I normally credit Nigel Farage with courage, energy, judgment and entrepreneurial flair that made him one of the most consequential figures of the postwar era. He has spent years making fools out of his opponents. But sometimes, leaders go into meltdown and their judgement collapses.

Farage is now forcing a by-election - but not over an issue affecting his constituents, or the people he purports to champion. This is all about him and his money. He dislikes answering question about it, and is holding the by-election in protest. We’re told how angry he is - outraged, even - that anyone found out about the £5m “gift” wired to him from a Thai-based crypto king: a sum he did not disclose to others in Reform UK. He seems genuinely shocked that my newspaper, The Times, would run an investigation exposing the property portfolio that he failed to disclose to parliament. He has now been reprimanded 17 times for not abiding by Commons financial disclosure rules, bridling at the accountability that comes with public office. He seems appalled, at times enraged, by the scrutiny and transparency expected of MPs. It makes you wonder how on earth he’d cope with the pressure of bring PM.

Hissy-fit by-elections

I was on BBC Newsnight last night with Laila Cunningham, who I regard as one of the most effective Reform UK broadcast performers and one of their best signings. I feel for her having to defend this madness. When I said that Nigel Farage had called a “hissy-fit” by-election, she accused me of borrowing Kemi Badenoch’s words. It was an important point: am I part of a Farage-hating elite, beating up on him and showing my bias?

I replied that I had been using this phrase for years: always to attack Conservatives who called by-elections in an explosion of ego. I’ve always attacked this tactic, denounced it as an egregious abuse of public office, forcing them into a by-election at your own whim costing the taxpayer £350,000. “When the Tories started treating constituents as if they were props for their careers and whims (Nadine Dorries’ hissy-fit by-election over her non-peerage, Chris Skidmore’s pre-election job offer) it was a sign of the end,” I wrote. I’ve long seen such hauteur as indefensible abuse of public office. I accused Zac Goldsmith of a “hissy fit” in 2016 when he forced a by-election in protest over Heathrow’s third runway runway. A law needs to be passed, I argued, to stop MPs calling by-elections out of pique. Farage likes to say his critics are partisan. I’ve been attacking such egotistical explosion for years.

When MPs behave in this way with their constituents, it tends to mark the end. It shows either they have forgotten who serves whom, or they never understood in the first place. Why is Farage doing this to the people of Clacton? Are its voters really expected to become props in the great drama of Nigel and His Money? He seems to want to use his constituents as human shields to deflect questions about his financial links to convicted criminals and crypto kings. So he can say, when asked: ‘questions about my honesty were resolved in a by-election!’ This would not work for a second: but it’s the only card he seems to think he has left to play.

Enter Count Binface

It seems he didn’t properly consider the scenario where the other parties would not field a candidate. I’m not sure why not. This is what happened when the Tory MP David Davis pulled the same ridiculous stunt in 2008. S anyone sit Farage down and explain that his nemesis may arrive in the form of a human bin? And that there was a non-negligible chance of his losing to that bin?

Count Binface stood in Makerfield and captured the public imagination: a walking, comic, tin-hatted rebuke to the circus that out politics has become. William Hill has him at 7:2 - the only serious challenger to Farage. Cometh the hour, cometh the bin.

Count Binface stands in a long British tradition of using humour and satire as a check to egotism and pomposity. Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. It’s an important democratic principle: a device, allowing voters to blow a raspberry. When the Blair government wanted Hartlepool to choose a mayor in 2002, its voters thought this an absurd proposition and returned a candidate in a monkey suit. He served for ten years. Binface himself is named after Boaty McBoatface, the winner of a 2016 poll when people were asked to name an underwater drone.

Readers of my vintage may remember droning, pompous Vienna by Ultravox in 1981: declared a masterpiece by the worst people; a shoo-in for No1. It was heroically kept off that slot by Joe Dolce’s Shaddapa You Face: vulgar, daft and magnificently unserious. All very British. I’ve always see that Dolce moment as one that defines an important part of our national character.

If Farage asks Clacton to rise up and vindicate his money-grabbing modus operandi, I’m not sure I’d bet against them choosing Count Binface to make a point. This, after all, is how Britain tends to deal with men who begin to confuse themselves with destiny: by ridicule. And after all, are Count Binface’s policies - £2 kebabs - any less ridiculous than Reform’s claims to save £234 billion (!) from cutting immigration?

Farage has always been at his best as the mocker, the jester, the licensed insurrectionist standing outside the castle walls. But in Clacton he risks becoming the thing he has always mocked: the grand, pompous man demanding a plebiscite on his own wounded dignity. He now looks like he’s busy assembling not an insurgency but a rival elite: global, moneyed, in many cases crooked (with criminal convictions) and outraged at any challenge. A YouGov poll shows 73pc of voters now regard him as “sleazy.” An image he hard dispels by picking a by-election over this scandal. Abouut his right to trouser huge sums from Bangkok sugar-daddies, spend nights in undeclared Westminster penthouses, take cash from convicted criminals and run what’s starting to look like a global funny-money operation.

When I made my Ch4 film on Reform UK I focused on its popular support, how it was giving hope to millions who loathed the Labour-Tory duumvirate. But Reform now starting to look like another, even more shameless piece of a self-serving establishment. A clique of people who loathe accountability so much, so viscerally, that they call by-elections in protest against it.

Against this, are we really so sure that Count Binface is the joke candidate? He gives better interviews than most politicians. He represents the voter’s right to rebel: to same that some propositions are too absurd to be dignified with normal politics. A by-election held because the local is irritated by scrutiny is exactly such a proposition.

When the British are told that it is their role to rise to a national occasion, to play the clapping extras in the coronation of a musical or political monarch, they often revolt. With a monkey; a boat. With Joe Dolce. Or perhaps with a man wearing a dustbin on his head.

Farage says Reform UK will cover the £350k cost, which itself reminds us of the problem. What kind of party has that cash to waste on a pointless by-election stunt? The answer: a party awash with funny money sent from the crypto kings it shamelessly serves. Only today the Bank of England governor confirmed that Farage has lobbied him against setting up å ‘Britcoin’ currency that would challenge the interests of Christopher “£5m gift” Harbone and Ben “£4m donation” Delo.

The Commons inquiry into that £5m - and, now, the George Cottrell money and the property empire - is a quasi-judicial process. It may lead to a proper by-election, a process that Farage seemed to wish to pre-empt by calling one now. “It’s a gamble,” he said yesterday. Quite so. Let’s see how it plays out.

I wrote my Times column last week on what Andy Burnham could get right. After his speech in Manchester yesterday, about transferring power from wicked London to the virtuous regions, a new scenario opened up: how he could go wrong, and quickly.

Scots have heard his devolution argument before - and learned the hard way why it doesn’t work. Better decisions are made locally, runs the logic: Britain is over-centralised! Scottish solutions for Scottish problems! With democratic accountability driving local progress so we end up more mature, more Joe Chamberlain or the German lander. Oh, it’s a beautiful idea: which, as we now know, doesn’t work in the UK.

I write as someone mugged by this reality. I left my job at The Times business desk to switch to politics in Edinburgh to chart the emergence of what I believed would be a country that would soon be embarrassing England with advances in health and education using national inventiveness and small-country dynamism. Most of all: tackling our own problems which had been left to fester by Westminster - like the drugs crisis which had in 1996 been given global prominence by the film Trainspotting.

Reader, here’s what happened to those Scottish drugs deaths. The problem is now four times worse than when Trainspotting was released.

I’ll spare you the graphs on health and education, but you get the idea. At every turn Holyrood blamed Westminster and dodged accountability while wrecking what had been the best school system in Europe and pushing health outcomes to the worst in Europe. As the SNP chieftains behaved like medieval kings and queens - molesting women, embezzling money, trying to jail each other - they kept being re-elected on an independence ticket. Local elections are decided on national questions in our small island. That’s why the devo logic doesn’t work: we think nationally as a people.

Highlander and Cornishman, Scouse and Geordie: our problems and priorities are surprisingly alike. Look at Barnsley: its pioneering Labour council worked miracles yet Labour was crushed by Reform in last month’s local elections. Why? For the same reason the scandal-addled SNP is Europe’s longest-surviving government: voting patterns are linked to national concerns, not local performance.

Yet we see Burnham stand in Manchester promising the same devolution promises as if they had never been made before. My suspicion - okay, hope - is that this is not his plan. Just placeholder stuff about a subject he knows about, buying time while he works out a real plan for the nation.

You can see Burnham’s critics framing him as a mayor that could not grow up into a Prime Minister and hid behind cliche because he could not handle central government or work out how to use a national capital for its intended purpose.

This ‘northern’ gripe should be dropped. For a start, Manchester is to the south of 40pc of the UK landmass. Describing it as ‘north’ is the ultimate expression of southern chauvinism: it’s the language of people whose world ends at where theMidland Main Line terminates. It’s that chat of the Westminster class who visit Wigan then come back writing shocked, what-I-saw articles about how many pies they had to eat and how miserable everyone is. This cliche - poor industrial North against a prosperous London and South - may make sense to guilty Londoners but I’m not sure it does to anywhere else. The data is derived from a regional average, and averages are exactly what hide poverty. Once you look below the regional line, Burnham’s “London vs Manchester, North vs South” framing breaks down.

Factor in housing costs, and everything changes. Yes, measured by income alone, London has one of the lowest poverty rates in Britain: around 15pc. Measured after housing costs - which is what actually determines whether a family can make ends meet - London has the highest poverty rate of any region, about 26pc. Ahead of the West Midlands, the North West and Yorkshire. So the single richest region of GDP is also, in the way that matters to household budgets, the poorest. A north-south or capital-vs-provinces lens can’t survive that fact: the same place is top and bottom depending on whether you count rent.

The largest gaps are within places, not between them. Look at life expectancy, a powerful reflection of poverty. Black spots are scattered across the nation: Leicester, Blyth (Northumberland), Clacton, Sheffield, Bradford, Barrow. “London vs Manchester” is meaningless when the sharpest divide is between two wards a mile apart in the same city. Rich and poor Britain are not two regions; they are interleaved street by street. Lose sight of that and you have lost sight of Britain.

I’m from Nairn, a coastal town near Inverness. And when I go home, to see the boarded-up shops and shuttered pubs and hotels, I see problems mirrored in England’s coastal towns. I see the effect of a neglect which is embodied by this comic-book ‘north vs south’ narrative. The Chief Medical Officer’s 2021 report showed how coastal communities’ health problems are “more similar to each other than to their nearest inland neighbour” - a shared syndrome of low pay, seasonal work, poor housing, an ageing population and thin public services, regardless of which coast.

Look at Blackpool, Blyth, Great Yarmouth, Hastings, Skegness - and, crucially for puncturing the north-south story, Clacton and Jaywick in Essex. Jaywick has repeatedly ranked as the single most deprived neighbourhood in England and it is in the prosperous South East. In Farage’s Clacton Central, male life expectancy around 69 - roughly ten years below the England average - hidden inside a county (Essex) that looks unremarkable on paper. Reform UK prospers because it understands this: it has moved on to contemporary, real problems while Labour stuck to the old stomping ground.

Mayors are mascots without real power and Burnham has acted the role well. He even wears a costume for our age of performative politics. But Richard Lees and Howard Bernstein were responsible for what he now calls “Manchesterism”: the city thrived on competing local authorities while Birmingham suffered under the biggest single local authority in Europe. Burnham, an English Lit grad, has invented a story that linked the Mayor’s office to Manchester’s success: a necessary fiction. But if he tries to run the UK on that fiction it will end in disaster.

The inequalities he talks about exist because of bad UK economic rules: welfare and tax conspiring to destroy the work incentive, inhibit hiring etc. These inequalities present more acutely in some areas than in others due to the distribution of jobs and labour force dynamics (welfare vs low-paid work). But the only remedy can be national because the flawed system is coded in London.

To fix a problem, you have to see it. Does Burnham? Or are we to be given this Wigan Pier schtick in lieu of a governing policy, by someone with no democratic mandate for five years let alone the ten he now talks of? If he wants to change the way Britain is run, he’ll need a mandate through an election.

As things stand, he leads a Labour government that was elected on hard promises. Some 1.5m net additional new dwellings in England over this parliament, 92pc of routine operations and appointments being carried out within 18 weeks, raising the proportion of kids ‘ready for school’ (count to 20, pronounce ‘cat,’ etc) to 75pc, employment rate for 16- to 64-year-olds at 75pc. None of these are going in the right direction. None of these problems will be solved by devolving more power to mayors.

I want Burnham to succeed, and believe that he can. His Chief of Staff is James Purnell, a Londoner who grew up in France and can see through this ‘grim up north’ stuff. I hope Purnell applies decent ideas fast and that Burnham quickly evolves from Manchester Mayor into national Prime Minister. So I’m not sure we should take this speech seriously: it’s just there for the choreography, to tide him through the leadership election, until he finds an governing agenda. Devolution doesn’t seriously improve public services: the UK has found that out the hard way over a quarter-century of trial, error and more error. And devolution as a remedy to sluggish growth? This theory has been studied to death. The link tends to be a negative correlation with huge, complex tax and regulatory burdens.

So let’s not take yesterday too seriously. It’s not a national plan, and Burnham will have known he was pushing his luck dressing it up as one - perhaps why he took to questions after his speech. As of now, he has no answers. Let’s hope he manages to find some decent ones.

Such graphs are adored by anti-Brexit campaigners and anti-migration campaigners alike: they shows migration control collapsing under the new system. And it did, but the actual picture is more nuanced. Most of that blue spike of non-EU migration was students or asylum. By ‘non-EU’ the New York Times throws in humanitarian / asylum figures - including Hong Kong and Ukraine. Strip them out individually (we need to bear in mind that most non-EU students return home) and the non-EU line peaks at half of the New York Times’s figure.

The impact of students on the so-called Boriswave is huge, reflecting the UK’s many globally-minded unis who collect £30k pa fees. Nigel Farage himself said they should be encouraged, seen as an export - external income to the UK.

The grey line at the botton is the net UK migration. But we need to remember that “British” is UK passport holders: including immigrants. One of the biggest trends right now is remigration: about 400,000 migrants a year are now leaving for good. As you’d expect: this is just the students going home or the Boriswave unwinding. The ONS recently changed its data series but you see the tend.

Meanwhile Shaban Mahmood is using the new Brexit controls properly and work visa issuances has collapsed. The next stop for Britain could be net zero migration, as my Times colleague Tom Calver was the first to point out. Factor in modelling from Warwick’s James Bowes and the picture looks something like this.

It suits no one to clarify that now; especially not the New York Times - which specialises in misrepresenting Britain from the left as egregiously Elon Musk does from the right. My colleague James Marriot has written powerfully about this bizarre American obsession with us. But for those of us who live here, the real picture is worth bearing in mind. I’ll keep it updated in my data library here.

PS About 3% of non-EU students overstay their visas. Those working do so via the Visa route and the latest (Feb26) study found 31pc still in the UK at that point. A quirk in UK rules means anyone staying for >1yr is counted as a immigrant and anyone who goes home after study is counted as an emigrant.

At The Times’ CEO Summit this morning, we heard from a bunch of people: leaders in tech, banking and two politicians: Rachel Reeves (interviewed by Mehreen Khan) and Kemi Badenoch. Since the last Times CEO Summit, her popularity had gone from -32 to -8 (she claims minus 1), which, as the below chart shows, defies the usual gravity…

“I’m the least-hated leader!” Badenoch chirruped. “We’re also now the least hated political party!” But the Tories as a party are flat at 17 points. When it comes to the Conservative rating there is no sign of a Kemi bounce - or any other kind of bounce.

On the above, Reform would be 81 seats short of a majority. They’d need a partner. So what are the chances of the Conservatives doing a deal and propping them up? “No chance whatsoever,” she replied. “I stay very, very clear. I’m not doing a deal with Nigel.” After the election, I told her.

“Same thing. What are we doing a deal on? He has said all sorts of things that I don't agree with. He wants to nationalise. He wants more benefits. He wants a bigger state: just one that he is in charge of. This goes against so many of the things that we believe in. At the last election, people were voting against [parties] more than they were voting for [them]. At the next election, there will be an undercurrent of : ‘how do we remove Labour and stop Farage?’… We are the answer to both questions.”

But with the Tories so far behind Reform, what are the prospects of her ever winning?

“The political landscape is completely fragmented. A lot of people talk about Reform UK, but they’re polling about where we were when we lost the election in 2024! And there’s three years to go. There’s everything to play for. In 2019, the question that the public was asked was: " How do we just get Brexit done? And there was a very clear answer in Boris Johnson.”

And the last general election? She was candid. “It wasn’t ‘who do we want to run the country?’ It really was: ‘How do we get the Conservatives out of office’? And people voted however they could to remove Conservatives. The mistake that Keir Starmer made was believing that there was this huge love for Labour, which the landslide - caused by Reform getting involved - gave him. But there wasn’t, and so he’s run into trouble because there wasn’t an agenda, there weren’t principles that were underpinning it.

At the next election, there’s going to be a question. What do we think it will be? It has to be something that goes across the board with a full agenda. Who is going to fix our economy? It has to be that, because if it is not then we are going to run into a lot of trouble and we will go bankrupt… People are going to be asking, who’s going to get me higher wages? Who’s going to create jobs? And real jobs: not government-created jobs that have no productivity whatsoever.”

So that’s the theory. YouGov polling suggests the economy is narrowly ahead of immigration as the concern that troubles the public most…

…and immigration is falling fast, with Shabanna Mahmood keeping a tight lid on. A message that has not really filtered through, but may do over time…

Reform UK is now switching to integration issues, racial politics (that whites are discriminated against) and drawing new dividing lines (mainly with foreign nationals, whom they’d tax more and deny council accommodation to). Social media may create fertile ground for this messaging, and immigration may come to be defined as those already here.

But the bigger question for the Tories is whether, having messed so much up, they can be trusted when they promise (as they always have done) to cut taxes. What we got last time, I told Badenoch, was the highest tax rate in postwar history. And yes, she may say: ‘under new management’. But the Tories have been doing a good line in new management. So how can she expect voters to believe them this time? Might this be why their poll rating is marooned?

Her reply:-

“You are right. There’s been a lot of ‘new management’, and I think with Labour, we’re going to see some new management coming in as well. It’s getting harder to govern because people are straying from first principles. We need to start thinking again about what it is we are trying to do. If you want to know why I will be different, you only have to look at what I did when I was in government.

What did I do when I was business secretary? I deregulated, I scrapped loads of corporate audit regulations: lots of stuff was split in training in 2018 and landed on my desk in 2023, and I looked at it, I thought, well, all that will happen is that the good guys will have more regulation and the bad guys will just ignore it. Why are we doing this?”

She then asked if anyone was from KPMG was in the room. She had taken a swipe at Rachel Reeves, entrepreneur adviser, earlier on, so I can understand why the KPMG represne was reluctant to self-identify, but she was outed by others.

“I scrapped these regulations, and I got lots of letters from people and WhatsApp saying ‘thank you’. Nobody wanted this, so glad someone saw common sense. What was on the cover of the FT? KPMG complained that I got rid of these regulations, and I know why, because there was lots of advisory work that was coming that would have been fantastic for KPMG, but not for the rest of the system.

You need people who are going to be tough, who can say no, who don’t care about what the papers, especially the FT, are going to write. People who are prepared to take difficult decisions. What we have seen so far is a lot of changes in new management, with no principles underpinning.”

She’s right to say we’ll likely see a lot of new management in Labour if Andy Burnham replaces Keir Starmer. But can a party about to lose its deposit in Makerfield credibly pose as the plausible next government? Badenoch seems to calculate that her best chances of doing so is to saying Never-Farage.

The honest answer, from the data, is no. But the point of this Substack is that I can share my working, to explain why the hypothesis when tested came back negative. And the way the answer falls apart is perhaps more interesting than the question.

Start with geography. Across England’s 306 local authorities, the share of residents born abroad is essentially uncorrelated with welfare claimants - and if anything negatively correlated with the sickness caseload. Immigrant-heavy areas are, on average, slightly poorer but distinctly less sick. So at first glance immigration looks protective. I first came across this in mental health: home-domiciled university students are three times as likely as overseas students to report a mental disorder (this is domicile, not birthplace - but the pattern is striking).

Part of this may be the well-known ‘healthy migrant’ effect: those who cross borders to work or study are simply more healthy. Compare like-aged people: those born abroad are far healthier than the UK-born. They are less than half as likely to be economically inactive through long-term sickness (2.8pc against 6.7pc), and noticeably less likely to report bad health or a long-standing illness. This is the well-known “healthy migrant” effect - people who move countries to work are a self-selected, fitter bunch. It stands to reason. It has nothing to do with ethnicity and everything to do with the act of migrating.

But area averages are a trap - the classic ecological fallacy. Knowing that immigrant-heavy areas are less sick tells you nothing about whether the immigrants are the healthy ones. It could just as easily be that migrants cluster in younger, more dynamic places, and it’s their UK-born neighbours carrying the good numbers. To break that open you need data on actual people: the same individuals’ ethnicity, country of birth, health and work status, all recorded together - and enough non-white and foreign-born respondents to say anything reliable about them.

That last point is why I turned to Understanding Society. It is run by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, funded mainly by the Economic and Social Research Council, and it is the largest study of its kind in the world. It began in 2009-10 with around 40,000 households - some 100,000 people - and re-interviews the same individuals every year, which is what makes it a panel rather than a snapshot. Until recently, it was beyond the scope of journalists to query. But I’ve been developing a tool, SocietyScan, that allows a single researcher to query it. I’m starting to release the results on this SubStack, with the caveat that the tool is in beta mode.

USoc, as it’s known, was deliberately built to over-sample minorities: an Ethnic Minority Boost of about 4,000 households at the launch, and an Immigrant and Ethnic Minority Boost of roughly 2,900 more added in 2015. I used the latest available wave - Wave 14, fielded in 2022-23 - and I used the tool to age-standardise everything. Migrants and ethnic minorities are younger, sickness rises steeply with age and any honest comparison has to strip the age effect out. USoc's generation variable identifies the second generation - those born in the UK with at least one migrant parent - separately from other UK-born groups, allowing a clean comparison.

What we see is, ethnicity on its own barely moves the needle. Once you account for age, non-white Britons are not meaningfully protected from the syndrome. Their rate of bad self-rated health is statistically level with the white majority’s. The thing that looked like an ethnic advantage in the raw numbers was really an age effect wearing a disguise.

The foreign-born first generation carry the healthy-migrant glow: just 2.6 per cent inactive through sickness, 20pc with a long-standing illness. The descendants of migrants - non-white, but born and raised here - have shed the first-generation health advantage and largely converged with the national population. Age for age, the non-white second generation report bad health at 30pc (against roughly 20pc for white second-generation - showing this is about UK-born minorities, not the second generation as such) and long-standing illness at 31pc (against 30 for the national average). Their inactivity rate - 5.2pc - is actually marginally below the 5.7pc national average; the convergence is clearest on health, not worklessness.

Whatever it is that makes deprived Britain sick, it is not kept at bay by ethnicity - and nor is it imported. The immigrant health advantage is real but fragile - a one-generation phenomenon that dissolves on contact with the conditions of British life. The children of migrants inherit the syndrome, not the immunity.

This cuts against both of the lazy positions. It is not true, as some on the right imply, that immigration is filling our sickness rolls. The foreign-born are the healthiest group we have, more likely to work. But nor can anyone on the left take comfort that diverse, dynamic communities are somehow insulated from the malaise. Whatever is happening to working-age health in this country is happening to everyone who stays long enough to be shaped by it.

This is one of the reasons that it’s such a shame that Reform UK is wasting its energy and research trying to conjure up race-based narratives rather than asking the difficult questions that other parties do not. If something about growing up in modern Britain is making the second generation as sick as the first generation was healthy - what is it?

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Understanding Society (UK Household Longitudinal Study), Wave 14, working-age adults 16-64, survey-weighted and age-standardised in five-year bands. “Inactive through sickness” is self-reported main activity; figures are individual-level, not benefit records. Single cross-sectional wave - directions are robust, exact magnitudes less so.

The resignation of John Healey and Al Carns is a reminder of the Labour tradition of patriotic realism, a formula that used to win landslide elections. The two defence ministers could not go along with running down national defence to bankroll Net Zero and welfare. They reject as false the choice between defending the realm and funding schools and hospitals. Carns goes further, saying he was that ageing Northern Ireland veterans are being “dragged to court” over historical operations. The IRA lost the war in physical means, he says, ‘and now they’re trying to achieve it through political means’.

This is understood to be directed at attorney-general Lord Hermer and the legal priesthood, who are seen to have taken a high‑caution ECHR‑compliant line that limited how far veterans were shielded from Troubles‑era litigation. Similar forces stop* Shabana Mahmood from making the changes needed to rewire the law and stop the boats.

But the Home Secretary has used what powers she has to basic migration down to tens of thousands (see here). Add to this the groundbreaking Alan Milburn review on Neets, the principle of Healey and Carns, reference against the Blair diagnosis and and what does it leave?  A Labour movement with a greater claim to seriousness, patriotism and credibility than anything else on offer. An agenda that could yet save the party: and the country.

Blair was mocked for referring to a “radical centre,” but wrongly. Healey, Carns, Mahmood and McFadden all want radical change. All could deliver: within months. All would win votes across right and left. They would, as Carns says, “tale the country by the scruff of its neck and make it great again”. He’s a former Marine who served five tours of Afghanistan and sounds like he wants to take a tilt at leadership. Even if he’d get enough MP support the chances of Labour’s membership choosing this formula of reality-rooted fiscal radicalism is slim-to-none, but the talent is there. That’s what makes the party’s suicide so hard to watch.

Why they quit

But Healey and Carns were gunning for No10; they are not nursing Burnham-style ambition. It’s a point of principle. Their resignation is not quite as Thelma-and-Louise at it looks: it seems Harley locked Carns out of the talks and he quit when it was clear he wasn’t going to be Defence Sec. Reeves had wanted ~£7bn more and Starmer talked it up to £13bn. Progress there wasn’t bad: the real bugbear was the inability to fund the 3.5pc pledge. Neither Healey or Carns see how Rachel Reeves could deny the money for basic defence while spending billions more on discretionary green priorities and, even worse, on the surging cost of welfare and social failure.

My Times colleague Simon French points out, just 1pc of the £345bn welfare bill would have provided the money Healey needed. Or get to 3.5pc. “There is an argument about welfare,” Carns says. “I am a firm believer that it’s about hands up, not a hand out. But we need to help the people who need the most help within the nation while also getting the balance right on defence.” George Robertson, the former Labour minister commissioned by Starmer to review defence, has made the same point. These gentlemen will look at the graph below and see not just tragic social decay but the warped priorities of a nation choosing welfare over basic defence.

A crisis of capability, not just money

Crucially, they argue the defence crisis is not just money. Whitehall is too slow to respond to the revolution now underway in warfare. Russia is expected to build 7m drones this year; Ukraine 5m. Just 100,000 a year are being built in all of Europe. Autonomous warfare - a drone with a closed-learning loop - is revolutionising warfare and the revolution is the organisation and speed of decision-making, not just the kit.

Russia is now deploying cheap mass on a scale Britain cannot begin to answer: more than 5,000 attack drones a month, with single-night salvos topping 800; some 5,000 guided glide bombs a month; and fibre-optic drones that trail an unspooling thread of glass, immune to every jammer we own. A drone costing a few hundred pounds now destroys two-thirds of the vehicles killed at the front. Turn that on British forces and our chances would not be great. We have perhaps four air-defence batteries to cover our islands. In one recent allied war game, the British Army exhausted its vital ammunition in eight days. Our strength is a handful of showcase platforms — six destroyers, of which perhaps two can sail — rather than the mass that modern war devours. As Europe discusses how to deter Russia without America, our need is quite urgent.

Ukraine shows that a country can evolve, to develop expertise from nowhere. Can Britain do the same in peacetime? Not if we’re mired in procurement crises that expose a Whitehall response measured in decades rather than years, let alone the weeks in which Ukraine and Russia now operate. The Public Accounts Committee recently counted 21 years of cumulative delay across thirteen programmes.

And yes, many countries have made unfunded pledges. But the UK is drifting and its position, now, is not one of a serious country.

Money is no proxy for capability, of course. The Global Firepower Index seeks to adjust for this across 60 factors. Russia is second only to America; European powers lag some way behind.

Much depends on what happens now. Will the nationa debate change after these resignations? Will the sense of urgency kick in? Or is this another wake-up call that will be ignored as the government slips back into slumber?

The trade-off

To find money for defence the obvious place to start is welfare. Starmer has abolished the two-child benefit cap, costing around £3bn a year by 2029-30, eroding work incentives and deepening welfare traps. He has rolled out free childcare expansion at a cost of £4.1bn a year by 2027-28, extending it down to nine-month-olds. A straight enlargement of the welfare state. Bigger savings can be found by grasping bigger nettles.

The triple lock remains the great untouchable. General Sir Richard Barrons told Newsnight he would “release the triple lock in order to put more money back into things like defence”. The Resolution Foundation’s What a Ratchet! report shows that simply switching to a smoothed earnings link next year - protecting pensioners from price shocks while ending the ratchet - would save around £650m a year by 2030 and more every year after. A far bigger prize lies in the decades beyond.

High electricity prices are now having the effect on industry that Thatcher was once blamed for. Britain has already made extraordinary progress on decarbonisation - the fastest in the G20. And that’s including imports (the so-called ‘consumption’ figures, vs ‘territorial’).

Such world-beating progress makes the case for a pause, while we fix defence. There is no end of programmes to shelve, to release urgently-needed money. Healey needs £17bn and it can be found by pausing the Net Zero pledges, a dividend of the UK’s progress. Subsidies for home insulation and heat pumps amount to £13.2bn by 2029-30. Carbon capture - burying has under the sea - receives £9.4bn by 2030, with £22bn pledged over twenty-five years. Overseas climate finance (!) costs £11.6bn over five years. Great British Energy receives £8.3bn over the Parliament. The STEP fusion prototype receives more than £2.5bn for technology that may not reach the grid until the 2040s, if it works at all. None of these programmes are individually absurd. The question is one of priorities. And whether they should wait until the government has fulfilled its basic pledge of defending the realm.

Taking down the sign in the window

In Davos this year, Mark Carney used Vaclav Havel’s famous essay The Power of the Powerless to describe national self-deceit. People display slogans they no longer believe. Everyone knows they are false. Everyone pretends anyway. Real change, Carny said, begins when the pretence stops. At the time, I wrote in The Times that sign Starmer has placed in the window says “3.5pc of GDP on defence”. He does not mean it. Nobody does. Healey and Carns know it’s more a lie than an ambition. So they have now taken that sign down, arguing that such deceit, in current circumstances, is unconscionable.

Their resignations mark the point at which pretence collides with reality. Labour can continue the habits of drift and denial that brought it here. Or it can recognise that the world has changed and change with it.

“The next war won’t be won by armies, navies or air forces alone,” Carns said earlier today. “It’ll be won by the country whose 19-year-olds can code, whose factories can build drones in weeks not years, and whose grid stays on when someone tries to switch it off. Industry. Society. Economy. That’s the fight now. We’re not ready. And we’re not being honest about what getting ready will cost.” Quite.

Healey and Carns stand in a long Labour tradition. Attlee initiated Britain's nuclear weapons programme in 1945. Hugh Gaitskell fought to keep it. When Labour adopted unilateral disarmament in 1960, he vowed to “fight and fight again to save the Party we love” and won his battle within a year. The other Healey, Denis, became one of Britain's leading proponents of nuclear weapons and deterrence strategy. All three understood that defending the realm comes first, that credibility rests on capability, that spending choices cannot be ducked. It is a progressive-realist tradition that spoke through achievement - and won landslides.

The odds are that Labour is now locked into a death spiral and will look past the genuine leaders in its midst. But Healey and Carns have reminded their party of another Labour tradition; another path. Theirs is not just a way out of this mess: it is the only way out. It’s not too late for their party to listen.

—

* Allies of Lord Hermer say this is an unfair characterisation and “significant action” has been taken on illegal migration and asylum backlog reduction with his help.

I looked at who actually turned out at the last election, broken down by what people were doing with their lives. The pattern is the same across the last three general elections. This is the cleanest single picture of it, from 2019, with every vote validated against the register. Only a few dozen people on welfare were captured, a very small sample. So this is indicative: nothing more. But with that caveat (the number surveyed is stated as n= after each group), here is the resulting picture:-

Look closer and there are two different problems hiding inside one number. The long-term sick and disabled are mostly registered to vote – only one in ten is missing from the roll – but they do not use it: 58 per cent were on the register and stayed home. The unemployed (or, rather, the 15 unemployed that the BES managed to find) were the opposite. More than half were not even registered, though that figure rests on a small sample and is best read as a flashing light rather than a precise measure. Either way you arrive at the same place. The people with the greatest stake in the welfare system are the least likely to have a say over it.

None of this is new in direction, only in degree. The Institute for Public Policy Research has traced the gap between rich and poor turnout widening from four points in 1987 to twenty-three by 2010. An Oxford study found that simply having been unemployed knocks around nine points off the likelihood that someone votes, an effect that lingers long after the job has been found. Worklessness, it seems, does not just empty the wage packet. It corrodes the sense that the system is yours to shape.

It would be easy, and wrong, to read this as apathy. The more troubling possibility is that these voters have made a rational calculation. If your income arrives regardless of who wins, if no party speaks to your situation except to promise to get you back to work, and if the system feels less like a covenant than a maze, why would you queue at a polling station? If you hear yourself used as a prop - denounced as a scrounger or patronised as a charity case - why would you vote?

Disengagement of this kind is usually a symptom rather than a cause – the same erosion of agency that the welfare trap produces in the labour market, reproduced at the ballot box.

The consequences run both ways, and both are uncomfortable. Because claimants do not vote, politicians have little electoral reason to fix a system that fails them: there is no bloc to reward good reform or to punish neglect. Yet the same fact makes the welfare state unusually easy to cut, because the people affected will not be heard from on polling day. Democracy works on the rough assumption that those most affected by a policy will turn out to defend or change it. In welfare that assumption breaks down, and the result is a policy area conducted, in effect, over the heads of the people it is meant to serve: reformed by the votes of those it affects least.

A word of caution before anyone over-reads it. These are survey figures, and the cells for some groups are quite small – the unemployed row in particular rests on a few hundred respondents and should be treated as indicative. The relationship is an association, not proof of cause: the welfare class is also younger, poorer and less likely to have stayed in education, each of which independently lowers turnout. And self-reported voting flatters everyone, which is why I have leaned on the register-validated figures, where they exist, rather than on what people told the interviewer.

But the broad picture is hard to argue with, and it has held across three elections. The welfare state was built as a covenant between the government and the governed. The figures suggest that one side of that covenant has quietly stopped turning up. If we want a welfare system that works for the people in it, we might start by noticing that they are no longer in the room where it is decided.

In the aftermath of Sweden’s early-1990s crash - a banking collapse, a run on the krona, and the deepest recession since the 1930s - policymakers faced a structural puzzle that went deeper than the generosity of any single benefit. The welfare state had become a trap. Not by intention, but systematically. A worker who earned a little more could lose more in withdrawn benefits and tax than they kept. The progress that was then made is - to British eyes - stunning. Here’s the latest.

These welfare cliffs were invisible in any one rule. They emerged from the interaction of many. Housing benefit phased out. Childcare fees rose with income. Tax bit. Stack them on the same krona and the cumulative marginal rate in certain income bands could reach 70 or 80 per cent - meaning a worker who earned an extra 1,000 kronor netted 200. No minister owned the problem. No manifesto contained it. It simply emerged from the interaction of well-meant rules written in separate rooms.

To see the system whole, Sweden needed a tool - and, unusually, it had already built one. Work on the model that became FASIT - Fördelningsanalytiskt statistiksystem för inkomster och transfereringar, the Distributional Analysis System for Incomes and Transfers - began in the early 1980s, when the Government Offices started asking how they might simulate the effects of changes to the tax rules before enacting them. The first large-scale use came ahead of the great tax reform of 1991. From the early 1990s the model’s operation passed to Statistics Sweden (SCB), where it has lived ever since.

That single number is the innovation. A change to the sickness-benefit taper, modelled on its own, might look sensible. Run through FASIT, alongside the housing-benefit rules and the childcare fees already in force, the same change could open a new cliff at a different income. FASIT made the interactions visible. It let the government see the system not as a row of separate programmes but as one organism, and to find where it was broken.

Test-and-eliminate

Sweden built FASIT to remove the cliffs, deliberately, in order to clear a person’s road back to work.

The clearest case is sickness benefit. For years, anyone on long-term sickness compensation faced the starkest cliff of all: take a job, and you risked losing the entire benefit. The rational choice was to stay home. In 2008 the Reinfeldt government legislated that cliff way of existence. One of the gents I met just handed me a printout of the whole document: Prop. 2007/08:124, Från sjukersättning till arbete: “From sickness compensation to work.” Its mechanism was a steglös avräkning, a “stepless offset”. In the government’s own words, sickness benefit would be reduced according to a so-called reduction income under a system of stepless offsetting.

The route back to work was cleared and FASIT showed where the cliff stood, how high it was and what a stepless taper would cost. FASIT was used to calculate how many Swedes were ensnared in a welfare trap (ie, losing >60pc of every extra pound they’d earn rendering work pointless). It was a staggering 30pc in 1997: no wonder they had so few workers. But this was cut to 15pc by 2003. The levers were Sweden’s labour market recovery, a pension-fee tax change and the childcare fee cap. Reinfeldt’s earned-income tax credit, which came later in 2007, was a separate lever.

The Reinfeldt reforms kept tweaking the system until this halved. This sophisticated action let them a) recognise the government had trapped so many b) target help and those who’d likely best respond to this. It was strategy more advanced than anything ever attempted in London.

The sickness reform did not stand alone. They offered carrot and stick: jobbskatteavdrag or earned-income tax credit introduced in 2007, pushed in the same direction from the other end - lowering the tax on low and middle earnings so that the first steps into work, and up through the hours, paid more than they had. Marginal tax fell by around six percentage points. I always think Fredrik Reinfeldt didn't get the credit he deserved for this - he showed the labour market is far more sensitive to tax cuts and work incentives than the old models suggested.

The point is not any one of these reforms but the discipline that linked them: each was checked against the same model, so that a credit designed to make work pay at one income could not quietly reopen a cliff at another. The scanning was continuous.

Engineering, not ideology.

The government did not need to win an argument about whether work should pay. It used the model to reshape the system until it did, and it did so inside the ordinary machinery of budgeting. When housing benefit was examined, FASIT was there. When childcare subsidies moved, FASIT modelled the interaction with tax and the rest. When sickness eligibility was tightened through the new rehabilitation chain, FASIT checked whether the income-support rules would punish those trying to return.

FASIT also gave reform a language that crossed the aisle. The system was broken not because benefits were too generous or too mean, but because they conspired against work. Fixing that was arithmetic, not creed. A social democrat could own it as a matter of dignity and labour-market participation. A centre-right minister could own it as a matter of incentives and efficiency. Both could agree on the one indefensible thing: a system in which earning more left you worse off. As one of those involved put to me: Sweden’s welfare revolution has been more Sir Humphry than Jim Hacker.

The cliff-edge, mainstreamed

The deepest difference is institutional. In Sweden the ‘composite marginal effect’ is a regular metric churned out by national statistics office. SCB runs FASIT every year to publish the distributional effects of the state Budget on household incomes, and the model carries dedicated routines for marginal effects, replacement rates and stylised type-cases. The watchdog uses it too: in its 2017 audit of housing benefit, the Swedish National Audit Office used FASIT specifically to measure the benefit’s marginal effects on work incentives, concluding that recipients faced lower average marginal effects than before, while warning that housing benefit still depressed the labour supply of young, childless households. The UK has never once bothered to do so, yet our housing rules have destroyed the work incentive for thousands.

The UK is quite good at studying problems; less good at solving them or sharing data. We have

• UKMOD, the free, open-source, Family Resources Survey-based microsimulation model run from the University of Essex which explicitly analyses work incentives.

• We have the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ TAXBEN, used for decades to compute effective marginal tax rates.

• The DWP’s Policy Simulation Model (PIS)

• HMRC’s Intra-Governmental Tax and Benefit Model. The engines exist. The data exists. But no one has ever bothered to look at this mess from the point of the user.

The PIS is capable of the same calculations, running the same FRS data, flagging the same welfare cliffs. But PSM is run only when a policy change is mooted, its outputs buried in ad-hoc impact assessments, never published as routine statistics. Sweden made welfare-trap measurement a standing habit. Britain treats it as an occasional finding. That is the difference.

No British body publishes, as a routine headline statistic, the answer to the obvious question: what share of working-age claimants face a marginal deduction rate above 70 per cent? Above 100 per cent? How many people, this year, would lose money by working an extra hour? In Sweden that figure is produced, published and audited as a matter of course. In Britain it is not. The UK government is not yet in the habit of asking what its welfare system is doing to people.

When I was in Newcastle I met a caseworker who said his client’s dad has banned him from getting a job because it would lose his family benefits. I recently spoke to a researcher who found a girl who had been thrown out of her house because she got an apprenticeship, thereby denying the parents child benefit. Our cliff edges are real, cause massive family agony: but they exist because of neglect. We have the tools, the info. But we don’t care to look. It’s a box that no one in power wants to open.

That is the lesson worth importing. Sweden did not reform sickness benefit, or housing, or childcare in isolation. It built a machine to make the whole system legible, and then it kept the machine running - so that the message stayed constant from one Budget to the next: work should always pay.

- Family of Henry Nowak, 1 June

“Henry Nowak died the same way a civilisation dies. Abandoned. Handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit. His murder is as tragic as it is enraging. He should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”

- JD Vance, X, 5 June

The Nowak family’s wish was never going to be respected: the brutal truth is that his death was just too politically rich not to exploit. Elon Musk had long been demanding the release of the police bodycam video shown to the court of Henry’s last moments. It would be Twitter dynamite, as galvanising for the digital right as George Floyd was for the BLM-left. Nothing solicits a more visceral human reaction than seeing, hearing a dying man cuffed by police. Certain politicians will always seek to traffic in atrocity, to exploit and direct such emotions. JD Vance very much included.

Vance, the algorithm and the British Gotham

To frame the murder in racial terms - the result of immigration, rather than criminality - is precisely what Henry’s family begged politicians not to do. But doing so is vital for JD Vance’s overall message: that British civilisation is somehow under attack because “the mass invasion of migrants” and their children has left streets full of murderers and, even, a civilisational threat. The problem is that Vance and those on the populist right who promote “Britain is Broken” narrative cannot point to actual crime figures because they show that while the immigrant population has doubled, crime has actually halved.

JD Vance’s style of politics relies on building ever-refreshed narratives of conflict, keeping rage (and fear) alight. A glance at the US government website, Aliens (‘they walk among us’) gives a sense of this vibe. Vance seeks to lead the MAGA tribe when Trump goes. They want to know that “London has fallen,” that Europe is ablaze and that Britain is now a dumpster-fire of a country with civilisation is being “erased” - all because of immigration, enabled by leftists. The point about ‘civilisation’ being under threat is the new war-cry of Europe’s hard right. First it was about Muslims. It has now widened to Sikhs.

Vance presents a fake version of Britain as a cautionary tale for America. The barbarians are inside the European gates, and Henry Nowak’s death is an example of what happens when their children run amok! Pete Hegseth was at it in his D-Day speech; Reform UK also draws this ‘invasion’ military analogy. Your country is being attacked, your women and children defiled: who will defend? This isn’t politics as we commonly understand it, but a call to arms. Now promoted by a new media ecosystem, as desperate for new material as MAGA. Twitter nativist accounts like the one Vance cited scour Europe for examples of migrant crime and push them out to fuel the narrative of racial conflict or migrant vs native clashes.

Vance calls for “righteous anger;” Nigel Farage for “cold rage.” Both now speak the language of racial conflict: between migrants and, now, the children of migrants. An attack of the white majority by the criminal minority whose very presence embodies the betrayal of a country by its elites. The ‘broken’ country Reform speaks of, the dumpster-fire that JD Vance points to, bears no more resemblance to the UK than Gotham City does to New York. But these gentlemen and their media allies are forever building up their picture of British Gotham with fake narratives, fake stats, made-up think tanks and books with concocted quotes. It depends on deceit.

I have written my Times column about the lies being told about the Nowak murder - and the industrial-scale attempt to concoct fake narratives. I’d like to expand some of the points and share the data I researched in my column (all in my data library, here).

If what JD Vance said about Britain and migration was even halfway true, the post-2000 immigration surge would have sent our crime through the roof. Instead, it has halved. Henry Nowak’s murder was tragic, harrowing, sickening - but not part of a rising trend. In fact, in this country - where immigrants make up one in five of workers - murders are hovering at a 40-year low in absolute terms and a 50-year low when population-adjusted.

Some argue that the decline of murder is a technicality: that medical advances means they don’t die. I debated Zia Yusuf on Monday and he he paraphrased me as saying “come to London, you’ll be stabbed but thanks to our amazing emergency services you have a better chance of surviving.”

First, here are the figures for London murder: at the lowest in decades. Probably centuries, when you think of what came before. Note the under-25 tab.

And to Yusuf’s point - you’re not dying because the NHS is stitching you up? Well, the NHS keeps records of those admitted for knife crime (‘assault by sharp objects’). I updated it to take in the latest. It shows knife casualties at the lowest level since records began 27 years ago. Again, the opposite to the picture that Vance paints:-

It’s not just knife crime. When someone is assaulted and admitted to hospital, the NHS records it. The UK’s NHS model means we have very good data on this: you can mine it from their website. Again, we see hospital admissions for assault hovering at a multi-decade low.

You can click on the above to get ‘injury by bodily force’, by ‘blunt object’ etc: same trend. And let’s remember that one in four NHS staff who serve the country’s sick and injured are immigrants. The period of mass migration has coincided with an unprecedented drop in violent crime. Never have our streets been more racially mixed, it’s true. But seldom have they been safer to walk down. Surveys show women, in particular, say they feel markedly safer walking the streets than they did 30 years ago.

And yes, most crimes are not reported to the police. That’s why the Crime Survey of England & Wales asks 35,000 households to talk about their experience of crime: to give a consistent picture, pick up unreported crime. The resulting picture makes a mockery of the JD Vance caricature.

Click on the ‘police recorded’ tab and you’ll see a different picture - and here’s the paradox. Better policing means a greater share of crimes are reported. As the situation improves there are more interceptions, people are more confident in reporting crime. If more people were actually being stabbed, assaulted or killed, we’d see it in the hospital or murder figures. These figures show what the crime survey shows: violence roughly halving over the 20 years where the migrant population has doubled.

The switch from immigration to race

Vance is highly intelligent and strategic: unlike Trump he chooses words carefully. Nowak, he said, would still be alive today “if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”

This is not a complaint about today’s immigration. Vickrum Digwa was born here. Vance, like Farage, has switched the criticism to those already here. Both seem to be anticipating how to keep the fight going when migration is under control - as it now is in the UK.

So Vance talks about the threat to the country of migrants’ children: now framed as threats because of their bloodline, not their actions. Only here, Vance says, because the “few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants.” Migration framed as “invasion,” and the problem goes back “generations”. A new argument, with new implications.

This is why we see papers like the Jewish News now defend Muslims: they see how the argument is shifting. They know what happens when this crowd gets their boots on. First it was the Muslims. Now, the Sikhs. Who do we think might be next? Rupert Lowe, the Reform pace-setter, has already started on Kosher meat. How long until Judaeo is dropped from the demands to protect Europe’s ‘Judaeo-Christian heritage?’.

Even on racial grounds, Vance’s narrative collapses. If you look at the arrest rate by ethnicity - a poor proxy for crime as it doesn’t adjust for social factors - it shows Indians significantly below whites.

What Henry Nowak’s murder reminds us is how far we still have to go. His attacker should never have been allowed to walk around Southampton with a massive knife: the law needs to be clarified so police know to reject false claims of religious exemption. Snatch crime is surging, as is shoplifting: if Vance wanted to talk about rising acquisitive crime he’d have a point. Sexual offences are not experiencing the same trend: there is no surge, but no collapse either.

Vance needs to tell his MAGA base that Britain is a migrant-addled criminal hellhole - and if they’re not careful, America will be too. MAGA politics means selling a worldview, rather than solutions. A dystopia needs victims and villains. This non-stop media circus needs recruits: new people to be angry at. More causes for the currency Vance incites:

Imagine if a UK Prime Minister had issued a statement after George Floyd’s death demanding Americans take to the streets over policing. Or after Rodney King. Or Michael Brown. Or Eric Garner. It would be seen as extraordinary overreach - a foreign leader attempting to promote domestic unrest on a false basis. The Swedes now have a ‘Psychological Defence Unit’ to deal with foreign powers who use fake news to sow internal division: it recognises that these fake, viral claims are assaults on the national fabric. And need to be responded to quickly with the cold, hard truth.

Vance is attacking a Britain that does not exist. Our islands are not seething with racial tension; polls show only one in four buy Farage’s ‘two-tier policing’ line. I suspect his departure this week from anti-migration politics into racial politics will prove a misjudgement. Yes, they won Twitter; by playing the race card they won attention. But I suspect lost most of the country,

Britain is not a place where people who look affrighted or askance at colleagues, neighbours and countrymen who have different faiths or skin colour. My own hunch is that MAGA is obsessed with Britain because we are living rejection of this thesis: a country that has, in Britishness, a unifying theme that people of all faiths, ethnicities and skin colours can unite around. Britain’s story is the opposite of what JD Vance says it is.

I’d like to close with the final paragraph of my Times column:-

Vance has one thing right: there is such a thing as 'civilisational decline’. A national debate that cannot defend truth when facts are distorted will eventually find itself governed by whichever outrage spreads fastest. “This is not a case about Sikhism,” said Nowak’s family. “This is not a case about racism. This is about murder.” It is hard to imagine a clearer statement of what was lost amid the noise.

This post has been updated to take in the ruling.

MPs from three political parties have now called for the Sikh kirpan to be banned - which, if it went ahead, would be a significant abridgement of their religious freedom. The kirpan is a small ceremonial sword or dagger carried by initiated Sikhs (sometimes worn on a necklace) as one of the ‘Five Ks’, symbolising duty to defend the faith and protect the weak. It’s part of the faith, not culture. Demands to ban IT come in response to the conviction of Vickrum Digwa for the fatal stabbing of Henry Nowak, a Southampton University student, last December. Digwa said later that he carried the murder weapon for religious reasons. He also lied that his victim had racially abused him.

Digwa’s brother had called 999 to report a “physical attack” by an assailant that they had actually captured (‘We’re restraining him right now’). Hence the blue-light response by the police. When officers found Nowak, they handcuffed him. It took them “about a minute”, the judge said, to realise their horrific error and then started trying to save his life. A police inquiry is underway into this aspect of the tragedy.

But the politicisation has started, with cynical misrepresentations effectively promoted. That police rushed out to investigate a loose allegation of racism, rather than a report of assault and capture. That the sentence was reduced because the killer could claim his knife was a religious item: so, two-tier justice. (In fact, the lower 20-year minimum was applied as there was no premeditation: an outcome dictated by the Sentencing Act 2020). One big claim, made by the killer, is that the murder weapon was a religiously-mandated Sikh kife.

The George Floyd murder in 2020 shows what reaction can be summoned when webcam video is released on social media. Nigel Farage has said the murder shows anti-white police bias and has called for a response of ‘cold rage’. Sikhs now find themselves in the dock.

To untangle the faith from the crime I caught up with Jagbir Jhutti-Johal OBE, Professor of Sikh Studies at Birmingham Uni. She has spent more than 25 years researching Sikh theology, community and contemporary affairs, and was appointed OBE for services to higher education and faith communities.

Prof. Jhutti-Johal does not say that there are no problems with the law as it stands. On the contrary, she says that understandable confusion about the kirpan is being exploited by Sikh youths. The remedy there, in my view, is to clarify the law rather than abolish it. Sikhs are very under-represented in the media and don’t have much of a press operation, so their side of the story risks being ignored entirely amid the algorithmic anger. Nowak’s family said they didn’t want his death to be politicised, or the cause for further division. My aim, in this post, is to put a Sikh perspective on this complicated and explosive situation on public record. Over to Prof. Jhutti-Johal.

Q: Let’s start with Henry Nowak’s murder. What’s your reaction?

A: As a Sikh and simply as a human being, my heart breaks for his family and for everyone who loved him. A young man lost his life in an act of shocking and senseless violence. No words can lessen that grief, and nothing should distract from the fact that a family is now living with an unimaginable loss.

I’m appalled that Vickrum Digwa, as an initiated Sikh, could commit such an act and then lie in an attempt to avoid responsibility. What he did is completely antithetical to Sikh teachings and values.

He did not use a kirpan. The kirpan is meant to symbolise restraint, justice, compassion and the defence of the vulnerable — not aggression, intimidation or violence. His actions dishonour those principles, and they dishonour the Sikh faith itself.

Q: One of the most disturbing details is that Digwa’s defence claimed he carried the weapon as part of his religion. How do you respond to that?

A: I find it deeply troubling that this argument was even put forward. The defence told the court he carried the knife “in the same way that he does every day in his life: as part of his religion.” But a Sikh, even one who practises Shastar Vidya, would never — and should never — carry a weapon of this nature as part of their daily religious observance.

And, in law, that claim did not stand. The weapon was a 21cm blade, and the court treated it as a large bladed article that is not, and was never intended to be covered by the kirpan exemption. Digwa was already wearing a small kirpan under his clothing which satisfied the religious obligation of an initiated Sikh. He had also chosen to carry a far larger blade. He was convicted not only of murder but of carrying a bladed article in public. In many ways, that demonstrates that the exemption itself works.

Q: The reporting confusion seems to be the definition of a kirpan. What is it?

A: It is one of the Five Ks that initiated Sikhs are required to wear at all times. The word itself comes from two Punjabi words: kirpa, meaning mercy, grace and compassion; and aan, meaning honour, dignity and self-respect. So the kirpan is not simply a “knife” or a “weapon”; it is a sacred article of faith, intended to remind Sikhs of their duty to stand against oppression and to protect others. During the Coronation, seeing the Curtana - the Sword of Mercy [carried by Penny Mordaunt] - reminded me strongly of the symbolism of the kirpan. Both represent the idea that power must be restrained by mercy and justice.

In his sentencing remarks, His Honour Judge William Mousley K.C. states: “10 It is a strict requirement of the Sikh faith to have a knife, called a kirpan, at all times. Generally, this will be a small knife, hidden from view, often on a length of cord and worn around the neck. You had that but, in addition, the large dagger in a sheath. You are a member of an order of Sikhs called the Nihang who have a tradition of having a second knife, or kirpan and that is often fully visible, believing that the guru will look favourably on that. You observed that tradition in your everyday life, at work and in public. However, it was not a strict requirement; that is borne out by the fact that neither your brother nor father who arrived on the scene after you had stabbed Henry were so dressed.”

This passage has caused some confusion because of the phrase:

“You are a member of an order of Sikhs called the Nihang who have a tradition of having a second knife, or kirpan and that is often fully visible, believing that the guru will look favourably on that.”

Some people have interpreted this as the judge describing the second weapon as a kirpan. However, it was not a Kirpan, but a ceremonial sword, which forms part of the Shasters.

Q: If the murder weapon was not really a kirpan, what was it?

A: He used a knife known as a choora/pesh-kabz, which is entirely different. The choora features a distinctive straight, heavy T-backed blade that tapers to a fine piercing point.

Historically it was used by Sikh warriors for piercing armour. It sits within what we call shastars: sacred weapons. Sikh theology teaches that we should be “saint-soldiers”, which is why Sikhs have a rich martial tradition known as Shastar Vidya. But that has never been a licence for violence; the saint-soldier ideal is a moral responsibility to wield strength ethically and with compassion.

Vickrum, belonged to the Nihang sect. They practice Shastar Vidiya and have a deep reverence for arms, which are seen as the physical manifestation of the Divine. However, some of the knives that make up the Shasters are not Kirpans and should not be defined as such and nor worn daily in public.

The kirpan is something very different. It is one of the five articles of faith worn by initiated Sikhs men and women. The 5Ks are kesh (unshorn hair), kangha (a wooden comb), kara (a simple steel bracelet), kachera (special cotton underwear) and kirpan (a short sword). These articles of faith are symbols of commitment to both spirituality and the defense of justice. The kirpan is a small, curved, single-edged blade, often between 3 and 8 inches in total length including the sheath and handle, and frequently even smaller. There is no single mandated size. It is worn beneath clothing and is not generally visible to the public.

Larger kirpans, typically around 3 feet (approximately 90 cm) in length, are more commonly associated with religious ceremonies, Nagar Kirtans, weddings and martial or ceremonial contexts connected to Sikh shastar traditions, including Gatka. They are not carried or worn in everyday life by Sikhs, as their size makes them impractical for routine activities.

What is happening now is that media reporting, which historically reduced the kirpan to a “small dagger”, is increasingly conflating the kirpan with the wider range of bladed weapons associated with Sikh martial traditions. When Sikhs try to correct the narrative, those distinctions collapse into a single category that is automatically treated as threatening.

Q: Does anything about this case suggest that the law is too broad and needs changing?

A: This case does not prove the exemption is too broad. It proves the law works as worded: the exemption already does what it is meant to do. The court was saying that this weapon did not qualify for religious protection. The law is not ambiguous on this point. He had a kirpan. He also carried an illegal, offensive weapon that no law would defend. That is precisely why calls now to ban or restrict the kirpan miss the point.

Q: Do Sikhs have any concerns about the kirpan law?

A: Yes, and we should be honest about them. When legislation was debated in 2019, Sikh organisations — the Sikh Federation, the then Sikh Council UK and Lord Singh — lobbied the Government very hard. But some of us were also raising concerns about misuse by a small minority of young Sikh men.

I have been asked to respond to cases, which never received public attention, of young men keeping large swords - or what were effectively hunting knives - in their cars “for protection”, while describing them to police as kirpans or religious articles of faith. This should be seen as part of the broader knife-carrying culture we see among some young men today. Blades being carried, in theory, for protection, identity or intimidation - but, ultimately, creating the conditions for serious violence and tragedy. Police conduct stop-and-searches for precisely this reason. Officers can hardly be expected to have detailed knowledge of Sikh practice. If they are told that the knife is being carried for religious reasons, officers may accept the claims at face value. That concern about abusing the law is real and should not be ignored.

So this is the potential for abusing the law. Young men exploiting the exemption, claiming that a blade is religious when it’s not. As a community we should be able to have honest conversations about misuse and accountability — with government, police, educators and wider society. Avoiding those conversations helps nobody.

Q: There has been a strong political reaction to this case. What do you make of it?

A: It is deeply troubling. It is striking to watch ministers now calling for bans on the kirpan, or using inflammatory language about Sikh practices, when many of these same politicians strongly supported the Sikh community and defended the kirpan exemptions during the passage of the Offensive Weapons Act in 2019. At that time they recognised the kirpan as an important article of faith, deserving legal protection and sensitivity. Now, in a highly charged political climate, some appear willing to abandon those principles in favour of rhetoric designed to look “tough”.

This kind of political opportunism is reckless. It creates fear, division and suspicion around an entire community because of the actions of one individual. Responsible leadership should calm tensions, protect social cohesion, and distinguish clearly between criminal acts committed by individuals and the beliefs of an entire faith community. Instead, some politicians are fuelling a narrative that places ordinary Sikhs at risk.

On another note, our Sikh politicians also have a responsibility to speak out and help correct the narrative. For many years there was a strong demand for visible Sikh representation in Parliament so that the community would have a voice within public life and political institutions. Moments such as these are precisely when that representation matters most. At a time when public debates around the kirpan and Sikh identity risk becoming increasingly distorted, this is exactly when we need to hear those voices most clearly and publicly, to counter misleading narratives often amplified in far-right or populist discourse.

Q: And the media?

A: The media has a serious responsibility here too. Large sections of the press and the social media ecosystem are amplifying fear rather than encouraging understanding. Sensationalist headlines, inflammatory commentary and misleading framing are helping to create a climate where Sikhs are increasingly viewed with suspicion or hostility. Words used in headlines matter, especially if the headline is what most people read. Saying that the murder weapon was a ‘ceremonial knife,’ for example, could give the impression that the law allowed this blade to be carried.

There is a real problem in how language travels from the courtroom to the front page. The judge dealt very well with the legal facts established in evidence, using terms such as “blade” or “bladed article”, without adopting religious or cultural classifications. The prosecution and defence drew on words such as “kirpan” and “shastar-style knife”. The media then simplified matters further, collapsing these distinctions into “knife” or “sword” depending on the angle of reporting. It is in that movement — from legal classification to media framing — that nuance and context disappear, and an entire community is reduced to stereotypes.

Q: This case has been in the news for months. Elon Musk is talking about it to his 220 million followers. The tone, at times, has been quite harsh. What has the effect of this case been on ordinary Sikhs?

A: Many Sikhs, particularly initiated Sikhs who wear the kirpan, are feeling truly vulnerable. I know initiated Sikhs who — whether they used to wear the kirpan visibly over their clothes or discreetly underneath — are now conscious of it being visible and are deliberately hiding it, because they no longer feel safe displaying it in public. Before this, they would not have thought twice. Now they are anxious about how they will be perceived, whether they will be confronted, or whether they might become targets of abuse or hostility.

Q: What does the law say about kirpans now?

Sikhs have long had legal exemptions relating to the kirpan under the Criminal Justice Act 1988 and, more recently, the Offensive Weapons Act 2019.

Under section 139 of the 1988 Act, it is lawful to carry a kirpan in public for genuine religious reasons. That is what allows practising Sikhs to wear one as part of their faith in everyday life.

Separate rules under section 141 restrict certain offensive weapons, including some curved swords with blades of 50cm or more. The Offensive Weapons Act 2019 expanded the Sikh exemptions in this area so that religious possession, ceremonial use, manufacture, sale and gifting of kirpans could continue lawfully.

The ordinary kirpan, worn daily by most Sikhs, does not fall within the category of prohibited curved swords. But even where a kirpan does engage the offensive-weapons rules, the exemption is not unlimited. The protection depends on the religious purpose and surrounding circumstances. No one can simply carry a blade and claim it is a kirpan. If challenged, the court would look at factors such as the carrier’s faith, the manner in which the blade was worn, its purpose, and the context in which it was carried.

Nor does the law permit anyone, Sikh or not, to carry a kirpan or any other blade for self-defence. The statutory protections exist for genuine religious and ceremonial purposes, not for use as a weapon.

The law was already clear before Digwa, and he broke it on every single level.

Q: What do you expect to happen next?

A: If the conversation around banning or restricting the kirpan continues it will be interesting, though deeply difficult, to watch unfold. After 9/11, similar debates took place within the Sikh community and between Sikhs and the UK Government. At that time there were suggestions such as welding the kirpan permanently into its sheath, limiting its size significantly or replacing it altogether with a very small symbolic kirpan worn as a necklace. Those proposals created considerable tension and disagreement, because Sikhs felt they undermined the religious significance and integrity of the article of faith itself.

If calls for restrictions emerge again, the discussions will not be easy conversations. They sit at the intersection of public safety, religious freedom, and the challenge of how minority faith practices are understood and regulated in the public sphere. My hope is we keep in mind that the law has worked to strike the right balance between religious freedom and public safety. We see very little evidence that kirpans have been associated with wider patterns of violence. The British way has been to take an evidence-led approach that addresses legitimate public safety concerns without allowing the issue to be exploited for political point-scoring, anti-immigrant sentiment, or broader culture-war agendas.

Q: What do you most want people to take from all this?

A: That we must be able to hold several truths at once. We must condemn this violence unequivocally, support Henry Nowak’s family wholeheartedly and address legitimate concerns about the misuse of religious exemptions. But also refuse to allow an entire minority community to become the subject of collective blame, fear-mongering and political scapegoating.

The irony in all of this is that Sikhs have historically been respected precisely because of our martial tradition and the values associated with it: courage, discipline, self-restraint, the protection of the vulnerable, and standing against injustice. The saint-soldier ideal has long been understood not as a licence for violence, but as a moral responsibility. What makes this case so painful is that one man’s actions — amplified by some reporting and seized upon by politicians — risk reducing that entire tradition to fear about weapons and violence. That is deeply damaging, not only for initiated Sikhs, but for the wider understanding of Sikh history, identity and theology.

I’m not a fan of Britain’s deplorable habit of prosecuting, even imprisoning people for saying daft or even vile things on Twitter. The law needs to be changed. But worse is politicians blaming judges for carrying out the laws laid down by Parliament. Even worse is the populist trope that the UK has a “two-tier justice system.” This was the cry of Elon Musk, then Reform UK and now the Tories.

Chris Philp, the Shadow Home Secretary, was at it again today - invoking Lucy Connolly after a jury failed to reach a verdict on one of the trials in the notorious Manchester Airport case.

Connolly “got two years in prison for an off-colour tweet” - he says, while setting it beside footage he says wasn’t enough to convict a man of assaulting all three police officers in Manchester. The guy in his video, Mohammed Amaaz, was actually convicted and is awaiting sentence, but none of those trying to whip up outrage will accept that). Philp he files the whole thing under a now-ritual slogan: “two-tier justice.” The implied villains are Keir Starmer and the judge who sentenced her.

She pleaded guilty in Sep24 to publishing material intending to stir up racial hatred, contrary to section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986. No trial, no jury, no “verdict” to attack - only a sentence for a judge to calculate. Her tweet, in my view, was grotesque. But so was her treatment: using 1986 laws in the social media age is a disgrace. But the results should be blamed on the law: not on the police, CPS or the judges who implemented those unmodified laws.

I’m a defender of British judges. We have the best in the world, their impartiality is famous. Which is why so many foreign companies use UK law to agree contracts: our system isn’t politicised. But the rise of judicial populism, blaming judges as being somehow complicit, does well on social media. It’s also a staple from the European poulist playbook, to which Reform is steadily conforming. Nigel Farage's intervention - branding the brothers “violent thugs” - was serious enough that the defence sought to halt proceedings saying they couldn’t get a fair trial.

Like claims about surging street violence, it doesn’t apply here. But if you can break free from constraints like truth, then you can come up with spicier narratives.

For the Tories to fall into this, seeking clicks, is awful. They are promoting a corrosive narrative that the UK judges are biased, all set to lock up the native poor while letting immigrants off. That’s not to say there are no occasional, appalling rulings: but they cause so much fuss because they are so rare. The Lucy Connolly case has its roots in bad laws, which the Tories did not update for the digital era - and should have. Her year-long sentencing is on them. The judge was enacting Tory laws.

So let’s look at the Connolly case - and Judge Melbourne Inman KC, the Recorder of Birmingham. Under law (section 59 of the Sentencing Act 2020) the judge had to follow the Sentencing Council’s definitive guideline unless it would be contrary to the interests of justice. Those guidelines were set under - you guessed it - the Tories.

The guidelines (here) are a flowchart, and the decisive steps were agreed by both the prosecution and Connolly’s own barrister:

1. Categorise. Highest culpability (she intended to incite serious violence) and highest harm (her post encouraged activity threatening life) make it a “category 1A” offence. Even her lawyer agreed that this is what she intended. The Court of Appeal later called the categorisation “obviously correct.”

2. Read the table. Category 1A carries a fixed starting point of 3 years and a range of 2 to 6 years. The judge did not pick this figure. The guideline did.

3. Weigh up and down. A judge can move the dial. He moves it up for the timing - the post went out on the evening of the Southport murders, as disorder spread across the country. Down for her mitigation: no previous convictions, good character, a young daughter, the death of her infant son in 2011. Net result: 3 years 6 months.

4. Plea credit. A 25% reduction (not the full third, because she didn’t plead at the first opportunity) brings it to 31 months.

5. Discount She was sentenced to 31 months, of which she’d serve roughly half in custody.

That is the entire calculation, and under law the judge has to do it this way. The only genuinely discretionary act - the weighing at step three - left the pre-plea figure sitting in the lower-middle of the guideline range, not at the top.

Could the judge have gone much lower? The ‘starting point’ sentence was three years, and the aggravating timing of her tweet pushed him up to 3 years 6 months before the plea discount. So 24 months years, the floor of the range, was never in play. To go below it he'd have had to drop 1A and put the offence into a lower category: exactly what Connolly's appeal argued, and what both the trial judge and three senior appeal judges said was legally impossible.

Philp’s phrase - “an off-colour tweet” - makes it sound like she was being rude about Carol Vorderman. Here is what she wrote:-

Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f**king hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.

If Philp doesn’t think hers was a 1A offence under the law, if he thinks the judge and the Court of Appeal got this wrong, he should say so. But he’s using twitter-language, misleading for clicks.

Philp’s tweeted comparisons with the Manchester case fails at a deeper level too. Connolly pleaded guilty. Take the footage Philp posted. He says it “wasn’t enough to convict the guy in blue for assaulting all three police officers.” But the guy in blue has been convicted - of assaulting two of the three officers, plus a member of the public at Starbucks. Only the charge over the third officer, PC Marsden, ended in two hung juries and was dropped today. So the man in Philp’s clip is actually a convicted assailant awaiting sentence.

And while Starmer as prime minister did publicly urge swift justice during the Aug24 disorder (as all Prime Ministers do after riots) he did not choose the charge: that was the independent Crown Prosecution Service. He certainly did not set the sentence or the guideline: that was the Tories.

Parliament - not judges - decide the sentence

The Public Order Act 1986 was passed under Thatcher. The guideline that fixed the three-year starting point was issued by the Sentencing Council and came into force in Jan20, under Boris Johnson.

And if ministers don’t like what judges do, they can simply pass a new law or update guidance. In Mar25, Shabana Mahmood, objected to a Sentencing Council guideline on pre-sentence reports (which Tories were complaining about, even though the guideline came in on their watch.) Within weeks the Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Reports) Act 2025 was on the statute book, forbidding the Council from doing what it had proposed. The lever exists. Ministers pull it when they choose.

Which is the hypocrisy at the centre of all this. A politician who can change a guideline by letter, and the law by Act of Parliament, who instead points at the judge applying the existing rules, is having it both ways: keeping the rules they could change, and outsourcing the blame to the one person in the room constitutionally forbidden from answering back.

Why judicial populism is so corrosive

Judges cannot do podcasts. They cannot fire off a reply tweet, or go on the morning round, or correct the record. The bargain of an independent judiciary is that they apply the law without fear or favour, and in return they are shielded from the political brawl. Judicial populism breaks that bargain on purpose. It treats the judge as a soft target precisely because the judge won’t fight back, and it teaches the public that an unwelcome lawful outcome is evidence of a corrupt or biased judge rather than of a rule someone elected wrote.

I do think there is a two-tier aspect in that the police are going after the legally responsive (motorists doing 25mph in a 20-zone) while you can rob a bottle of vodka from a store and have minimal chance of being caught. Computers catch motorists; it takes more effort to catch those who live their lives off grid. Jenni Russell wrote a brilliant Times column about this on Monday. But that’s about policing, not courts.

If you think 31 months for a deleted post is too much - and I certainly do - then your argument is with the law and the guideline. Campaign to change the category boundaries. Campaign to lower the maximum. Admit that your colleagues should have done so in government, rather than make out it’s a Labour innovation. Those are the levers, and they sit in ministers’ hands, not the judge’s.

In another tweet yesterday, Philp misrepresented a £26 court surcharge as a ‘fine’ for rape: more clickbait. Such dishonesty makes the Tories look like the part of the problem, still living in a world of fiction and denial. If they wish to pose an alternative to Reform, they’ll have to act like one. The Tories in office had a poor record on free speech, the Online Safety Act being a prime example. They should have set different rules for digital nonsense then: the 1986 Act was not intended for Twitter. We need a new one.

But ‘two tier’ justice system? No, Mr Philp. For the treatment of Lucy Connolly, as with so much else going wrong right now, the root cause lies in problems that the Tories either created or failed - in their 14 years - to correct.

When I recommend his book, I do so in memory of my friend and colleague Clarissa Tan who died of entirely-preventable bowel cancer. The NHS told her she had irritable bowel syndrome after she presented with symptoms that ought to have merited a stool-test. That test may well have identified as the cancer that also killed her mother. Attia’s book is all about this: work out what genes run in your family. And what tests you can now do, some for as cheaply as £50 if the NHS GP won’t play ball. Don’t fight your niggles. Make sure you minimise the risk. Be mindful that the medical world is a lot better now; we know more. About how basic diet, sleep and fitness - as well as statins and HRT - can genuinely move the dial. And much of the progress is anazing.

Take dementia, for example. In the ‘progress’ section of my data library, I share this chart showing its stunning decline. Look at its prevalence in 1984, 2004 and 2024…

Attia’s book opens saying that progress has slowed since antibiotics and sanitation tamed the big infectious diseases. Strip them out, he says, and progress has been flat: he cites a 2016 study by Robert J Gordon. I don’t have the data, so please forgive the crude book photo.

Look at that flatline: seventy years of no progress. But then again, we’re getting older - and perhaps that has an effect? Out of curiosity I ran the figures for age-standardisation mortality in the UK. You can see the crude rates (left menu option) but the trend is more encouraging.

Now of course the above do contain (prewar) the various infectious diseases: TB, cholera, typhoid, scarlet fever, smallpox etc. But this work had been done in the postwar years - and we kept seeing a decline. Even UK infant mortality is down by three-quarters in my 53-year-old lifetime:-

Look at heart disease and stroke: both down by two-thirds over my lifetime.

Worryingly, we can see a small uptick on heart disease in the end. And of course, cancer is still showing staggering lack of response to the advent of modern science. As much of a killer now as it was half a century ago. In Attia’s book he talks about the ‘horsemen” of which cancer is one. But as smoking has been on the way out so, too, has lung cancer. The correlation between these two graphs is quite striking. I publish it here as we can forget just how, within a couple of generations, this killer has largely been taken out of our culture.

And on the other cancers, the upside for the UK is greater than the figures suggest. Our survival rates have room for improvement, as this Lancet study from 2014 shows.

Once the cancer is detected, the NHS does move quickly. The problem is detection. As it was with Clarissa. Brits don’t like to bother people, we’re likely to say ‘it’s probably nothing’, we’re mindful of not imposing on the NHS, of not being a hypcondridact. It’s a fatal instinct. One thing that I also do to those I know well is recommend SameDay Doctor in London: for about £100 you can see a first-class GP any time you like. And not worry about burdening the NHS. And yes, not everyone can afford it - but for those who can, it helps.

That is the overall lesson of Attia’s book. Not that we can biohack our way out of mortality; or that every blood test is a revelation or every symptom a prophecy. But a more general point that prevention, now, is less guesswork. Family history, blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose, HRT, bowel screening, statins, fitness, sleep, alcohol, smoking: these are not lifestyle trivia. They are the levers by which quite ordinary people can buy themselves years of good life. And are already doing.

The trick is to get this message across. Clarissa’s work was all about what she was as the important untold stories, the case for optimism and beauty. She told me towards the end that she thought journalism, if done properly, can help. If we can resist the allure of clickbait catastrophism and share what’s going right - the fall in dementia, the improvements in society - then people might be less gloomy; less fatalistic. And recognising that we may have more control over our own health than we might think.

This breakdown, a relatively new feature from the ONS, shows how much of the ‘Boriswave’ was students. It was government policy from 2019 to build up to 600k a year. There was a graduate visa introduced in 2021 that let people stay and work for two to three years after graduating – that made it more attractive to people essentially coming to work leading to a big surge in Indians and Nigerians. And they brought their families, which they could do until restrictions in 2024. At peak, students’ family members are almost a third of the total: 137k out of 486k total.

And it suited universities which got money they needed and kept quiet about low quality students who were really here to work or to claim asylum. When the Tories worked out what was happening, they reversed course - and much of the falls are to do with their policies rushed in towards the end. There is no pre-2019 breakdown of ‘basic migration’ but if there was, it’d likely at its lowest for 20 years.

We can expect an instant narrative shift to ‘exodus of Brits’! Fewer returning Brits gives the appearance of an increase in Net British outflow. But the ONS figures show a remarkably steady outflow, in both total and age composition.

The main lever that Shabana Mahmood is pulling as Home Secretary is work visas. Applications for health visas, for example, have fallen from 232k a year to ~40k now.

The below shows how immigration collapsed as a concern after Brexit when people wrongly thought that border control tools, once acquired, would be used well. Concern and dismay surged when the Covid dust cleared and it was clear the Tories set the bar too low.

It’s worth looking at the Boriswave in historical perspective. It’s a blunder that flattened a party.

So far above, of course, is legal migration. The small-boats problem continues: driven not by sloppy coastal patrols but by dysfunctional laws that oblige the UK to meet small-boat people as soon as they enter UK waters and escort them to shore and then their hotel. For as long as this is the law, then no amount of coast-guarding will ‘stop the boats’. But we do see them arriving far less frequently.

The influx is ~7,500 so far this year vs ~12,700 this time last year. And meanwhile, serious progress is also being made cutting the asylum backlog bequeathed by the Tories.

Alongside this, Bas Javid’s deportation squad has been upping its game - albeit still far below levels seen under David Cameron’s coalition government. There is a lot of potential to increase, even double, the below.

Reform UK is proposing camps and ICE-style snatch-squads. None of this is necessary: we know where the next 5,000 people to deport are, we just lack the resources to deport. There’s even a special category of welfare for people who cannot work here - being here illegally and not having any asylum case - but whom the UK has not got around to booting out. The most egregious example of this is foreign criminals who are released from jail and milling around, waiting to be sent home.

The above is a different question to net migration - but when Shabana Mahmood sorts it (leave her in the Home Office and I suspect that she will) the question will turn to things like the above. And it’s down to Rachel Reeves: the deportation system works, and without any of the ICE-style agony Trump inflicts in America or Reform threatens for the UK. It needs more cash. More deportations deter arrivals, helping speed the progress on small-boats.

Overall, the above is a story of success and opportunity: ministers delivering what they promised. Effective government. The question now is whether this is a story that Labour cannot bring itself to tell.

Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study run from the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Essex, does collect it. Its Wave 14 sample, released in Dec25, includes 25,831 working-age adults aged 16 to 64 for whom country of birth is known. Two-thirds were born in the UK, one-third abroad. I have run the comparison.

In the raw data, 16.8% of UK-born working-age adults are on out-of-work benefits, against 15.7% of foreign-born adults. Foreign-born adults are marginally less likely to claim, by 1.1 percentage points. That is before any adjustment for who is being compared with whom.

Adjust for age, sex, ethnicity and parental qualifications - the variables that ought to be held equal in any like-for-like comparison - and the gap closes further. The model predicts a 14.0% benefit rate for UK-born adults and 14.3% for foreign-born adults at average demographics. The two figures cross over: foreign-born adults come out a fraction of a percentage point higher than UK-born, not lower. In neither the raw nor the adjusted comparison is the difference statistically significant.

The plain reading: working-age migrants in Britain are not over-represented on out-of-work benefits. Whatever the political argument about immigration and the welfare state is about, this is not it.

The finding does not settle every adjacent question. There are differences between specific ethnic groups, and patterns differ between first-generation migrants and their UK-born children. But the headline binary comparison - the one the DWP cannot answer because it does not collect the variable - has, on the best individual-level data Britain has, a clear answer. There is no migrant-versus-native gap in welfare receipt.

The new ‘civilisationalism’

Faith and politics is mixed all too much on Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom march yesterday. Most protests hand out placards. This one had a pile of wooden crucifixes for people to pick up, reinforcing its new theme of a war for Christian civilisation. This was a minority theme foisted on those present who, from all evidence, seem to be ordinary people marching in support of their country rather than against anyone. But many of the organisers want to change that, and have an agenda to sell: from Christian nationalism to all-out anti-Islam. Hence the massive pile of crosses and scenes like this…

This ‘Christian civilisation under attack’ theme is popular in America too: so much so that, Robinson told the crowd, the event had been bankrolled by a big US donor (he asked them to shout ‘USA, USA’ in appreciation.) A new spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of ‘civilisationalism’ - and it’s now going on both sides of the Atlantic. This is a big MAGA theme and the latest US National Security strategy talks about Europe facing “civilisational erasure”. Christian norms are being attacked by an influx of mostly Muslim fifth columnists, the argument goes, who erase our culture and values. (This iteration of the Robinson projects accepts black Brits in the ‘this is a Christian country’ theme). A globalist elite is ushering this on, set to imprison ordinary citizens who protest. But ordinary souls can rise up to protect their women, children and Christian culture. Barbarians are inside the gates.

It’s tempting to laugh this off as bizarre (the Robinson march even assembled women in niqabs for the audience to boo at). But we can see versions of this theme filter down into politics: to dismiss this as a far-right, racist march is to miss its point. Its the leaders and speakers, not the attendees, who you need to keep an eye on. You’ll struggle to find a hard-right provocateur who has not ‘converted’, picked up the cross - and promptly used it as a cudgel. It’s seen in varying degrees throughout politics. The idea of the British model - where Jews walk streets without fear, where Muslims can grow up in a country that doesn’t speak of them as a structural problem - needs defending.

It’s funny: after the Trafalgar Square iftar debacle I was invited to crisis talks by senior Muslims in Westminster worried about the mainstreaming of anti-Muslim worldviews. I was invited as a rare example of a supportive Catholic, but at the meeting we struggled to muster half a dozen people who thought this was an issue. The Aspen Institute Religion & Society event in DC was standing room only. I met a pastor from Alabama, a Hindu representing Muslims, a southern-Irish Protestant: religiously-literate, thoughtful, serious people who are concerned about this new form of politics. While they were all American, the debate is relevant here.

My fellow panellists were Hannah Alam, who covers counterterrorism and national security for ProPublica and Prof. Asma Uddin, author of The Politics of Vulnerability and other books. I’ll post the summary of the discussion later, but there was one question that stayed with me from Guthrie Graves of the Interfaith Alliance. “Is the only alternative to ‘civilisationalism’ a rootless, godless globalism?”

We know what Tommy Robinson is offering: a dramatic, strong narrative of struggle. But what’s the alternative vision? I’m a Roman Catholic who opposes the idea of ‘Christian Britain’ because I remember when it was ‘Protestant Britain’ and people like me were seen as the outsider. Seen as IRA-sympathising, supporting a foreign papal authority, incapable of being patriotic, enemies within. I lived through this madness when I was growing up. I had thought it gone forever.

And then, to Monticello

Such questions were still in my mind the next day when I headed out to Monticello. Going there is like living in history; stepping back in time. They’ve decorated it with Jefferson’s old furniture, books, art. When journalists do interviews, we always scan bookshelves and room decoration for clues about the character. The chance to stand by Jefferson’s deathbed, to see the art he chose, to stand in the kitchens staffed by the slaves he owned: it gives you new insights. About evils he felt unable to stop (slavery) and those he felt a new republic could vanquish (sectarianism).

Amongst the books Jefferson owned is a Koran. You can request it from his collection; read it yourself if you want. His interest was quite unusual at a time when Muslims, Jews and Catholics were seen as a trifecta of reviled religious outsiders - debarred from public office and polite society even in the new American states. Thanks to Jefferson, Virginia had a Statute for Religious Freedom. He wanted this achievement on his gravestone (which I also visited). No mention of his presidency.

I learned in Monticello that he wanted his Virginia law to offer “the mantle of its protection to the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination”. As far I can work out there were no Muslims in the US at his time; perhaps two thousand Jews at most. He was writing in defence of an imagined community, but, moreover, creating a precept of liberty.

What drove him? Walking around his house (I took three of the tours) I looked at the portraits he had, the busts he commissioned. He had three in his main room: Bacon, Newton and Locke. Jefferson called it a “trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced.” All Englishmen. We’re living in a civilisation that emerged from this: from Bacon’s inquiry, Newton’s reason and Locke’s liberty. Jefferson wanted to take these Enlightenment ideas and put them in a civic context - which meant rejecting the ‘this is a Christian country’ logic. Jefferson knew then, as the Jewish News knows now, that this is the sectarian’s cry: the language of the old world.

The warning on the shelf

I also noticed he had Cromwell’s creepy death mask in his bookshelf (pictured below) I suspect as a reminder of sectarian menace. Having lived through one revolution, Jefferson feared another. Cromwell was the warning: that the man who tears down the old order in the name of liberty can become the new tyrant faster than anyone expects. Especially if you throw religion into the mix. Cromwell’s mask was there, I suspect, as a memento mori for republics. Mixing religion and politics had cost Germany a quarter of its population in the Thirty Years War. (When editor of The Spectator I kept a framed version of The Scotsman as a momento mori: a reminder that even the greatest, most historic publications can collapse.)

So this, finally, is my answer to Guthrie Graves’s question. What are we defending? Not a rootless globalism, not a faith-free public square. Something more specific and more demanding: the idea of civic belonging, irrespective of creed. Jefferson’s insight was to see that religious pluralism would not be the enemy of a strong republic; it would be its foundation. As described by Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration. The irony is that the ideas Jefferson was putting into constitutional concrete were British - born in the same island that is now being told, by Robinson’s speakers - and a few in parties - that it belongs to one faith alone.

Tribalism and sectarianism lie inside all of us: a primal switch, waiting to be flicked. This happened in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Lebanon. I lived at the tail end of a sectarianism in Scotland that took generations to bury. The pile of crucifixes at Tommy Robinson’s march is sectarianism reaching from the grave.

And here’s the thing: I don’t look at Robinson’s march with contempt; I don’t see it as a Nuremberg. Gathering in the nation’s capital to express pride in your faith and country is a good thing: precisely what Muslims did when they invited Jews and others to join in the Trafalgar Square iftar at Eid. And if it feels they’re in a culture where expressions of national pride is seen as racist: well, that’s worth protesting against. In quirky forms, perhaps. But if they want to come together to carry crosses and say the Lord’s Prayer in a mass meeting: well, it’s a free country. This is why it’s so weird that a Tory MP wants public Muslim prayer banned. When Nigel Farage agreed, he conceded he’d have do this by banning all mass prayer. Presumably including the Our Father led on stage by Robinson’s manic street preachers yesterday.

Abridge freedoms for one minority and everyone suffers. Protect everyone’s freedoms in a British model and there need be no conflict. As we saw in the King’s coronation: a Hindu Prime Minister, a Buddhist Home Secretary, a Muslim mayor of London - and an electorate that didn’t care how any of them worshipped. It took the UK a while to get here, but we seem to have created the world’s most successful multi-faith democracy. The problem is that we’re too British to say so.

The King’s gambit

Many of the Robinson’s marchers want to say that they’re British, Christian and proud, as they are richly entitled to do. I’ve written about my issues with the ‘this is a Christian country’ phrase, which I see as exclusionary. But what if it were repackaged to be inclusionary? What if ‘a Christian country’ is defined as having not just respect but love for the outsider, as mandated by countless Bible passages? Exactly this definition has been put forward by King Charles. I never tire of quoting it: this is the principle of our Carolingian age.

“The Sovereign has an additional duty: less formally recognised, but to be no less diligently discharged. It is the duty to protect the diversity of our country, including by protecting the space for Faith itself and its practise through the religions, cultures, traditions and beliefs to which our hearts and minds direct us as individuals. This diversity is not just enshrined in the laws of our country, it is enjoined by my own faith. As a member of the Church of England, my Christian beliefs have love at their very heart. By my most profound convictions, therefore – as well as by my position as Sovereign – I hold myself bound to respect those who follow other spiritual paths, as well as those who seek to live their lives in accordance with secular ideals.”

To see Britain’s integration success, look around you

If the UK government were not midway through meltdown it would point to a picture where immigration is fast being brought under control - and where Britain can lay claim to be the most successful melting pot in Europe. At times the Robinson rally looked like a Benetton advert: ebony and ivory, marching in perfect harmony (or, sometimes, not so perfect). The political interview that has got everyone talking today is Kemi Badenoch and Sky’s Trevor Phillips: a conversation that has sparked thousands of comments. None, as far as I can see, making a point about their skin colour.

The name for this isn’t tolerance or liberalism: it’s just Britishness. Not a rootless globalism, not a faith-free public square but the oldest idea in this story: that national belonging is distinct from creed. The nation we made - ours by evolution, America by revolution - is not a Protestant country or a Christian country but a free country, belonging to people of all colours, faiths and none. Pull this off, recognise Britishness as tool of cohesion - remember the principles that forged both modern Britain and America - and you have a formula for success.

The pace of demographic change in Britain and the attempts to revive sectarianism raise important questions. But as my trip to Monticello reminded me, we have even better answers.

Journalism is always a team effort, even if there’s usually only one person’s name on the story. There are researchers, sub-editors, revise editors, sources who cannot be named and others whose input can be seen all over a piece, even if their byline is nowhere to be seen. I’d like to write here about perhaps the least visible but one of the most important people in my years editing The Spectator: Keith Mathieson, The Spectator’s lawyer, who retires today. He was with me throughout my time there and I came to see him as indispensable. The George Martin to our Beatles.

A bad media lawyer is risk-averse. He advises against this, warns against that, removes anything that carries even the smallest chance of a writ. A good lawyer knows the law but also understands the point of journalism. I saw Keith as a journalist at heart who happened to be a lawyer. Every time, his instinct was on the side of the story: how to make it work, how to get the difficult truth across, how to let the writer say what needed to be said without stepping into legal disaster.

The legal jungle

You may be surprised to know out how much of The Spectator is sent to lawyers. Even theatre reviews would go across. Britain is a highly litigious country, as an editor is legally responsible for every word, dot and comma in the magazine: whether he was in the office or not, whether he knew about the article or not, whether he was on holiday in Bermuda or not. Colin Myler resigned as Sunday Mirror editor after a story published when he was on holiday. Quite right: that’s the only way it’s going to work. Full responsibility for everything - online, podcast, magazine - is part of the job. If any head rolls, it’ll be the editor’s.

That is when you realise that you do not just need a lawyer: you need a sherpa, a spy, a strategist. Someone who understands not just what the law says but how judges are likely to interpret it, how the risks are moving and where the trapdoors lie. The law is forever changing. The courts change, the judicial mood changes, the tolerance of for press freedom changes. Journalism school teaches you the basics: the Reynolds defence, public interest. None of it quite prepares you for the reality of legal warfare.

The instinct of any journalist is to fight for the truth. Publish and be damned. Fiat veritas et pereat mundus - let truth be done though the world perish - was the Hannah Arendt phrase that sat on my bookcase. But you soon discover that truth is not quite the shield you imagine. It helps only if you can prove it, if the right people will testify, if the case is heard in the right way, if you can afford to get that far. The Sun has spent years being sued by people who’ve worked out that it has to settle hacking claims, no matter how far-fetched, because the anti-press bias in the judiciary means papers are unlikely to be given the benefit of the doubt. Some £1 billion has been lost from journalism in this way. The battle is all too real.

Over the past 20 years, we have seen the rise of legal jihad: bad-faith Islamist actors using technicalities, costs and process to threaten small publications. This is why The Spectator had to be so careful. We had a tiny staff, but one prone to tackling the hardest of topics. If someone wanted to make an example of a publication, we were an obvious target.

The villains who sue

In my experience, the innocent are often the least likely to sue. We once accusing someone of leading a double life when it was in fact two people with the same name. The wronged man was gracious, accepting an apology. He could have taken us to the cleaners and did not.

Genuine villains are different. They understood the power of being seen to be litigious. They sue not just to win money, but to warn others off - especially if they have something to hide. A court apology they can weaponise: proof, or something that looked like proof, that a journalist had been forced to back down. It’s away of saying: don’t come after me, you won’t be able to afford it.

The last case I was involved in was Douglas Murray writing about the behaviour of a rabble-rouser named Mohammed Hijab during the Leicester disorder. Douglas’s analysis was, as ever, 100pc accurate - but Hijab was trying to sue on a technicality. He wanted money; an apology - or he’d take us to court. Keith’s advice was characteristically clear-eyed. The case was, he said, roughly 50-50. If we lost, the bill could be hundreds of thousands of pounds. For a small company, that was not theoretical. We had to make provision in the accounts for money we might lose.

But Keith also made a broader point. If we fought and lost, at least we would show that The Spectator did not automatically apologise and hand over money. Even if you lose once every ten years, it’s a worthwhile investment to show that you always figt - and stand by your reputation. Once a publication gets a reputation for buckling and settling, every low-life in the country will come for a slice of the pie. So we fought. And thanks to Keith and his brilliant team, we won.

I came to trust Keith’s judgment completely. If he said something was OK, that was all I needed to know. If Keith raised an eyebrow, I would stop everything and work out what was worrying him. I do not remember him ever making a suggestion that we did not accept. Nor do I remember him making one that killed the flow of a piece. Quite often he would say, in effect: Rod is right, but he can’t say it quite like this. Then he would find a form of words that kept the argument alive. Everything he did was in the service of journalism.

The scariest five words

I came to realise how unusual this was only when Keith was not away. The scariest five words in the English language, for me as editor, were: “Keith is away this week.” Whenever I heard them, I became massively more risk-averse. I would scour the copy more anxiously, tell the subs to seek my personal sign-off on any sentence even halfway risky. I would worry more, bowdlerise more; probably made the magazine worse.

My point: lawyers come in all shapes and sizes. There’s nothing better than a good one. A great media lawyer is not a brake on journalism but part of its engine. He understands that the reader has a right to know and that this right must often be fought for, sentence by sentence, clause by clause, sometimes in court. Keith understood this better than anyone I worked with. He gave editors courage and writers security. So he retires with my heartfelt thanks, as an editor fully aware of the debt I owe him. But also with the thanks of the writers whose stories he facilitated, whose sentences he saved, whose work he let fly. And with the thanks of the readers, because ultimately that is who we all serve.

We now live in a world of digital media where anyone with a smartphone can present themselves as a journalist. But look at the major stories: the grooming-gangs scandal, the £5 million ‘personal gift’ Nigel Farage: the stories that make history require persistence, documentation, risk and institutional support. They are all broken by newspapers. Why? Because newspapers are teams: a formula unreplicable by any other outfit. And no single first-class newspaper team can work without first-class lawyers riding alongside it, often involved in every stage of ongoing investigations.

Journalism is about the reader’s right to be informed. entertained - and, above all, the right to know. That right does not defend itself. It needs reporters, editors, publishers and, more often than most people realise, lawyers. Keith Mathieson spent his working life fighting for that right: and the journalistic world is richer for it.

I sometimes feel that I have more faith in Keir Starmer than he ever had in himself. A lawyer-PM, elected at a time when legal overreach is immobilising politics - who better to cut down those legal weeds? A relative newcomer to politics, in No10 when the old ideologies are failing - who better to forge a new, evidenced-based path? What I started at The Times I found my columns often ending highlighting some opportunity or another facing Starmer. Specifically if he became the lawyer who reined in the lawyers; the progressive who fixed immigration. A PM who repaired the nation state model correcting errors of New Labour. And one whose march on parliament took massive intake of new Labour MPs ready to regenerate his party.

But who do we see as the new face of his post-May disaster regeneration? Harriet Harman and Gordon Brown as his new auxiliaries - perhaps shields. It’s hard to see the logic. He needs to be talking to his party, not his predecessors. The Labour MPs who just saw hundreds of activists put to the sword; they feel unloved and unled. And perhaps a bit regicidal. Angela Rayner is making insurrectional noise and they need to be reassured. Naming Brown and Harman, retreating into the past rather than face the future, is almost daring them to take him out. Showing a picture of Brown outside No10 is the political equivalent of showing an orange in The Godfather: a harbinger of death.

There is precedent. When Rishi Sunak exhumed David Cameron in Nov23, bringing him back as Foreign Secretary, it was a distress flare. Sunak had just given a conference speech about defining himself against a “30-year failed consensus” then invited back Cameron, who had been part of that consensus. It didn’t just undermine his message signalled a Tory party that was running out of talent after 13 years in power. Can Labour really have reached this stage not even two years after its landslide? Starmer has hundreds of MPs: are none of them promising?

And how sure are we that Gordon Brown is associated with success? He’s back as a ‘special envoy on global finance’, which is worrying. He ruled at a time when debt was the new gold; the age of leverage. His speciality is off-the-books debt: IFF and PFIs back then, war-bonds now. But Brown’s fiscal chicanery will be harder to pull off now the UK is on the verge of fiscal crisis. Brown’s undoubted passion for poverty reduction was tragically misdirected: his end-product was always chasing simplistic metrics in a way that created more problems than they solved. This blinded Labour to what could have been a full-spectrum view of poverty; an oversight that also afflicted the post-IDS Tories. This is the problem Pat McFadden now has to solve.

And now to Starmer’s next hire…

Harriet Harman, back as an adviser, was Equalities tsarina at a time when her definition of women included men and boys who identify as female (as JK Rowling has lost no time in pointing out). Brown and Harman are both 75 years old now. Younger than Donald Trump, to be sure, but both are creatures of their time. The debate has moved on; demographics pose new challenges. Westminster’s failure to recognise this, its gravitation pull back to the old comfort zones, creates the space for Reform. Brown and Harman suggest this gravity is in play.

I argue in my latest Times column that the Brexit dividing line reasserted itself in the local elections - mainly because the communities who felt undervalued and overlooked then feel doubly so now. I charted the relationship between the Brexit vote in the local authority area and Reform UK vote ten years later. Quite a correlation.

These voters have a broader political outlook. Starmer struggles to see it, and I’m not sure if Brown or Harman will be able to help him. The advice he really needs is from Shabana Mahmood, his Home Secretary. She understands that these voters want border control not for xenophobic reasons, but because immigration has led to a model that they believe stunts opportunities for them, their families and communities. As I say in my Times column

The Brexit vote was never just about the EU; it masked a cry for a better economic model. To dial back globalisation and move away from a new norm where employers will import workers rather than train locals. It was all really about the nation state: community cohesion, a sense of place. Labour’s problem is that the only button it knows how to press — more spending — doesn’t work. It boasts of free school breakfasts, lifting the two-child welfare cap. But such measures are nowhere near enough to change the trajectory of the places in open rebellion.

The irony is that Starmer has decent results. He’s trashing Brexit saying it led to more immigration - he should be saying that the Tories botched these border-control powers but Labour is now using them responsibly with striking results. Net immigration is now ~80pc below its Tory peak.

(By the way, I’ve separated this into a ‘type’ stacked area chart to show how much of the migration was always post-lockdown rush of students.)

Basic immigration is by now probably at a multi-year low. This is what Starmer should be talking about. Instead he’s in the Observer today with the opposite message: free movement for young people, etc. Ten tears of power for him. This is a Brown-era folly. If enacted free movement for the young would allow employers to keep importing workers rather than try harder (and pay more) to find local talent. Also, look at the asylum backlog, now at 64k. Shabana Mahmood is making serious progress.

I’m no Starmer fan but there is a success story here: of achievement in the first two years, as a promissory note for what can happen in the next two. Redefining progressive government for the late 2020s. But instead he’s exhuming figures from the past - and not terribly successful ones at that. By all means take advice from them. But to present them as post-election reset figures may tip his party into meltdown, standing against him with no proper plan - the same despair that Tories fell into after Boris Johnson with calamitous results.

Britain as a country cannot afford more leadership madness. Our finances are on the brink; our gilt yield - the interest we have to pay on our debt - are now the highest in the G7. We’re in a far more delicate position than we were during the Liz Truss madness.

A highly-indebted country that spits out Prime Ministers every couple of years will start to look like a basket case - and there is, now, a big price to pay for that. I’m no Labour supporter. But the biggest asset they had at the last election was to pose as the party of stability vs ‘Tory chaos’. Now they’re all set to torch that claim. It’s like the final scene in The Wicker Man - but they can’t see it’s the Labour party, not Keir Starmer, trapped in the effigy. If they come for him in this inchoate way, they’ll be singing at their own funeral.

If UK finances were secure and Labour had a brilliant alternative ready to go then they could - at a stretch - afford to engage in the Tory regicide game. What they’re talking about doing now isn’t renewal; it’s meltdown.

Most governments end up unable to see what they’re doing wrong. It would be tragic if Starmer’s government collapses from an inability to see what he’s doing right.

So what moves the dial? I’ll write separately about the new generation of longitudinal studies - particularly the DfE’s LSYPE2 cohort, now tracked into adulthood, and NatCen’s work for the Youth Futures Foundation. Both are rich and under-discussed. But the headline finding, before we get to the ranked list below, is one worth sitting with:

The factors that most reliably predict welfare dependence are overwhelmingly ones the child cannot control.

Family structure is in there - I’ll come to where it ranks - but it is far down the list. Health, disability, mental illness, special educational needs: these dominate. The implication is both important and uncomfortable. We have spent a great deal of political energy debating the choices adults make. The evidence points more firmly at the circumstances children are born into.

Here are the 30 factors, ranked by how directly they predict welfare receipt, NEET status, or persistent poverty - with an estimate of how many children are affected.

The 30 factors

1. Health condition or disability limiting activity - affects roughly 12pc of UK children

This is the single strongest predictor in the literature. Disabled children are dramatically less likely to meet educational attainment standards at every key stage. Research published in the British Educational Research Journal (2024) found that only 23pc of children with SEND met expected writing standards at KS1, against 78pc of children without SEND. The educational gap translates directly into a welfare gap. Once a child’s trajectory is bent early by disability or chronic health conditions, the course correction required later is formidable.

2. Mental health difficulty - affects roughly 20-23pc of children and young people, depending on age band

This is a larger category than disability and one that has grown substantially. NHS mental health surveys now show that around one in five children aged 8-16 has a probable mental disorder. The number rises to roughly 23pc for 17-19 year olds. NatCen’s work for the Youth Futures Foundation identifies poor mental health as one of five factors that most strongly correlate with NEET status in early adulthood - alongside low qualifications, limiting disability, young parenthood, and care experience. The interaction between mental health and other risk factors is important: a child with poor mental health is also more likely to be absent from school, more likely to be excluded, and less likely to achieve Level 2 qualifications.

3. Being NEET or inactive - affects roughly 13pc of young people aged 16-24

NEET status is both an outcome and a risk factor. Once a young person falls out of education, employment, or training, the probability of returning diminishes over time. The Youth Futures Foundation notes that nearly half - 48.5pc - of NEET 18-24 year olds are “inactive” and not claiming benefits, which means they are outside the reach of Jobcentre Plus. These are young people who have slipped through every net.

4. Caring responsibilities - affects 1.4pc on the formal measure, but up to 45pc on broader definitions

This entry has an important caveat on the numbers. The formal young-carer measure from the 2021 Census captures 1.4pc of 5-17 year olds. NatCen’s longitudinal cohort measure - which tracks caring responsibilities among young people after 16 - finds something closer to 45pc have had some caring role. The two figures are measuring different things. What both agree on is that caring responsibilities are strongly associated with interrupted education, reduced hours of paid work, and higher welfare risk. The 1.4pc formal figure almost certainly undercounts the problem.

5. Early parenthood - affects roughly 10pc of young people; among NEET young women, birth rates run at 32pc vs 6pc for those in education or employment

Having a child in adolescence or early adulthood is one of the most reliable predictors of later welfare dependence. ONS data shows births are far more common among young women who are NEET than those in education or employment - roughly 32pc against 6pc. The causal arrows run in multiple directions here: poverty and low aspiration predict early parenthood, and early parenthood in turn makes exit from poverty harder.

6. No GCSE (Level 2) English and maths by age 19. Affects roughly 27pc of 19 year olds

This is one of the most striking numbers in the list: more than a quarter of 19 year olds in England have not achieved the basic qualification threshold that the labour market uses as a floor. The DfE’s LSYPE2 data makes the consequences clear. Attainment at KS4 is the single strongest predictor of later NEET risk. Every other factor on this list operates partly through educational attainment - disability depresses it, absence interrupts it, poverty constrains it.

7. Special Educational Needs - affects roughly 20pc of school pupils

Nearly one in five pupils in England - and half in Scotland! - has some form of SEN, split between those with Education, Health and Care Plans (5pc) and those on SEN support (14pc). SEN is both a cause of lower attainment and a marker for wider disadvantage. The DfE’s outcomes data for children in need shows that over half of children in need have SEN, against 18pc of the overall pupil population. SEN status is, in the words of one NatCen analysis, “often used as a single marker” in risk tools - but the research suggests it needs disaggregating. A child with an EHCP in a well-resourced local authority has a very different trajectory from one on SEN support in an underfunded one.

8. Care experience - affects roughly 3pc of young people in the NatCen cohort

Small in prevalence, but enormous in risk intensity. DfE statistics for 2024 show that 39pc of care leavers aged 19-21 were NEET, against an estimated 13pc of all young people that age. Government statistics have described this as a “longstanding problem” since at least the National Audit Office’s 2015 report. Care-experienced children are three times more likely to be NEET than their peers. They are underrepresented in higher education (participation rate of around 12pc against 43pc for the general population) and overrepresented in homelessness, mental health services, and the criminal justice system.

9. Child in Need or social care contact - affects roughly 10pc of pupils when measured over a six-year window

About one in ten pupils in England has been classified as a Child in Need at some point in a six-year period. Children with social care involvement are at much higher risk of school exclusion - research in the British Journal of Social Work (2025) found large inequalities in exclusion rates between children who had received social care services and those who had not. SEN provision among children in need runs at over 50pc, more than twice the overall pupil population.

10. Persistent poverty or free school meals eligibility - affects roughly 26pc of school pupils

FSM eligibility is the most widely used proxy for child poverty in English administrative data. One in four school pupils now qualifies - the highest rate on record. The LSYPE2 data shows FSM eligibility is correlated with almost every other factor on this list: lower attainment, lower parental engagement, greater likelihood of SEN, greater likelihood of social care contact. It is less a single risk factor than a summary statistic for accumulated disadvantage.

11. Parental worklessness - affects roughly 9pc of children, or around 1.2 million

Around 1.2 million children in the UK live in long-term workless households. Parental worklessness is both a direct economic risk (household income) and an indirect one via aspirations and social capital. The LSYPE2 data shows that parental worklessness is associated with lower school engagement and lower post-16 aspirations in the child.

12. Living in a highly deprived area - affects roughly 20pc by definition

Area deprivation operates partly through school quality, partly through peer networks, and partly through labour market access. NatCen’s NERI work (for the Youth Futures Foundation) shows elevated NEET risk for young people who have ever been in the lowest income deprivation quintile. The Learning and Work Institute has documented extreme local variation: in some places - Blackpool, Hartlepool - more than one in five young people are claiming Universal Credit.

13. Socially excluded profile - affects roughly 6pc, per DfE’s vulnerable-young-people latent class model

DfE Research Report 118 used latent class analysis to identify groups of vulnerable young people. The “socially excluded” group - characterised by multiple overlapping risk factors - made up 6pc of the sample. By age 25, 52pc of this group were receiving qualifying benefits, against 8pc of the non-vulnerable group. This is the highest welfare-receipt rate in the research.

14. Low-attainment-only profile - affects roughly 8pc

A separate DfE latent class: young people with low educational attainment but not the full constellation of social exclusion. Around 30pc of this group were receiving benefits by age 25. Attainment matters independently of the wider profile of disadvantage.

15. Persistent school absence - affects roughly 18pc of school enrolments

Around one in five school enrolments is persistently absent - meaning missing 10pc or more of possible sessions. Persistent absence is both a symptom of other problems (illness, poverty, caring responsibilities, school anxiety) and a cause of the attainment gap. A persistently absent child is less likely to achieve Level 2 qualifications and more likely to be NEET.

16. Severe absence - affects roughly 2.4pc of enrolments

The more extreme category: missing 50pc or more of sessions. These are children who have, in effect, dropped out of school while technically remaining on roll.

17. Suspension - affects roughly 2pc of pupils in any given term

Children on FSM are five times more likely to be permanently excluded than their peers, according to CSJ analysis of DfE data (2024). Children with SEN support are also five times more likely to be excluded. Exclusion and suspension are strong predictors of later NEET status and welfare receipt - partly because excluded children are more likely to fall into the gaps between institutions.

18. Permanent exclusion - affects roughly 4 per 10,000 pupils per term

Low in frequency but high in consequence. The CSJ’s exclusion tracker found 3,608 permanent exclusions in summer 2024 - 16pc higher than the previous term and above pre-pandemic levels.

19. Very low post-16 aspirations - affects roughly 0.2pc in the extreme DfE category

This is a very small group but worth noting. DfE modelling of KS4 trajectories found that pupils who expected to “work full-time or do something else” after Year 11 had very low attainment and very high welfare risk. Low aspirations, where they genuinely reflect a child’s circumstances rather than a rational reading of limited options, compound other disadvantages.

20. Poor school engagement or attitude - no clean national prevalence

Measured in cohort surveys rather than administrative data, so no stable national figure. But DfE RR118 includes it as a predictor of vulnerable-group membership. School disengagement is often an early signal of other problems - mental health, home instability, peer difficulties.

21. Low parental engagement with school - affects roughly 11pc, per DfE modelling

The LSYPE2 analysis found that 10.6pc of the sample had lower parental engagement. This matters most in early years, when parental support for reading and learning has the largest measurable effect on attainment.

22. Low parental qualifications - affects roughly 11pc (mothers with no qualifications in the DfE model)

NatCen’s risk-factor work and the DfE’s own modelling both identify parental qualifications as a background risk factor. It operates partly through income, partly through aspirations, and partly through the home learning environment.

23. Poor parental health or having a disabled parent - affects roughly 10pc

A disabled or chronically ill parent creates both financial and practical pressures. The child may take on caring responsibilities (pushing them up the list to factor 4) or face disrupted home life affecting school attendance.

24. Single-parent household - affects roughly 24pc of families with dependent children

Here is the entry that most surprises people when they first see this ranked list. Single-parent household is common - around 2 million lone-parent families in the UK - but as a standalone predictor of welfare dependence, it ranks 24th, not first. The DfE RR118 data shows it as a background risk factor: odds ratios of around 2 for the socially excluded group and 1.7 for the low-attainment-only group, compared to the non-vulnerable group. That is a meaningful association. But the point is that single-parent status is most risky when it combines with other factors: low income, parental worklessness, poor parental health, low qualifications. In isolation, a single parent who is employed, qualified, and engaged with their child’s education produces outcomes much closer to a two-parent household. The policy implication is that targeting single parents as a category misses where the real risk is concentrated.

25. Homelessness or no stable parental support - no clean national prevalence for children

DfE’s RONI guidance includes homelessness as a NEET risk marker. The evidence on outcomes for homeless young people is severe - but the population is hard to measure.

26. Youth justice or criminal justice contact - no clean national prevalence for children

Also a RONI marker. The Youth Futures Foundation’s evidence submission to parliament noted that offender employment outcomes are among the worst of any group. Criminal justice contact at a young age has a strong scarring effect on later employment.

27. Risky behaviours profile - affects roughly 8pc, per DfE latent class

DfE RR118’s “risky behaviours” latent group - characterised by substance use, anti-social behaviour, and related factors - made up 8pc of the sample.

28. Substance misuse profile - affects roughly 8pc

A separate DfE latent class, overlapping with the above. But I’m surprised by how low down the list this is.

29. Bullying victimisation - no clean national welfare prevalence

NHS mental health data shows that among 11-16 year olds with a probable mental disorder, 37pc reported being bullied in person, against 8pc among those without a disorder. Bullying is better understood as a pathway to mental health problems than a direct welfare predictor - but the indirect route is real.

30. High-claimant local labour market - no single child-level prevalence

Where you grow up matters. The Learning and Work Institute has documented that in high-claimant areas, the proportion of young people claiming UC can exceed one in five. Local labour market conditions shape aspirations, networks, and the returns to qualification.

What to take from this

The dominant theme in the top ten is health, disability, and educational failure. Not choices, not family structure, not aspiration - though all feature lower down the list. The factors that bear most heavily on a child’s trajectory are the ones they were born with or were born into.

The second theme is accumulation. The NatCen data shows that only 8pc of young people in the cohort experienced none of these risk factors. The average was four. Most vulnerable young people are not defined by one problem but by the interaction of several. A child who is disabled, has a parent with poor health, lives in a deprived area, and is persistently absent is not four times as likely to end up in welfare - the effects compound non-linearly.

The third theme, which I find genuinely striking, is where single parenthood sits. It is a real risk factor. But it ranks below persistent absence, parental worklessness, area deprivation, socially excluded profile, care experience, SEN, low qualifications, early parenthood, mental health, and disability. When politicians talk about family structure as the key driver of welfare dependence, they are not wrong that it is associated. They are wrong that it is the dominant factor. The evidence points elsewhere.

I’ll write more about what the studies say we can actually do about this. But the first step is getting the diagnosis right.

Sources: DfE LSYPE2 multiple disadvantage report (RR118); NatCen/Youth Futures Foundation, Risk factors for being NEET among young people (2023); DfE Explore Education Statistics, outcomes for children in need (2024); DfE Explore Education Statistics, children looked after (2024); DfE suspensions and exclusions (2024/25); NHS Mental Health of Children and Young People survey (2023); CSJ Exclusion Tracker (Jul25); Learning and Work Institute; ONS Family Resources Survey; BERA, Azpitarte et al (2024).