as those who want mr biden to step down are uniting around the idea that she should be the one to take over. no—one can force him out of the race, but many will keep trying to persuade him to go. cheering sarah smith reporting. a historic theatre in greater manchester that was closed in march last year when it lost is arts council funding is to reopen. the oldham coliseum, which is 137 years old, has been saved by campaginers who decided to bring the theatre back to life. our entertainment correspondent colin paterson reports. we have had charlie chaplin here, stan laurel, pat phoenix, anne kirkbride... a lot of the corrie cast. this is a feelgood theatre story. last march, oldham coliseum shut after almost 140 years. it had lost its arts council funding. but the actressjulie hesmondhalgh refused to give up. we're very experienced at fighting

and campaigning for things, but not very experienced at winning. so it was a real shock when we found out that the council had listened to us, because it shows that with passion and persistence, you can change the world. people power! the council had planned to build a brand—new theatre half the size of this one, and it wouldn't put on its own productions. finally got a job. julie's husband, the writer ian kershaw, was born in oldham and some of his earliest work was performed at the theatre. you've written tomorrow night's coronation street. i've written tomorrow night's coronation street, yes. would you have been able to do that without this place? no, no, iwouldn't, because without this building and without theatres, we wouldn't... there would be no tv writers. this is where save oldham coliseum had their meetings... every two weeks, theatre lovers gathered above an italian restaurant to formulate a plan, and they are overjoyed at today's news. i've just had a massive smile on my face ever since i found out. i think to have have the coliseum back will give everybody in the area

such a huge boost. i think people are bitter. as forjulie hesmondhalgh, she does know a thing or two about the power of persistent campaigning. earlier this year, she starred in mr bates versus the post office. how about the stage premiere of mr bates versus the post office here? well, well, we're open to all suggestions, obviously! you know, the future is ours. colin paterson, bbc news, oldham. great suggestion, call in full now here on bbc news it's time for newscast with adam fleming and the team. newscast from the bbc. hello, it's adam now in the newscast studio. and it is chris at westminster. and for the first time in quite a while, feeling like it is the place to be. whereas when i was here during the campaign, i had sort of itchy feet to be back out on the road.

it was very weird walking past westminster the few times i was there during the campaign, and just you could hear, you could literally hear the tumbleweed. the power left basically. and now it's come back. that's the nature of a campaign. and then it's aftermath, isn't it? i've just been totting up the numbers of mps after i did my little voice note on the train. and according to the house of commons library, 300 mps out of 650 were re—elected. so coming back, 335 were candidates who successfully became mps for the first time, leaving 15 who are retreads, as in, people who were mps then had a gap, i don't know, back. yeah, there is a bit of that. it's been a really kind of different vibe of a day to day compared with normal, because this is a postcode all about argument, isn't it? and anger. and then today, there's that kind of undiluted joy on a personal level for all of the newbies,

irrespective of their party. they'll have different views depending on there, you know, how well their party did, but on a personal level, to be elected as a member of parliament and come to westminster to a building that is at once familiar and then totally unfamiliar, and then you've got elsewhere in the same parliamentary estate as it's known at westminster, people packing boxes full of books and emptying drawers into bin liners and having to sack members of staff and then think about their own future. and, you know, that's the kind of necessary brutality of democracy. but on a personal level, it's still pretty brutal. i was talking to one now former mp who said, because i was saying to them, you know, to what extent

does it feel personal? because if a tide is against you, you know, against your party, then what can you actually do about it? and they said, well, that's true, except throughout your time as an mp, and certainly when you're campaigning in election, you have to convince yourself that you can make a difference. 0therwise, why would you get out of bed every morning and go and knock on loads of doors? and therefore when you lose, you have to accept that part of that is quite personal. it was your name on the ticket. even if your party affiliation was a far greater contributor to your win or loss than anything you yourself might have done. so yeah, a very human day really, with contrasting emotions and very different from how this place normally is. ijust remember being there on this equivalent day in 2010 when the coalition government, well, the coalition hadn't been formed yet, but they were negotiating. and i remember doing an interview on the daily politics with sajid javid as a new mp. gone. and then later that week filming with penny mordaunt, new mp in the back of a taxi on the way to the train station also gone, which sort of symbolises that that era is really over. yeah. 0h, totally. yeah, exactly. and it's an odd psychologically, it's a bit odd, actually, even as a reporter, of course,

as a reporter, you know, that people come and go and that's the nature of democracy. of course it is. and that's exactly how it should be. and yet at the same time, you get quite used to familiar faces who are then gone, and then a whole swathe of new mps and a bit like your observation from 2010 and your memory from 2010. you know, as i've been meeting these newbies, you think, who's the, who's the future prime minister among these people and who's the future, you know, leader of the opposition or cabinet minister or who's the big campaigner? who's the big personality? you know, you think all of those things because parliament in that sense is that reflection of, um, the full spectrum of personality traits and all of that. so you just, you know, as a sort of study in the kind of human behaviour of these newbies turning up their newbies today, but there won't be newbies for long. and yeah, it's just very interesting because of the scale of it. obviously you get this after every election, but what's notable about this is the sheer scale of turnover. right. let's talk about what the new prime

minister, sir keir starmer, has been doing, although i notice and this goes back to an episode of newscast the other day there when someone messaged in saying, is he officially prime minister, sir keir starmer? and i've noticed on the downing street emails they just say the prime minister, they never actually say his name. yeah, well he doesn't like particularly, um, the knighthood label. he's very proud of it for his service, uh, as, uh, director of public prosecutions. but i don't think he's particularly fond of it as a, uh, a sort of thing that's bolted onto his name all of the time. and certainly plenty of conservatives regarded it as a political stick with which to beat him because they thought it, i don't know, perhaps made him look posh. yeah, basically that and sort of, uh, yeah. absolutely that. so conservatives before the election would always they would never fail to attach his, his title. and you know, and certainly in my reporting i call him that at second reference because you can't say mr starmer because he isn't that.

mhm. um, so, um, but yeah. no it is interesting, you know, that that they are saying that it's interesting actually as well, because 99% of the time i kind of work on the assumption that the prime minister is the one person in the world on which i report that i don't have to name. yeah, i'd never say rachel reeves without saying chancellor in the same way i'd have never said jeremy hunt without saying chancellor. but you can say prime minister and the prime minister's name and use them interchangeably. except probably this week, where it's probably helpful just to spell it out because everything sort of changes. and even when you hear keir starmer talking about the chancellor or the home secretary or the defence secretary, you have to remind yourself he's talking about yvette cooper and john healey and rachel reeves, and not the guys who carried those titles just a matter of days ago. yeah. good to reinforce that, that we're in a new world. right. let's hear whether you want to call him the pm. sir keir, keir starmer, not mr starmer. here he is. he's been doing a tour of the four nations of the uk quickfire whistle stop. this was him speaking in wales where he was on monday afternoon. it's very important to me to reset relations with scotland, northern

ireland and wales because i want to make sure that we collaborate. there's mutual respect and trust as we deliver for scotland, for northern ireland and for wales. now, chris, i rememberwe�*ve had enough new prime ministers in the last few years. they all do this thing first, don't they? it is not some like eureka move to be like, i know i'll go and visit all four corners of the uk as i'm on my first week as prime minister. that's true, although i remember there was a bit of a row, so liz truss did it because she did it as part of the, um, reflections that followed the passing of the late queen. but there was a bit of a ruckus when liz truss first became prime minister about whether or not she actually rang up the first minister of scotland, nicola sturgeon, at the time. so there are there are kind of routines that prime ministers will often follow, but not always follow. and it's, isuppose, a basic courtesy. and then also, if you know, you are the nature of our kind of complicated structures of government mean that you're the prime minister

of the united kingdom, but you have significant power sitting in those devolved bodies. the political point, of course, that labour are rather keen to make is the first time in ages where a government at westminster has had a majority in england, scotland and wales, as opposed to a majority merely by totting up the whole, the whole total so they can lean into that a bit, but not northern. ireland, because labour don't stand in northern ireland. and keir starmer was sort of hinting at his press conference at the weekend that he had a mandate from northern ireland too. yes. um, so that is the curiosity, isn't it, that because northern ireland have its own political parties, unless you're in the situation that, uh, theresa may was in, where you're reliant on votes from northern ireland in order to prop your majority up, then yeah, clearly it is a bit different there. but, you know, obviously as a uk prime minister, you want to make sure you are seen in, in sort of all of the different sort of nations and regions of the, of the uk. right. that rustling you will have heard

was faisal islam, economics editor, creeping in like as quiet as a mouse because he's, because he's going to do the second half of the episode. but faisal, chris has got a thing to go to shortly. so we're going to the same thing, but. 0h, 0k. i'm sorry sir. oh no, oh no, oh no, ithink, no, i think i'm going to. the thing you're going to find chris is going to a different thing. 0k. got to make it sound really secretive. it's nothing very exciting, nothing very exciting. it's just things that are happening. um, yeah. so, faisal, can you be patient while we milk chris'...? milk away. ..brief time he has with. us, like one of those auto udder cow milking machines. off you go. well, we're always looking for productivity on newscast. so, actually, chris, if i could just plug you into a machine, i could just have a day off. right. anyway. right. we've got auto udder. deary me. me. um. 0k, chris, to maximise the use of your time, we're going to maximise the number of questions we fire at you from newscast listeners, here is liz. hi, newscast, it's liz in teesside.

i was wondering what the process is for appointing ministers. - i does the secretary of state makel personal appointments or can mps apply for a role? or could it also be - a mixture of these things? how long should this take realistically? i thanks. hello, liz. 0mnibus question from liz. this is like watching a prime ministers press conference. three questions, if i may. hello, liz, iwas rather wondering if that was going to be liz in norfolk or packing up from norfolk. and by the way, the auto udder thing. my goodness, maybe that's the route to economic growth and higher productivity. um, so in terms of the appointment of ministers, they are in the gift of the prime minister. so, a prime minister will appoint, as keir starmer did on friday and saturday, a cabinet. so the cabinets involve the secretary of state's the most senior ministers in each government department. there are then more junior ministers, usually two, three, four junior ministers in each department. they are also appointed by the prime minister rather than by the secretary of state. although, you know, close allies of the prime minister will chip in with their suggestions, etc, etc. we've seen lots of more junior

ministers being appointed today and it being publicly announced their appointments. but the power lies with the prime minister. it's actually quite complicated because quite a lot of people that make up a government. yes, more than 100, isn't it? exactly in the departments. exactly, in the departments. and you've got to try and work out who you're going to disappoint, and where's the best fit for this person and that person? 0h, hang on a minute. this person doesn't get on with that person. so we better not put them in the same department. or maybe we will. and all that kind of all that kind of stuff. so it's quite complicated. it usually takes a period of days and it is still ongoing. and i mean, it's actually taken a bit of a while, hasn't it, to do like the second rung. so they did the cabinet very, very quickly over the weekend. but it wasn't until, kind of, monday lunchtime that we got the next rung of ministers of state. yeah. and i think that's because, um, it's well it's quite complicated. prime ministers have quite a lot to do. you've got to work out who's won and lost. and it's the other thing that, from labour's perspective is quite

tricky is i mean, they have, obviously, a colossal parliamentary party now because the number of mps that they've got. but if you look at those who were in parliament in the last parliament, ie a far smaller number than they have now, and you assume that the vast majority of your ministers are likely to come from them because they've got more parliamentary experience, particularly if you then just discount those who were coming back into parliament, having not been in parliament in the last parliament, but having previously served, like douglas alexander, for instance, and uh, um, and heidi alexander, not related. um, then you actually have a relatively small number of people from whom to pick, and then you're doing that, as i say, whilst he's charging around the country and no doubt having 1,000,001 briefings that prime ministers get that you're trying to get your head around, as well as the whole business ofjust thinking, crikey, you know, your prime minister and all of that. but yeah, it is taking it is taking quite a while. and that has been noted by the kind of whitehall machine who i think many of whom were sort of preparing

to work on sunday to welcome, you know, ministers a, b, c and d and then realising they had a because b, c and d hadn't actually been appointed. and of course, a famous political podcaster has gone into the house of lords or will be going into the house of lords and then into the education department. you never told me. congratulations. no, i'm completely politically neutral. um, um, i also have no managerial or executive skills. um, yeah. jacqui smith is who i'm talking about. yeah. so, yeah. jacqui smith is returning former labour home secretary. heading into the department for education as a junior minister, or certainly morejunior than being a secretary of state. it means that, yeah, iain dale is hunting for a successor on the for the many podcast. so there's a reshuffle going on in broadcasting as well as in, uh, as well as in government. i mean, if he'd been selected as a tory candidate, that podcast would just have vanished because both their presenters would be working, working for politics. apart from the fact that the seat that he was likely to fight the lib dems actually. 0h, true. good point.

so so his, you know, decision to um, uh, to, to not run turned out to be a good one. well, maybe it did, although, who knows, maybe he'd have made the difference. who knows? but yeah, certainly the tunbridge wells that it looked like he was due to fight because it's where he lives. um, yeah. switched for the first time. um, newscaster fiona message saying what's happened to emily thornberry? she was the shadow attorney general, but she's not the actual attorney general now. she isn't, because it's keir starmer has recruited a long standing senior lawyer, given him a peerage, and he's become attorney general in the blink of an eye. and there was quite a lengthy contribution to social media from emily thornberry, sufficiently lengthy that it was one of those types. something out? something out, take a photograph and post it, because you'd otherwise run out of characters if you were to bash it out as a conventional tweet or x or whatever it's called. um, in which i mean, she sounded pretty cheesed off, to be quite honest. she acknowledged that this other guy had far more legal experience than she does. but, um, there was a definite sort of tone of, well, annoyance, anger,

frustration, disappointment in that, uh, in that text. and there was some, some warm words from the prime minister when he was asked about it and not quite got to the bottom of whatjiggery pokery there might have been about otherjobs, or quite what or who knows. but, um, yeah. you know, um, it's a reminder that i suppose that, you know, if you are wanting to be ruthless and appointing who you consider to be the best in particular positions, they're going to be some people who've done one heck of a lot of work for you in opposition and emily thornberry and no doubt takes that box who end up being disappointed. and the guy who got the job has just got way more high level legal experience than her. so actually, if you were talking about if it was like an interview. and she acknowledges. yeah, exactly. he would beat her on experience. yeah. and i suppose keir starmer of all people is going to be particularly aware of, um, the value of sort of, you know, high end legal experience as an attorney general, given his, you know, previous line of work. the person i will be taxing tonight, though, is somebody who i know anyway, is nick thomas—symonds, because he is ministerfor two of my favourite subjects constitutional reform, which sounds

like they're probably going to be doing quite late on, like the house of lords and stuff like that, but also european relations. so it sounds like he's going to be masterminding the renegotiation, except they wouldn't call it that. the reset with the eu. yes. and performing that that michael gove esque role from the past in terms of those negotiations and conversations interactions. call them what you will with the european union, both in terms of what labour aspire to do. and they've told us that they want to do, which is a kind of closer relationship in a handful of areas without entertaining the sort of the big east stuff, customs union and single market. but then also that thing that's not a million miles around the corner now, which is the kind of review of the whole of the whole deal that was set out when it was first signed. right. chris, i'll let you go. see you soon. tara. faisal, thanks for being so patient.

no, but also. thanks for bringing in the cow milking machine to the podcast. i can i'll we can tweet a picture of it. it was actually, uh, it does exist i know, i know. i've seen it, i've seen it. right. so rachel reeves, she's the first female chancellor ever. and she did herfirst big speech in the treasury. was there like, did it feel i've noticed a lot of sort of captains of industry and like industry groups getting selfies with her at this speech sounds like this was quite a big, big production. oh, well, we never get any journalists trying to do such shenanigans as that. but yeah, i think, um, i mean, i use the phrase and quite rightly, um, nikki campbell picked me up on it, like summoned to the treasury. i mean, they weren't very willingly, these business leaders, and it was top tier stuff in terms of banking chief executives, financiers and others. um, and she used the opportunity, the first sort of full working day at the treasury. they'd worked through the weekend to try and make essentially an offer to these business leaders. um, but yeah, they were, you know, we weren't in the bit where they were. we were shut out of the networking drinks, but they what was really interesting was they turned up

with half the cabinet too, and they were really trying to send a message. and that message wasn't maybe primarily to us as journalists or to viewers and listeners and readers at home. it really was to those investors. and it was we were a united cabinet, perhaps contrasting with what we have seen in various guises over the past several years. and we are willing to take some short term political pain in order to deliver policy and political certainty that you need to splash the cash and splash the cash now in order to affect the growth rate in a year or two's time. the short term political pain being maybe a big housing development, being built in a place where lots of people have previously objected to it, or some onshore wind turbines being built on a hill where previously people didn't want them to be built, and under the law, it was very hard to build them. yeah. and this is one of these things we take a step back where i think it's quite hard to get out of the mode of thinking about what politics has been for the past 14 years. right? and we just sort of took

for granted, did we not that it's too difficult to do big infrastructure projects or to, you know, in shire areas where there are conservative councillors and they'll stand up. and i think, to be fair, what they've done today in liberalising the planning regime, both for house—building and for wind power in a massive way, and also for data centres, which is going to be important in our ai future. but i think thatjeremy hunt or rishi sunak would have wanted to do stuff like this, but they couldn't do it because of the internal contradictions of the conservative coalition, of the free market wings of the conservative party and the wings. um, but this is the only option right now where they don't have the fiscal lever to pull, ie pouring money. into borrowing loads of money. into it. this, they say, helps make the numbers add up or makes the difficult trade offs

that we heard so much about from the ifs. the conspiracy of silence. it makes all that stuff easier or less hard, you might say. um, but it's vitally important. um, it's a vitally, vitally important sort of, um, uh, restraint on growth that i think the easiest way to explain it is it sounds quite nerdy, and i know you like nerdy techie stuff, but you take someone like oxford and cambridge world beating research and science has not grown physically. you can see it from a map of those two university towns, as you'd expect a similar american university. they haven't grown massive industries around them. there isn't the housing under these sorts of reforms, you should expect hundreds more wind turbines up and down england, hundreds of thousands more homes and potentially places like oxford and cambridge to grow into the countryside around them. well, let's hear how rachel reeves put it herself in her speech. this government will be different and there is no time to waste. i nowhere is decisive reform needed more urgently than in the case - of our planning system. planning reform has become a byword

- for political timidity in the face - of vested interests and a graveyard of economic ambition. _ our antiquated planning system . leaves too many important projects tied up for years and years in red tape before shovels even get - in the ground. so rachel reeves then conveniently gave a bullet pointed list _ of all the things she was doing, and i put it in my new. - so rachel reeves then conveniently gave a bullet pointed list of all the things she was doing, and i put it in my new. new labour government notepad. um, just to say this is a notepad marking the new labour government. it's not like they've issued us all with one. i don't know, maybe they did. i wasn't there. right. so unfortunately, it's a seven point bulletin, which i always think is too many people have heard me say that before. so the first thing was changing this, changing the national planning policy framework. so basically these are these big documents that the government puts out that are sort of like the national bits of the planning system, because most of the planning system is actually local authorities, but some big

bits of it are national. and that is where they reversed the so—called ban on onshore wind. so up until now, it's been virtually impossible to build a wind turbine in england. that's changing. then she talked about point to priority being given to energy projects that are already in the system. in other words, it sounds like there's a big queue of projects waiting to be approved that the system just hasn't got round to. so they're going to do that. then there's this thing, this new task force that they're going to set up to restart stalled housing projects. and she listed a few places, for example, in liverpool and worcestershire, where there's obviously big projects ready to go but just haven't happened. and she installed a couple immediately. yeah, with. a click of her fingers. yeah. uh, hiring 300 new planning inspectors. yeah. which doesn't sound like the most exciting thing, but actually, if you've got a system where there aren't enough people to actually approve the things.

and there's been council cuts. so that's sort of that's a cycle of problems for the for trying to get through the planning system. there just aren't enough people. yeah. then point five was a little section in the speech about angela rayner because as well as deputy prime minister, she's also the levelling up and housing and local government secretary. and apparently they're losing the levelling up. apparently so, yes. but they haven't done it yet. and also that costs money to take words off like letterheads and plaques. um, it sounds like. yeah. angela rayner, who has the power to look at individual planning applications if they get to her desk, changing the sort of the criteria she might use to say yay or nay to something. yeah, but to make it much more focussed on growth. yeah. point six, this is why you never have seven bullet points in a speech. i haven't memorised them. yeah, well this is i knew that's why i was like, i'm just going to write these down. then number six was the transport secretary and the energy secretary prioritising projects to do with like, big national infrastructure. have to make some things. and then point seven was a slightly longer term thing that it will take that most of the next year is changing these national policy statements to mean that ministers have got more levers to sort

of demand that things are built rather than, yeah, letting local authorities. and that's where your data centres thing comes in, isn't it? just zoom in on the data centre thing. what's happening there. so there were literally two data centres. and these are like basically big warehouses of computers that provide cloud computing. absolutely essential for the future of ai. i'll give you a quick example, and we'll expand upon this. president macron has been going around, uh, telling the big tech companies we have surplus nuclear electricity that's green. come and put your data centres in france, because they know the data centres will then mean that the, the sort of business of computing and ai happens. so this is quite important. two big data centres in their home counties i think it's buckinghamshire and hampshire potentially were were rejected by their local councils there. one of them is on the green belt. at least one maybe both of them on the green belt. but the green belt that's next

to the m25 motorway. exactly. and they've just said we're going to allow them now with a stroke of the pen. so this is really, really fascinating. and i think if you add all of these seven points together and the general vibe, if you like, given to the investors, they're saying they're notjust saying we accept there's going to be political pain. they want to tell the investors that we will we're going to have this political pain, because then that gives the confidence for them to to to write their checks and write their checks quickly. so that is what this is all about. and i think to go back to the french analogy, um, president macron was rather brilliant at getting foreign investors to come to the palace of versailles. he'd name them, he'd know their names of their children. he'd be like, bit creepy. maybe he'd be like. he'd charm the socks off them. and even though france has some interesting labour laws and all this sort of stuff, he'd be saying, come and invest in france. and as a result, on the league tables of investment, france shot

to the top and there was a little bit of side eye from france about, oh, those guys over the channel. they've gone a bit crazy though actually. i say a bit, quite a lot of that, although they didn't make some big explicit statement about it. they didn't start trolling us explicitly, but that was definitely part of the sell. well, the argument from the new government is that he's changed now_ and it's entirely reversed, which is there is now a labour government with a solid majority for five years. obviously, there's all sorts of questions that people are asking about vouchers and all this stuff, but you ain't going to outvote them in parliament and they can push all this stuff through with the political pain. and then you look over at paris and what policies could you be sure or sure of, even if a government can be formed. and that's all for this episode of newscast. thank you for watching it. we recorded more than we could fit into this tv slot, so if you'd like to hear the extra stuff, then you can listen to our podcast on bbc sounds. bye. newscast from the bbc.

welcome to newsday, i'm steve lai reporting live from singapore. the headlines... another senior democrat says joe biden should stand down — but the us president says he's going nowhere. russia's latest attacks on ukraine kill at least 36 people. in the capital kyiv, the main children's hospital

is largely destroyed. people in the centre of gaza city say they are seeing some of the heaviest fighting since the war with israel began. and families face deportation from australia because of its laws on people with disabilities. welcome to the programme, we start this hour in the us wherejoe biden is coming under increasing pressure to drop out of the presidential race. in the past few hours, another senior us democrat has publicly urged president biden to step down. congressman adam smith said if mr biden were to continue his campaign for re—election, it would be a "mistake". earlier, the us president had insisted he's "not going anywhere". he called in to a morning

tv show — and wrote to democrats in congress — to say he was the person best