2 min read13 min

Host Alain Tolhurst also takes a look at Andy Burnham’s first few days in Number 10, how his Cabinet picks and his initial policy blitz are going down with his Labour colleagues, as well as the voters, and what else we can expect from our latest Prime Minister alongside two colleagues: deputy editor of our sister title The House magazine, Sienna Rodgers, and editor at PoliticsHome, Adam Payne.

The trio discusses the thinking behind the ministerial appointments, as well as what was going on behind the scenes in Westminster this week, plus how the Burnham government is keen to avoid the mistakes of the Keir Starmer administration in its first weeks in office. 

They also look at what the new Prime Minister might have planned for the summer, with the government already facing questions about how it will fund its cost-of-living package.

As well as trying to oppose the new Labour government, the Conservatives are looking to close the gap on Reform UK in the polls. Stride was in bullish form, saying he thinks Nigel Farage’s party has been on a “steady decline” since last autumn.

“And it’s quite conceivable that decline will continue,” he told the podcast. 

“What has underpinned that souffléing down of Reform is the fact that the firework display, the shimmy of the sequin dress, the music, the razzmatazz, it can’t last forever before people say I’ve heard that before, play me another song.”

The Rundown is presented by Alain Tolhurst, and is produced and edited by Ewan Cameron for Podot

• Click here to listen to the latest episode of The Rundown, or search for ‘PoliticsHome’ wherever you get your podcasts.

Make Love Not Porn founder Cindy Gallop, Labour MP Samantha Niblett and Coco de Mer CEO Lucy Litwack at the ‘Summer of Sex’ campaign launch party (Coco de Mer/John Lewis)

7 min read1 hr

Three months on from kicking off her campaign for lifelong sex education via an exclusive interview with PoliticsHome, Niblett partnered with major retailer John Lewis and luxury lingerie and sexual wellness brand Coco de Mer to host an event on Wednesday evening to officially launch the ‘Summer of Sex’.

Speaking at the event with Coco de Mer CEO Lucy Litwack and Make Love Not Porn founder Cindy Gallop – who has partnered with Niblett for her campaign – Niblett laid out how the campaign has progressed over the last few months.

“If I get known as Samantha the sex MP, I just start making it easier for other MPs to start to talk about it. Many of them have gone ‘my god, good on you, this is amazing’.”

She said some supportive MPs have told her that some of the “original doubters” have started to see the point of the campaign.

“Some MPs that were critical of the way that I went about it, they don’t like the sex toys, they think it’s diminishing the campaign.

“But it’s not. I grabbed the mic. It did get the attention, and I am absolutely going to do a sex toys event in Parliament because I want it to not be shocking. I want it to not be pearl-clutchy. 

“Some colleagues are going on a journey. I honestly believe it: the more that the country gets behind this campaign, the more that Parliament will, because it will be led by what is palatable. We are as basic as that, seriously. People are interested in sex. Everybody wants to talk about sex.”

Niblett said she aims to pull together a briefing document by the end of summer recess to send to fellow MPs and promote the purpose of the campaign.

In her interview with PoliticsHome in April, Niblett said she wanted to push for more open, inclusive lifelong sex education by securing a debate in Parliament on the topic in the autumn. Niblett said she wanted to promote wider awareness of consent, prevent abuse and violence, and raise awareness of how childbirth, the menopause, stress and other health conditions can impact sexual satisfaction.

Niblett shared that she watched porn herself like “lots of other people” and that it was a “turn on”. She said she will host an event in Parliament where she brings in sex toys, which has since been confirmed to be allowed by the parliamentary authorities. 

The campaign took Westminster by storm, generating discussion in the chamber, in which Tory leader Kemi Badenoch accused Labour of “fiddling while Rome burns”, and heated debate within the women’s Parliamentary Labour Party WhatsApp group, in which other MPs accused Niblett of trivialising a serious topic. 

“I certainly found myself posting less in MP WhatsApp chats because there were slightly terse comments that went flying by in the women’s PLP chat,” Niblett said. 

“So I extricated myself from it, which is horrible because you think you’ve got comrades, but it didn’t feel like that. So that was a bit sad, but it’s politics.”

The interview generated many TV interviews and opinion columns, including an LBC interview with Labour deputy leader Lucy Powell in which she said: “I personally don’t own any sex toys, but each to their own”.

Niblett has since become the chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for sexual and reproductive health.

The campaign launch event on Wednesday evening was attended by sponsoring brands John Lewis and Coco de Mer, sex education content creators, sexual intimacy coaches, charity campaigners and journalists. It was an exclusive affair, with the vast majority of the around 50 attendees being women. 

The event was located at the rooftop bar of John Lewis in central London, with servings of canapés and glasses of Aperol spritz, flowery decor and luxury goodie bags for attendees that contained biscuits, canned cocktails and intimate bodycare products. 

The ‘Yes sex please, we’re British’ campaign has a broad scope: covering lifelong sex education which Niblett describes as needing buy-in from government, the NHS and education systems, parents, and businesses.

Pressed on what specific demands she hopes to bring to government ministers, Niblett said she is continuing to speak to stakeholders and charities throughout the summer to learn as much as possible, before delivering a speech at the debate she has secured in Parliament, which is set to be held in the autumn. 

Talked about what she wants to systemic change and for positive sexual wellness should be “promoted” across the health and education systems.

“I have spoken to doctors and sexologists and people working within the NHS and educators that are just so grateful someone is taking this seriously within Parliament, that’s prepared to put their head above the parapet,” Niblett told PoliticsHome.

“We need to be talking about sexual wellness within the NHS, not just sexual health. Talking about the benefits of sex, not just let’s fix you when you’re broken.”

Niblett spoke of concerns raised by people working in the NHS that support is “patchy” for patients whose health conditions affect their sex lives: “Some doctors are embarrassed to talk about it; there isn’t a standard of sex education in GP training even.”

The MP also wants to start work on determining the economic value benefit of improving lifelong sex education, as a way of getting the Treasury on board by saving money for the NHS.

“How is it preventing other illnesses from happening? How is it making people better?”

Niblett also recently hosted a roundtable with Meta to express her opposition to the banning of accounts that share ‘positive’ sex education content.

The MP hopes that the sponsorship from John Lewis for the launch event will help to legitimise the campaign. John Lewis has seen a 22 per cent increase in demand for their sexual wellness products in the last year, which has been growing since the Covid-19 pandemic. John Lewis and Coco de Mer representatives told PoliticsHome at the event that both companies wanted to help take the “stigma” out of sex. 

Niblett has already won the support of Emma Thompson, who recorded a video with Niblett last month, saying that the campaign was “not party political, but it was critical”.

The MP has her sights on further celebrity endorsements: She is in conversation with LGBTQ dating app Grindr to get her an introduction to pop star Madonna, and with American media company Condé Nast to connect her with singer Harry Styles, who launched his own sex toy range last year.

“We’re trying to get the nation behind the campaign, because when you do that, MPs will fall in line,” Niblett said. 

“If it looks like a vote winner, people don’t want to look like the idiot who looks like the one who’s on the side.”

Geraldine Coggins is the Green Party candidate for the Greater Manchester mayoral by-election (Alamy)

5 min read24 min

Geraldine Coggins will announce on Friday that she will seek to twin the Greater Manchester city-region with the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the West Bank if she is elected as mayor next week.

On 30 July, voters in Greater Manchester will head to the polls to elect a new regional mayor to replace Andy Burnham, who left the role to become the new prime minister of the United Kingdom.

The mayoral by-election is a hugely significant contest for the Labour Party, which wants to prove it can maintain its stronghold in the region, and Reform UK and the Green Party, which both made significant electoral gains in the local council elections in May and want to show they can challenge Labour on its home turf.

With Andy Burnham as the new Labour leader and prime minister, the Green Party are having to rethink their strategy to retain left-wing voters who have moved from Labour to support them during Keir Starmer’s premiership.

Asked by PoliticsHome how the party might have to change its campaign messaging to adapt to a Burnham premiership, Coggins said it would “depend on which version of Burnham we get” but insisted that the Greens had a clear dividing line with Labour over the war in Gaza, which the party believes resonates with voters in the Greater Manchester region.

“We’ve not seen the serious recognition of what is happening in Gaza, and a lot of people will not go back to Labour and really see Labour as morally bankrupt,” she said.

“That’s what we hear from people. That is not a thing that people just get over.

“We are still funding and fueling this war and sharing military intelligence. Our government is still complicit in that, and people are not just going to get over that because there’s a new prime minister at the front.”

The Greens included a pledge to partner with a Palestinian city in their mayoral election manifesto. The party has now chosen Ramallah as the proposed twin city because it has growing technology, creative, professional services, and education sectors which could create opportunities for collaboration between the cities.

Coggins will announce the pledge outside the Dar ul Uloom Mosque in Manchester’s Longsight District on Friday, where she is expected to say that Manchester has a “proud tradition of international solidarity, from the campaign against apartheid to welcoming refugees fleeing conflict”.

A Green Party source said: “People up and down the country have been outraged by Labour’s complicity in Israel’s genocide.

“It’s clear that this isn’t going to change now Andy Burnham has become Prime Minister. Greens will always stand up for human rights and international law. And, as mayor of Greater Manchester, Geraldine would continue to call out the government’s failings and show there is a different way.”

The Manchester mayoral by-election is shaping up to be less closely fought than was initially expected following Labour’s devastating losses in the region in the May local elections.

A YouGov poll on 17 July put Labour candidate Bev Craig at 62 per cent in the second round of the by-election voting, beating Reform UK’s Sian Astley on 38 per cent. The poll also showed Craig leading on 38 per cent on first preference votes, compared to Astley’s 24 per cent and the Greens in third on 17 per cent.

Nevertheless, the Greens say they are continuing to campaign hard after their former leader Caroline Lucas told PoliticsHome it was the party’s intention to “throw everything” at the contest.

Speaking to PoliticsHome in Manchester this week, Coggins criticised Burnham’s announcement to cut VAT on household electricity as a measure that would only save the average household less than a pound a week.

“That’s a continuation of the sort of incrementalism that we had under Starmer,” she said.

“It is not the wholesale change to the rip-off Britain model that we really need. I don’t think people are going to be fooled by that.”

Coggins highlighted suggestions that Burnham intends to continue drilling in the North Sea, and his failure to eradicate homelessness in Greater Manchester during his time as mayor, with the new PM now making the same pledge from Downing Street.

She also criticised Burnham’s approach to ‘Manchesterism’, arguing that the way housing development had been carried out in Manchester was seen primarily as an “investment opportunity for wealthy individuals and big corporations”.

In contrast, she said the Greens see housing as “bringing back homes for people” in Greater Manchester, with a pledge to create 20,000 “genuinely affordable” homes over 10 years.

At an LGBT hustings in Manchester’s Gay Village on Tuesday evening, Coggins was keen to draw a dividing line between the Greens and Labour on housing in particular. PoliticsHome previously revealed that the Greens were hoping to target unease about gentrification in the region to attack Labour in the contest.

“Unlike Bev, I can tell you what genuinely affordable means,” Coggins told the hustings. 

“That means that if you are on housing benefit, you will be able to afford to rent them.”

She described a system where housing benefit money was being “funnelled into big corporate landlords who own these shiny towers in other countries who aren’t even paying tax here” and said she wanted to “really radically change our housing”.

Craig responded by saying that Coggins’ comments got a “little bit personal”.

“If you want to know what I think genuinely affordable homes look like, you can look at the Manchester living rent,” the Labour candidate said.

“And you can look at the record numbers of council and social homes that we built last year, building more in the city than we’ve done in 25 years.”

The full list of Greater Manchester Mayoral Candidates:

Sian Astley (Reform UK)

Geraldine Coggins (The Green Party)

Bev Craig (Labour and Co-operative Party)

Phil Eckersley (The Conservative Party)

Marcus Farmer (Independent)

Richard Kilpatrick (Liberal Democrats)

Marlon West (Restore Britain)