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Sir Keir Starmer’s tour of key battlegrounds kicked off in Scotland on Friday. His message was singular: change. And his target was singular, too: take out the SNP.

In four elections on the bounce, Labour has been nearly wiped out in Scotland by the SNP. In 2019, the party returned one MP to Westminster from Scotland. It now has two. The task in this election campaign is to turn that into dozens.

“This is an election about change, and Scotland’s voice is vital. It needs to be a leading voice,” he said in a slick campaign event with hundreds of people holding up “change” placards and cheering Sir Keir and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar on.

General election latest: Reaction as two senior Tories stand down

“Send a message, send a message: that is the height of the SNP’s ambition, to send a message of protest to Westminster. I don’t want Scotland to send a message. I want Scotland to send a government. A Labour government.”

Ask Labour strategists, and they say Scotland is vital to get Labour over the line to a majority because of how far behind Labour were in England back in 2019. They are operating a twin attack on two failing governments – the SNP one in Holyrood and the Conservative government in Westminster – to implore voters to switch back from the SNP to kick the Tories out.

Starmer told me in Glasgow that winning in Scotland was important numerically but also to him personally, because he wants to be a prime minister, should Labour win, that governs for the whole of the UK.

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He has been emphatic that there will be no deal with the SNP, whatever the outcome of this general election, to hammer home the point that if Scots want to be rid of the Conservatives they have to vote Labour in.

But in truth, it is not true that Labour need to win big in Scotland to win a general election.

Yes, since the 1950s, Labour hasn’t formed a majority with fewer than 40 seats in Scotland, but Tony Blair actually had a majority in 1997 on seats won in England alone.

To put it into context, there are 91 parliamentary constituencies in the South East of England and 59 in Scotland.

When the country moves against a government – like the polls are suggesting is happening now – and Labour are doing well in local elections in battlegrounds across England, they should be able to hit a majority without needing a huge amount of the 59 out of 650 parliamentary seats in Scotland.

It is, if you like, a version of Project Fear, as Labour try to sell to the Scots that a vote for the SNP is a vote to keep a Conservative government in.

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Starmer: ‘You have the power to end the chaos’

But there is also a sense – and this is where Starmer has got lucky after 14 years of SNP dominance – that the travails of the SNP, which has been embroiled in scandal around former leader Nicola Sturgeon and her husband, Peter Murrell, the former chief executive of the SNP, and a leadership crisis, has finally given Labour an open goal to win back Scottish voters that turned away from a Labour Party that had for too long taken Scotland for granted.

But as Starmer looks to steal votes from the SNP, with Scotland a key battleground, there are fault lines in this election too for the Labour leader among his base that will emerge as a big theme of this election. As we look at geographical battlegrounds – be that Scotland, the Red Wall across parts of the Midlands, the North East and North West, or the Blue Wall in pockets of the south – there are also demographic divisions emerging. And the schism between Sir Keir Starmer and Labour-voting Muslim communities over the Israel-Hamas war is perhaps one of the most salient going into this general election, with prominent MPs from Jess Phillips to Shabana Mahmood and Wes Streeting facing challenges in their constituencies.

I asked Starmer about this on our second tour stop of the day, when he travelled to South Ribble – a Labour target that switched to Labour in 1997 only to return to the Tories in 2010 – to address building depot workers.

He said, in the wake of the West Midlands mayoral victory by a whisker, that he had listened to voters (the independent candidate in this race took tens of thousands of votes from Labour).

And he left me thinking that while he has a clear message to sell to voters in Scotland, to those who feel let down by Labour, he hasn’t got the answer.

He told me there “needs to be a ceasefire straight away” and more humanitarian aid and “the beginning of a process to a two-state solution, including recognition of Palestine” but demurred from committing to formally recognising the Palestine state in its own right, as Ireland, Norway and Spain have done in recent weeks, saying that policy was to recognise Palestine as part of a two-state solution and that “it was only going to happen if we work with our partners on it”.

The US, UK and other Western countries have backed the idea of an independent Palestine existing alongside Israel, but insists statehood should come as part of a negotiated settlement.

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Starmer is at pains not to diverge from the US and other close allies as he eyes Downing Street.

But there is a cost to him when it comes to some of his traditional voters. His majority doesn’t just rest in the marginals, he has to secure his base too.

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Conservatives call for Labour’s Lucy Powell to resign over grooming gang remarks

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Conservatives call for Labour's Lucy Powell to resign over grooming gang remarks

The Conservatives are calling for Lucy Powell to resign after the Labour MP’s exchange with a commentator about grooming gangs.

The comment was made by Ms Powell, the leader of the House of Commons, after Conservative political commentator Tim Montgomerie started to ask a question on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions.

“I don’t know if you saw the documentary on Channel 4 about rape gangs,” he started, in relation to the recent programme Groomed: A National Scandal, which centred around five girls who were sexually abused by rape gangs.

Ms Powell, who is MP for Manchester Central, responded: “Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Yeah, OK, let’s get that dog whistle out.”

Sir Keir Starmer and the government have been under sustained pressure from political opponents over the handling of historical sex abuse cases in the UK.

ConservativeHome founder Mr Montgomerie, who will be appearing on Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips, continued: “There is a real issue where… There were so many people in local government, in the authorities, who, for good reason, were worried about upsetting community tensions, that those girls went undefended.”

The conversation moved on, but politicians criticised Ms Powell’s comment, with some calling for her to resign.

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Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said in a statement: “This shocking outburst from a Labour cabinet minister belittles the thousands of girls and women who were raped by grooming gangs over decades.

“We have consistently called for a national enquiry in parliament, which has been blocked by Labour ministers who don’t seem to know or care about the disgusting crimes which have been perpetrated.

“Anyone who has seen the shocking Channel 4 documentary will know that it is clearer than ever that this is not a ‘dog whistle’.

“To dismiss thousands of victims who were raped and the cover up that followed is sickening. She should resign.”

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Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick said: “Labour’s Lucy Powell thinks it’s a ‘dog whistle’ to demand arrests and accountability for the rape gangs. What a disgusting betrayal of the victims. They are part of the cover-up.”

Ousted Reform MP Rupert Lowe, now an independent, shared a letter he wrote to Ms Powell demanding she apologise, calling her comments “deeply, deeply offensive”.

On X on Saturday night, Ms Powell said: “In the heat of a discussion on AQ, I would like to clarify that I regard issues of child exploitation and grooming with the utmost seriousness. I’m sorry if this was unclear.

“I was challenging the political point scoring around it, not the issue itself. As a constituency MP I’ve dealt with horrendous cases. This Gvt is acting to get to the truth, and deliver justice.”

Read more:
Grooming gangs scandal timeline
PM says government will fund further local grooming gangs inquiries if ‘needed’

Sky News has contacted the office for the Leader of the House of Commons for comment.

The long-running row over grooming cases has continued after Labour promised five local inquiries into grooming gangs in January.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk had accused Sir Keir of being “complicit” in the failure of authorities to protect victims and prosecute abusers while the PM was director of public prosecutions from 2008-2013.

The prime minister has repeatedly defended his record, saying it shows he tackled the issue head-on.

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Reform’s mission to ‘remoralise’ young people, says party chairman

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Reform's mission to 'remoralise' young people, says party chairman

Reform UK chairman Zia Yusuf says his party’s mission is to “remoralise” young people.

Speaking off the back of his party’s massive gains in the local elections, Mr Yusuf said young people were being taught to “hate their country” and that Reform’s mission was to change their morals.

“There has been an industrial-scale demoralisation, particularly of young people in this country, who are basically being taught quite deliberately that they should hate their country; they should be deeply ashamed of their country’s history; that the United Kingdom had a brutal empire,” he told The Times.

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“Look, of course, you know, the British Empire was not perfect, but I actually think overall the British Empire did much more good for the world than it did bad.”

He said the party’s mission was to “remoralise” the youth and that within a couple of months of gaining power, Reform would erect statues of great British figures and end “all this woke nonsense”.

He continued: “How many young people know who Isambard Kingdom Brunel is? Look at the character assassination that has occurred on the legacy of Sir Winston Churchill.

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“The fact that they have to cover up his statue because they don’t want to provoke protesters. I mean that’s the sort of utterly indefensible so-called leadership that we’ve had and young people feel that in their bones.”

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Inside Reform’s election success

Read more:
Tory leader apologises to councillors as Reform makes big gains
‘I get it’: Starmer responds after losing Runcorn by-election to Reform UK

He said he believes Reform leader Nigel Farage’s message is “resonating” with young people and added: “I think that a lot of young people we speak to feel very smothered by a finger-wagging sort of teaching class.

“They feel very restricted, they feel a huge lack of opportunity … You’re going to hear from us over the next couple of years more and more of a policy platform for young people, for Gen Z and for millennials.”

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Voters turn to Reform UK

Mr Farage has been more focused on what his party’s trajectory is doing to the Conservatives, saying in his column for The Telegraph that Kemi Badenoch’s party had been “hollowed out” and is experiencing a “strange death” due to the rising popularity of Reform.

He said the UK had reached a “new political age”, reiterating earlier claims that two-party politics “is finished”.

Reform chairman Zia Yusuf will be appearing on Sky News’ Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips from 8.30am this morning.

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OKX fires back at Tron’s Justin Sun over mysterious ‘freeze notice’

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<div>OKX fires back at Tron's Justin Sun over mysterious 'freeze notice'</div>

<div>OKX fires back at Tron's Justin Sun over mysterious 'freeze notice'</div>

OKX founder and CEO Star Xu has publicly defended the crypto exchange after Tron founder Justin Sun accused it of failing to act on a law enforcement request to freeze stolen funds following a recent hack of Tron’s official X account.

ā€œOKX also has consumers protection policy according to law, we can’t freeze a customer’s funds according to your personal X post or an oral communication. I think you should understand it as the CEO of HTX,ā€ Xu said in an X post.

OKX says there is no communication in the spam box, either

Xu said that the crypto exchange had not received any related correspondence through OKX’s official channels. ā€œOur LE cooperation team just checked the email, including the spam box; we haven’t received any request related with this case,ā€ Xu said.

Cryptocurrencies, Tron, OKX
Source: Star Xu

In what is now an unavailable X post, but was screenshotted by Xu, Sun had earlier claimed that OKX has not responded to a ā€œfreeze noticeā€ sent to its official email address from a ā€œrelevant law enforcement agency.ā€ Sun said that he had no other way to contact OKX’s compliance department.

ā€œThese stolen funds do not belong to me; I’m acting to protect the community,ā€ Sun said. On May 3, Tron DAO told its 1.7 million X followers that its account had been compromised. Tron explained that during the breach, an unauthorized party posted a malicious contract address, sent direct messages, and followed unfamiliar accounts.

ā€œIf you received a DM from our account on May 2, please delete it and consider it the work of the attacker.ā€

In response to Sun’s claims of inaction, Xu publicly called on him to provide a screenshot showing when and where the law enforcement request was made.

The Tron incident is one of several recent security breaches involving high-profile crypto accounts on X.

Related: Over 14,500 Tron addresses at risk of silent hijacking

Kaito AI, an artificial intelligence-powered platform that aggregates crypto data to provide market analysis for users, and its founder, Yu Hu, were the victims of an X social media hack on March 15. The hackers opened up a short position on KAITO tokens before posting that the Kaito wallets were compromised and advised users that their funds were not safe.

The Pump.fun X account was compromised on Feb. 26 to promote a fake governance token called ā€œPUMPā€ and other fraudulent coins.

Meanwhile, the X account of UK member of Parliament and Leader of the House of Commons, Lucy Powell, was hacked to promote a scam crypto token.

Magazine: Crypto wanted to overthrow banks, now it’s becoming them in stablecoin fight

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