation and Technology Secretary in Melksham & Devizes in the second week.
He has visited four other ministerial seats, all of which polling has suggested could be at risk. Those were Justin Tomlinson in Swindon North, Jacob Young in Redcar, David Johnston in Didcot & Wantage, and David Rutley in Macclesfield.
So far no visit from the PM to the likes of Penny Mordaunt, Johnny Mercer and Grant Shapps, all of whom are said to be in a close fight for their parliamentary careers.
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4:18
Highlights from Sky’s leaders’ event
Sir Keir Starmer has also spent little time in shadow cabinet constituencies, instead taking many of them on the road with him to seats he’s targeting from the Tories.
Some have also been deployed in key areas where they’re popular, like deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner who has been spending time in the north of England seats that Labour lost to the Conservatives in recent elections. She’s also been hitting “true blue” northern areas like Macclesfield and Altrincham & Sale West, which have never been represented by a Labour MP.
Battle is in the areas that take Labour to a large majority
At Sky’s event on Wednesday, Starmer let slip that he’s expecting to be in government.
A national uniform swing of 8.3 points from the Conservatives would make Labour the largest party, one of 12.7 would deliver them a majority. If Labour uses its vote more efficiently than in the past and gains extra seats in Scotland then it reduces the overall swing required.
So far, Starmer has visited nine target constituencies which require swings of less 8.3 points vs 11 which require a greater vote swing. One of those which he visited this this week was Redcar, where Sunak went last week.
Labour’s candidate Anna Turley is trying to win it back after losing to the Conservatives in 2019. Last week we outlined its importance for each party’s campaign.
He has only visited five places where the swing required is more than 12.7, such as Nuneaton, a Brexit voting constituency in the West Midlands held by Labour in the early Blair years but Conservative since Cameron. The required swing to gain for Labour is 14.5 points.
Twenty-one of the 34 seats that Sunak has visited are Con-Lab battles that he defends. Seven have swings of less than 8.3 for it to be a Labour gain, while eight require swings bigger than 12.7.
Then there is the final front on which Sunak is defending: against the Lib Dems. Sunak has been to 11 seats where he’s fighting them off, such as Horsham in West Sussex this week where the Lib Dems need a swing of 15.5.
All bar two of Davey’s 27 visits have been to targets the Tories defend, where the average swing needed is 22.4 points.
Dr Hannah Bunting is a Sky News elections analyst and Co-director of The Elections Centre at the University of Exeter.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
2024 is known as the year of elections because in these 12 months more voters in more countries than ever before will exercise their right to cast a vote to choose who governs them.
That is the march of democracy – even if nobody was convinced when President Putin was elected, again, in Russia.
The UK is in the throes of a general election campaign which could end 14 years of Conservative rule. Americans will decide whether Donald Trump returns to the White House in November.
In India, a victorious Prime Minister Narendra Modi is licking his wounds after his Hindu nationalist BJP underperformed in the world’s largest election.
Right now, the world’s second-largest election is taking place; this weekend and just over the seas surrounding Great Britain.
It has attracted little attention here, even though the UK took part in it right up until 2019. Even though previous elections of this kind kept Nigel Farage alive as a political force. And even though its outcome may be the most directly consequential for the UK, at least in the short run.
Image: Elections for the European Parliament got under way from Thursday in the Netherlands. Pic: AP
This election is also part of a unique experiment. Voters in many countries are electing members of the world’s only functioning trans-national parliament in which MEPs from different countries come together in blocs according to their political ideologies.
More on European Parliament
Since Thursday, nearly 400 million citizens in the European Union’s 27 member states have had the chance to elect a total of 750 members to the European Parliament (EP).
Appropriately, the EP election started on the 80th anniversary of D-Day, 6 June, in the Netherlands, with Ireland voting on Friday, and most other member states at the weekend, including Belgium which is also holding a national election on Sunday.
This seems appropriate because the parliament is designed to be a peaceful unifier of democratic Europe. It is ironic because some of the parties expected to do well this year have links going back to Franco, Mussolini and Hitler.
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10:22
From Wednesday: ‘Far right breaking all of European right’
The parliament is the only directly elected EU institution. It is less powerful than most national parliaments. EU policy is directed by the Council of Ministers, who are the elected leaders from individual member states. Plans are carried forward by the Commission, an appointed bureaucracy.
The parliament debates, amends and puts proposals into law, as well as overseeing the Commission’s budget, actions and appointments from current president Ursula von der Leyen.
Lots of politicians move between the EP and their national parliaments. Whether they are candidates standing or not, the results of these elections often have a major impact on what happens in home countries.
For example, during Britain’s membership of the EU, Nigel Farage failed seven times to win first-past-the-post elections to become an MP at Westminster.
Thanks to proportional representation however, he served continuously as an MEP for South East England from June 1999 to January 2020, when the UK left the EU as a result of the Brexit referendum. He made full use of the salary and expenses available to him from the EP.
Image: Despite never sitting as MP, Nigel Farage served as an MEP from 1999 to 2019. Pic: AP
Farage has the distinction of having led two different British parties to victory in the EP elections – with very serious consequences.
In 2014, UKIP beat Labour and the Conservatives, panicking David Cameron, the then-Conservative leader, into holding the EU referendum.
Five years later in 2019, when the UK had still not completed its exit from the EU, Farage led what was then called the Brexit Party to first place in the EP election. The Conservatives came fifth. Theresa May fell and Boris Johnson became prime minister with his slogan “get Brexit done”.
The UK is no longer part of the EU. We have our own general election to choose MPs, not MEPs. Farage’s latest party, Reform UK, is standing in the general election.
Across the rest of Europe, the radical right is on the rise. There is talk of Europe’s “Donald Trump moment” amid cost of living concerns.
Populist parties are widely expected to make gains according to opinion polls. If they do, the shakeout between rival blocs on the right will impact on issues including the Ukraine war, mass migration, climate change, and trade.
All matters on which whoever wins the UK election will be hoping for greater co-operation with European neighbours.
Image: Giorgia Meloni, prime minister of Italy and leader of Fratelli di Italia, at a rally for the European Parliament elections. Pic: AP
The results of the EP elections in France, Germany and Italy will greatly influence the direction in which the internal politics of those major UK allies develops.
The contest can also be seen as a battle for the soul of euro-populism – pro-Russia or pro-NATO – between its two feuding queens: Marine Le Pen of the French National Rally (NR), formerly the National Front, and Giorgia Meloni, prime minister of Italy and leader of Fratelli di Italia (FdI).
In Germany, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) is on course to come second ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats.
NR, led in the EP by the charismatic Jordan Bardella, is expected to win 33% of the votes in France, much more than President Emmanuel Macron’s party. And Le Pen is already the most popular candidate ahead of the presidential election in 2027 – when Macron must stand down.
Image: Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella at a National Rally event ahead of the European Parliament elections. Pic: AP
Radical right parties are already in power or supporting governments in eight EU countries and are expected to come back in Austria’s election due this month.
In total populist parties may end up with more MEPs than the centre-right European Peoples Party (EPP), which has long dominated the parliament, and the struggling Socialists and Democrats.
But it is not clear that the warring factions on the right will unite to act together or work with the mainstream EPP, made up of conventional conservative and Christian Democratic parties.
They have in common ethnic nationalism, anti-wokeism, Islamophobia, hostility to migrants and net zero, and suspicion of climate change and multilateral institutions including the EU, UN and NATO. They differ on the economy – free markets and state intervention – and, above all, on Russia.
Read more: US-made bomb identified in Gaza school strike Amanda Knox insists she is a ‘victim’ The ultimate guide to the general election
Giorgia Meloni’s FdI, Poland’s Law and Justice party and others European Conservatives and Reformists group are giving strong backing to Ukraine.
But the Identity and Freedom group, dominated by Le Pen’s FR, support a settlement handing territory to Russia, while the AfD, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Austria’s Freedom party belong openly to the Putin fan club.
The radical right will only be able to exert its full influence in the parliament if Meloni and Le Pen can reach an accommodation on such matters as Ukraine or whether von der Leyen should be given a second term as Commission president.
Image: The European Parliament will decide whether Ursula von der Leyen continues as Commission president. Pic: AP
This seems unlikely but it has not stopped von der Leyen touring the EU seeking support and making it clear that Europe will give less priority to green policies in the next parliament than it did in the current one.
The largest grouping in the EP recommends who the Commission president should be. In practice, national leaders in the council have usually imposed their own candidate.
Increasing factionalism is preventing the EP from having the influence it would like. Ten groups have official status giving them funding and status on committees, with a further three unofficial groups.
After this election, there may be no sufficiently dominant group emerging to take up a leadership role.
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The split in the mainstream right in the EU is in part a legacy of Britain’s membership of the EU. The ECR only came into existence when David Cameron defied Angela Merkel and pulled the Conservative Party out of the EPP.
Whether the UK is in or out, neither the UK nor the EU are sheltered from the winds of radical right-wing populism.
We here may be too busy to pay much attention to the world’s second-largest election. We won’t be able to ignore its consequences.
Jeremy Hunt will promise further tax cuts if the Tories win the next general election and will accuse the Labour Party of not being honest about how it will fund its spending pledges.
The chancellor will give a speech in London on Friday in which he will accuse his shadow, Rachel Reeves, of resorting to “playground politics” with her criticism of the high levels of taxation on UK households.
Mr Hunt will also reiterate his ambition to eradicate the national insurance tax – which the Tories have already slashed twice in a bid to move the polls – where they currently lag 20 points behind Labour.
Politics latest: Sunak ‘can still win election’ – as he’s hit with blunt question on Loose Women
Labour has attacked the policy as an unfunded £46bn pledge and likened it to the policies that saw Liz Truss resign from office after just 44 days as prime minister.
The chancellor was previously forced to make clear that his desire to abolish the “unfair” national insurance tax would not happen “any time soon”.
Read more from Sky News: Water firm refuses to say when boil water notice will be lifted Workers ‘poisoned’ at prison by ‘inmates working in staff canteen’
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The chancellor described national insurance as a “tax on work” and said he believed it was “unfair that we tax work twice” when other forms of income are only taxed once.
The overall tax burden is expected to increase over the next five years to around 37% of gross domestic product – close to a post-Second World War high – but Mr Hunt will argue the furlough scheme brought in during the pandemic and the help the government gave households for heating both needed to be paid for.
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2:03
Last week: National Insurance to be axed ‘when it’s affordable’
“Labour like to criticise tax rises this parliament thinking people don’t know why they have gone up – the furlough scheme, the energy price guarantee and billions of pounds of cost-of-living support, policies Labour themselves supported,” he will say.
“Which is why it is playground politics to use those tax rises to distract debate from the biggest divide in British politics – which is what happens next.
“Conservatives recognise that whilst those tax rises may have been necessary, they should not be permanent. Labour do not.”
James Murray, Labour’s shadow financial secretary to the Treasury,said: “There is nothing Jeremy Hunt can say or do to hide that fact that working people are worse off after 14 years of economic failure under the Conservatives.”
An Abu Dhabi-backed fund has conceded defeat in its bid to buy The Daily Telegraph after its ownership was effectively blocked by the government.
RedBird IMI announced it had placed The Telegraph and The Spectator titles up for sale, declaring that its ownership was “no longer feasible”.
The move was confirmed after ministers revealed plans last month to outlaw foreign state ownership of UK newspapers.
The gulf state-backed fund had reached a deal with previous Telegraph owners the Barclay family, in December last year, to take control of the group by paying off debts owed to their bank, Lloyds.
But the move sparked investigations by the Competition and Markets Authority and the media regulator and culminated in the government pulling the plug through an amendment to the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill.
A statement read: “RedBird IMI has today confirmed that it intends to withdraw from its proposed acquisition of the Telegraph Media Group and proceed with a sale.
“We continue to believe this approach would have benefited the Telegraph and Spectator’s readers, their journalists and the UK media landscape more widely.
“Regrettably, it is clear this approach is no longer feasible.”
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The chief executive of a busy NHS Hospital Trust has described preparing for winter amid ongoing industrial action by consultants and junior doctors as “going into a really tough battle with one hand tied behind your back”.
Matthew Trainer, CEO of Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, was speaking exclusively to Sky News on the first day of an unprecedented joint action by consultants and their junior doctor colleagues.
He said: “I think we’ve cancelled more than 10,000 outpatient appointments here. We’ve cancelled more than a thousand non-urgent surgeries and a small number of urgent surgeries.
“What we’re increasingly seeing is actually we’re not cancelling things, because we’re not even booking stuff in any more for the strike days.
“It feels like we’re walking into a really tough battle with one hand tied behind our back.”
Mr Trainer, who has 12 hospitals under his care including the Queen’s Hospital in Essex and the King George Hospital in Ilford, said his patients and his staff were suffering because of the industrial action by NHS health workers. which is now in its 10th month.
He said: “It’s about the patients who are not getting access to the care that they need. And the second thing, it’s about the staff that we’re asking, at times, to work in some really tough circumstances.
“I regularly meet our emergency department teams because they tend to bear the brunt of it. Emergency departments are the last unrationed part of health care, they’re the only place you can walk into and guarantee someone will see you. And as a result, we’re seeing real pressures piled on to them.”
Some 900,000 NHS appointments have been cancelled across England since December last year.
Image: Matthew Trainer has 12 hospitals under his care
Hospitals now routinely do not book appointments for strike days, with the dates announced at least six weeks in advance. That means the true figure of disruption to elective care is likely to be much higher.
Mr Trainer added: “I think one thing that worries me is actually that we’re finding the strikes less difficult to cope with because we’re becoming so practised at them.
“The NHS is good at crisis management and responding to incidents. Actually, we now know how to stand up a strike rota. We know to take down all the planned care activity. This shouldn’t be something we’re used to doing.
“You know, this should remain a real outlier for us, to have cancelled 10,000 outpatient appointments since April is not normal. And we should not become accustomed to this as a way of doing business in healthcare.”
But this is likely to be the case for months to come, deep into another crippling winter.
Read more from Sky News: NHS England waiting list hits record high Health secretary attacks ‘increasing militancy’ of strikes Thousands of Tube workers to go on strike
The junior doctors and consultants have long mandates for strike action and show no sign of calling them off.
Their union, the BMA, will feel vindicated in its action after learning that the public is more than twice as likely to blame the government for the ongoing strikes than the doctors’ trade unions, by 45% compared to 21%, according to a YouGov poll commissioned by Sky News.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has made bringing down waiting lists one of his key pledges.
But that is not achievable unless there is a resolution to what is becoming an increasingly bitter and protracted dispute. It also means trusts are not able to prepare for the fast-approaching winter.
Mr Trainer continued: “We had a really tough winter, last year. January was as bad as I’ve ever seen it in terms of the pressures. Primary care is also seeing huge increases in demand.
“They’re seeing more people than ever before, but they can’t keep up with the demand, and mental health services are also dealing with enormous backlogs for care and emergency care.
“So we’re trying to get ourselves ready for that. But what we know at the minute is that unless there’s some kind of resolution to this, we’re going to have to deal with that regular disruption of strike action.
“And I think we’re getting to a position now where it’s making it very hard to plan for what’s going to be the toughest period of the year in the NHS.
“We’ve got clinical staff trying to deliver good quality health care in some really challenging environments at the minute. And this is just adding to the strain they’re feeling and adding to the pressures on the NHS.”
Dartmoor National Park has been at the centre of a couple of overlapping stories this summer: the overturning of a ban on wild camping and arguments over whether livestock farmers were ruining or improving the place for nature.
A question that has echoes across many of our supposedly protected landscapes. So, those rows made good reasons to put my tent in my rucksack and head to the heath.
Dartmoor is 953 sq km and I aimed for Holne Moor, walking about a mile from the road through small clusters, barely herds, of cattle and ponies.
The sheep are a bit more numerous with 145,000 over the whole area.
The vegetation immediately around me is rough grass, stands of bracken and scrubby heather. Beautiful if you admire sparse, less so if you love bounty.
One of the conservationists accusations is that this place is over-grazed, with little variety of species and very few trees. Certainly avoiding the dung was a challenge when finding a camping pitch.
No baying beasts overnight but the morning brought one of the moor’s infamous fogs featured in Sherlock Holmes’ Hound Of The Baskervilles.
Striking camp and setting off through the murk I make a rendezvous with Guy Shrubsole, environmentalist and author who lives nearby.
“Our national parks are in a pretty shocking state for nature… they’ve actually found that on average, they’re in a worse condition than nature is, outside our national parks.
“We’d expect there to be a lot more dwarf shrub heath, things like bilberry and heather growing in much more abundance.
“And that obviously supports a whole range of other species of birds and mammals as well. Dartmoor is a very overgrazed landscape.
“Records suggest that after the second world war there were about 40,000 sheep grazed on the Dartmoor. By 1990 that had risen to something like 130,000.”
He would like to see national parks being a key part of the government’s ambition to have 30% of the UK protected for nature recovery by 2030.
Read more: Hundreds of water voles reintroduced to Lake District UK’s largest opencast coal mine confirms closure date Thousands of hours of fishing still taking place in UK Marine Conservation Zones
But national parks in Britain never have been primarily for wilderness like Yellowstone or Yosemite in America. They are for the people who live there too. And many of the people who live there are farmers.
Plenty of them rear livestock and believe that grazed landscape, not scrubby woodland, is what people flock to see – 18 million visitors a year in Dartmoor – and point out that some wildlife needs pasture.
When we are there, a group curlew chicks relocated from East Anglia is released on Neil Coles’ farm.
He thinks much of the moor is now under-grazed.
“The birds have all gone because it is not the habitat they like. We need a balance of areas. Wooded in the valleys but we also need tight grazing on the top for the ground nesting birds. In a natural situation there would be herbivores, so we are managing that and producing food,” he said.
The vexed question of how many cows, sheep and ponies should be grazing, the moor is the subject of a government commissioned but independent review due to report in the autumn.
It will be scrutinised not just here but across many of our upland parks like The Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors which are facing similar dilemmas.
But the recommendations from government sponsored reports aren’t always followed. Four years ago there was much fanfare over the Glover Review into the future of our national parks.
One of its proposals was that parks should have a duty to enhance nature. That hasn’t been taken up.
Each national park is run by an authority with some control over planning but little real power other than encouraging different groups to talk to each other.
Ironically, they have more power over the built environment than the natural environment.
Kevin Bishop is chief executive of Dartmoor National Park and he wants national parks to be “the beating heart of a nature recovery network”.
So, I asked if he has the power to deliver that?
“We don’t have those powers. We don’t have the resources to do it. The government could change our purposes but without giving us the powers and without giving us the pounds new purposes are, in essence, meaningless.”
The power he really wants is to be able to change the behaviour of farmers by having control over the payments farmers get for looking after nature.
“The most important tool in my book for nature recovery is agri-environment agreements… We have no formal role in the current environment schemes.”
National parks can’t change significantly on their own. Their future rests on the powers we give them and that is a decision for parliament and the nation.
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Greggs says it wants to open new stores in Cornwall and the South West of England – in a move that could put the bakery chain toe-to-toe with traditional Cornish pasty makers.
The company’s boss, Roisin Currie, says the company is on track to open 150 new shops nationwide this year – and could open even more if the right sites become available.
She says the company is particularly interested in new sites in Cornwall and other areas of the South West of England.
Image: File pic
It is set to open its fourth shop in Cornwall, at a business park in Saltash, today.
But Greggs – founded in Tyneside in 1939 and famed for its sausage rolls and steak bakes – will face a competitive grab-and-go market in the county, where the Cornish pasty has been a staple for hundreds of years.
“The opening strategy is going to plan and the new location in Cornwall is a key part of that,” Ms Currie said.
“Obviously we are a brand that started from the North and the natural growth of the business from there means there are some parts of the country, such as in Cornwall and the South West, where we see more scope to open sites.”
Greggs currently operates around 2,300 shops across the UK – and hopes to expand to more than 3,000 as part of its long-term growth strategy.
A number of new sites in the company’s growth plan target tourists and motorists, with openings at forecourts and service stations.
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In May, the bakery chain revealed in May that sales surged by nearly a fifth over the start of 2023 – despite the cost-of-living crisis.
It said its cheap meals remained “compelling” to cash-strapped consumers.
“We’re looking very positively towards the summer and hopefully this warm weather will mean more people out and about, and ultimately looking for somewhere to eat,” Ms Currie said.
The government has been accused of an attempted “cover-up” as it bids to block the COVID inquiry’s request for Boris Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApp messages and notebooks.
Bereaved families and opposition parties criticised Prime Minister Rishi Sunak after the Cabinet Office revealed it was taking the unusual step of bringing a judicial review of Baroness Hallett’s order to release the documents.
It comes after Mr Johnson, the prime minister during the pandemic, said he was “more than happy” to adhere to the inquiry chairwoman’s request and hand over the material directly.
Ahead of a deadline of 4pm on Thursday to provide it, the Cabinet Office said it was bringing the judicial review challenge “with regret” and insisted it would “continue to co-operate fully with the inquiry before, during and after the jurisdictional issue in question is determined by the courts”.
The legal practice representing the COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, Broudie Jackson Canter, said the move showed “utter disregard for the inquiry”.
Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner accused the prime minister of “a desperate attempt to withhold evidence”.
“The public deserve answers, not another cover-up,” she added.
Liberal Democrats deputy leader Daisy Cooper said the government’s judicial review was a “kick in the teeth” for the bereaved families of the tens of thousands of people who died from COVID during the pandemic.
Read Adam Boulton’s analysis: Politicians are drawn to WhatsApp – and it threatens us ever knowing the whole truth
The Cabinet Office’s argument is the documents and messages being sought by the inquiry are “unambiguously irrelevant” and cover matters “unconnected to the government’s handling of COVID”.
In a host of documents released as part of the legal proceedings, it emerged the WhatsApp messages given to the Cabinet Office by Mr Johnson are only from May 2021 onwards – more than a year after the pandemic began.
He was forced to change his mobile in 2021 after it emerged his number had been available online for 15 years.
The documents also included a list of 150 questions sent to Mr Johnson by the inquiry in February, including: “In or around autumn 2020, did you state that you would rather ‘let the bodies pile high’ than order another lockdown, or words to that effect? If so, please set out the circumstances in which you made these comments.”
He was also asked: “Between January and July 2020 did you receive advice from the then Cabinet Secretary that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock MP, should be removed from his position? If so, why?”
A spokesman for the inquiry said more information about the Cabinet Office’s challenge would be provided at a preliminary hearing on 6 June.
The company behind a controversial coal mine in West Cumbria and the UK environment regulator are both intervening in a separate court battle over plans to pump oil in the Surrey countryside.
Next month’s Supreme Court case about whether to extract about three million tonnes of oil from Horse Hill is regarded as a test case that could bring the “beginning of the end” of new fossil fuel production in the UK.
The site, near Gatwick, was first approved by Surrey County Council in 2019 but has faced a legal challenge by campaigners ever since, and will next month go before the UK’s highest court.
Unusually, the Supreme Court has permitted four extra bodies to intervene – meaning they can make written or oral submissions to aid the court’s understanding, reflecting the public importance of the case.
Image: If approved, Horse Hill would extract oil from six wells over 25 years
One of those weighing in is West Cumbria Mining, whose plan to develop the UK’s first new coal mine in 30 years in Whitehaven was controversially approved by the government in December.
WCM did not respond to a request to comment on why it had intervened.
But if the campaigner’s appeal against the Surrey oil site wins next month, it could be “that you have to completely reassess whether that coal mine in Cumbria can happen at all”, according to barrister Sam Fowles.
“It is extremely difficult to overstate the significance of this case,” said Mr Fowles, who specialises in planning and environment law at Cornerstone Barristers.
It has the potential trigger the “beginning of the end of … new fossil fuel extraction in the UK going forward”, he added.
The government is due to make a decision imminently on the giant Rosebank oil and gas field in the North Sea.
Charles McAllister, director of industry group UK Onshore Oil and Gas, called it “incontrovertible” that the UK needs some oil and gas beyond 2050, “even with huge growth in renewables”.
“It’s a case of where we got it from, not if we need or not.”
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Setting the agenda for COP28
‘Clear ramifications’ for future projects
Both the Cumbria coal mine and the Surrey oil case hinge on the same thorny issue plaguing planning authorities presiding over fossil fuel projects.
The question is whether their assessments of the project’s damage to the environment have to factor in only the emissions from getting the fossil fuel out of the ground, or also from when it’s used or burned later “downstream”.
These are known as “scope 3” emissions and tend to make up the majority of a project’s or company’s greenhouse gases. Fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change, which is already threatening the UK via things like rising sea levels and last summer’s intense drought.
Both the Cumbria coal mine and the Horse Hill oil site were approved partly on the basis that these “downstream” emissions need not be taken into account, and therefore overall emissions would be low.
Sarah Finch, the lead campaigner challenging the oil decision, told Sky News: “More than 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide could be released when the oil from Horse Hill is ultimately burned.”
Katie de Kauwe, a lawyer at campaigning group Friends of the Earth, which is also intervening, said: “It can’t be right that the biggest impacts of fossil fuel projects on people and our planet can effectively be left out when planning decisions are made.
“This is a hugely consequential legal challenge that could have clear ramifications for other fossil fuel developments, including the new coal mine planned in West Cumbria and the legality of the Secretary of State’s decision to approve it.
“West Cumbria Mining is clearly concerned, which is why they’re intervening.”
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Protesters disrupt Barclays meeting
Ms Finch’s initial challenge in the High Court was thrown out. But she took it to the next court, the Court of Appeal, where the three judges were split, with one agreeing she had a point but the majority saying it was a matter for planning authorities rather than the court.
But that creates a huge problem, according to the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) – the UK environment watchdog set up after Brexit in 2021 – which is, for the first time, intervening in a Supreme Court case.
“It means that local planning authorities could reach entirely different conclusions on an important issue of principle on essentially the same facts,” it said in its submission to the court, leaving the law “in an unpredictable state with potentially capricious results”.
Image: Horse Hill has been challenged by campaigners since it was first approved in 2019
‘Not clear-cut’ if UK should pump more oil and gas – climate advisers
“If it is successful, which I don’t think it will be, it will set a precedent,” said Charles McAllister from UKOOG.
If the campaigners win, it would have “far-reaching implications beyond the onshore oil and gas industry, ranging from the offshore oil and gas industry, mining, metals, manufacturing, aviation”, he warned.
The Horse Hill site would extract around 200,000 barrels of oil over 25 years, which could be used to power jets, create electricity or heat homes. The UK produces about one million barrels of oil a day.
Image: UK Onshore Oil and Gas says its greener to extract oil at home
Independent government climate advisers from the CCC have said the UK will need some oil until 2050, though it is “not clear-cut” whether it should produce more domestically.
The International Energy Agency has said no new fossil fuel project is compatible with the globally accepted goal of limiting warming to 1.5C.
UK Oil and Gas, the main developers of Horse Hill, declined to comment.
A spokesperson for Surrey County Council said it is “required to determine planning applications in accordance with the Development Plan, the National Planning Policy Framework, national policy and other material considerations, as set out in legislation and case law.
“The County Council will present its case to the Supreme Court, which will issue a decision in due course.”
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