The unopposed second reading of the Private Member’s Bill to give British Sign Language (BSL) legal status is a welcome bright light in these dark and dingy days. In proposing the Bill Labour MP Rosie Cooper recalled her own experiences of growing up as the hearing child of deaf parents. “I saw first-hand the difficulties deaf people face every day – the huge challenges my parents had to...

Whatever “formidable” civil servant Sue Gray uncovers about the Prime Minister, his wife and their coterie of pals, advisers and party backers, there are a few other events going on worth our attention. One takes place in the High Court on Monday morning to Julian Assange: will he be allowed to appeal the High Court’s ruling on extradition to the United States? Try to hold these two pictures in...

What must it have felt like for Douglas Ross, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, to learn that he was “quite a lightweight figure” in the eyes of his fellow Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg? As a qualified football referee the MP for Moray will have received much more vulgar abuse than this patronising putdown from Boris Johnson’s fellow Etonian, but it was still pretty nasty from the grandiloquent...

It’d be hard to think of a better time to celebrate the life of Hillsborough campaigner Anne Williams, brought so vividly to life in ITV’s drama Anne. ((https://www.itv.com/hub/anne/2a5505)) If we’re discouraged by Downing Street deceit as we try to cope with Covid, rising inflation and the rest, imagine what it was like for the Merseyside mum whose young teenage son died in the 1989...