Megan Kenyon

3 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Megan Kenyon

In last year’s General Election, the Green Party quadrupled its representation in parliament (from one in 2019 to four in 2024, albeit). Caroline Lucas, elected in 2010, was for a long time the party’s only MP. After years of the Green’s representation in Parliament resting solely on Lucas’s shoulders, July 2024 was a turning-point.

3 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Megan Kenyon

It has been 606 days since the start of the war in Gaza and according to Gaza’s health ministry, as of 5 May, 52,615 people have died. The conflict has reached a turning point; a “dark new phase” as the Foreign Secretary David Lammy recently described it. Today, the US-backed organisation operating aid distribution centres in Gaza announced they would be closed all day.

3 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Megan Kenyon

“We need to completely reset the idea that it’s OK to be dishonest in public life,” Mike Berners-Lee told me on a bright spring afternoon at the New Statesman’s offices in London’s Hatton Garden. The 61-year-old environmentalist radiated with the same quiet rage I recognised from his latest book, A Climate of Truth. In it, he argues that misinformation and dishonesty have become normalised in British politics, which has had a calamitous effect on any discussion of the climate crisis.

3 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Megan Kenyon

Keir Starmer has used the past few weeks to assert that Reform UK is his party’s main opponent – but Ed Miliband already knew that. The Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero holds the portfolio that Reform’s leader and its deputy – Nigel Farage and Richard Tice – hate the most. Tice regularly calls for an end to “Net Stupid Zero” and Farage has described the government’s clean power agenda as “lunacy”. Today, the Energy Secretary will fight back.

3 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Megan Kenyon

Labour MPs could be forced to vote on whether to hold a public inquiry into the UK’s involvement in Israeli military operations in Gaza, if recent manoeuvring by Jeremy Corbyn pays-off. On Wednesday (4 June) the former Labour leader, who now sits as an Independent MP, has secured a Ten-Minute Rule Bill calling for an “independent public inquiry” into the UK’s “military, economic, or political cooperation with Israel since October 2023”.