Westminster

Amid the gloom of the economy and the noise of Westminster power struggles, the government has quietly unveiled a policy that might just be a sleeper hit. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has confirmed a new Screen Sector Growth Plan, injecting a cool £75 million into the independent film industry. It’s not the sort of headline figure that makes the front pages—£75m is a rounding error in a defence budget—but for the scrappy, brilliant, and perpetually underfunded world of British indie cinema, it’s manna from heaven. The question is: can a cash injection save an art form that is being crushed by the algorithms of streaming giants?

The state of British independent film is, to put it bluntly, on life support. The economics of making a small, daring, original movie—the kind of film that launches the careers of future Oscar winners like Andrea Arnold or Steve McQueen—have become almost impossible. The collapse of the DVD market and the reluctance of streamers to pay fair rates for niche, non-franchise content has left producers begging, borrowing, and maxing out their credit cards. Cinemas are struggling to fill seats with anything other than the latest Marvel behemoth or a sing-along version of *Wicked*. This £75 million is designed as a seed fund. It’s public money intended to de-risk private investment. The plan includes a new tax relief sweetener specifically for lower-budget films (under £15 million) and a commitment to ensure that a portion of the funding goes to projects made outside the M25, telling stories from the regions that usually get ignored.

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In a rare moment of unvarnished clarity and moral indignation, the Prime Minister has stepped into the Kanye West Wireless Festival furore with both feet. Sir Keir Starmer, speaking to journalists on the tarmac before his Gulf trip, delivered a statement that was as blunt as it was necessary. Responding to questions about the rapper’s scheduled appearance in London, Starmer said it was “deeply troubling” and that antisemitism “must be confronted firmly wherever it rears its ugly head.” It was a political intervention that cuts across the usual “art should be separate from politics” defence and draws a clear, unambiguous red line in the sand.

This is not a throwaway comment for Starmer. It’s personal. He has spent the last four years methodically, and sometimes brutally, purging the Labour Party of the stain of antisemitism that festered under his predecessor. He dragged the party to a formal apology and a settlement with former staffers. He made it his mission to restore trust with the British Jewish community, a community that had felt abandoned and gaslit by the institution of the Labour Party. To remain silent while a figure like Kanye West—who has openly praised Hitler and harassed Jewish executives—is given a prime-time, taxpayer-adjacent platform in a London park would be to undermine all of that work.

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The red box has been swapped for a diplomatic passport. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has left the drizzle of Downing Street behind and jetted off on an urgent, unscheduled dash to the Gulf States. His mission, should he choose to accept it—and he has no choice—is to prop up the desperately fragile US-Iran ceasefire before it collapses and takes the global economy, and his premiership, with it. It’s a high-stakes game of diplomatic poker where Starmer is holding a pair of twos, but he has to convince the table he’s got a full house.

The two-week truce is hanging by a thread. While the shooting between American naval assets and Iranian proxies has paused, the underlying tensions in the Strait of Hormuz are as volatile as a petrol tanker in a lightning storm. The UK has a specific and urgent interest here that goes beyond the price of unleaded at the pumps. British-flagged vessels still transit those waters, and the Royal Navy’s presence, while gallant, is a shadow of its former imperial self. A miscalculation that leads to a mining incident or a ship seizure would drag the UK into a conflict it can neither afford nor politically sustain. Starmer’s plan is to use Britain’s historic, albeit sometimes frosty, ties with the Gulf monarchies—Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar—to act as a backchannel.

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Hold onto your flags, because the United Kingdom could be about to face its most profound constitutional challenge since the Good Friday Agreement. With the May elections for the devolved parliaments and assemblies just around the corner, the political betting markets are flashing red. The prospect of a “Nationalist Triple Crown”—where pro-independence parties hold the reins of power simultaneously in Edinburgh, Cardiff, and Belfast—is no longer a fringe fantasy. It is a very real, and very unsettling, probability for the government in Westminster.

In Scotland, the SNP, despite recent turbulence, remains the dominant force. The central plank of their campaign is simple: “The Westminster parties have failed. Give us the mandate for a second referendum.” In Wales, the tectonic plates have shifted even more dramatically. Plaid Cymru, long seen as the junior partner in a Labour-dominated Senedd, is polling to become the largest party outright. Their message resonates in the Valleys and the rural West—a feeling that Cardiff Bay has become just as remote and out-of-touch as Westminster, and that only independence can protect Welsh language and industry. And then there’s Northern Ireland, where the delicate balance of power is tipping. For the first time, Sinn Féin’s call for a border poll on Irish unity is being backed up by electoral dominance and, crucially, favourable demographic trends.

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The political tectonic plates under Westminster are groaning and shifting, and for the first time in a long while, the vibrations are coming from the Opposition benches. A new, bombshell opinion poll has put Kemi Badenoch ahead of Sir Keir Starmer in the personal popularity stakes. The numbers show the Conservative leader overtaking the Prime Minister as the country’s preferred choice for Number 10. It’s a seismic moment in the 2026 political calendar and a stark warning to Labour that the honeymoon—if there ever was one—is well and truly over, and the divorce papers might be in the post.

How has Badenoch managed this? She’s hardly a cuddly, centrist unifier in the mould of a Cameron or even a Sunak. She’s a conviction politician with a capital ‘C’, and her convictions often involve saying things that make the liberal metropolitan elite spill their oat milk lattes. But that’s precisely the point. In a political landscape paralysed by managerial blandness, Badenoch sounds like she actually believes in something. Whether it’s her robust defence of free speech on campuses, her scepticism about the costs of Net Zero, or her refusal to bow to identity politics, she has carved out a space as the authentic voice of the “anti-woke” majority—or at least, a sizable and very noisy minority. More importantly, she’s managed to avoid the bitter infighting that plagued the Tories after the election defeat. She’s kept her party quiet, which in Conservative terms, is a miracle akin to turning water into a decent claret.

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