Connect with us

Published

on

More “zombie-style” knives and machetes will be banned and the police will be given more powers to seize and destroy them, under plans announced by the Home Office.

A new offence will also be introduced for possessing bladed articles “with the intention to endanger life or cause fear of violence”.

The maximum sentence for the importation, manufacturing, possession and sale of the weapons will be two years, the Home Office announced.

The government said the measures, first proposed in April, will be legislated “when parliament allows” and after a public consultation has taken place.

The possession of so-called “zombie” knives, which the government defines as a blade with “a cutting edge, a serrated edge and images or words suggesting it is used for violence”, was made illegal in 2016.

Under the new measures, the Home Office said the definition of a zombie knife would be expanded to include any bladed weapon more than eight inches long with a plain-cutting edge and sharp pointed end that also has either a serrated cutting edge, more than one hole in the blade or multiple sharp points like spikes.

The government hopes the changes will close a loophole which has allowed some dangerous weapons to be sold without breaking the law by removing certain banned features.

More on Knife Crime

Rishi Sunak opts for helicopter for Norwich trip – politics latest

Recent figures revealed that the number of fatal stabbings in England and Wales was at its highest level since records began more than 76 years ago.

The Office for National Statistics said 282 homicides were committed using a knife or sharp instrument in the year to March 2022 – a 19% rise compared with the previous year and the highest annual total since records began in 1946.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Pastor Lorraine Jones Burrell speaks passionately about police and knife crime.

Some 51 teenagers aged between 13 and 19 were among the victims.

Labour’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said the newly prohibited weapons “should have been banned years ago”.

“This is the sixth time in seven years that the Conservatives have promised to outlaw zombie knives,” she said.

“Yet even now they are still failing to close the loopholes that mean they can still be sold online. Time and again the Tories have been hopelessly weak and slow to tackle this serious and dangerous crime.”

Currently, the law stipulates that if police find a machete or other legal blade in somebody’s home they are not allowed to seize or act on it, even if they believe the knives could be used criminally.

But police will now be given new powers to seize and destroy knives found on private premises if there are “reasonable grounds to believe the blade will be used in a serious crime”, the Home Office confirmed.

Read more:
Police must investigate every theft – as home secretary challenged over number of new officers
£130m worth of cannabis, £636,000 of cash and 20 guns seized in UK-wide crackdown

The Sentencing Council will also be asked to consider amending guidelines for the possession of bladed articles and offensive weapons so that these are treated more seriously than possession of non-prohibited weapons.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

The Minister said serious violence is down by 41% since 2010, but Chris Philp says there is ‘a lot more to do’.

Some machetes and similar knives can have “legitimate uses”, such as for gardening, but the Home Office warned criminals are “buying, selling and using larger bladed articles as weapons to intimidate and cause others serious harm”.

The department said specific exemptions will be made for “legitimate articles” such as objects of historical importance and those that are hand-made, in order to avoid negative effects on the antiques market.

Policing minister Chris Philp said the newly-prohibited weapons “serve no other purpose but to inflate criminal egos and endanger lives” and there is “no reason” to own them.

“That is why we are banning these knives and making sentencing more severe, so our communities can be reassured that this violent criminality will face the punishments they deserve, and lives will be saved,” he said.

Continue Reading

Politics

One year of Starmer: Nine charts that tell us whether Labour’s first year has been a success or failure

Published

on

By

One year of Starmer: Nine charts that tell us whether Labour's first year has been a success or failure

It might feel like it’s been even longer for the prime minister at the moment, but it’s been a whole year since Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a historic landslide, emphatically defeating Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives and securing a 174-seat majority.

Over that time, Sir Keir and his party have regularly reset or restated their list of milestones, missions, targets and pledges – things they say they will achieve while in power (so long as they can get all their policies past their own MPs).

We’ve had a look at the ones they have repeated most consistently, and how they are going so far.

Overall, it amounts to what appears to be some success on economic metrics, but limited progress at best towards many of their key policy objectives.

From healthcare to housebuilding, from crime to clean power, and from small boats to squeezed budgets, here are nine charts that show the country’s performance before and after Labour came to power, and how close the government are to achieving their goals.

Keir Starmer leaves 10 Downing Street.
Pic Reuters
Image:
Sir Keir Starmer has been in office for a year. Pic Reuters

Cost of living

On paper, the target that Labour have set themselves on improving living standards is by quite a distance the easiest to achieve of anything they have spoken about.

They have not set a specific number to aim for, and every previous parliament on record has overseen an increase in real terms disposable income.

The closest it got to not happening was the last parliament, though. From December 2019 to June 2024, disposable income per quarter rose by just £24, thanks in part to the energy crisis that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

By way of comparison, there was a rise of almost £600 per quarter during the five years following Thatcher’s final election victory in 1987, and over £500 between Blair’s 1997 victory and his 2001 re-election.

After the first six months of the latest government, it had risen by £144, the fastest start of any government going back to at least 1954. As of March, it had fallen to £81, but that still leaves them second at this stage, behind only Thatcher’s third term.

VERDICT: Going well, but should have been more ambitious with their target

Get inflation back to 2%

So, we have got more money to play with. But it might not always feel like that, as average prices are still rising at a historically high rate.

Inflation fell consistently during the last year and a half of Rishi Sunak’s premiership, dropping from a peak of 11.1% in October 2022 to exactly 2% – the Bank of England target – in June 2024.

It continued to fall in Labour’s first couple of months, but has steadily climbed back up since then and reached 3.4% in May.

When we include housing costs as well, prices are up by 4% in the last year. Average wages are currently rising by just over 5%, so that explains the overall improvement in living standards that we mentioned earlier.

But there are signs that the labour market is beginning to slow following the introduction of higher national insurance rates for employers in April.

If inflation remains high and wages begin to stagnate, we will see a quick reversal to the good start the government have made on disposable income.

VERDICT: Something to keep an eye on – there could be a bigger price to pay in years to come

‘Smash the gangs’

One of Starmer’s most memorable promises during the election campaign was that he would “smash the gangs”, and drastically reduce the number of people crossing the Channel to illegally enter the country.

More than 40,000 people have arrived in the UK in small boats in the 12 months since Labour came to power, a rise of over 12,000 (40%) compared with the previous year.

Labour have said that better weather in the first half of this year has contributed to more favourable conditions for smugglers, but our research shows crossings have also risen on days when the weather is not so good.

VERDICT: As it stands, it looks like “the gangs” are smashing the government

Reduce NHS waits

One of Labour’s more ambitious targets, and one in which they will be relying on big improvements in years to come to achieve.

Starmer says that no more than 8% of people will wait longer than 18 weeks for NHS treatment by the time of the next election.

When they took over, it was more than five times higher than that. And it still is now, falling very slightly from 41.1% to 40.3% over the 10 months that we have data for.

So not much movement yet. Independent modelling by the Health Foundation suggests that reaching the target is “still feasible”, though they say it will demand “focus, resource, productivity improvements and a bit of luck”.

VERDICT: Early days, but current treatment isn’t curing the ailment fast enough

Halve violent crime

It’s a similar story with policing. Labour aim to achieve their goal of halving serious violent crime within 10 years by recruiting an extra 13,000 officers, PCSOs and special constables.

Recruitment is still very much ongoing, but workforce numbers have only been published up until the end of September, so we can’t tell what progress has been made on that as yet.

We do have numbers, however, on the number of violent crimes recorded by the police in the first six months of Labour’s premiership. There were a total of 1.1m, down by 14,665 on the same period last year, a decrease of just over 1%.

That’s not nearly enough to reach a halving within the decade, but Labour will hope that the reduction will accelerate once their new officers are in place.

VERDICT: Not time for flashing lights just yet, but progress is more “foot patrol” than “high-speed chase” so far

Build 1.5m new homes

One of Labour’s most ambitious policies was the pledge that they would build a total of 1.5m new homes in England during this parliament.

There has not yet been any new official data published on new houses since Labour came to power, but we can use alternative figures to give us a sense of how it’s going so far.

A new Energy Performance Certificate is granted each time a new home is built – so tends to closely match the official house-building figures – and we have data up to March for those.

Those numbers suggest that there have actually been fewer new properties added recently than in any year since 2015-16.

Labour still have four years to deliver on this pledge, but each year they are behind means they need to up the rate more in future years.

If the 200,000 new EPCs in the year to March 2025 matches the number of new homes they have delivered in their first year, Labour will need to add an average of 325,000 per year for the rest of their time in power to achieve their goal.

VERDICT: Struggling to lay solid foundations

Clean power by 2030

Another of the more ambitious pledges, Labour’s aim is for the UK to produce 95% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.

They started strong. The ban on new onshore wind turbines was lifted within their first few days of government, and they delivered support for 131 new renewable energy projects in the most recent funding round in September.

But – understandably – it takes time for those new wind farms, solar farms and tidal plants to be built and start contributing to the grid.

In the year leading up to Starmer’s election as leader, 54% of the energy on the UK grid had been produced by renewable sources in the UK.

That has risen very slightly in the year since then, to 55%, with a rise in solar and biomass offsetting a slight fall in wind generation.

The start of this year has been unusually lacking in wind, and this analysis does not take variations in weather into account. The government target will adjust for that, but they are yet to define exactly how.

VERDICT: Not all up in smoke, but consistent effort is required before it’s all sunshine and windmills

Fastest economic growth in the G7

Labour’s plan to pay for the improvements they want to make in all the public services we have talked about above can be summarised in one word: “growth”.

The aim is for the UK’s GDP – the financial value of all the goods and services produced in the country – to grow faster than any other in the G7 group of advanced economies.

Since Labour have been in power, the economy has grown faster than European rivals Italy, France and Germany, as well as Japan, but has lagged behind the US and Canada.

The UK did grow fastest in the most recent quarter we have data for, however, from the start of the year to the end of March.

VERDICT: Good to be ahead of other similar European economies, but still a way to go to overtake the North Americans

No tax rises

Without economic growth, it will be difficult to keep to one of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ biggest promises – that there will be no more tax rises or borrowing for the duration of her government’s term.

Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said last month that she is a “gnat’s whisker” away from being forced to do that at the autumn budget, looking at the state of the economy at the moment.

That whisker will have been shaved even closer by the cost implications of the government’s failure to get its full welfare reform bill through parliament earlier this week.

And income tax thresholds are currently frozen until April 2028, meaning there is already a “stealth” hike scheduled for all of us every year.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

One year of Keir: A review of Starmer’s first 12 months in office

But the news from the last financial year was slightly better than expected. Total tax receipts for the year ending March 2025 were 35% of GDP.

That’s lower than the previous four years, and what was projected after Jeremy Hunt’s final Conservative budget, but higher than any of the 50 years before that.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) still projects it to rise in future years though, to a higher level than the post-WWII peak of 37.2%.

The OBR – a non-departmental public body that provides independent analysis of the public finances – has also said in the past few days that it is re-examining its methodology, because it has been too optimistic with its forecasts in the past.

If the OBR’s review leads to a more negative view of where the economy is going, Rachel Reeves could be forced to break her promise to keep the budget deficit from spiralling out of control.

VERDICT: It’s going to be difficult for the Chancellor to keep to her promise

OVERALL VERDICT: Investment and attention towards things like violent crime, the NHS and clean energy are yet to start bearing fruit, with only minuscule shifts in the right direction for each, but the government is confident that what’s happened so far is part of its plans.

Labour always said that the house-building target would be achieved with a big surge towards the back end of their term, but they won’t be encouraged by the numbers actually dropping in their first few months.

Where they are failing most dramatically, however, appears to be in reducing the number of migrants making the dangerous Channel crossing on small boats.

The economic news, particularly that rise in disposable income, looks more healthy at the moment. But with inflation still high and growth lagging behind some of our G7 rivals, that could soon start to turn.


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.

Continue Reading

Politics

Sweden’s justice minister says to ‘turn up the pressure’ on crypto seizures

Published

on

By

Sweden’s justice minister says to ‘turn up the pressure’ on crypto seizures

Sweden’s justice minister says to ‘turn up the pressure’ on crypto seizures

Gunnar Strömmer reportedly said that Swedish authorities had confiscated more than $8.3 million worth of criminal profits since a law related to seizures was passed in 2024.

Continue Reading

Politics

US Senator Lummis’s crypto tax relief plan fuels DeFi momentum: Finance Redefined

Published

on

By

US Senator Lummis’s crypto tax relief plan fuels DeFi momentum: Finance Redefined

US Senator Lummis’s crypto tax relief plan fuels DeFi momentum: Finance Redefined

Increasing US regulatory clarity is enabling more traditional finance participants to seek out decentralized financial solutions.

Continue Reading

Trending