Active travel groups call for clear targets on walking and cycling in England

More than 50 groups connected to transport and public health have urged the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, to set specific targets for levels of walking and cycling in England, warning that plans as they stand are too vague.A letter from groups including British Cycling, Cycling UK, the National Trust and the British Medical Association says the government’s proposals for active travel must “move from good intentions to a clear, long-term, fully deliverable national plan comparable to other strategic transport programmes”.Transport planners for modes such as road and rail have the confidence of established funding and plans setting out objectives over decades, the groups point out, contrasting this with what they say remains an often short-term and piecemeal approach to active travel despite this making up a third of all trips.The government has promised unprecedented levels of funding for walking, wheeling and cycling. Ministers are consulting on the third cycling and walking investment strategy (CWIS3), which promises a “fundamental shift” in how active travel is treated

UK politics: Your Party’s Sultana suggests ‘electoral alliances’ could help stop Farage – as it happened

Zarah Sultana, who co-founded Your Party with former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in July, said “there has to be conversations around electoral alliances” as she suggested this could help stop Nigel Farage, the Reform UK party leader, from becoming prime minister.Asked what her message would be to voters who might look at the Green party rather than “a party that is finding it quite hard to agree with itself” such as Your Party, the Coventry South MP told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme:I think it’s important that voters have a choice and that they are able to look at the left of politics, given the fact that the Labour Party has left the scene, and see multiple parties that are speaking to their interests.Obviously the Green party have a new leader who’s doing really well, and I get on really well with Zack Polanski.Asked if she would work with him and would she defect, Sultana added:I think there has to be conversations around electoral alliances. We have to look at the next election where the goal has to be to stop Nigel Farage from getting the keys to Downing Street

Keir Starmer says ‘hugely talented’ Angela Rayner will return to cabinet

Keir Starmer has predicted that Angela Rayner will return to the cabinet, calling his former deputy, who resigned in September after underpaying stamp duty on a property purchase, “hugely talented”.In an interview with the Observer, the prime minister described Rayner, who left school aged 16 without any qualifications, as “the best social mobility story this country has ever seen”.Rayner resigned as deputy prime minister and housing secretary after Starmer’s ethics adviser, Sir Laurie Magnus, found she had breached the ministerial code over her underpayment of stamp duty on a flat in Hove.Magnus said Rayner had “acted with integrity” but that her failure to get sufficient advice on how much stamp duty she had to pay amounted to a breach of the code.Asked in the interview if he missed Rayner, Starmer replied: “Yes, of course I do

Nigel Farage aide dismisses alleged racism as ‘playground banter’

One of Nigel Farage’s key aides has suggested the Reform UK leader was involved in “playground arguments or banter” when he allegedly made racist and antisemitic comments while at school.Danny Kruger, who has been preparing Reform’s possible programme for government since defecting from the Conservatives, also said he was relieved that Farage was facing so much scrutiny about his behaviour as a teenager because it meant he was not being attacked for his present-day politics.Twenty-eight of Farage’s contemporaries at Dulwich college have told the Guardian they experienced or witnessed racist or antisemitic behaviour when he was a teenager.They include Peter Ettedgui, 61, who is Jewish, and who said Farage repeatedly told him “Hitler was right” or said “gas them” at him when they were at school. On Friday, Yinka Bankole said a then 17-year-old Farage told him: “That’s the way back to Africa” when he was much younger and new to the school

Faith and Reform: is the religious right on the rise in UK politics?

At recent Reform UK press conferences, two very distinctive heads can often be spotted in the front row: the near-white locks of Danny Kruger, the party’s head of policy, and the swept-back blond mane of James Orr, now a senior adviser to Nigel Farage.As well as guiding the policy programme for what could be the UK’s next government, the pair have something else in common. Both are highly devout Christians who came to religion in adulthood and have trenchant views on social issues such as abortion and the family.Kruger, an MP who defected from the Conservatives in September, and Orr, who is a Cambridge academic, also sit on the advisory board of a rightwing thinktank called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, led by Philippa Stroud, a Conservative peer who is strongly religious.Another member is Paul Marshall, the hedge fund millionaire who owns GB Newsand the rightwing Spectator magazine

From bricklayer to mayor: Steve Rotheram is quietly building a Liverpool success story

From the towering south stand of Everton’s gleaming new riverside football stadium, the Liverpool city region mayor Steve Rotheram is showing off his next big goal to the visiting government minister.It was not much to look at: acres of industrial wasteland, disused docks and a sorry-looking gothic clock tower, said to be one of only two in the world with six faces.The hands of the Grade II-listed “dockers’ clock” have not moved for years, an all too fitting symbol of time standing still on this part of the Mersey dockland against the rampant regeneration nearby.Accompanied by the communities secretary Steve Reed on Thursday morning, Rotheram announced a “once-in-a-generation” development on the 174-hectare (430-acre) site beside the £800m Hill Dickinson stadium. A new government-backed body promises 17,000 new homes and commercial premises over the next 15 years