6 June 2019 | UK NEWS
Photo credit: David Rose
At least 10 bookmakers, including Betfair and William Hill, are posting odds equating to an 80%+ chance of the Brexit Party winning today’s by-election in Peterborough. The chance of a Labour victory, according to these same bookmakers, is thought to be somewhere in the 20% range. The Brexit Party itself appears confident, despite speculation amid the Labour ranks that they may just clinch a win.
The pools will close, as ever, at 10pm tonight. The result, due to be announced when the count finishes around 4am on Friday morning, will confirm whether or not the Brexit Party has managed to gain its first MP in the House of Commons since it was formally announced on 20th January of this year. With 61% of the Peterborough electorate having voted Leave in the 2016 EU referendum, and given that its former Labour MP, Fiona Onasanya, was recalled in disgrace after she was discovered to have lied about a speeding offence, tomorrow’s result will be seen by some commentators as a key test of the Brexit Party’s domestic electoral viability.
Full coverage of the vote will be posted on this site tomorrow.
In other political news, Andrea Leadsom, the former Leader of the Commons and one of the candidates in the Tory leadership election, has announced today that she would declare a ‘climate emergency’ in the event that she became Prime Minister. Mrs Leadsom said: “For me, a very big headline policy would be to declare a climate emergency, to say that the UK is going to lead the world in this area in the same way that we lead the world in financial services.”
She added: “This is a massive opportunity to demonstrate that, far from decarbonising being a loss of GDP, loss of jobs and so on and so on, actually the clean growth technology sector is fast-growing, and it can be an opportunity for new jobs, new skills, a way to get young people energised to decarbonise our economy.”
Leadsom then drew on her prior experience working in financial services, saying that, owing to the potential for new skills and jobs arising from the clean growth sector, she believed that tackling climate was “something that could be as big if not bigger than the whole financial services sector” in terms of its potential economic boon for the country. She further expressed a wish that “the UK [could] lead the world in that and actually expand our economy at the same time”.
It comes as the latest leadership backing figures unveiled by Guido Fawkes suggest that Mrs Leadsom is unlikely to secure enough nominations to be included in the official contest, which begins on Monday after Theresa May’s formal resignation as Conservative Party leader (although not yet as Prime Minister) tomorrow.
In the newspapers today, we read in The Telegraph that the Speaker of the House, John Bercow, has appeared to rule out Dominic Raab’s suggestion that he would be willing to prorogue Parliament in order to achieve a No Deal Brexit by the end of October, saying that it was “simply not going to happen”.
Meanwhile, The Mirror carries a story reporting that Kevin Moore, a Brexit Party campaign co-ordinator for the North West region, has been sacked by the party after a Manchester Evening News investigation revealed his past ties to the BNP.
