Which party has won the most council by-elections since the May 2025 local elections?
Who’s up and who’s down?

A former Conservative Scottish secretary has called (£) moves by the party north of the border to increase the powers afforded to the Scottish Parliament a “suicide mission”.

The chancellor went on the Today programme this morning to trumpet his success in getting seven government departments to agree on their budgets for 2015-16 as part of the Spending Review that he will announce on 26 June. It is reported that they have all agreed to cuts of between 8 and 10 per cent.

The payday lending industry punishes people for its own faults: they don’t carry out the correct credit checks then continue to charge borrowers excessive fees and interest on loans they probably couldn’t afford to begin with.

The average weekly disposable income has fallen to a 12-month low, the second consecutive year-on-year decline in two months, according to Asda.

The UK is in the midst of an occupational pensions revolution as 10 million people are automatically enrolled in a workplace pension for the first time.

According to the dictum attributed to Edmund Burke, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Yet evil will triumph even more easily if good men help the evil-doers. In the Syrian civil war, with more than 80,000 dead and no end in sight, that is what the European Union has been doing, by upholding an arms embargo on the supply of weapons to all sides.

I would like to see Michael Gove asked the following question: does he stand for every school child, or just those who attend academies and free schools?

I cannot be the only person with personal experience of managing schools whose jaw dropped at reading the headlines of the Reform report launched last week: Must Do Better: Spending on Schools. Based on lots of number crunching of data tables, it came to the conclusion that school spending could be cut by close to 20 per cent without compromising standards.

The most read articles on Left Foot Forward this week.

Because the Spectator apparently doesn’t believe in the right to reply