United Kingdom (National)
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Martin Ivens focuses on opinion editorials and government-related topics, particularly UK politics, the Conservative Party, and Labour Party. He also covers legal policy regulation extensively. To effectively reach out to him, pitch well-researched opinions on UK political developments or legal regulations with a focus on insightful analysis rather than breaking news.
Given his emphasis on opinion pieces related to UK politics and government actions, experts who can provide nuanced insights into these areas would likely capture his attention. It's important to note that he has a national geographic focus in the United Kingdom.
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Three months ago Iran launched two intercontinental ballistic missiles toward the UK-controlled island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Neither reached its target: A US destroyer shot down one and the other broke up in flight. Yet the strike blew an enormous hole in the credibility of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s grandiose foreign and security policy.
In March, ministers tried to reassure voters that the U.K. had everything it needed to defend the country. It wasn’t true and Healey knew it.
After a spectacular by-election victory in Makerfield that exceeded the pollsters’ most optimistic forecasts, Andy Burnham returns to London this week as the ruling Labour Party’s conquering hero. He has shown he can vanquish the threat from the right-wing populists of Reform UK, whereas other party candidates have failed to slow Nigel Farage’s momentum. The self-styled King of the North now moves to seize Keir Starmer’s crown.
No one ever went broke underestimating the survival skills of a UK prime minister. There have been six of them since 2016, each with their own often short and always inglorious tenure. Can Andy Burnham turn the tide? The critics say he is just a personable version of his robotic predecessor, Keir Starmer, who failed to restrain the Labour party’s profligate tax-and-spend habits. The best — and most difficult — way to prove them wrong would be to tackle welfare reform.
Everybody says the UK is a laughing stock. The economy is in the doldrums, the Royal Family has been besmirched by controversy and infighting and the country is about to have its seventh prime minister in 10 years. Britain, once a byword for political stability, has become an unserious country like Italy but without the good weather and the pasta, goes the argument. If only it were true.
Whenever there’s bad news, shoot the messenger. Last week Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, Britain’s hard-right populist party, found himself in an unlikely alliance with Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and second son of King Charles III. Both men share an animating passion: They blame the press or “the Establishment” for the wholly avoidable messes they have got themselves into.
When mischievously invited by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch to offer some public advice to his successor Andy Burnham, Keir Starmer tactfully declined — at least for now. Stanley Baldwin, outgoing British prime minister in 1937, promised that when he left office he wouldn’t “speak to the man on the bridge or spit on the deck,” and kept his word. Baldwin, however, was an exception among his peers; in practice, few former prime ministers can resist semaphoring the new captain.
By: Martin Ivens
Bold, big-bang reforms will give the 56-year-old Labour leader the confidence to face the electorate, writes journalist Martin Ivens.
What a difference a change of leader makes. When news broke last week that two prisoners convicted for killing a policeman in the line of duty were to be the beneficiaries of an early prison-release program, the new UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham immediately halted the process, saying nothing was more important than public safety. Keir Starmer would have dithered for days while the newspapers and social media tore into a government “soft on crime.”
Andy Burnham fulminates against forty years of “neoliberalism,” which he claims has laid waste to the UK and especially his native north of England. The prime minister’s solution, outlined before his recent return to Westminster, was explicit; “Put more things under public control: energy, housing, water, transport.” If he means a return to wholesale nationalization and the industrial policy of the 1970s, then “broken Britain” will stay broken. Nobody should want to turn the clock back by half a
