I’m not writing my usual blog today but here, as an alternative, is the Politics Live readers’ edition. It is a place for you to discuss today’s politics, and to share links to breaking news and to the most interesting stories and blogs on the web.
Feel free to express your views robustly, but please treat others with respect and don’t resort to abuse. Guardian comment pages are supposed to be a haven from the Twitter/social media rant-orama, not an extension of it.
You can read all today’s Guardian politics stories here.
And here are some of the main ones on our site this morning.
- Labour’s Janet Daby has won the Lewisham East byelection but the party suffered a big swing to the Liberal Democrats, who leapfrogged the Conservatives to come second. The Lib Dem leader, Vince Cable, hailed it as the largest swing from Labour to his party in over a decade.
- Theresa May is heading for a fresh showdown with Conservative rebels next week after they rejected a government-drafted amendment to the EU withdrawal bill.
- The government’s ambitious change to the benefits system, universal credit, fails to deliver promised financial savings or employment benefits and leaves thousands of vulnerable claimants in hardship, according to the public spending watchdog.
- Theresa May is poised to increase the NHS’s budget by up to £6bn a year in a bid to capitalise on its impending 70th birthday and rescue the beleaguered service’s faltering fortunes.
- Upskirting – the taking of surreptitious, sexually intrusive photographs – is to become a specific criminal offence punishable by up to two years in prison.
There was a parliamentary byelection yesterday, but also two local council byelections. But, as Britain Elects reports, the results are coming this morning.
Two council by-elections today: a free-for-all for three seats for a new Southwark ward; and a Labour defence in Doncaster @andrewteale previews them here: https://t.co/tE32mdvIIC
— Britain Elects (@britainelects) June 14, 2018
Both the Doncaster by-election and countermanded election in Southwark are counting tomorrow morning.
— Britain Elects (@britainelects) June 14, 2018
