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Duffield: Anybody would be a better leader than Starmer
Another day, another Labour drama. Now it’s Independent MP Rosie Duffield making waves after giving a rather revealing interview to TalkTV. The animosity between the former Labour politician and the current party leader has spanned years, with public disagreements over women’s rights, policy decisions and sleaze scandals. Are there any circumstances in which the left-leaning politician would ever consider rejoining her old party? Well, maybe.
Speaking on TalkTV today, Duffield was quizzed by Talk’s Russell Quirk on her relationship with Labour.
RQ: What would you do, Rosie, though? Will you wait for Keir Starmer to be replaced, which I think is probably inevitable before the next general election and then find a way back? Or are you determined to carry on and then stand again as an independent?
RD: Do you know what? Honestly, I’m not talking political spin here, but I just don’t know yet. I mean, it’s four years away… I would really like to rejoin the Labour Party. I’d like to recognize it as the Labour Party that I joined and have always been supportive of… I just want to see a Labour party that I recognise and whoever takes over as leader, because I think if the local elections go as badly as things are going now…
RQ: Who would you like to see be the leader of the Labour Party that would allow you, in all good conscience, to come back?
RD: That’s a really good question. And to be honest, I don’t know the answer.
RQ: Come on, get off the fence. Wes Streeting? Angela Rayner?
RD: Wes and Angela could do a really good job… I think they’ve both got very good political instincts. They understand that they would have to allow the left and left backbenchers and senior backbenchers to have a say. And if they do that, then there’s room for me again.
RQ: Do you think anybody’s better than Keir Starmer?
RD: Um, yes. I didn’t vote for him. I knew he’d be not particularly brilliant, but he’s much worse than I thought.
Burn…
Watch the full clip here:
Kemi Badenoch is right to bide her time
Kemi Badenoch has only been Conservative leader for two months. The next general election is likely to be held in 2028 or 2029. Yet there have been persistent rumblings that she must set out clear policies if she is to win back support from voters who left the Tory fold. In The Financial Times, Robert Shrimsley warned that Badenoch “does not have as much time as she thinks”, and that “she does not have the luxury of leisure to figure it out while a grateful nation waits and watches”.
Announcing specific policies at this stage would force Badenoch to create an army of hostages to fortune
Shrimsley has previously won a prize for satire, so perhaps this was an unannounced return to the genre. But the idea that the leader of the Opposition should be announcing detailed policy plans at this stage of the electoral cycle is absurd. It is unnecessary, as the amount of attention voters are currently willing to grant the Conservatives is tiny; but it is also actively dangerous and potentially counter-productive.
The circumstances of January 2025 are not those in which the next general election will be fought. Although the Labour government has performed more strongly in vacuous and repetitive oratory than in terms of delivery of public policy, we have begun to see a direction of travel: higher taxes, economic stagnation, a stifling but unshakeable belief that a larger and more interventionist state is the solution to Britain’s problems. Conservatives can guess with some confidence the areas in which there will be ideological clash, but no-one can be expected to know the details.
Increasing National Insurance contributions for employers was clearly going to have a negative effect on jobs, and the Conservatives have been right to say so. But expecting Badenoch to devise an alternative taxation scheme now which she would not be in a position to implement until 2028 or 2029 is to encourage fantasy economics, or else invite a proposal so weighed down by caveats that it becomes meaningless.
Announcing specific policies at this early stage would also force Badenoch to create an army of hostages to fortune. As any politician should know, the internet never forgets. A politician only needs to hint that he or she is mildly inclined towards a course of action for that to be framed somewhere as what Sir Keir Starmer would call a “cast-iron” guarantee. The public mood does not allow a change of heart or a review of evidence. To think again is to show weakness.
It is especially important for Badenoch and her top team to avoid this because they have, rightly and with spirit, criticised the government for setting a match to many of the promises it made in its own manifesto. Even though Starmer recognised the hazard of detailed commitments and gradually trimmed the Labour party’s policy platform, issues like winter fuel payments, the pledge not to raise taxes on “working people”, compensation for WASPI pensioners and the repeal the Northern Ireland Troubles Act 2023 have shaken the government’s image.
Voters are justified in seeing an administration that does not do what it has said it will do. This is another blow for the already-low level of public trust in politics and politicians, and it is a fate Badenoch and the Conservatives must avoid. This is especially true since the party’s renewal must include an acknowledgement that the previous government fell down in this regard, most notably on immigration.
What Badenoch must do over the coming months, and has started to do already, is articulate a vision of the kind of Britain she wants to create. We know she favours lower taxation and free markets, and that she believes that the state “should do fewer things, but what it does, it should do with brilliance”. She has criticised enshrining environmental targets in statute – a mistake of the last government which its successor shows no desire to change – as “trusting regulation rather than innovation”. It is simply not credible to look blank and claim not to know what Badenoch stands for.
Sometimes it pays to learn from the past. When Margaret Thatcher made her first party conference speech as leader in 1975, she had been in post for nine months. Her address is worth reading, especially in this context: it is a determined and rousing performance, which drew on her fundamental principles. In more than 40 minutes, however, Thatcher made only one concrete policy commitment, to overturn then-social services secretary Barbara Castle’s abolition of hospital pay beds. That was not the fulcrum on which Thatcher’s election victory four years later would turn.
A blizzard of pledges would do nothing but harm. Badenoch should follow her own advice to do less but to do it well. First come the principles, the overarching philosophy, the vision of a future Conservative Britain. Then, as the general election comes closer, certainly once we pass this parliament’s halfway point, the “what” needs to be buttressed by a “how”. Keeping a measured pace is not a luxury, but a necessity. Kemi Badenoch will not be coerced by the notional timetables of others. If the Conservatives want to get this right, they must be thorough. The party will only get one chance.
Farage to blast Badenoch’s ‘crazy conspiracy theories’ about Reform
You might have forgotten about Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch’s Twixmas Twitter spat, but the Reform UK leader certainly hasn’t. Mr S would remind readers that, during the Christmas period, a fight on the right broke out between the two party readers after Reform announced it had officially overtaken the Conservatives’ membership total – which led to a rather unedifying back and forth. Talk about a lack of festive spirit, eh?
On Christmas, the Farage-led party projected a ‘countdown clock’ onto CCHQ to mark the moment when Reform got its 131,670th member – thus overtaking the Tories. While the up and coming party took to social media to celebrate the achievement, their political rivals were not quite as chipper. Badenoch was quick to accuse Farage of ‘manipulating your own supporters’, before claiming the figures were ‘not real’. To evidence her remark, she added:
It’s a fake clock coded to tick up automatically. We’ve been watching the back end for days and can also see they’ve just changed the code to link to a different site as people point this out.
It’s quite the claim. Nige didn’t take long to hit back at the Conservative party leader, demanding on 27 December: ‘I am asking Kemi Badenoch to apologise immediately for this intemperate outburst.’ More than that, as Katy Balls wrote at the time, The Spectator was even shown the code on the front end of Reform’s online tally, the backend code, and how that code links to the third-party donation site built by Nationbuilder – and the demonstration appeared to provide evidence that the online tally did correspond to members that had signed up to Reform.
And now Farage has escalated the row further. Ahead of his party’s regional conference in Leicester this afternoon, the Reform leader has taken to Twitter to take another pop at the Tory leader:
An apology has not been forthcoming from Kemi Badenoch regarding her crazy conspiracy theories about Reform UK. I will be giving my full response at a sold out conference tonight in Leicester.
In another nod to his new friend Musk, Farage has also promised all those interested but unable to attend that the event will be broadcast live on Twitter from 7pm this evening. Stay tuned…
An apology has not been forthcoming from @KemiBadenoch regarding her crazy conspiracy theories about Reform UK.
— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) January 3, 2025
I will be giving my full response at a sold out conference tonight in Leicester.
The event will be LIVE on X from 7pm.
Meghan makes her Netflix return
To the Montecito monarchs who, no matter how much they protest about the press, just can’t seem to stay away from the spotlight. Not content with her failed podcast Archetypes – which one Spotify exec fumed should have been called ‘the f***ing grifters’ – or the couples’ documentary, rather creatively titled ‘Harry and Meghan’, the Duchess of Sussex has now released the trailer to her latest venture: ‘With Love, Meghan’. Brace yourselves…
The Queen of Privacy’s teaser clip depicts Prince Harry’s controversy-prone wife cooking in California, picking produce from her garden and mingling with famous friends – all rounded off with the Sixties hit ‘Do You Believe in Magic’. How sweet – although from the clips Mr S has seen, it’s more showbiz than supernatural.
Taking to Instagram to alert her followers to her latest undertaking, Meghan gushed about her new show:
I have been so excited to share this with you! I hope you love the show as much as I loved making it. Wishing you all a fantastic new year! Thanks to our amazing crew and the team [at] Netflix. Beyond grateful for the support – and fun!
Netflix bosses will be hoping the show outperforms Prince Harry’s underwhelming ‘Polo’ docuseries, released last month to rather scathing reviews. In fact, the dilettante Duke and Duchess have a lot to prove after signing an £80 million five-year deal with the film giant in 2020 but failing to deliver anything much other than a series of flops. The dynamic duo are rather prone to taking on paltry projects that don’t particularly take off – from Archetypes being cut short to Meghan’s lifestyle brand ‘American Riviera Orchard’ running into patenting difficulties before it had officially launched. Dear oh dear…
The blurb on Meghan’s latest show notes that:
For Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, love is in the details: the small, personal moments that bring delight to those we cherish. Sharing some of her favourite tips and tricks for cooking, gardening, crafting and more, Meghan reveals how even the most minute details can help add beauty to our lives and, most importantly, help bring people together.
Good heavens. A recipe for disaster or success? Keep posted…
Mark Zuckerberg could regret Nick Clegg’s Meta departure
When Donald Trump won the US election, the writing was on the wall for Nick Clegg at Meta. Now, just a few weeks before Trump’s inauguration, Clegg has stepped down from his role as president of global affairs at the social media giant. He will be replaced by his deputy and Republican Joel Kaplan, as the firm shifts to the right to fit in with the new regime.
No one ever had much idea what Clegg did all day
Clegg has tried to put a positive spin on his departure, tweeting that: ‘As a new year begins, I have come to the view that this is the right time for me to move on’. But it seems likely that the former Lib Dem leader – and perhaps his boss, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg – may have decided that the smooth, centrist liberalism of Sir Nick Clegg is about as relevant as a three-week-old Instagram post in Trump’s America. Trump is no stranger to clashing with Meta; he has repeatedly accused the tech firm of censorship and silencing conservative speech. Last March, he called Facebook ‘an enemy of the people’.
Relations between Trump and Zuckerberg have thawed in recent months. But while it seems clear that Meta is trying to ingratiate itself with the new regime, it should beware of doing so too cynically. Trump is no fool, and he is unlikely to be persuaded easily that Meta has changed its spots. Zuckerberg could ultimately come to regret the abrupt departure of Clegg.
On a day-to-day basis, it is unlikely that Sir Nick will be missed at Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Apart from the occasional cringy video with Zuckerberg, no one ever had much idea what he did all day anyway. Whatever Clegg’s job did involve will now be carried out by Kaplan, a lobbyist with deep links to the Republican Party.
Zuckerberg, who has been for dinner with Trump at his Florida estate in Mar-a-Lago since the US election, is steadily making sure Meta fits in with the new regime. It is not hard to see why. Meta could potentially face a break-up if the White House demands it. Even if that does not happen, there may well be tempting assets on sale very soon, such as TikTok. From a commercial perspective, it makes sense to cosy up to the all-powerful Trump regime.
Here’s the problem, however: it is far too transparent. Few ever really believed that Sir Nick, despite his multi-million dollar salary, and his grand titles, was ever much more than expensive window dressing at Meta. He didn’t ever have much influence as deputy prime minister to David Cameron, and he likely carried even less weight as Zuckerberg’s PR handler. He didn’t have any real power. In reality, no one will be fooled that his departure will change anything very much. If Trump thinks Meta is nakedly trying to cosy up to him, he’s sure to notice – and it could easily come back to haunt Zuckerberg.
What’s the point of a social care review?
Whack! That’s the sound of social care reform once again being hit into the long grass. Thud! Another hit sends it into a thicket of scrub. Not only has Labour announced a ‘longer-term’ solution to a problem the party itself has acknowledged is urgent by setting up a commission that won’t report until 2028, but it has also taken steps to make that reform even harder to realise by saying it is looking for a ‘cross-party solution’.
Ministers have set up a taskforce led by crossbench peer Louise Casey to draw up plans for a national care service, which will produce an interim report in 2026, and a final set of recommendations in 2028. The appointment of Casey is one of the few good things about this whole sorry story, along with more money going into the Disabled Facilities Grant, which allows people to install ramps, stairlifts and other adaptations to their homes. The rest of it is deeply frustrating – though not very surprising.
Casey, who has been a tsar on pretty much everything else in government over the past few decades, will first examine the problems facing social care and recommend medium-term reforms in 2026. Then her second phase will provide the longer-term solutions, reporting just as the parties are going into election campaigning mode. Health Secretary Wes Streeting is setting up cross-party talks from next month, in order to build a ‘national consensus’. The other parties have said they want to work together on it, he said, adding: ‘I hope that when the commission repots ahead of the next general election, we can all agree on the direction on social care for the long term. In the meantime, this government is getting on with the job.’
What could possibly go wrong? Well, Andy Burnham might be able to tell us, given he produced a similar long-term solution for social care involving a national care service and cross-party talks back in 2009. Streeting knows very well that the cross-party consensus ended in acrimony, with the Conservatives branding his solution a ‘death tax’. Streeting also knows – because he was by this point an MP fighting for his seat – that Labour got its revenge in 2017 by branding Theresa May’s election solution for social care a ‘dementia tax’. It’s almost as though cross-party talks might be valuable in the same way as ecumenical events are: everyone lights candles together and talks about shared values, but no one comes away having changed religion.
The parties all have totally different views on how social care should be administered because they have different first principles on the size of the state, the role of individual wealth and assets in society, and even on how much responsibility for caring families should take. There have been – by my counting – six commissions since 1997 looking at social care. Legislation for social care is still sitting on the statute books after it was proposed by one of those commissions, which was led by Andrew Dilnot. What could Louise Casey possibly discover in the next three years that hasn’t already been covered in the reams of paper produced by governments, select committees, think tanks and others? That social care is quite difficult to reform? That it is urgently in need of reform? It will be even more so by 2028. The only thing that really changes now is the severity of the crisis.
Three bets at Sandown tomorrow
The Unibet Veterans’ Handicap Chase at Sandown tomorrow (3 p.m.) is a fascinating contest with a first prize of more than £50,000. Any of the nine runners could win if performing to their best but, with the field aged between 11 and 13, most of them are now well past their prime.
Sam Brown and Eldorado Allen are the class acts in the field, even now officially rated at 153 and 149 respectively. Chambard is forecast to be the outsider of the field at odds of 20-1, but don’t forget it was only 14 months ago that he easily won the Boylesports Becher Handicap Chase on heavy ground at Aintree.
My preference, however, in this three-mile contest is for a horse from the in-form yard of Henry Daly, who has had four winners from just 14 runners in the past 14 days for a winning strike rate of 29 per cent. His runner, FORTESCUE, was a good staying chaser in his prime and still retains ability.
It’s a long time – four years to be precise – since he was able to run off an official mark of 130, he has winning form at Sandown and is a sound jumper for his usual jockey Hugh Nugent. Back Fortescue 1 point each way at 9-1 with Sky Bet, paying an attractive four places.
However, I can’t resist a second bet in this race on Scottish handler Sandy Thomson’s grey EMPIRE STEEL. Trainers are creatures of habit and Thomson won this veterans’ chase final in 2021 with his only previous runner, Seeyouatmidnight. I suspect this race has been Empire Steel’s target all season and his prep race at Haydock went well enough. Back him 1 point each at 13/2, also with SkyBet to take advantage of the four places.
Harry Derham is another trainer with his string in top form: three winners from just eight runners in the past 14 days for a 38 per cent winning strike rate. I think his horse MONVIEL is a big price for the Try Unibet’s New Acca Boosts Seniors’ Handicap Hurdle at Sandown tomorrow (1.15 p.m.), especially if the forecast rain arrives in time to turn the ground even softer.
Put a line through his poor seasonal debut when he ‘bled from the nose’ (burst a blood vessel) at this course in November. He has been highly rated by his handler and this race for horses aged eight or more could be just what he needs at this stage of his career. Monviel is not 100 per cent reliable and certainly not one for the mortgage but back him 1 point each way at 16-1 with Paddy Power or Betfair, both paying three places.
Until now, I have not had any ante-post bets on the Cheltenham Festival in which William Hill is already betting Non Runner Money Back (NRMB), more commonly phrased as Non Runner No Bet (NRNB).
The Grade 1 Close Brothers Mares’ Hurdle on the opening day (March 11) could be a red-hot contest if both Brighterdaysahead and/or Lossiemouth line up for the race. However, I suspect one or both will be aimed higher and will run in the Unibet Champion Hurdle on the same day even with Constitutional Hill to contend with.
As usual, Willie Mulllins will be strongly represented in the mares’ race and no doubt Gordon Elliott too. However, there was a lot to like about the seasonal debut of JULY FLOWER for Henry de Bromhead last weekend, winning a Grade 3 hurdle at Leopardstown in a very fast time to give Rachael Blackmore her first winner since returning from injury.
An expensive purchase from France, July Flower has plenty of scope to improve now that she has learnt to settle, especially as both quick jumping and stamina are among her strengths. It’s just possible she could be stepped up in trip and aimed at the Paddy Power Stayers’ Hurdle but it is surely more likely she will run in the mares’ race over two miles and four furlongs.
July Flower seems to go on all ground so back her 1 point each way with Unibet at 11-1 for the mares’ race and hope that the big guns go for bigger targets on the opening day of the Festival.
Pending:
1 point each way Monviel at 16-1 for the Try Unibet’s New Acca Boosts Seniors’ Handicap Hurdle, paying 1/5 odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Fortescue at 9-1 for the Unibet Veterans’ Handicap Chase, paying 1/5th odds, 4 places.
1 point each way Empire Steel at 13/2 for the Unibet Veterans’ Handicap Chase, paying 1/5th odds, 4 places.
1 point each way July Flower at 11-1 for the Close Brothers Mares’ Hurdle paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
Last weekend: + 8 points.
1 point each way Monbeg Genius at 20-1 for the Welsh Grand National, paying 1/4 odds, 4 places. 4th. + 4 points.
1 point each way The Newest One at 18-1 for the Welsh Grand National, paying 1/5th odds, 5 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.
1 point each way Desertmore House at 11-1 for the Paddy Power Chase, paying 1/5th odds, 7 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.
2 points win Henry’s Friend at 5-1 for the Mandarin Handicap Chase. 1st. + 10 points.
2 points win Bill Joyce at 9-2 for the Challow Hurdle. 3rd. – 2 points.
2024-5 jump season running total: – 18.3 points.
2024 flat season: + 41.4 points on all tips.
2023-4 jump season: + 42.01 points on all tips.
2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.
2022-3 jump season: + 54.3 points on all tips.
The myth of the God-shaped hole
In a recent interview, I imprudently said I was a “cultural Christian”, and I haven’t heard the end of it. I find myself unwillingly counted in the Great Christian Revival (translation, “We don’t actually believe that stuff ourselves, but we like it when other people do”) which is the subject of so much wishful thinking these days.
The trans-sexual bandwagon is a form of quasi-religious cult
Of course I’m a cultural Christian. Always have been. Packed off to Anglican schools, I was confirmed when too young to know better. Large chunks of the English Hymnal were imprinted in my long-term memory, and duly pop out when I’m fooling around with my electronic clarinet. I know my way around the Bible, at least well enough to take an allusion when I encounter one. I love mediaeval cathedrals. I’ve never met a parson, of either sex, that I didn’t like. But none of that undermines my conviction that what they believe about the nature of reality is nonsense.
An irritating strain of the Great Christian Revival is the myth of the God-shaped hole. “When men choose not to believe in God, they then believe in anything.” The famous aphorism, which GK Chesterton never uttered, is enjoying one of its periodic dustings-off, following the vogue for women with penises and men who give birth. Whenever I sound off against this modish absurdity, I’m met with a barrage of accusations. “Frankly Richard, you did this. You defended woke BS for years” (of course I didn’t: quite the opposite but, for this believer in the God-shaped hole, discouraging theism is indistinguishable from encouraging woke BS). “But don’t you see, you helped to bring this about.” “What do you expect, if people give up Christianity?” Then there’s this, from a Daily Telegraph opinion column:
“New Atheists allowed the trans cult to begin. . . By discrediting religion, Dawkins and his acolytes created a void that a new, dangerous ideology filled.”
And here’s Debbie Hayton on The Spectator’s website, writing (mostly reasonably) about a recent episode in which Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker and I resigned from the Honorary Board of an atheist organisation that’s been taken over by the trans cult:
“An atheistic organisation worth its salt would oppose these movements in the same way that it opposes established religion, so Coyne, Pinker and Dawkins are right to walk away. But maybe the key lesson from this sorry debacle is that it is not so easy to expunge the need for religion from human beings than atheists might like to think. If there is a God-shaped hole in us then without established religion, something else is likely to take its place.”
And from the comments following her article:
“Why is Richard Dawkins surprised that people who reject Christianity have rejected its moral values also? Those values have stood us in good stead for two thousand years.”
Christianity provides reasons for rejecting trans nonsense. Therefore Christianity provides the only reasons for rejecting trans nonsense. Some syllogism!
The scientific reasons are more cogent by far. They are based on evidence rather than scripture, authority, tradition, revelation or faith. I’ve spelled them out elsewhere, and will do so again but not here. I’ll just support the claim that the trans-sexual bandwagon is a form of quasi-religious cult, based on faith, not evidence. It denies scientific reality. Like all religions it is philosophically dualistic: where conventional religions posit a “soul” separate from the body, the trans preacher posits some kind of hovering inner self, capable of being “born in the wrong body”. The cult mercilessly persecutes heretics. It abuses vulnerable children too young to know their own mind, encouraging them to doubt the reality of their own bodies, in extreme cases inflicting on those bodies irreversible hormonal, and even surgical damage.
Far from playing into the hands of these preachers, my colleagues and I are opposed to all faith creeds, all non-evidence-based belief systems. This includes traditional supernatural religions, but it also includes younger faith systems such as that in which a man literally becomes a woman (or a woman a man) by fiat. Or by legal decision (you could as well legally repeal the laws of thermodynamics so we can have perpetual motion machines).
How patronising, how insulting to imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational. If I am to profess a faith here, it is a faith in human intelligence strong enough to doubt the existence of a God-shaped hole.
Bridget Phillipson wants no alternatives to expose her education mistakes
Wales has long been an embarrassment for any aspiring Labour education secretary. While the Conservative government’s school reforms shot England up the international league tables – in the PISA rankings it rose from 25th to 13th in reading and 27th to 11th in maths between 2009 and 2022 – performance in Labour-run Wales and in SNP-run Scotland has declined.
Labour has always been the enemy of excellence – which it wrongly confuses with elitism
These three UK nations provided a perfect real-time experiment with which to assess the merits of different education philosophies. The tried-and-tested methods of phonics, a knowledge-rich curriculum and firm behavioural policies won decisively.
Simultaneously, the pioneering Free Schools and Academies programme – the foundations of which were laid at Policy Exchange – created pioneering test-beds within the English state-school system. Free Schools such as Michaela in Wembley or the West London Free School, and academy trusts such as Outward Grange and Inspiration Trust, showed up coasting comprehensives by consistently delivering outstanding results for some of the most disadvantaged pupils in the country. If one looks at the 20 state secondary schools with the highest Progress 8 in the country – a measure of how much pupils have improved between entry and GCSE – almost all embrace high standards and reject the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Many of these schools’ innovations and methods have since been adopted by the wider state sector. The then education secretary Michael Gove understood that outstanding performance could not simply be dictated by ministers from the centre, but required a system that would incentivise and sustain it: a system founded upon school autonomy, parental choice and strong accountability.
In her three-fronted war on academy freedoms, independent schools and home education, Labour Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is seeking to stamp out any spark of autonomy that might demonstrate the folly of her own reforms. The centrepiece of her reforms is Labour’s Curriculum Review, which is being drawn up by a committee headed by an academic who co-authored a paper arguing that setting children by ability is ‘symbolic violence’ and criticised the Blair government for its supposed ‘obsession with academic achievement’. In the name of ‘diversity and inclusion’ Labour is seeking to dumb down the academic rigour injected by Michael Gove and Nick Gibb, replacing it with “a curriculum that reflects the issues and diversities of our society.”
What might this look like in practice? The teaching and headteachers unions have attacked the current curriculum as not having enough emphasis on “ethnicity and sexual orientation” and have called for “embedded anti-racist and decolonised approaches”, and for diverse reading material to “subvert racial biases.” This is despite polling for Policy Exchange for our Portrait of Modern Britain report finding that 72 per cent of the population believed “Children raised in Britain should learn to be proud of their heritage” – with net positive agreement from every ethnic minority group polled.
The unions have also argued that the push for high standards in English and Maths are “impacting on attendance and behaviour”.
Phillipson, for all of her faults, is no fool. She knows that many good schools and parents would want nothing to do with such a politicised and dumbed-down curriculum. Accordingly, she has introduced the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to force academies to teach it, while simultaneously imposing VAT on independent schools to drive more children back into the state sector.
Almost nowhere in the Western world taxes education. Yet Phillipson has repeatedly referred to the lack of taxation on private education as a ‘luxury’ – failing to recognise the natural desire of all parents to do the best they can for their children’s education and well-being. Could her rhetoric be paving the way for increasing the tax levied still further?
Labour has always been the enemy of excellence – which it wrongly confuses with elitism. The 1960s and 70s saw the closure of grammar schools and, even more damagingly, the ‘progressive’ onslaught on grammar, phonics and writing standards that betrayed an entire generation. The year 1997 saw the end of the assisted places scheme – which sent poor, gifted children to top private schools – and the phasing out of dedicated funding for Oxbridge. It should be no surprise that 2024 has ushered in a tax on educational aspiration alongside the fettering of our top state schools.
The assault on excellence is not only harmful, but deeply misguided on its own terms. Shakespeare, the Magna Carta and calculus are the birthright of every child, regardless of race, religion or class. This has been repeatedly proven by our top state schools, some of which now send more pupils to Oxbridge each year than Eton. Yet Labour believes that tall poppies should be lopped off – exemplified by last month’s mid-year axing of the Latin Excellence Programme for state schools. As in all such culls, it is always the disadvantaged who suffer most.
Phillipson believes that she knows best how to run schools. Yet she is ignoring the results and best-practice of the outstanding headteachers who have driven up standards across England.
Under Phillipson’s plans, there will be no escape routes for bright, aspirational children who seek to ‘rise above their station.’ No free schools or academies with the freedom to expose the intellectual paucity of her curriculum, fewer bursaries for poor children to attend private schools, home-educating parents harassed back into the state system that has failed them. A one-size-fits-all approach, in which the best of our schools are levelled down to meet a poverty of aspiration.
England’s schools’ educational performance stands as a personal affront to Labour, showing up the inadequacy of ‘progressive’ approaches at both country and school level. Rather than seek to build on it, Phillipson would rather tear it down in a futile attempt to hide the bankruptcy of her own policies. The biggest tragedy is the children from hard-working families who will lose out as a result.
Could Emmanuel Macron be Elon Musk’s next target?
Days before Christmas, the BBC published an article on its website headlined ‘Elon Musk’s curious fixation with Britain’. The broadcaster was anxious to discuss why Donald Trump’s right-hand man was taking such an interest in British affairs from across the pond.
It turns out that Musk – who will be Trump’s efficiency tsar when he becomes president this month – is also keen to cast a critical eye over Germany’s domestic travails.
Last weekend, he endorsed the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in an op-ed published in Welt, a conservative daily. Ahead of February’s general election, Musk described the right-wing AfD as the ‘last spark of hope’ for Germany. This, he claimed, was because the ‘traditional parties have failed… their policies have led to economic stagnation, social unrest, and the erosion of national identity.’
Just as the left in Britain have bridled at Musk’s musings on everything from Jess Phillips to Labour’s tax raid on farmers, so have his comments about Germany’s progressive politicians caused indignation. ‘Interfering and presumptuous’ was how the centre-right CDU responded to the American billionaire, while the centre-left Social Democrats likened him to Vladimir Putin.
While Musk’s ‘fixation’ with Britain isn’t as curious as the BBC thinks – Labour did send 100 activists to work for the Democrat party in the run-up to November’s election – his endorsement of the AfD is more intriguing. The state-owned German broadcaster Deutsche Welle suggests that there are two reasons why Musk is championing the AfD. The first is economic; his Tesla plant close to Berlin is the first electric car factory in Europe, and Musk believes that an AfD government would be good for business because of their commitment, as he said in his column, ‘to reduce government overregulation, lower taxes and deregulate the market.’
The second reason is ideological. Deutsche Welle accused Musk of ‘driving a global political agenda to promote right-wing forces’. The broadcaster then mentioned the rumour that he is poised to make a hefty donation to ‘British right-wing populist Nigel Farage’s party’.
If that claim is true, then there must be some anxious people in Paris right now. If Musk thinks Germany’s centrist elite have led the country to ‘economic stagnation, social unrest, and the erosion of national identity’, then surely he has a similar take on what Emmanuel Macron has done to France.
This is a country that has gone through four prime ministers in the last year, is crippled by record debts, overwhelmed by illegal immigration, and blighted by violent crime and vicious drug cartels. As for national identity, France has at its helm a president on record as saying ‘there is no such thing as French culture.’
Musk expressed his distaste for the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics last summer, criticising the parody of the Last Supper. ‘Unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish,’ Musk wrote on social media.
Donald Trump called the mockery ‘a disgrace’, but from Macron, there was nothing but pride and euphoria for the opening ceremony.
Musk was more appreciative of the restored Notre-Dame cathedral when he was among the guests at its reinauguration last month. So, too, was Trump, who was invited by Macron to bear witness to the cathedral’s remarkable rebirth five years after its terrible fire.
Macron has been excessively unctuous towards Trump since he routed Kamala Harris in the presidential election. He was the first European leader to offer his congratulations and the most vociferous in his praise. This despite the fact Trump poked fun at Macron during a rally earlier this year, and that in 2022 he boasted that he had ‘dirt’ on the president’s sex life.
Macron is desperate to keep on the right side of Trump’s administration for trade reasons. In 2023, Musk promised that Tesla would be making ‘significant investments’ in France in the years ahead, and last July construction began on France’s biggest battery storage facility (in Nantes) that will house Tesla’s Megapack product.
But perhaps the real reason why Musk has gone easy on Macron is that he regards him as the best of a bad bunch. What are the alternatives? Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s coalition of communists, socialists and environmentalists or Marine Le Pen’s National Rally? Economically, there isn’t much difference between Le Pen and Mélenchon, both being protectionists and interventionists. As Nigel Farage said earlier this year, a National Rally government would be a ‘disaster’ for France because they would be ‘even worse for the economy than the current lot.’
Surely he has a similar take on what Emmanuel Macron has done to France
The party’s youthful president, Jordan Bardella, is cautiously trying to steer the National Rally away from this position, back towards the economic liberalism espoused by Jean-Marie Le Pen when he ran the party. But it’s an awkward balancing act for Bardella because he knows that many of the party’s 11 million voters are blue-collar workers who defected after giving up on the Socialists and Communists.
The other drawback for Le Pen is that she’s never really attempted to cultivate her image abroad, particularly in the Anglosphere. Unlike other prominent nationalists in Europe such as Giorgia Meloni, Holland’s Geert Wilders and Alice Weidel of the AfD, Le Pen doesn’t speak English. She’s proud of the fact, boasting to an American journalist in New York in 2015: ‘I don’t speak English, I’m French!’
Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, is less narrow-minded and received global coverage in 2018 when she gave an address in English at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). As I wrote in November, while Macron was effusive in his praise of Trump’s victory, Le Pen was curiously quiet. Her reticence – and that of her party in general – will have been noted by Team Trump. That is maybe why Musk – for the moment, at least – is going easy on Macron.
The science of a happier 2025
As 2025 gets under way, I’m going to guess that one of your hopes for the coming year is ‘to be happy’. I’m also going to take a punt that you’re likely to spend a considerable amount of time, effort and money doing things you hope will make you feel that way.
But considering that happiness is the number one goal of most people living in the western world, here lies the unspoken paradox at the heart of this tireless quest. Most of us can reel off a list of things that we believe will make us feel good – a great holiday, a delicious dinner, a promotion at work, fabulous sex. Yet many still don’t have a clue about how the feeling of pleasure is made in our brains in the first place. And knowing would be an incredibly useful way to work out how get more of it in 2025.
It was Greek philosopher Aristotle who first named happiness as a goal of humankind in around the 3rd century BC. For thousands of years since then, the human race has mused over, chased and tried to commodify it – but never quite cracked its source code.
Dopamine – and feelings of pleasure – are not triggered by getting what you want. They are triggered by seeking and anticipation, by having a goal, by discovering new places and things
But then, from the outside, the brain is inscrutable. As this lump of jelly sits in the black box of your skull, it’s the only organ in our bodies which tries to work itself out, while giving very little away. For centuries it hasn’t easily exposed the alchemy which turns the inputs from our senses into actual good feelings.
The first eureka moment in understanding how happiness was made in our brains came just over 60 years ago in a lab at Canada’s McGill University. Two psychologists, James Olds and Peter Milner, were trying to understand the psychology of motivation. In experiments with rodents, they realised that lab rats would press a lever as many as 7,500 times an hour to get stimulation from an electrode which was implanted in a certain spot in their brains. It felt so good that they would give up food and sex in favour of this shot of pleasure.
But when the electrode in their brain was moved just a few millimetres, the animals no longer got the same euphoria. The discovery was immediately seized on as the answer to the secret of happiness. Newspaper headlines of the day trumpeted that scientists had found the elusive ‘pleasure area’, dangling the possibility of a world where endless joy would be freely on tap.
As we now know, of course, that utopia never came to pass. That’s because many other things have to happen in the reward system first before happiness is unlocked. By prodding that small part of the rats’ brains, Olds and Milner had discovered the nucleus accumbens – a small region in the basal forebrain which is indeed a key hub that gives pleasure. But this is just one stop on the route of the mesolimbic reward pathway that runs through all our brains. For the hotspots in the nucleus accumbens which make ‘pleasure’ to be triggered, the process has to be sparked by the chemical messenger dopamine.
We need to clear up a basic misconception about what dopamine is for. Despite its reputation as the ‘happy hormone’, dopamine’s job is not to make us happy. It’s actually to encourage us to get our survival needs met. It’s only when we do this that we are rewarded with a release of opioids in the nucleus accumbens.
Dopamine has been the secret sauce of humankind’s success – as we have more of it circulating in our brain’s reward system than any other great ape. It’s this extra dose of motivational rocket fuel which gave our hunter-gatherer ancestors the drive to keep searching for more nutritious foods and probably move out of Africa to explore the rest of Earth. As the Ice Age dawned, it also gave us the mojo to stay on the move and discover new ways to feed our increasingly energy-hungry brains. As a result, love of novelty is also built into our basic reward pathways.
So to boil it down into a lesson we can use, dopamine – and feelings of pleasure – are not triggered in your reward system by getting what you want. They are triggered by seeking and anticipation, by having a goal, by looking forward and discovering new places and things.
Of course, pleasure is not everything – and for the purposes of this short article, I have simplified some highly complex science. But it’s also very simple to apply this basic neuroscience to our everyday lives. How? In the year ahead, try setting a goal or a plan for an activity that you can look forward to doing later that week. Supercharge it by making it something new. For example, if you’re thinking about holidays in the coming year, plan short breaks to new locations, instead of one long visit to a place you’ve already been.
It doesn’t have to cost a fortune either. Since writing my book Feeling ‘Blah’?: Why Anhedonia Has Left You Joyless I’ve put the science to the test with weekly activities as simple as setting an intention to fly a kite in the park at the weekend or organising a visit to a museum I’ve never been to. And it works because, no matter what life throws at you, you’re giving your brain’s primal reward system an intentional and regular boost.
The bad news is that life is tough at the moment for a lot of people – and likely to remain so for a while. But the good news is that we’ve never known more about how happiness is made in our brain. If 2025 is going to be anything like 2024, there’s never been a better time to harness this knowledge.
Nick Clegg gets unfriended by Facebook
Happy new year Nick Clegg. The onetime Deputy Prime Minister has spent much of the past decade collecting oodles of cash from the social media giant formerly known as Facebook. Clegg has served as one of Mark Zuckerberg’s senior executives at Meta since October 2018, living out of a £7 million mansion in Silicon Valley. Talk about a good European eh?
But all good things must come to an end. And today, just months after trumpeting the UK’s Brexit freedoms on AI policy, he has now announced his departure from Meta. Writing, ironically, on rival platform X, Sir Nick wrote a four tweet statement that had all the spontaneity and joy of a hostage video. ‘As a new year begins, I have come to the view that this is the right time for me to move on from my role as President, Global Affairs at Meta’ he wrote stiffly of his ‘adventure of a lifetime.’
He went on to note, with commendable understatement, that ‘my time at the company coincided with a significant resetting of the relationship between “big tech” and the societal pressures manifested in new laws, institutions and norms affecting the sector.’ Well, yes, you could call it that. And in that spirit of change, Sir Nick is – apparently – ‘simply thrilled’ to say that his replacement is going to be Joel Kaplan, his current deputy. Who he, you might ask? Why, none other than George W Bush’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff.
Reports claim that Kaplan was ‘one of the most forceful voices inside Meta against restrictions on political speech, arguing internally that such policies would disproportionately mute conservative voices.’ Convenient timing, perhaps, given that Donald Trump’s inauguration is now just 18 days away. Clearly the market in ex Lib Dem MPs isn’t what it once was…
Speaker’s Office doubles under Hoyle
When John Bercow finally left the Speakership at the end of 2019, MPs breathed a sigh of relief. At last, they thought, no more endless partisan showboating from the Speaker’s chair. Yet, over time, his replacement has faced a mounting chorus of criticism. Lindsay Hoyle’s interruptions at PMQs seemed to become more frequent, prompting sketch writers to accuse him of ‘headline-hoggery’. He then became embroiled in a row over ‘Speaker-led diplomacy’ after a leaked email suggested he would fly the Palestinian flag at parliament.
Next there was the debacle of last February, when Hoyle was accused of bending the rules to let Labour off the hook on a Gaza motion in the chamber. A cry of ‘Bring back Bercow!’ was even heard on the floor of the House. And now, there is increasing focus on Hoyle’s use of the office for travel. His decision to open the headquarters of Betfred prompted criticism from anti-gambling campaigners while the Times last week reported that Hoyle has racked up £250,000 in worldwide travel expenses in five years.
And today Mr S can reveal that under Lindsay Hoyle, the number of staff working in the Speaker’s office has doubled in less than five years. Between 2014 and 2019, the number of staff working under John Bercow in such roles remained roughly stable. According to a Freedom of Information request, between seven to nine staff were working in the office in Bercow’s final year in post. Yet under Lindsay Hoyle numbers had doubled to between 17 to 19 in July as of last year. Asked to explain why numbers had ballooned, a spokesman for the Speaker’s Office said:
The staffing structure of the Speaker’s Office reflects the fact that areas of work have moved from other departments in the House Administration to the Speaker’s Office and ensures there is resilience to support the Speaker and colleagues whenever there are changes in workload due to parliamentary business and events. In addition, new initiatives have been created such as an apprenticeship scheme, opening Speaker’s House for public tours and a series of annual events and exhibitions to celebrate the diversity of the House and mark key religious festivals.
As one MP asked Mr S before Christmas ‘When did John Bercow develop a Lancashire accent?’
Labour loses 20 councillors in Starmer protest
All is not well in Labourland. Now it transpires that 20 councillors have quit Sir Keir Starmer’s party in a rather extraordinary protest at the direction of the party under the new Prime Minister. Those involved will now sit as independent councillors in Broxtowe Borough Council in Nottinghamshire. Dear oh dear…
The disillusioned lot have even discussed the establishment of a new independent party after losing faith in Starmer’s army, with some claiming Sir Keir’s crowd had ‘abandoned traditional Labour values’ and blasting winter fuel payment cuts. The BBC notes that council leader Milan Radulovic was driven to leave the party, despite being a Labour member for 42 years, over recent policy decisions by the PM. The group have also claimed that as many as ten of their lot had been blocked from standing for the party at the looming local elections after pushing back on the winter fuel policy. So much for healthy debate, eh?
In a scathing statement, council leader Radulovic fumed about the Starmtroopers:
I cannot support and will not support another centrist government intent on destroying local democracy and dictating national policy from a high pedestal. I believe the concentration of power in the hands of fewer people and the abolition of local democracy through the current proposals of super councils is nothing short of a dictatorship, where local elected members, local people, local residents will have no say over the type and level of service provided in their area.
Shots fired…
While the group is adamant that 100 grassroots members had also turned their backs on the party, the remaining Broxtowe Labour councillors have insisted that ‘these defections have no effect on the commitment of the Labour councillors in serving our residents’, adding: ‘It is incredibly disappointing that some Broxtowe councillors have decided to leave the Labour party and sit as independents when they were elected on a Labour ticket just over 18 months ago.’
But if the Labour leadership are keen to avoid this pattern repeated elsewhere, they can’t simply bury their heads in the sand. Will more councillors follow suit? Watch this space…
Ed Miliband doesn’t understand how energy pricing works
Are we about to find out the full foolishness of Ed Miliband’s policy of blocking licences for new oil and gas extraction in the North Sea?
While it may come as a surprise to some, until New Year’s Eve Europe was still receiving gas supplies from Russia – not through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline which was sabotaged in 2022, but via an unlikely route through Ukraine. These taps have now been turned off, after an agreement for Russia to supply gas to Europe came to an end. That leaves the continent facing a similar situation, if less acute, to that which it faced in 2022. It must look elsewhere to make up for lost Russian gas.
In 2022, the first year of the war in Ukraine, there was a huge spike in gas prices as Germany and other countries scrambled to secure enough gas to get them through the winter. Terminals to receive liquified natural gas (LNG) from the US and Qatar were hurriedly constructed in the North Sea. This time, Turkey is being looked at as a potential source of gas for central Europe.
While the effect won’t be as drastic this time around, Britain will not be unaffected. We do, after all, sit on the end of a gas grid which until two days ago extended to Russia. In recent days wholesale gas prices in Europe have risen to their highest level since October 2023.
According to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, the cutting off of Russian gas supplies via Ukraine ‘highlights the importance of energy independence in order to insulate the UK from volatile global fossil fuel prices. That’s why we’re on a mission to build a clean, secure energy system that reduces reliance on foreign fuels, protects consumers, creates jobs and tackles the climate crisis.’ But that rather misses the point. If your priority is to promote energy security – as the name of Miliband’s department suggests it ought to be – then surely you would be promoting self-reliance on gas as well as building renewable power plants. Miliband now accepts that even in 2030 (and probably long after that) Britain’s electricity grid will be reliant on gas in times of light winds. But the government is currently expediting the decline of Britain’s gas industry by refusing to grant new drilling licenses and enacting excessive ‘windfall’ taxes which have persisted long after the windfalls of 2022.
In a parallel universe where the previous government had faced down the environmentalists and embraced fracking, Britain could by now be self-sufficient in gas, just as it was between 1995 and 2003. This doesn’t seem to wash with Miliband, who has this fantasy that global gas prices are set entirely by dictators, and that therefore it doesn’t matter how much gas we produce in Britain – we would still be at Putin’s mercy. (He might like to explain how America’s unashamed drive for self-sufficiency in oil and gas led to lower energy prices there…)
Regardless of Miliband’s green energy plans and how much sense they make, Britain’s energy supply would be a lot more secure if we were not running down our fossil fuel industries without having enough renewables to make up the gap. Miliband is making us more dependent on dictators, not less.
Small boat crossings up by a quarter on previous year
Labour’s crackdown on people smugglers comes as New Year’s Day Home Office figures show the number of small boats crossing the English Channel increased by a quarter on 2023. A staggering 36,816 people were recorded as having made the journey on small boats in 2024, with the last group of just under 300 people arriving on 29 December. Good heavens…
The figures reveal a 25 per cent increase on the previous year, in which 29,437 people took on the Channel to get to the UK – although 2022 remains the busiest year on record, with a whopping 45,774 arrivals onto British shores. In fact, the latest figures take the total number of people crossing the Channel in small boats since 2018 to more than 150,000. Crikey.
The stats coincide with the Home Office’s announcement that tougher sanctions will be applied to suspected people smugglers as part of Sir Keir Starmer’s plan to ‘smash the gangs’. Powers will be given to law enforcement to place restrictions on suspected traffickers before they are arrested, with sanctions set to include the freezing of assets, social media blackouts and travel bans – while Politico reports that ‘closer data sharing’ with European countries will be used to help build cases against criminals. And it’s not just small boat gangs in the firing line: those suspected of terrorism, drug trafficking and money laundering offences will also be targeted.
The announcement hasn’t satisfied everyone that Starmer’s army knows how to stop the boats, however, with opposition politicians calling for the return of a Rwanda-esque deterrent. Shadow home secretary Chris Philp raged that ‘Labour voted against higher sentences for these very same smuggling gangs in the last parliament’, while David Davis MP slammed the new measures as sounding ‘unnecessarily draconian’. Ouch.
Will Labour’s new legislation prove successful in suppressing the smugglers or, as the Tories insist, is a harsher deterrent needed? Time will tell…
Starmer’s queue-cutting blunder shows he isn’t very good at politics
Who would want to be Prime Minister, when even an innocent holiday can lead to a PR disaster? Keir Starmer had to cancel his summer holiday last year because he couldn’t be seen to be swanning off to the sun while towns in the Midlands and North were erupting into rioting. Surely, then, a few days in out-of-season Madeira in the dead period between Christmas and New Year would provide a well-earned rest?
It would be tempting to feel sorry for Starmer if he hadn’t taken every opportunity to make political capital out when his predecessors were accused of exceptionalism
Unfortunately not. Starmer is back in the headlines for turning up at a toboggan run and being ushered past a queue of holidaymakers who had been waiting for a reported three hours. While their teenage kids took the ride, Starmer was then driven down the hill to meet them at the end. According to observers, a crescendo of ‘boos’ went up, along with cries of “get to the back of the queue!”
The Prime Minister’s spokesman claimed that the decision to usher the PM past the queue was made by Madeira police. Starmer has previously deployed a similar security argument after accepting invitations to sit in corporate hospitality seats at Arsenal’s football stadium.
Personally, I think anyone who is prepared for wait for three hours to be conveyed in a whicker basket on greased runners on a 10 minute ride down a suburban road perhaps needs to broaden their imagination a little. Why not escape the tourist traps and have a walk in the island’s beautiful mountains for free? Moreover, if you really want to do the toboggan ride, there are ways for ordinary mortals to avoid the three-hour queue. Go online and you can book a four hour private tour of the island which includes a timed, ‘skip-the-line’ ticket for the toboggan run. The cost is £139 plus £30 for the ride itself, which seems a lot cheaper and less bother than having to build yourself a political career.
Nevertheless, one does wonder about Starmer’s political acumen. Surely he and his aides could have seen this coming? All it would have taken is a bit of choreography. His wife – whose face hardly anyone knows – could have taken their children to the top of the run, and then he could have met them at the bottom of the hill. No-one would have been any the wiser if his kids had skipped the queue. Other prime ministers seem to have had a little more skill in turning their holidays into PR triumphs rather than disasters. David Cameron and his wife managed to get themselves photographed sitting in the departure lounge at Luton airport waiting for an easyJet flight. I bet they didn’t slum it for the rest of their stay. Yet all that ended up getting into the papers was Dave and Sam behaving like millions of other Brits taking a foreign trip.
It would be tempting to feel sorry for Starmer if, that is, he hadn’t taken every opportunity to try to make political capital out when his predecessors were accused of exceptionalism. There was no hint of understanding on Starmer’s side of the House when Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were caught breaking lockdown rules when the prime minister was presented with a birthday cake in the cabinet room. Starmer, more than anyone, hammered home the message that the prime minister and his staff should obey lockdown rules to the last, petty detail; a prime minister must, he implied, be seen to behave like everyone else. The trouble is that once you have decided to hound your opponents like that, you can’t complain when you get held to the same standards.
I would never begrudge a Prime Minister a well-earned break, but Starmer has rather brought his embarrassment on himself. Once again, he has shown that he really isn’t very good at politics.
Treasury under fire over private school VAT ads
New year, same problems. Already Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government is in the firing line again – this time facing criticism for private school VAT adverts. Now the Treasury has been accused of breaching impartiality for saying that Starmer’s move to apply 20 per cent VAT to private school fees ends a ‘tax break’. Dear oh dear…
In social media ads, the Treasury has insisted that the scrapping of the VAT exemption on private school fees means that ‘tax breaks for private schools will end from 2025’, adding that the move will ‘enable better investment in state education’ and help recruit 6,500 more teachers – one of its first ‘steps for change’ in government. While one poll suggests that over half of Brits support the VAT policy, the Telegraph pointed out that fee-paying schools are set to increase their prices by more than the Labour lot predicted – with a fifth of private schools including Eton hiking fees by as much as 20 per cent. Ouch.
As pointed out by the Times, education secretary Bridget Phillipson has, alongside other Labour ministers, used similar language to that employed in the advert over the last few months to defend the move. How curious.
And the wording of the Twitter ad certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed by Tory politicians. Conservative MP Jesse Norman took to the social media site to fume:
The absence of a charge is not a tax break, and any money it may raise has not been hypothecated for education. This is a highly political tweet at odds with the proper neutrality of the Treasury and the civil service.
Oo er. Dame Priti Patel agreed, noting: ‘This tweet shows that the Treasury has lost its impartiality and objectivity and is now a mouthpiece for Britain’s left-wing government while you tax the education of children.’
Talk about pulling no punches. For its part, the government claims the policy will raise £1.7 billion, which it plans to invest in more state education teachers. The Treasury has also defended the post, commenting that: ‘Private schools had exemptions from paying VAT and business rates – they are by definition tax breaks.’
But it’s not just opposition politicians who have taken issue with the Treasury ad. Barrister Daniel ShenSmith slammed the Twitter post, saying it ‘breaks the rules on the ethics guidance for government communications’, while chief of the Independent Schools Association, Rudi Eliott Lockhart, was adamant:
It’s not a tax break. VAT is a tax on parents, not schools. It won’t raise the sums Labour claim and it won’t lead to 6,500 new teachers. It will close small, lower-cost schools and special educational needs schools.
Hardly a glowing indictment of the PM’s new policy, eh?
Will terrorists target Donald Trump’s inauguration day?
Donald Trump is an unconventional politician and he responds to terror attacks unconventionally. When bad things happen, he often goes on the offensive.
‘Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!’ he posted on his Truth Social media account last night, after 15 people were killed in the New Year’s Day terrorist truck attack in New Orleans. ‘This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership.’
Trump was the target of not one but two near-miss assassination attempts in 2024
There is no evidence yet linking the New Orleans incident with a car explosion on the same day in Las Vegas. Yet given that Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, the New Orleans terrorist, a former US army staff sergeant, appears to have been inspired by Isis, and the other explosion took place outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, the concern now is that Trump’s second inauguration, on 20 January, will be the target of a major co-ordinated attack designed to derail his leadership before it begins.
‘CIA must get involved, NOW, before it is too late,’ added Trump. ‘The USA is breaking down – A violent erosion of Safety, National Security, and Democracy is taking place all across our Nation. Only strength and powerful leadership will stop it. See you on January 20th. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!’
Trump himself, of course, was the target of not one but two near-miss assassination attempts in 2024 and understandably feels strongly about security failures on the American homeland. At one level, he’s seizing the political opportunity of an atrocity to bash the Democrats ahead of his return to the White House; and of course there were terror incidents on the American homeland under his first administration.
But he’s also sincerely concerned that security authorities will fail once more to stop a serious terror incident from spoiling what should be his triumphant party in Washington later this month. If that were to happen, Trump’s conspiracy-sensing anger towards the Democrats and the authorities would echo across America and the world.
Labour rejects calls for Oldham grooming gang inquiry
State failure was a consistent theme of British politics in 2024. So as the new year begins, attention has turned to perhaps the most egregious instance of that malaise in modern times: the horrific scandal of grooming gangs in dozens of UK cities. Jess Phillips, the Safeguarding Minister, has rejected calls for a government inquiry into historic child abuse in Oldham, prompting a Tory backlash. Robert Jenrick, the Shadow Justice Secretary, called it ‘shameful’; Liz Truss, the ex PM, labelled Phillips’ title ‘a perversion of the English language.’ Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter/X, argues that the Home Office minister ‘deserves to be in prison.’
Phillips’ letter to Oldham Council, seen by GB News, claims it is for the local authority ‘alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the government to intervene.’ Reports have previously been commissioned and produced in Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford; Oldham now plans to launch its own Telford-style inquiry. Given the strength of feeling – which Phillips acknowledges in her letter – it seems inevitable that there will be questions or debate in the Commons when parliament returns next week.
Yet for the hundreds of victims and those invested in bringing perpetrators to justice, this will seem pitifully inadequate. In each town where grooming gangs operated, similar patterns emerged: victims were ignored, law enforcement complicit and political officials more concerned about reputational damage than lives affected. Local authorities can hold their own inquiries, of course. But given the scale of these crimes, the fact they took place over decades, in many towns, suggests a level of institutional complicity requiring the attention of central government.
Labour’s stance is made harder by its previous support for such inquiries. The party has launched a review every two-and-a-half days it has been in office. If the two-child benefit cap gets a task force, then surely child abuse warrants an inquiry? In its election manifesto, the party pledged to stand for open government.
‘Too many victims of historical injustices have had insult added to injury by years of legal delays’, it said, promising to right the historic wrongs of Hillsborough and the Battle of Orgreave. Phillips herself previously claimed that Tory ministers ‘literally don’t give a toss’ about ‘violence against women and girls.’ Critics will ask if that stance stacks up with her decision on Oldham.
Government investigations are not a panacea, as demonstrated by the aftermath of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. None of its recommendations have yet been implemented, two years after the last of Alexis Jay’s 19 reports was finally published in 2022. But Labour does need to offer some answers to the politically uncomfortable questions raised by the abuse in Oldham and many other such towns. Part of this is about addressing the widening ‘credibility gap’ between state institutions and the British public.
In the age of Elon Musk’s Twitter, where many obsess about ‘two-tier’ Keir, any complacency risks turning this gap into a gulf.