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The worst culprits for noise pollution on trains? The staff
Modern irritations seem to come in threes. No sooner do you trip over a Lime bike ‘parked’ on its side in the middle of the pavement than you discover that the self-checkout in the Co-op has a handwritten note stating ‘out of order’ taped to it and the man in front of you in the queue for the sole remaining human-staffed counter is attempting to buy (and scratch) 14 lottery tickets.
That’s what happened on my venture out of the house this morning, anyway. The experience sent me scurrying home again to muse on whether I have had a more dispiriting, in the picayune sense, start to any morning this year so far. It turns out that I have. And call it a first world problem if you will, but the apotheosis of my ‘tripartite of annoyance’ theory was reached on a train heading from London to the Midlands recently.
The misery began at Euston, with the usual stampede caused by the announcement of the platform from which the train would be departing only being made around two and a half minutes before the carriage doors were shut. An old hand at this transport Darwinism, I elbowed and shoved with moderately successful elan, managing to snag myself a seat next to an, inevitably, out-of-order disabled toilet.
But my attempts to recover a normal heart rate were promptly stymied by an audio interruption far more effusive than anything the Euston station announcer could muster. ‘Good morning and welcome aboard this 09.27 service to Birmingham International…’ it began, the voice belonging to a man who it appeared harboured ambitions of being a radio disc jockey on a commercial pop station in the mid-1980s.
On and on and on he went, with the charisma of one of Ian McDonald’s MoD briefings during the Falklands War, telling us things that I suspect a six-year-old train traveller would already know. Why do we need to be informed, over and over and over again, that ‘tickets with other providers are not valid on this service’? Why do we need to be told which stations the train will be passing through four times? How many times have you seen anyone leap from their seat, hollering something along the lines of ‘Maidstone? I thought this was the cross-Channel ferry to Dieppe!’ before hurtling out of an already moving loco?
I wanted to get my breath back. I wanted to open my newspaper. I would have loved to have simply had some quiet time to try to unpick last night’s horrible dream – that one about being stuck in a lift with Jools Holland again. But the final element of my rage tripartite only began after we creaked away from horrible Euston. The driver was, I presume, either busy driving the train or writing another job application to Smooth FM. In his place my fellow passengers and I got the adamantine cheerfulness of ‘Tracey in the on-board shop’ telling us she ‘has a wide variety of sandwiches, cakes, hot snacks, hot and cold drinks, beers, wines and spirits’.
I only want to hear the voices of the train staff if there’s a fire, hurricane or thermonuclear explosion
Incredibly, I’m already aware of what an on-board shop is likely to sell. So why are we poor customers, who just want to read our books or try to have a micro-sleep, subjected to this needless taxonomy? I don’t ever recall employees of Greggs, let alone the Ivy, marching around outside their place of business with a loud hailer, instructing us that they have ‘food on offer’. So why do it on a train, a place where I only want to hear the voices of the staff if there’s a fire, hurricane or thermonuclear explosion? Even in those eventualities, I’m still quietly confident I could figure out these developments on my own without Tracey’s help.
We live in an increasingly selfish society where the use of headphones to conduct a phone conversation or watch a YouTube clip on a bus, plane or train is now seen as somehow quaint. But noisy commuters are only taking their lead from the bodies who take us from A to B. Is it any wonder that there are parents out there who are happy to let their child watch an entire Harry Potter film on their iPad on loudspeaker from London to Birmingham when there are on-board staff who can, and will, be even noisier with their winning hand gambit of having access to a microphone and speaker system that reaches every corner of the train?
There is a growing, suitably sotto voce protest movement against noise pollution in this country. But we’re way behind France, where a British traveller was recently given a fine for using his phone on loudspeaker on a platform. I’d feel much happier if we travellers could slap down our own fines (or at least start expecting discounts) if we can prove that our journey was ruined by staff feeling the need to use their microphone powers in a manner usually only abused by wedding reception DJs.
Am I being ludicrously atavistic in pining for a time when a train journey meant I could read my book, do a crossword and have a nap without being the victim of a barrage of information that neither me, nor anyone else, wants, needs or asks for? It would appear so. My horror dreams about Jools Holland will, no doubt, soon be replaced by ones about Tracey. And when you start feeling nostalgic for the strangulated adolescent tones of Jools, you know something has gone seriously awry.
The brilliant, brave sister I never knew I had
My own episode of Long Lost Family doesn’t involve a hug from Davina McCall or a visit from Nicky Campbell, armed with a box of tissues and the kind of tight smile that tells you that you’re about to cry your eyes out. It begins with an unexpected call from my brother who lives in the United States. Had I got a minute? Perhaps I should sit down…
We have a sister living in Matlock in Derbyshire, he said. She was born in August 1976 – making her a year and half my junior – and had come to light through the wonders of a genetic match on the family history website Ancestry.com, which my brother had put his DNA on.
Was I surprised? Not massively. In his day my dear late father was a handsome devil: an ex-military, poor man’s Roger Moore who was suave, witty and charming in equal measure, and – rather like Squire Western and his foxes – absolutely devoted to the chase.
So after my own parents’ marriage dissolved in the mid-1970s and Frank, my father, moved back ‘home’ – to where his mother’s family came from in Derbyshire – I’m not at all surprised that he found the sort of solace that would produce another sibling. What was perhaps surprising is this new sister wasn’t by the woman he married when he lived there.
Finding a sibling is fundamentally discombobulating; what you thought was fixed about the world closest to you is now altered. You don’t realise it at first but, like it or not, you’re going to have to make space for another chair around the fire and let them in.
So the next morning, I called up this new sister, Joanne, and we spent about an hour on a video call. It was a hard call to initiate – but it turned out to be a joy.
Any potential doubts I might have had about the truth of it all vanished when I learned that she was a nurse practitioner working in emergency care – medicine is in the blood going back at least five generations. What’s more she kept cocker spaniels, my father’s favourite dogs. I was told that her mother had cleaned for a man called Frank in the mid-1970s and that he used to pick her up in his red sports car…
In turn I was able to tell her about the missing parts of her family story – the grandmother who had been a nurse at Guy’s Hospital in the 1920s, the grandfather who was a pathologist – and it emerged that she lived next door to the site of the old factory that her newly discovered great-grandfather had owned.
Then came a revelation for me. After about a month, I think, Joanne told me why she had gone searching for her father’s family: she had cancer, the sort that you’ve never heard of and which her oncologist had only ever seen one case of. She was 47 at the time and determined to fight it and was clearly working hard to get the best advice and information. It was incredible to hear her talk about it: her fight, her focus.
I sat next to my new sister – marvelling at the realness of her – while our spouses sat opposite. Joanne’s husband was dumbfounded at the similarity between us
Eventually, between her cycles of chemotherapy and our colds – a constant feature of family life – we all met up; both families, for breakfast in Matlock. This was all very Long Lost Families. What should I wear? The nervous drive to the venue; the head numb because of the immensity of it. You’ve seen it on the telly. And they do capture rather beautifully.
But what a breakfast it was. I sat next to my new sister – marvelling at the realness of her – while our spouses sat opposite. Joanne’s husband was dumbfounded at the similarity between us, a comment I’ve heard a lot since. By then not well at all, Joanne had lost a lot of weight, but her composure was incredible. She was in pain, but you’d have never known. Breakfast lasted two and a half hours. It was a joy, and afterwards I sobbed.
A month later I was back in Derbyshire. Ashgate Hospice outside Chesterfield, it turns out, is an amazing place with sun-dappled lawns and lovely staff. Joanne’s husband was there with their children, who were warm and incredibly supportive of their mum – a credit to her. She and I chatted for more than four hours, looked at family photos, laughed and just sat. With a heavy heart we parted with a deep hug and I thanked her for finding me and other siblings, for doing that DNA search, which irony upon ironies, was prompted by her cancer diagnosis. ‘Bye bye,’ I said lightly, with wave and smile because I was sure I would see her again before long. A week and a day later, she died.
At the funeral there were some 300 people, including friends and colleagues from her hospital. Her son spoke with incredible fortitude. As a newcomer to the fold, I was embraced by Joanne’s family, her sisters and her wonderful extended family.
Having watched episodes of Long Lost Family and written it off as a species of misery porn and even potentially exploitative of the people whose pains its exposes, I discovered that it’s not like that at all. Not if my own personal version is anything to go by. You learn that blood truly is thicker than water, and not just because of cocker spaniels. Our genetic predispositions really are more potent than we think or like to admit.
As to this modern fad of people sharing DNA material on the internet, I realised it’s not such a bad thing. I just wish we had done it ten years ago, when our father was still alive and could have had the pleasure of meeting Joanne too. How proud he’d have been. Goodness, and her children, too. He’d have been over the moon. So perhaps more of us should do it?
In my case, at least, whatever the short-term shock or pains or emotional inconvenience of discovering an unknown sibling later in life, the reality of that knowledge is far more enriching than the not knowing. More is more is more. So if you are at all unsure and would like to find someone, while I can’t promise a happy ending, I can tell you without a shadow of doubt that it is the better of the available options. My darling little sister thought so and I would not choose to disagree with her. Rest in peace, Joanne, and thank you with all my heart for finding me.
Zohran Mamdani’s radical parents
Voters often pay a premium for socialism. It’s the modern-day equivalent of free-range eggs or an electric car.
Zohran Mamdani, a self-described “democratic socialist,” embodies that premium. In New York’s Democratic mayoral primary election, he got blown out of the water with lower-income voters – but won overwhelmingly with young, white, college-educated idealists desperate for the revolution.
He would be the furthest left mayor New York City has ever seen if elected in November. While his policy prescriptions – city-run grocery stores, higher taxes on the wealthy and a diminished police presence – are radical proposals, it is his deep devotion to socialism that truly defies convention.
There is no question that Mamdani loathes the West. Its history, its customs, its people. Online, you can watch him flip his middle finger to a Christopher Columbus statue and whine about white people trying to talk to him.
But no man is an island unto himself.
Zohran’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, is an academic. The radical sort who makes Saul Alinsky look blasé. An Indian by birth, he received his undergraduate degree from Harvard only to emigrate to Uganda in the 1970s and face expulsion. At the time, the Idi Amin regime sought to exile the Indian minority – an immensely influential event for the elder Mamdani, fueling his lifelong crusade against colonialism and capitalism. This has led Mahmood to adopt some very radical, fringe views.
In his 2009 book Saviors and Survivors, Mahmood Mamdani actually decried humanitarian intervention during the Darfur genocide, where hundreds of thousands were slaughtered in Northeast Africa: “Humanitarian intervention is not a neutral act but a political project that often serves to extend Western power under the guise of moral righteousness.” To Mamdani, Western missions providing food, water, medical care and shelter to millions of displaced refugees were just another costume for empire – an imperial smokescreen.
Mahmood laments America while enjoying its fruits. This comes in the form of bizarre, ahistorical assertions, such as his recent claim that the Allied governments in World War Two shared the Nazis’ goal of wiping out minority populations from Europe.
Such absurdity could only be believed by a university professor. The Allies fought to defeat the Nazi regime precisely because it was exterminating Europe’s minorities. After all, they were next.
He went even further, asserting that Hitler’s rampage was inspired by the American model of “settler colonialism.” In Mein Kampf, the young, psychopathic Austrian takes a single sentence to admire the displacement of Native American populations as a successful example of replacing “an inferior race.” But Hitler’s expansionist goals were not, of course, derived from the American creed. He was a devotee of a twisted Social Darwinism. The strong devour the weak.
In a 2021 Georgetown University review of Mahmood Mamdani’s book on genocide and ethnic violence, the author details how Mamdani is skeptical of the very idea of a nationhood. Mahmood laments that after the Holocaust, Germany only pursued punishment for Nazis instead of completely dismantling the society and beginning anew. The conclusion must be, therefore, that the nation-state itself begets violence. To live peaceably means to live borderless.
In the world Mahmood inhabits, not only was Nazism influenced by America, but Jewish self-determination is the purest expression of Nazism. The aforementioned reviewer of Mamdani’s book expounds, “Zionism, then, can be understood as the logical conclusion of Nazism, the Final Solution as Mamdani puts it, where the tragic violence of the nation-state is being reprised. This time with Jewish Zionists as the perpetrators and Palestinians as the victims.” Viewing the world through Mahmood Mamdani’s lens, Hitler reveres America and Jews are the perfect Nazis.
You can’t help but see Mahmood’s shadow drifting through his son’s. Just recently, Zohran refused to denounce the slogan “globalize the intifada” – another point scored for the pro-Palestine movement, I guess.
And while Zohran cosplays as a working-class revolutionary, he’s anything but. The Mamdani family is loaded. Most of the family fortune comes by way of Zohran’s mother, Mira Nair, who has earned millions as a successful filmmaker.
When landlords charge exorbitant rents, it’s theft, but not, apparently, when Ms. Nair collected $6,500 a month renting out a spare loft in Chelsea. As Zohran Mamdani pretends to stand with the tenant class, he and his family get to drift from Delhi to Kampala to New York City. The hypocrisy doesn’t shock so much as it clarifies: properties for he, not for thee.
It’s all there with the Mamdanis: a hatred of the nation that welcomed and showered them with wealth, the comfortable conviction that under every rock lies Western oppression. That a rich millennial is championing socialism is wholly unsurprising. His commitment to cultural Marxism, however, should raise alarms.
Only a few years ago did Zohran Mamdani instruct young socialists to embrace their inner Marx by “seizing the means of production” and embracing class consciousness. Ms. Nair affirms that her son “very much absorbed” the views of his parents. Upon inspecting the apple that fell not far from the tree, you can see plainly: it is red.
How ice cream got cool
In the depths of winter last year, an ice cream and wine bar opened in Islington. The Dreamery serves ice creams and sorbets in silver goblets with tiny vintage spoons. On the ceiling is a glowing mural of happy cows and a sun with a face, resembling a child’s finger-painting (the artist is Lucy Stein, daughter of Rick). Outside, neighbours whisper about a recent Dua Lipa spotting.
The Dreamery is inspired by the Parisian ice cream and wine bar Folderol, and makes fairly sophisticated flavours such as salted ricotta blueberry and Greek mountain tea. It is TikTok chic – a gamble, after Folderol unwillingly became a viral sensation and ended up sticking up signs saying: ‘No TikTok. Be here to have fun, not to take pictures.’
Ice cream shops in Britain are not a novel idea, but establishing one is still a brave and perhaps foolhardy endeavour. Ice cream weather (it can be quantified – ice cream doesn’t melt properly on the tongue in temperatures below about 14ºC) lasts half of the year if we’re lucky, and most of us only crave it during the hottest days of high summer. Even if it’s reasonably warm, there is often still the wind and rain to spoil things.
Yet the British demand for ice cream seems to be growing – and not just during a heatwave. You might have noticed the glut of parlours cropping up on high streets: the ubiquitous Creams, Kaspa’s, tourist-packed Amorino, the dubious American imports of Baskin Robbins and Cold Stone Creamery. In the past decade, 700 ice cream and dessert shops have opened up across the UK. Some do simple scoops, others paddle silky heaps of Italian gelato, and many more serve those made-for-Instagram monstrosities drowned in chocolate ‘drizzle’.
I wouldn’t be surprised if social media, which seems to have become the driver of most of our consumer desires, has played a large part in whetting our appetites for ice cream. Nearly 50 million posts tagged #icecream can be found on Instagram. Some cooks-slash-influencers – such as Mei Liao, who films herself making Sichuan-inspired flavours in a £60 Cuisinart churner – receive more than a million views on their videos. Many are keen to let you in on the secrets of their ‘two-ingredient ice cream’ – simple but for the fact that there are more than two ingredients and you need a highly specialised piece of equipment to make it. But this is immaterial. What matters is that by attempting to replicate their recipes, you too can get in touch with your inner domestic goddess (or god).
This is much easier to do now that you can find reasonably affordable, if impractical, ice cream machines in most major retailers. The Ninja CREAMi, which has a revolting name and seems primarily used for making frozen low-calorie protein shakes, was released in 2021 and sells for around £200. It doesn’t technically make ice cream in the traditional sense, as it only blends frozen ingredients rather than whipping air into them, but let’s not be pedantic about it.
Farah Kezouh, half of the team behind London-based Soft and Swirly, tells me that what is ripe and in season, not what is going to ‘go viral’, dictates the flavours she and her partner Sam Lowry make. ‘It just happens that ice cream is very Instagrammable, especially when it comes out of the soft serve machine,’ she says. ‘Influencers are looking for the next trend, and ice cream might be that at the moment. I’m not sure if that’s going to last, but it’s definitely good that people are trying to create ice creams that are not just your industrial ones.’
Deep down, perhaps the hype around ice cream is all just part of the quest to return to the comfort and safety of childhood. Farah says she sees a ‘childlike joy’ in her customers, no matter their age. Ice cream is often tied to our most treasured memories of childhood: summer holidays by the sea, or the excitement of hearing the jingle of the ice cream van. For many, it’s a recollection of the first instance where we experienced the weight and glorious freedom of choice: vanilla, or chocolate?
How to make Sicilian-style ice cream
There are two popular ways of making ice cream: Philadelphia-style, which consists of a dairy and sugar base, and French-style, which consists of a custard base with eggs, dairy and sugar. On the opposite side of the richness-spectrum you have sherbets, sorbets and granitas. But is that all?
Actually, there is a middle way: Sicilian-style ice cream. Italians are notoriously neurotic about their digestive systems – hence no cappuccinos after 11 a.m., no iced drinks, aperitivo before dinner and digestivo after, the passeggiata. Sicilian-style substitutes cornstarch for egg yolks and some of the cream, which are apparently bad for digestion.
This method results in a refreshing, light ‘milk ice’ that takes very little time (and leaves no leftover egg whites). The reduced amount of cream lets delicate flavours really shine through without having to jostle with the dairy or eggs.
I like to flavour mine with fig leaves, which smell like English summer but more precisely of toasted coconut, vanilla and a bitter note of something like green peppers. There is a magnificent fig tree in St James’s Park which lately has been especially fragrant during my lunchtime walks. If you cannot find fig leaves, I recommend fresh mint or fresh or dry bay leaves which can be obtained from most supermarkets.
This recipe can be made without a machine (see step 9*) and is remarkably easy – I learned it from Kitty Travers of La Grotta Ices in her intro to ice cream-making course at the School of Artisan Food.
You will need:
- 500ml whole milk
- 150ml double cream
- 130g + 30g granulated sugar
- 15g cornstarch
- 2 large fig leaves
- Prepare a large bowl of ice water, or alternatively fill your sink with ice water. This will be used to cool down the ice cream base, so make sure it is large enough for a pot to half-submerge in.
- Whisk the 30g sugar and 15g cornstarch in a large bowl and set aside.
- Combine the milk, cream and remaining sugar in a pot, preferably one with a slight lip. Warm over a low heat, stirring often, until the milk begins to steam.
- Remove the pot from the stove and pour the hot liquid into the bowl of sugar and cornstarch. Whisk the mixture as you pour to prevent the cornstarch from clumping.
- When the mixture is fully combined, pour it back into the pot and return to the heat until it begins to thicken. Put the bowl to the side and place a sieve over it.
- Once thickened, add the fig leaves to the mixture, turn off the heat and place the pot into your bowl or sink of ice water for three minutes.
- After three minutes, pour the mixture through the sieve covering the other bowl. Squeeze the fig leaves over the mixture to get as much flavour out as you can, then discard.
- Put the bowl into the ice water and stir often to cool it down faster. Once at room temperature, put it into a clean container (or cover the bowl with plastic wrap) and place it in the fridge overnight. This allows the flavour to ‘age’ and also improves texture when it comes time to churn.
- In the morning (my preference – ice cream and espresso are lovely together) churn according to your machine’s instructions. It should take about 25 minutes to come together and will be quite light and whippy.
* If you don’t have an ice cream machine, simply place the mixture into a well-sealed plastic bag and place that into a large plastic bag filled with 100g rock salt and 800g ice. Knead the bags against a stable surface for about five minutes and with a bit of sweat, you’ll have perfectly good ice cream.
- Place into tubs and freeze for at least two hours to get a ‘scoopable’ consistency. But remember that ice cream is never so good as when it’s freshly churned. This recipe makes enough for one pint and a bit – enjoy the ‘bit’ straight away. If I’m feeling fancy, I’ll scoop this into a champagne coupe and pour a bit of lemonade over it.
When using bay leaves, I like to use about five or six large dried ones. These can be steeped for a bit longer, usually five minutes, and add a pinch or two of salt to really bring out the savouriness of the leaves.
For mint, steep 20g for about 15 minutes. I like to add more chopped mint just as the ice cream is about to come together in the churner. You can also drizzle a thin stream of melted dark chocolate over the ice cream at this point to make it a mint stracciatella.
The UK should not have to ration water
The UK’s steady decline continued today with reports that water companies are looking to introduce ‘surge pricing’ in order to ration demand. Trials are being introduced by 15 water companies across the country this summer, with customers either paying more for water as they use more, or charged more at certain times of year. Higher prices, the water companies say, will ‘reduce discretionary water usage’. What this actually means is making every shower or load of laundry more expensive in the summer months.
In a wet, temperate climate like ours there is absolutely no reason we should have to ration water
This shouldn’t be necessary, of course. It rains a lot in Britain, particularly in Wales and Scotland, and especially in the winter. Reservoirs exist, which collect and store this water, so that we can use it during the drier summer months. But Britain’s last new reservoir, Carsington, in Derbyshire, was built in 1992, and despite the significant increase in our population since then, we even decommissioned and emptied Clydach Reservoir in 2024.
The situation has become so bad that the Environment Secretary has warned that if nothing is done we could run out of clean drinking water within a decade. This is, frankly, embarrassing. We’re supposed to be a developed country and we have abundant rainfall, and yet our state is so dysfunctional that we soon might not have enough drinking water.
While the government has approved the building of two new reservoirs, expected to be complete by 2036 and 2040, and plans to build another seven by 2050, this is not fast enough. And so water companies are considering rationing supply through surge pricing, much to the delight of some environmental campaigners.
This morning, LBC interviewed someone described as an ‘award winning climate activist, environmental scientist and ethical influencer’. They argued that people might actually prefer dynamic pricing, and that it would ensure that those with ‘hot tubs, swimming pools and massive gardens they water excessively’ could be charged more. This attitude is at the heart of so much of the ‘environmental’ movement. They want us all to be poor and miserable. They believe they are a better judge of how much water your garden needs than you are. They worship misery, and they want all our lives to be worse. And worst of all, they want to convince us we’re happy about it.
We don’t have to live like this.
I sit on a regional advisory board of the Canal & River Trust, the charity responsible for maintaining and operating most of our canals. They already use this centuries-old network to supply water across the country. I live on the Gloucester to Sharpness canal, which supplies Bristol with 245 million litres of water every day. Canals across the country could be used like this, in order to transport water from where it’s abundant to where it’s needed.
The Trust is now in the early stages of a plan to supply water to the South East of England, using the canal network to deliver water from the Midlands. We should go further. An expansive network of canal transfer systems could transport surplus water from the wet north and west of Britain to those areas which experience droughts. This transport network would also be attractive, provide pleasant places for leisure and create employment for engineering and maintenance workers.
If we quickly build the reservoirs we need, then hosepipe bans and ‘dynamic’ pricing would never trouble us again.
This is the kind of bold, ambitious programme that was once normal for Britain. We built the canal network, the rail network and the sewage systems. In a wet, temperate climate like ours there is absolutely no reason we should have to ration water. The government has already identified the reservoirs we need, but its target of building them by 2050 is desperately unambitious. Instead of accepting rationing and poverty, we should choose a future of abundance, in which water is too cheap to meter.
Sunday shows round-up: Labour defends its ‘one in, one out’ migrant scheme
The government is piloting a ‘one in, one out’ migrant scheme with France. As part of the deal, the UK will return some migrants to France, and in exchange others with a strong case for asylum in the UK will come the other way.
On Sky News, Trevor Phillips noted that France could refuse to take back certain individuals, and asked Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander why they would accept ‘violent offenders and rapists’. Alexander said there is a lot of ‘operational detail’ that the Home Secretary and Prime Minister are working on, but claimed the deal was ‘robust’ and ‘workable’, and could ultimately ‘break the model’ of the international people smuggling gangs. Alexander said the government is not setting a numerical target for returns, but they are doing ‘the hard work with our international allies’, and their ‘aspiration’ is to return more than one in 17 migrants once the scheme ramps up.
Camilla Tominey: ‘You can’t possibly convince people… the economy is in a good state’
On GB News, Camilla Tominey questioned Heidi Alexander over the economy, which shrank by 0.1 per cent in May. Alexander defended the government’s record, saying the UK had outperformed the other G7 economies over the first three months of the year, and that the £120 billion of inward investment since Labour took office showed that international capital looks at the UK as a desirable place to invest. Tominey pointed out that in 2022 Rachel Reeves had called for an emergency budget when the economy similarly contracted by 0.1 per cent under the Tories. Alexander said ‘GDP figures do bump around from month to month’, and talked up Labour’s trade deal successes with India, the EU and the US. The Transport Secretary reiterated that Labour’s ‘number one priority’ is to grow the economy.
Heidi Alexander: ‘When it comes to taxation, fairness is going to be our guiding principle’
On Sky News, Heidi Alexander would not confirm expected tax rises in the October Budget. She told Trevor Phillips that Labour have stuck to their manifesto promise of not raising taxes for people on modest incomes, and that ‘fairness’ would be their principle going forwards. Phillips suggested that ‘fairness’ might be code for wealth distribution, and asked why Alexander wouldn’t say there will be tax rises on the wealthy. Alexander said she wouldn’t set the budget in July because the ‘global economy is very volatile’, and the Chancellor would look at the OBR forecast and make decisions based on the need to invest in public services.
Ofcom CEO: ‘It is a really big moment’
On 25 July, the Online Safety Act regulations will come into force for social media companies, who will have to either remove harmful content or use age checks to protect children on their platforms. On the BBC, Laura Kuenssberg asked Ofcom CEO Melanie Dawes if she was confident that the new rules would be effective. Dawes admitted that the path ahead was ‘challenging’, but said the new rules represent a ‘big moment’ that will bring about change. Asked how the new regulations would work in practice, Dawes said that companies have been allowed to decide what works best for their platform, but some might become 18 plus only, and others might screen adult content behind age checks involving facial recognition or credit cards.
Chris Philp: ‘I think they’re wrong’
On the BBC, Laura Kuenssberg asked Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp about defections to Reform, after four former Tory MPs made the move in the last two weeks. Philp said those people represented a ‘very small number’ of Conservative MPs over the last ten years, and suggested Reform has ‘superficial attractions to people who are frustrated’. He criticised Reform for having ‘slogans’, but no ‘credible plans’. Kuenssberg pointed out that Jake Berry had been in the cabinet with Philp, and suggested that those defecting do believe Reform have credible policies. Philp said they were ‘wrong’, that Nigel Farage does not have detailed solutions to immigration issues, and that his plan to lift the two child benefit cap would increase the welfare bill and taxes.
Recovering the Sacred: Why young Christians are returning to church
Something mysterious is happening in churches across Britain: a growing number of young Christians are showing up. Millennial men, in particular, appear to be turning back to Christianity: there has been a four to five-fold increase since 2018 in 18-to-24-year-old males attending church. What’s going on?
Three hundred Spectator subscribers gathered in the beautiful surroundings of St Bartholomew the Great, the oldest parish church in the City of London – and one which has seen for itself this surge in young Christians worshipping – to find out why.
Michael Gove, Editor of The Spectator, was joined by Damian Thompson, presenter of the Holy Smoke podcast, and the Revd. Marcus Walker, Rector of St Barts. The Provost of the London Oratory, Father Julian Large; the Revd. Professor Andrew Davison, Oxford Regius Professor of Divinity; and Dr Cosima Gillhammer, Fellow in Medieval English at Oxford’s Lady Margaret Hall, also shared their thoughts on what appears to be an unexpected recovery of the sacred.
As well as hearing from the panel, the audience enjoyed sung Catholic and Anglican motets from the choir of St Barts. – and rounded off the event with a glass of wine and a chance to speak to the panellists.
Marcus Walker said that the ‘signs of resurrection go well beyond St Barts: ‘The Pentecostals are doing well. Conservative and charismatic evangelicals are booming. The rural church, much ignored by national church visions and strategies are seeing green shoots rising. And we hear of a huge uptick in baptisms in once Catholic France – 10,000 at Easter – and once Lutheran Sweden.’
St Barts has fostered a sense of community among its younger members with annual retreats for young adults, active WhatsApp groups and pub trips after church services. But Walker suggests that these things are ‘less important than the broader pan-ecclesial elements which are drawing people to church’ – not least the collapse of the humanist creed. The end of the ‘heady optimism of the 1990s and noughties’ – and the fading idea that humanity ‘has got it all right and it’s only going to get better’ – means God is firmly back in the picture, he said. ‘Reconnecting with eternity gives us a peace which the world cannot give,’ Walker said.
It’s a picture that Father Julian Large recognises. He says that the uptick in young worshippers has been particularly noticeable since the pandemic:
‘After the doors were reopened, we found ourselves facing a veritable tsunami of new parishioners. The average age of the congregation now is considerably younger than it was before.’
Many young people, he says, have become more sceptical towards traditional voices of authority and the mainstream media after Covid and lockdown. ‘They are in search of truth and authenticity,’ he says. ‘I think that we can agree that something’s happening. Even on the train and in the street, I seem to hear young people talking about Christianity more than ever’, says Davison. He told the audience of Spectator readers that, even during midweek services which traditionally were less popular, there are now few empty pews. The reason why, suggests Davidson, is that the church offers something in short supply: hope.
‘There seems to be some correlation between the people for whom life seems particularly bleak and those…who are coming to church – especially the young, perhaps even especially young men,’ Davison said.
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In defence of Christian Horner
Christian Horner has very beady eyes. If you sit opposite him, his shark-like spotlights will dart around you, probably in the hope there’s someone more important he can talk to, but also spying for threats and opportunities. His sacking as the team principal of Red Bull Racing after 20 years in the job has caught the paddock off-guard. We were at Eddie Jordan’s memorial on Monday at Central Hall Westminster with F1 powerbrokers past and present and none of them knew this was coming. But Horner surely did, and I bet he’s one step ahead.
Christian has faced more threats than opportunities during the past 18 months. There was the embarrassing leak of sexualised text messages to a personal assistant which proved, at the very least, that he is no Marquis de Sade, and an accusation of coercive behaviour of which he was cleared by an internal review. There was the pained smile of his Spice Girl wife of ten years, Geri Halliwell, as they walked hand-in-hand down the Bahrain paddock for the benefit of the photographers. And there was a fight for the future of Red Bull Racing itself: half-owned by the Austrian scion Mark Mateschitz and the Thai scion Charlerm Yoovidya, Horner persuaded Yoovidya, who has the 51 per cent casting vote, to back him. After all, if sexting your secretary is forgivable in F1 it’s positively encouraged in Bangkok. But that support appears to have now dried up. Star driver Max Verstappen’s father, Jos (a belligerent know-it-all), and Red Bull’s minister without portfolio Dr Helmut Marko (whose presence Horner has long resented) have been conspiring for Horner’s P45 ever since Verstappen and the team did the double in 2023, winning both the drivers’ and constructors’ world championships. You’d think that would have strengthened their bond, but something went awry.
This year’s car, the RB21, is the team’s worst since at least 2015, probably 2008. Why? Because the team have lost several key members, the most important being chief designer Rob Marshall (who left prior to sextgate and is achieving incredible results at McLaren), chief technology officer Adrian Newey (who’s been given a chunk of equity in the Aston Martin team), and sporting director Jonathan Wheatley (who joined Sauber this season as team principal). The three drivers on the podium at last weekend’s British Grand Prix were from McLaren and Sauber. Red Bull came fifth and last (though Verstappen was on pole position).
Why did these men leave Red Bull? Moral reasons, I don’t buy. I’ve no idea what Christian was or wasn’t doing with his PA but there has always been a code in this sport that what goes on on tour stays on tour, and Enzo Ferrari never even bothered to hide his mistresses.
Political instability, maybe. But most of my sources at Red Bull say the same thing: that Christian Horner was getting too big for his boots. He was taking too much credit for the cars and results. He was too pleased with himself for bagging a Spice Girl, being the pantomime baddie on Drive to Survive, and becoming irritatingly outré with his wealth. All that may be true, but Horner is still exceptionally competitive and driven. He is the longest serving F1 team principal of the modern era who, until now, has managed to defend against all attackers, and we haven’t seen the last of him.
When Red Bull GmbH bought the lacklustre Jaguar Racing team in 2004, the Milton Keynes outfit were seven out of ten in the standings. In 2005, Red Bull Racing’s first season, Horner was the youngest team principal in history at 31 – nearly three years younger than his lead driver, David Coulthard. You can imagine the grandees on the pitwall, like McLaren’s Ron Dennis, Ferrari’s Jean Todt and Williams’ Sir Frank Williams wondering if it was bring your kiddie to work day. Over the next few seasons, though, Horner proved he should be taken seriously, and in 2009 his team started winning. The company grew exponentially both in terms of employees and revenue. Over the last 15 years only Mercedes – run by his TV nemesis Toto Wolff – edges Red Bull for championship success.
Let’s compare Horner with the six team principals who’ve lorded it over Ferrari since 2005: He has won 124 grands prix, six constructors’ titles and eight drivers’ titles compared with the 65 wins, two constructors’ and one drivers’ championship that Ferrari has achieved in the last 20 years, and which required the combined efforts of Jean Todt, Stefano Domenicali, Marco Mattiacci, Maurizio Arrivabene, Mattia Binotto and current incumbent Frederic Vasseur.
No, Horner is not solely responsible for Red Bull’s success. Perhaps he wasn’t as important to the mix as Newey, Wheatley and Marshall, or Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen. But he was the man who brought all of those ingredients together. He is the Alain Ducasse of F1 chiefery.
What will make his next move harder is he doesn’t have many friends. He’s pissed off a lot of people in this industry and beyond. He is also finally a victim of the footballisation of grand prix racing. There’s a reason why Ferrari have gone through six team principals in two decades: Most TPs don’t have a shareholding in their teams. Toto is a rare example. But go back 20 years and beyond and most did. Many had their names above the door – Williams, Jordan, Tyrrell for example. They weren’t mere employees who could be dismissed after a string of bad results. Now F1 TPs are like football managers: a couple of bad seasons and it’s time to get your coat. In a very complicated sport that sometimes requires years for regulatory and senior staff changes and even things like wind tunnels to properly embed – and everyone talking about five-year plans – short term fixes rarely translate into long term results. Look at the mess the French have made at Alpine. They’ve had four changes of team principal in four years.
Since the news of Horner’s termination was announced, bookies have cut the odds of Max Verstappen leaving Red Bull to join Mercedes for 2026. Whether Horner’s exit will make the Verstappens wish to stay or go remains to be seen. It probably hinges on how good or bad next year’s Red Bull/Ford power unit it. Perhaps that’s what’s caused Christian’s firing, because there’s speculation it’s a bag of bolts and the Merc-engined cars will be well up the road.
Cadillac are entering F1 next year and already have a team principal in Graeme Lowden (ex-Virgin/Marussia) who is building the new outfit’s foundations. Horner would raise expectations were he to take over, and perhaps he could do for General Motors what he did for Dietrich Mateschitz, but that’d require starting at the back of the grid and taking a pay cut, which would go down like a cup of cold sick. No, it’s much more likely Horner is thinking about Ferrari $$$$$.
Fred Vasseur is rumoured to be getting the chop at the end of this year. Horner doesn’t speak Italian, which is far from ideal, and such is his flair for rubbing people up the wrong way it is highly unlikely Lewis Hamilton would be willing to work for him. Despite this, my sources tell me that Ferrari’s door is open, and Geri wouldn’t say no to a Tuscan castello and an entrée to even higher society, for the prancing horse affords greater status than the bull off the drinks can. Is it a good idea? Almost certainly not. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen – this is Ferrari were talking about.
Such is Horner’s ego and aggressive character, he’ll be looking for revenge. And equity – which Ferrari won’t give. Aside from Ferrari and Cadillac, there’s Alpine and there are rumours about Hyundai coming in. He has the skills to turn Alpine around and to make a new team hit the asphalt with minimal wheelspin. Horner wants to win and get rich and famous doing it, and I don’t think he’s any less hungry than he was when I first met him 20 years ago.Back then, I was the one looking over his shoulder for someone more important to talk to.
Reform is right to reject Liz Truss
Reform UK topping the opinion polls and winning local council elections has prompted several leading Tories to defect. But now Nigel Farage’s insurgent party is riding so high that it is getting choosy about which Conservatives it will accept into its swelling ranks.
If too many Tories join Reform they will begin to look like a convenient vehicle for rats leaving the sinking Tory ship
Sources in the party have told the Mail on Sunday that it would spurn any attempt to defect by former Prime Minister Liz Truss or former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, as both are so unpopular that they would ‘damage Reform’s public image’. Reform leader Nigel Farage confirmed that any approach by the two women would cause a heated debate in his party over the wisdom of admitting them.
Truss became prime minister in September 2022 after being chosen by Tory party members over Rishi Sunak, following the resignation of Boris Johnson. But she was forced to quit herself after just 45 days in No. 10 when world markets reacted negatively to a tax cutting and borrowing budget from her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, causing financial chaos. She was speedily replaced by Sunak.
Truss lost her Norfolk seat in the Tory rout in last year’s general election, but Braverman is still MP for Fareham in Hampshire. Both have been considered possible future recruits for Reform, especially after Braverman’s businessman husband Rael joined the insurgent party in December. It is a measure of Reform’s current confidence – or arrogance – that it feels able to reject such senior figures should they contemplate crossing the floor.
Last week, it was revealed that former Tory party chairman Sir Jake Berry and former Welsh Secretary Sir David Jones had quit the Tories and joined Reform, becoming the fourth and fifth former MPs to have done so since the election. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch reacted angrily to the defections by saying that the pair had never been real Conservatives anyway.
Reform has been topping the opinion polls for months, pushing the Tories into a humiliating third place behind Labour. And the party is winning real elections too. They took control of ten local authorities in May, and in the ten council by-elections held last week, Reform won four and came second in another five.
But the spate of Tory defections carries a danger for the populist party: if too many Tories join them they will begin to look like the old Conservatives dressed in new clothes, and become a convenient vehicle for rats leaving the sinking Tory ship who are seeking an easy way of rejoining the Westminster gravy train.
Reform’s entire USP is that they are not Tories or Labour. They may be untried and untested, but they claim to offer a real alternative to the two old parties who have failed Britain so dismally in government. While recruiting seasoned professional politicians like Berry and Jones adds welcome weight and experience to the party, it also risks tainting Reform with the failures of the past.
Critics of Sir Jake’s defection, for example, pointed out that as a stalwart Remainer during the Brexit referendum and a staunch supporter of net-zero policies, he was hardly a natural fit for the Brexiteer populists he has joined. Berry’s old colleagues accuse him of unprincipled opportunism in signing up to Reform.
Nigel Farage’s successful strategy has been to target Labour leaning working-class voters in the red wall areas of the north, Midlands and Wales, so he must be very careful not to alienate such people by looking like the Tories who they have so firmly rejected. Disillusioned voters are looking for a real fresh and new alternative – not old wine in new bottles.
How Live Aid ruined pop music
Today is the fortieth anniversary of Live Aid, the epic televised pop concert – or ‘global jukebox’ – designed to raise funds to alleviate the devastating Ethiopian famine. The proceedings were divided between Wembley and the Kennedy stadium in Philadelphia. It was billed, even at the time, as an epochal day, an event that would change the world and change pop music. And I think it was – but maybe not in the way everybody thought.
So, we exported Marxism to Ethiopia and it starved to death – and now we had the temerity to add Spandau Ballet, Phil Collins and Nik Kershaw on top
I was 17, and though I couldn’t articulate why, I felt that there was something wrong about the whole affair. ‘Crowds, properly worked up by skillful demagogues, are ready to believe anything,’ H.L. Mencken wrote in 1918, and I felt in my bones that Bob Geldof, however well-intentioned, was rousing a rabble and flattening their thoughts.
Modern mass-produced western pop music, for me, just doesn’t belong outdoors. It is a wonderful thing – but it is unnatural, synthetic, and contrived. It is best enjoyed alone at home or in small interior venues. Enormous rallies exalt it beyond its range, or rather they alter it into a mass Bacchic rite.
I could feel a strange cultural gear shifting, even though I couldn’t put it into words. For me, Live Aid felt like the end of something, or a transformation of something beyond its natural limits. A study of Spotify data in 2018 reported that our musical taste is locked in when we are young teens – 14 for men, 13 for women. It follows that the first changes in music that happen after that age are going to be particularly jarring for us. To an ordinary disinterested observer, the differences between the charts of 1982 and 1985 will seem very minor. But to me, at that crucial age, it was very apparent that something had dropped off, and Live Aid put the tin hat on that.
The pop scene of 82 was playful, varied and – however flat footed – innovative. Soft Cell, ABC, Yazoo, The Associates, The Teardrop Explodes, Shalamar, Dexy’s; they were all very different. Live Aid was a massive top-down corporate flattening-out of all that. It was the return of superannuated rock gods and the establishment of a gaggle of newer, much dumber concerns – Madonna, U2 and Paul Young. Pop was never exactly Mensa, no, but the brains it did have evaporated that day, and they never really came back.
My little new wave bubble was well and truly burst. It had run off the fumes of Bowie’s 1977 albums Low and Heroes, and in a strange way this came full circle with Bowie’s set at Live Aid. The song ‘Heroes’ was reborn that day – the edge and the angst of it sawn away as it became a self-glorifying stadium rock anthem.
There were other oddities and infelicities in the line-up. The inclusion of Adam Ant, who hadn’t had a sniff of a hit for years, just seemed peculiar in 1985. Bryan Ferry, with a back catalogue of huge singalong smashes, decided instead to plug noodling non-single tracks from his latest album. And there were frequent crass juxtapositions, the most ‘powerful’ being the playing of the twee, maudlin synth whinge ‘Drive’ by The Cars over footage of dying Ethiopian children. Pop music, a marvellous bauble, was simply not equipped for these emotions or situations.
The other thing which gave me the abdabs was the idea that pop stars were now moral exemplars. From that day on we were supposed to revere these people. Cue the pompous windbaggery of Sting, Bono, etc. jetting around the planet combining their grotty little ditties with geo-politics and trite zero-sum economics platitudes – ‘they have nothing because we have everything’. Because the troubles of the world were somehow all our fault.
In a way, they were. The Ethiopian famine certainly was, but not in the way Live Aid blithely assumed. It was the direct result of the deadliest of western exports, Marxism. The Derg regime of Ethiopia, the Red Terror, the forced farm collectivisation and land ‘reforms’. The Marxist government of the dictator Mengistu is estimated to be responsible for the deaths of two million Ethiopians in the famine. But don’t worry. Mengistu is living in luxury in exile in Harare, today.
So, we exported Marxism to Ethiopia and it starved to death – and now we had the temerity to add Spandau Ballet, Phil Collins and Nik Kershaw on top. Worse, we had idiot westerners like the Style Council advocating for the same ideology, from the safe distance of Woking, enjoying all the freedoms and plenty of western capitalism, and knowing full well that their puerile political bluff would never be called.
So I won’t be joining in the Live Aid anniversary celebrations today. It makes me feel quite queasy, even 40 years on.
Why I’ve changed my mind about climate change
Here we go again. Another blistering heatwave. Just a few days after the last one.
Like many, and probably like a lot of Spectator readers, I was a moderate climate change sceptic a few years ago. The whole ‘climate emergency’ thing came across as hysterical and alarmist. There seemed to be a clear agenda to get us to do things which would adversely affect the enjoyment of our lives. So the natural reaction was to go the other way and dismiss it as a load of hot air about hot air.
But after yet another scorchingly hot summer – and we’re barely in mid-July yet – I think such positions are no longer credible. We still get hardcore sceptics tweeting that ‘it’s called summer’, and not really that hot, but come on, who are you kidding?
Yes, before you can ask, I can remember the long hot summer of 1976 – in fact I remember it very well – but it seems like every summer is like 1976 now, only without ‘Sunny Jim’ Callaghan, Bjorn Borg and the Minister for Drought Denis Howell.
I suppose my epiphany came in the summer of 2022. On 19 July, 2022 to be precise. That was the hottest day since records began, with the temperature actually exceeding 40 degrees for the first time.
I remember the day well as it was quite a traumatic one. My 95-year-old father, who had been released from hospital nine days earlier following a bout of double pneumonia, was poorly again and in a state of collapse. We had an agonising one hour wait for an ambulance. When we finally got to hospital the emergency area was full. I later spoke to an ambulance driver and he said it was the busiest day he and his colleagues had ever experienced with so many call-outs because of the extreme heat. While my Dad thankfully survived – and lived for another two years – the death rates for these very hot days in July 2022 back this up.
Yet later when I looked at Twitter I saw the usual, ‘it’s not really that hot, it’s called summer’ comments. Clearly from people who hadn’t been in a hospital that day, as I had.
When you still keep believing something, even though the evidence is right in front of you, that’s not being smart or ‘edgy’, it’s being dogmatic. The trouble is that ‘climate change’ has become part of the Great Culture War and people feel obliged to pick a side and keep to it. No acknowledgment that the other side might have had a point is allowed. Because people thought Greta Thunberg and co. were going over the top with the dire warnings of climate catastrophe, they tended to go the other way and totally downplayed or denied what was happening.
But surely we can reach a sensible consensus.
Clearly, the climate is changing. The Met Office has found that the number of ‘very hot’ days when the temperature reached 30 degrees or higher has trebled compared to the average of the period 1961-90. Days when it reached 30 degrees used to be very rare – for instance there was only one June day in 1961 and 1968 when any weather station reached the 30 degrees mark. This June was the warmest on record for England, while July said ‘hold my beer’ and began with a temperature of 35.8 degrees recorded at Faversham in Kent.
The point is not that we didn’t get ‘very hot’ days before, but that their frequency is greatly increasing. And it’s not just in Britain. Continental Europe has been roasting too – with Spain recording its highest ever June temperature of 46 degrees and Portugal surpassing that with 46.6 degrees.
We need to have a proper debate on what if anything can be done but there’s no use denying that it is happening. It is hot out there. Britain has morphed into North Africa, and not because of immigration. Saying that this is normal is no longer credible.
Thatcher hit job piece backfires
It is a century this year since the Iron Lady’s birth – and conservatives are determined to mark it in style. Amid a whole host of dinners and seminars, the Margaret Thatcher Centre held a symposium on Monday to debate the legacy of the former Prime Minister. Among the likes of Lord Lilley, Sir Anthony Seldon and David Starkey was a writer from the New Statesman who duly filed a predictably snippy piece about the day. Quelle surprise…
Yet it seems that the piece has backfired somewhat. For Donal Blaney, the conference organiser, has penned a letter in response. It thanks the journalist in question and says:
We have shared the article online and to our supporters, and this has yielded us a six-figure donation from one supporter who said that if the New Statesman is decrying our work, we must be doing something right. I am only sad for you that you ended up paying us your hard-earned money to attend our event. Had you shared with us that you were a journalist, you would have been very welcome to cover the event and we would have given you a media pass for free (as we did for Allison Pearson of the Daily Telegraph). Should you wish to attend another of our events, please do let me know. I should be delighted to welcome you again, provided you write a similarly helpful piece afterwards.
Those so decried by the New Statesman who might wish to celebrate Margaret Thatcher’s life, values and achievements can enjoy the eponymous centre’s centennial gala dinner at Guildhall on 13 October. Given the way their last article backfired, let’s hope the Staggers is in attendance eh?
English schools are failing disadvantaged children
Education should be the great equaliser – the ladder with which all children, regardless of circumstances of birth, can improve themselves and, by doing so, climb towards a more prosperous future. It was certainly that way for me. I loved learning, and my state education took me from humble beginnings in Clacton-on-Sea to working in Westminster.
Fixing this system will not be politically easy … but political difficulty is no excuse for inaction
But not all children are so lucky. Despite England’s significant success at raising overall attainment over the past decade, the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils has stubbornly remained – despite the significant sums of money spent on the problem.
New research by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) highlights the issue. The average Attainment 8 score – calculated by adding together pupils’ highest scores from eight government-approved GCSE subjects – for disadvantaged pupils was 37 in 2016/17, 12.8 points lower than that for all other pupils. By 2023/24, this gap had risen to 14.4 points, the widest point for seven years. Much of the progress that began under the coalition government has since been reversed, and by 2023 disadvantaged secondary school pupils were over a year and a half behind their peers.
Perhaps most concerningly, the CSJ reveals that in six out of ten mainstream schools, results for disadvantaged pupils are now worse than they were before the pandemic – even as results for their better-off peers improve.
So, what to do about it? One way we try to tackle these persistent inequalities is by investing in the education of disadvantaged pupils, recognising that the time children spend in the classroom has the potential to be the most transformational years of their lives.
We spend huge amounts doing so: almost £30 billion has been spent on the Pupil Premium, a pot of funding which largely follows children who are eligible for free school meals, or who have been at any point in the past six years. Yet the evidence increasingly suggests the system is not generating the hoped-for returns.
At a time when public finances are so tight, it is important that we ensure the money we spend is delivering on its intended aims. Such stark statistics show the Pupil Premium is failing to do that, and we should be prepared to conduct a root-and-branch overhaul to ensure funding reaches the right schools.
This is not about scrapping the entire system or throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A series of targeted, sensible reforms could return the Pupil Premium to something more effective. A good place to start would be replacing the crude, binary eligibility test – where funding is triggered simply because a child received free school meals at any point in the past six years – with a more nuanced model that captures the full picture of cumulative deprivation. That means drawing on a broader range of indicators: welfare data, pupil attainment records and measures of geographical disadvantage should all be part of the equation.
Doing this would also allow us to differentiate between persistent and temporary hardship by accounting for how deprivation changes over time. It is astonishing that our current system could award the Pupil Premium to a child living in a household earning £80,000 because their parents’ income was once below £7,400 at some point in the last six years, while leaving a child growing up in a household with a consistent income of £10,000 with nothing. A fairer model would assign funding according to the extent and depth of disadvantage a child faces, rather than remaining statically tied to one point in their lives.
Politicians could also show a bit more creativity in targeting money at the problems disadvantaged children face today. An additional 100,000 children are now severely absent – meaning they miss 50 per cent or more of possible sessions, making them absent more often than present – since the pandemic. Tying Pupil Premium funding to reductions in absence could realign incentives and give schools more reason to ensure children attend. It would be good for the children too – not least because they cannot catch up if they do not show up.
Fixing this system will not be politically easy – particularly because the extra funding has become deeply woven into school budgets – but political difficulty is no excuse for inaction. If a policy has stopped working, it should change. Without reform, the government is set to spend another £10 billion on the Pupil Premium this Parliament and may well have little to show for it. Surely we owe it to the disadvantaged children across Britain to have another go?
Twenty years of failing to solve the migrant crisis
The front desk call out a name, ‘Mohammed Ahmed!’ Four men – or boys as they claimed to be – arrive at the glass window ready for Asda food gift cards and a cash subsistence payment. It’s a small job to find the real Mr Ahmed – the one whose face matches the ID card on file – who eventually gets the payment as the others sit down frustrated.
The route has changed, but Britain has don’t nothing to reduce the incentives. Again the merry-go-round of casual work is the big draw
It’s 2003, in a converted, decaying school building in Sycamore Road, Aston, barely a mile from Villa Park stadium, I am working in my first full-time job, as a lowest rung admin answering calls and doing the paperwork for payments for Birmingham Social Services in a team which puts recently arrived unaccompanied minors into homes across the city.
The issues then are exactly the same now – an unending flow of humanity with no place to put them. The air is thick with sweat and the smell of damp clothes, as an embattled security guard tries to corral these restless men into the few chairs.
As claimants are all here on the proviso they are under 18. Staff would play ‘Guess the age’ with their ID cards. ‘How old is this guy meant to be?’ you might get asked. ‘Thirty two?’ ‘No. Fifteen.’
In this pre-digital, paper document world – because of poor literacy – arrivals could scribble an ‘X’ on the form, take the benefits and leave. This meant you might give out dozens of payments simply to a Mr X.
To an 19-year-old admin worker, the manilla case files made compelling, if incomplete reading. ‘Vladimir has no documents because he was fleeing enemy forces in Albania,’ or ‘Mustafa has no family. He is from Sudan.’
Many of these folders would remain flimsy as huge numbers simply vanished. This was not a Home Office department and had no power to deport – regardless of what staff thought – only to facilitate asylum seekers’ lives while they were here.
The less information each asylum claimant submitted, the more likely they would be allowed to remain by the Home Office. In order to get hired for the job, I had to provide proof of ID, bank statement, pass a CRB check and also supply a reference. Yet, in order to get paid on the other side of the glass, saying you were an asylum-seeking child was enough.
Everything was upside-down. When one lie was exposed, another was laid in its place. A man from Jamaica was able to claim he needed asylum because, as a homosexual, he was vulnerable to homophobic abuse back home. He eventually, we learned, secured his permanent UK status by getting a woman pregnant.
The Home Office would grant leave to remain if the candidate could ‘demonstrate knowledge of war or torture in a foreign country.’ But there’s two types of people who would have knowledge of war and torture – those running from the gun and those holding it. It wasn’t always clear if people were escaping persecution or prosecution. Monday morning would often bring calls from the police enquiring about the whereabouts of different claimants. One might be wanted in suspicion of hitting a child on a pedestrian crossing – a double foul because, as a penniless unaccompanied minor, none were supposed to be able to drive or afford a car.
In 2015, as a journalist, I saw the other side of the queue. I visited the Calais migrant jungle for the first time and subsequently went back again a year later. The small flow of desperate cases was now a flood.
Barely two hours from King’s Cross station – hidden under the armpit of a motorway fly over, ‘The Jungle’ – subsequently removed in October 2016, but steadily growing back again today – was a grim, rubbish-strewn site of 4,000 people, almost all young men. A sort of desperate Glastonbury of rows of tents and mud, with miserable groups hunched among bramble bushes. Each nation was signposted by flags and their own communities – Sudanese in a series of tents kicking a ball around, neighbours to Afghans and Pakistanis, united by their mutual love of cricket. Alongside familiar conflict flashpoints there were also Kuwaitis – in an abandoned agricultural shed – and flags for Nigeria, Cameroon and Senegal. What war were they escaping from?
Hundreds of men stand in their pants queuing to use the camp’s single, overworked cold tap, or queuing for their only meal to be dished out at 5 p.m. by a soup kitchen. Many then – as they are now – are eldest sons from patriarchal societies. Their family go all in to send them here and they then have to say they are a success, even if that really means sweeping a factory floor. This lie of wealth is then told around tiny villages in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, and more sons are sent.
Frustrated by the fences, they would block the motorway heading to the Channel Tunnel in a human chain, causing riot police to try and force them back with tear gas and shields. Against the soundtrack of blaring car horns, the line yelled, ‘We are human! We are not animals!’ Homemade boards mocked, ‘Britain, did your mother not teach you to share?’
One of the saddest sights was the waste of time and potential. Ahmed, 22, from Kabul, spent two months trying to smuggle himself into the UK, but – having failed – created an enterprise running the site’s ramshackle convenience stall, stocking basics like pasta, rice and soap he’d buy from a Lidl supermarket in nearby Cochelles, wheeling them back three miles in a shopping trolley along the hard shoulder.
He would sell his own cigarettes from a handmade rolling machine – 15 cents a fag – but his biggest seller was Monster energy drink, rocket fuel to propel the migrants to the lorries or to the sea. This enterprising young man had dreams. ‘I’d like my job to be in a chicken shop. A KFC. Some restaurant,’ he said.
I sat in a lorry with Richard Burnett, chief executive of the Road Haulage Association, who had 10,000 lorry drivers go through Calais each year. As now, with dinghies, the migrants had a sophisticated choreography to break into Britain at exactly the right moment. They would use mobiles on the edge of the perimeter tunnel to hit lorries at the exact moment the Gendarmes left. The plan being to get into a vehicle which had already gone through passport control.
Burnett told me of one driver, ex-army, who was threatened at gunpoint. ‘The migrants know the drivers don’t want to hit them so they will run on to the motorway and the drivers are forced to stop. Other drivers opened their trucks to find their loads – containers carrying £250,000 of designer clothes –entirely written off because of soilage. ‘The migrants are in there for days sometimes so you can imagine how much bodily fluid there can be,’ said Burnett.
The route has changed, but Britain has don’t nothing to reduce the incentives. Again the merry-go-round of casual work is the big draw.
Britain has an enormous shadow economy that has no barrier to entry. In 2003 we’d hear asylum seekers would illegally work in factories or building sites, in 2025 it is Deliveroo and Uber driving. While not luxuriously paid, when the UK taxpayer covers all your basic subsistence, anything you earn is cash in hand.
There are also pulls that the UK cannot remove. The immeasurable success of English language media and alongside it – the Premier League. The Premier League has the same pull that Hollywood had 70 years ago. I lost count of the number of young men who – with no familiarity of other places in Europe – had picked England (never Scotland or Wales) purely because it was where Chelsea or Manchester United played. They’d show me giant murals in their hometowns of Wayne Rooney or Cesc Fabregas.
The final issue alongside that is social media. Every corner of the world has mobile phones and social media, all creating a drip feed of UK culture – a glamorous social media view of real people’s lives watched through a flattering filter. Twice I heard an Afghan migrant say they wanted ‘an English girlfriend.’ When pressed they just burst into fits of giggles. Did they think all British women looked like pop stars, influencers actresses they’d seen on screen, or was it something darker? It did occur to me that most online pornography is English speaking.
In Calais, I saw two women in the camp. Amara from Eritrea, was helping her brother Filimon around the site, who had broken his leg climbing a fence. At 1 a.m., on the long night walk between the camp and the entrance to the Tunnel where migrants would try to get into Britain, was a Syrian woman – hobbling along and eight months pregnant. She was scrambling under a metal fence to try and get into a lorry – ‘any lorry’, she said – in order to reach her husband, already in the UK and working.
Since 2018, more than 170,000 men have crossed the Channel in small boats – more than the number of people in the British army. Around 95 per cent apply for asylum. Between 2019 and 2029, the UK is projected to spend £15.3 billion housing asylum seekers, triple the amount the Conservative government predicted in 2019. Over £40 million a year will be spent on legal aid arguing these cases, often based on little paperwork or hard proof.
In 20 years, the UK has done nothing to stem this tide. When migrants arrive, no blocks are put on cash-in-hand work; little paperwork is ever asked for; no liars or criminals are turned away when discovered and the legal system performs gymnastics to keep them here.
Norman Tebbit, forgiveness and my father, the IRA bomber
Norman Tebbit, who died this week at the age of 94, embodied a sterner Britain. His political career was remarkable but it paled in comparison with his unyielding love for his wife Margaret, whom he wheeled through life for four decades after the IRA’s Brighton bomb paralysed her body in 1984. Tebbit never forgave those who nearly killed him and left his beloved wife in pain for the rest of her days.
My dad met Tebbit several times, earning his ‘hero of the week’ nod in his Sun column for exposing the IRA
My father, Sean O’Callaghan, was an IRA bomber who turned against his comrades and, in doing so, saved countless lives. He thwarted a bomb plot in 1983 aimed at Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Yet his early sins – planting bombs, plotting murders – haunted him to his grave.
Tebbit’s death stirred something deep, not just in me but in the regulars of my Oxfordshire pub who trickled in after news of his death emerged on Tuesday, their voices thick with memories of Tebbit. It stirred thoughts of forgiveness – or its absence – and what that word demands of us.
My dad met Tebbit several times, earning his ‘hero of the week’ nod in his Sun column for exposing the IRA. Tebbit respected him, not least for his refusal to soften his edges. But could a man like my father ever find redemption in the eyes of someone like Tebbit, who had paid such a terrible price for the IRA’s campaign of terror?
In 1974, my father helped kill Eva Martin, the first Greenfinch, female Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) soldier, who died in the ‘Troubles’, and murdered RUC detective Peter Flanagan. Until his dying day, these events shadowed him. Yet he sought redemption with fierce resolve, handing himself into the police in 1988 to face his past. He confessed to murders and other felonies in Britain and Northern Ireland, pleaded guilty to all and was sentenced to 539 years in prison.
He was released in 1996 after being granted the Royal Prerogative of Mercy by Queen Elizabeth II having served seven years. My father’s road was brutal, but he achieved what few do. He knew his worth, understood his flaws, and faced them unflinchingly.
Despite his guilt, I am proud to be his son. He pursued redemption with a single-minded ferocity that consumed him, body and soul. He risked his life, his freedom, living as a hunted man to warn authorities, thwart attacks, and dismantle the IRA’s machinery of death. Each act was a plea for atonement, a brick laid on a road towards a destination he never felt he reached. His drive tore through our family like a storm – years of fear, fractured bonds, lives upended by his choice to stand against terror. Yet many forgave him. To police, victims’ families, even strangers, he was a living testament to redemption through action, a man who bled for his amends.
Still, he never forgave himself, his guilt a shadow he couldn’t outrun. Tebbit, too, carried a debt, not of guilt but of loyalty to his wife and principle. He never forgave the IRA, nor did he pretend to. Forgiveness, he seemed to say, must be earned through deeds, not words.
Contrast this with others who’ve faced terror’s scars. Jo Berry, whose father Sir Anthony Berry was murdered in the Brighton bombing, forgave Patrick Magee, the bomber. She built a dialogue with him, seeking understanding over retribution. Gordon Wilson, whose daughter Marie was murdered in the 1987 Enniskillen bombing, forgave the IRA publicly, his voice breaking with Christian charity.
Their acts of forgiveness were noble, even saintly, but they jar in my taproom, where regulars – carpenters, farmers, old soldiers – judge a man by his actions. Magee’s ‘regret’ for murdering Berry feels like a hollow sham. You regret spilling milk, not murder. His vague contrition, peddled, it would seem, in order to pose as a commentator on peace and reconciliation, exploits Berry’s overwhelming grief – a raw, fathomless wound he’s gaslighted for his own gain.
Unlike my father, who surrendered everything to save others, Magee offers no genuine sacrifice, no deeds to match his words. Redemption demands action – prison served, lives saved, remorse proven – not empty platitudes.
Tebbit’s life was a testament to love forged in adversity. He cared for Margaret without self-pity or fanfare, his devotion a quiet rebuke to a world that mistakes sentiment for strength.
In my pub, where stories of loss and loyalty flow as freely as the ale, his example resonates. A regular, Mick, told me of his brother, killed in Belfast in 1982. ‘No one’s said sorry,’ he growled, ‘so why should I let it go?’
His words echo Tebbit’s resolve: forgiveness without accountability is surrender. My father, too, understood this. His meetings with Tebbit, though private, were marked by mutual respect – not for shared views, but for shared clarity. Neither believed in absolution without cost. Britain’s soul, like its pubs, thrives on honesty, not platitudes. Labour’s recent follies – surrendering Chagos, ceding fishing grounds – show a government too eager to appease, too quick to forgive slights against our sovereignty. Tebbit would have scorned such weakness. His Britain demanded respect, not apologies.
So, as I stack crates and scrub taps, I raise a quiet toast to Tebbit. Forgiveness is no salve unless it’s earned through remorse, restitution, and action. My father knew it, sacrificing all for redemption, forgiven by many but not himself. Mick knows it, nursing his pint and his pain. In this pub, where truth is poured as freely as beer, we know it too. Tebbit’s legacy, like a well-pulled pint, is clear, strong, and unyielding. Let’s not water it down.
Why the Lords doesn’t have to accept the Assisted Dying Bill
In an effort to hasten the Assisted Dying/Suicide Bill on to the statute books, Esther Rantzen and Lord Falconer have offered a novel interpretation of the role of the House of Lords. Falconer suggested that the Lords must ‘uphold’ what ‘the Commons have decided to go ahead with’. Meanwhile, Rantzen said of Parliament’s upper chamber: ‘Their job is to scrutinise, to ask questions, but not to oppose.’ Someone like Rantzen may be forgiven for playing so loose with conventions, but a former Lord Chancellor may not.
Labour’s manifesto made no reference to assisted suicide nor assisted dying
The reality is that both the House of Commons and the House of Lords play an equal role in the passing of legislation, except when it comes to matters of financial privilege. For legislation to become law, it must be approved by both Houses; where there is disagreement on the detail, there is negotiation through ‘ping pong’ until agreement is reached or the Bill falls. This encourages both Houses to compromise and find a way through.
Both adopt the same legislative stages, requiring MPs and Peers to approve the Bill as a whole, as well as the detail. If the Lords were not entitled to take a position on any Bill, then second and third reading would simply not exist.
The second major convention of the Lords is the Salisbury-Addison Convention, which holds that the Lords does not try to vote down at second or third reading a government bill which implements a manifesto commitment. That convention is founded, as Viscount Cranborne spelt out in the 1940s, on the principle that ‘it would be constitutionally wrong, to oppose proposals which have been put before the electorate’.
In the case of the Assisted Dying/Suicide Bill, these conditions are not met. Labour’s manifesto made no reference to assisted suicide nor assisted dying. Nor is this a Government Bill, despite the Prime Minister’s personal support for the legislation. At every stage of the Bill’s passage through the Commons, ministers told MPs that the Government is neutral on the Bill and the Bill represents the policy intent of the sponsor and not ministers.
The Noble Lords are also entitled to feel frustrated that Lord Falconer expects the more diligent of the two Houses to cut short scrutiny. On legislation of any significance the Lords will typically take twice the time that the Commons does.
The Commons took 15 days in Committee, two days for Report stage, and a day for Third Reading. The brevity of report stage was achieved only by curtailing debate, and the procedural controls that exist in the Commons. As such, while more than 90 concerns were identified by MPs at report stage, 80 were not even selected for a decision, eight were rejected, and just two that were not in Kim Leadbeater’s name were accepted.
If the sponsors of the Bill had been serious about securing the quick passage of the Bill through the Lords, more work should have been done in the Commons to ease the responsibility of the second House.
The Lords should also be comforted that the end of the session is penciled in for May 2026. This means that they can take the time to look at the detail of the legislation.
The thirteen sitting Fridays set aside in the Commons for the consideration of private members bills will have already run their course before second reading, which is due to take place on 12 September. The Lords is therefore under no pressure to return the Bill to meet a specific date, and it is the Government that will need to makeshift – should it chose to do so – to provide more time when the Bill completes its passage through the Lords. Nor is there any impact on the Government programme as the Bill can be dealt with on sitting Fridays, while Government legislation steadily progresses on other days.
Finally, we turn to the risk that the Lords are not done with the Bill by the time the session ends. This is plausible: there might be simply too many problems to patch, particularly in the absence of any consultative work to guide deliberations.
Here all sides should take comfort in the existence of the Parliament Acts and the specific provisions. The Royal Commission on Lords Reform concluded that the Parliament Acts – which enable the Commons to ‘achieve almost any result it desired’ – provided ‘another reason for the existence of a second chamber sufficiently confident and authoritative to require the House of Commons, at the very least, to think again’.
Should the Bill flounder in the Lords with too many unanswered questions, it would be perfectly permissible for the Government to take responsibility for setting up a Commission or Committee similar to the Warnock Commission or Peel Committee for IVF and Abortion to test the validity of the provisions and the policy approach taken in the Bill. If it was established that the Bill was safe, MPs could return with the same Bill. If the Bill was established as inadequate, a revised version could be developed.
In the former scenario, Peers need not worry that amendments made the first-time round would be lost if the Parliament Acts were used. The Acts and Erskine May are clear that if the Bill were to be reintroduced a second time, it can include amendments ‘made by the House of Lords in the former bill in the preceding session’; and if the Commons wished to propose further amendments recognising the debates in the Lords and indicating that the Commons is prepared to compromise, the Commons could also suggest these for insertion into the Bill.
On three occasions, bills have been introduced in a second successive parliamentary session to potentially allow the Parliament Acts to be used – only for the Lords to agree to the bills, with the passage of time helping to establish a way forward.
There are more than adequate mechanisms for the Commons to prevail should it wish to do so, but the Lords must not be bludgeoned into signing off a Bill of such complexity and significance. To do so is to abdicate responsibility and risks sacrificing some people, particularly the vulnerable, to secure the choice for others.
ITV’s Transaction is painfully unfunny
The plot of Transaction, a six-part comedy currently showing on ITV2, is simple. A supermarket accused of transphobia hires a transgender night shift worker to protect themselves from an activist mob hammering on the doors. The problem for manager Simon (played by Nick Frost) is that he employs a transwoman on a mission to be outrageous, vulgar and crude, and to lecture the audience on trans rights. Promoted as humour, there’s a big problem: it just isn’t funny.
Transaction was written and created by Jordan Gray who also plays the part of egocentric transwoman Liv, someone more accustomed to sponging off friends and surfing the internet than earning a living stacking shelves on the night fill. Gray is best known for stripping naked live on Channel 4, and playing the piano ‘with her penis,’ in the words of the Daily Mail. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that the humour is crude. ‘Bush sniffing’, for example, I learned was something rather different to the appreciation of horticulture.
It’s certainly hard to see the boundary between Gray the actor and Liv the character. Transaction’s audience is treated to regular intrusions of transgender politics. We hear that, ‘despite the objections of the right-wing press, [Liv is] in fact, in the ladies’ bathroom’. On another occasion, Liv asks, ‘Do you know what they do to women like me in prison? Nothing, because they’re too busy trying to figure out which prison to put me in.’
The script is rather stronger on trans privilege that trans responsibility
There are also, of course, references to Harry Potter and a ‘Scaniel Radcliffe’ – JK Rowling lives rent free in Gray’s head, I suspect.
Episode three includes the ludicrous idea that Liv might be pregnant after sex in the warehouse. But the impossibility is lost on coworker Mike who decides he is not ready to be a dad and blurts, ‘What if I cut the umbilical cord and I cut the wrong thing?’ It’s just not funny, but it does set the scene to discuss maternity and paternity rights. ‘I’m entitled to both’, demands Liv with that sense of entitlement characteristic of trans rights activism.
The script is rather stronger on trans privilege that trans responsibility. Maybe five years ago it would have worked for Liv to declare, ‘The last thing you can do right now is fire a transgender employee. But here’s the thing – the only thing worse than firing me would be if I quit.’
Liv goes on to break the rules while others face the consequences. Some allegedly transphobic graffiti that kept the cast busy for too long was eventually attributed to Liv. It could have been funny if it poked fun at the way trans people were seen as some saintly class, and most oppressed of all, but self-deprecation is not a feature of the script.
The public has tired of the nonsense, and many have seen through the unfounded claims that are made about gender identity and being somehow born in the wrong body. Liv’s ability to quell that activist mob calling for trans rights simply by standing on a checkout conveyor and delivering a homily speaks more to 2020 than 2025. The rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus and a halo effect from suitably placed ceiling lights added cringe rather than credibility. It might have worked had someone quipped, ‘He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!’ Alas they didn’t, either then or in the final episode when Liv sings, ‘You put me on this pedestal, now I’m never coming down! Don’t let my penis come between us. Born on Mars, now I live on Venus. Dick for brains? Then I’m a genius. There’s a chance I might be Jesus’.
It’s a shame because Gray can sing, and the acting is rather good. Gray and Frost both play their characters very well, while Francesca Mills and Kayla Meikle were excellent as co-workers Millie and Beefy Linda – a woman with dwarfism, and a rather large black woman. I could relate to their characters and I finished the box set wanting to know more about them. But in the end, this series is all about Liv, and hence all about Jordan Gray. Two hours of that was enough to last me a lifetime.
Why shouldn’t we call children ‘naughty’?
As we approach the final countdown to the school summer holidays and I am faced with the prospect of lots more quality time with my almost-five-year-old, and absolutely no idea what I will fill the days with, it seems a good moment to evaluate my style of parenting and seek out some advice to help the family get through the summer with our sanities intact.
These days, there is a whole animal kingdom of parenting styles to choose from: could I be an elephant mother? A panda, a jellyfish? Or the better-known tiger mum – usually associated with parents pushing their children towards over-achievement. This year my son has learned to read, write simple sentences and, significantly, will go for a poo on his own, so I feel like we have already reached the pinnacle of what can be achieved in the academic year – so not tiger for me.
Besides, if I’m honest, I’m not really looking for help on how to help my son achieve his goals – especially given his biggest aim is to get me to buy him the Hot Wheels T-rex transporter (for those blissfully unaware: a giant truck with light-up, roaring-effect T-rex head).
Really, where I’d be open to some advice is on the day-to-day management of the emotional fallout of being four or five. How do you deal with tantrums and meltdowns, and – the worst – prolonged whining, when your tiny tyrant shows immense resistance to reasoned argument (and you’re also dealing with a two-year-old who has recently discovered the power of ‘no’)?
Many modern parenting styles focus on managing a child’s emotions and behaviour, such as the millennial favourite ‘gentle parenting’ – where a child’s feelings are validated but parents do not use rewards or punishments. And today’s parenting ‘experts’ also seem to prize the validation of a child’s emotion above all else, allowing it to dictate how you discipline a child.
My interest was piqued recently by an interview with BBC anchor turned child counsellor Kate Silverton on the Netmums podcast. She suggested that parents ban the word ‘naughty’, as she claims children can internalise the label and think ‘“I’m bad. I’m naughty”. And then it becomes: “That’s me. That’s who I am.”’ She concludes: ‘That’s where sort of delinquency comes from.’
But isn’t ‘naughty’ exactly the kind of word you need when dealing with a young child’s bad behaviour? It’s an adjective made for children. ‘Don’t throw your toys everywhere, that’s naughty.’ ‘Don’t hit your sister, that’s naughty.’ You are not labelling your child with a permanently naughty identity – merely explaining to them what is good and bad behaviour, in appropriate terms. And what would you say instead? To actively try not to use the word goes against your parenting instincts.
I am not only looking to raise children who are ‘heard’, I also want to raise individuals who are well-behaved and resilient
Parental instincts are not always given enough importance by those offering advice. Silverton makes some decent points about taking a moment to calm yourself so that you can react in a more measured way, and trying not to unload your own childhood emotional baggage on to your children (although that might put her out of business as a therapist). But some of her tricks and tips, such as for defusing tantrums, are cringe-inducing and even counterintuitive.
Silverton offers the example of picking up her child from nursery and bringing an apple as a snack when her child wanted an orange. The child proceeds to have a tantrum, lying on the ground in front of other parents. (I feel her pain, as this week I was treated to a full meltdown after I cut my son’s toast in half, when he preferred it whole.)
In these scenarios, Silverton advises that you should get down with your child and attempt to match their energy as you articulate what you sense they are feeling. She calls it her ‘SAS’ tool: See/Sense, Acknowledge, Soothe. In the podcast, she demonstrates by adopting an exaggerated angry toddler tone: ‘You are so cross right now…’
Honestly, I would sooner crawl out of my own skin than do this. And in front of other parents too? Absolutely not. Surely I cannot be the only parent who thinks the key aim in a tantrum scenario is not to validate your child’s emotions, but rather to correct the bad behaviour and make your child understand that throwing a tantrum is unacceptable and will not get them what they want.
Naturally, I want my children to know they can talk to me about any problem, big or small. But as a mother I am not only looking to raise children who are ‘heard’, I also want to raise individuals who are well-behaved and resilient. Acknowledging your child needs help regulating their emotions shouldn’t mean abandoning all use of negative or authoritative language.
When my son made his feelings crystal clear about the injustice of having his toast cut in half and demanded a new piece of toast, I said no, it was cut toast or nothing. And eventually, he ate the toast. Look, I’m not a monster, and for the sake of a peaceful summer I’ll try my hardest not to cut his toast again. But if I forget, maybe, just maybe, he won’t react the same way again.
The Ten Commandments of Texas
Blessed greetings From Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott recently signed a bill that will require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Teachers must display the Commandments as a poster or framed copy, at least 16 inches by 20 inches, in a typeface that is clearly legible from any part of the room. Supporters of the bill say the Ten Commandments are a cornerstone of American history, though they may have that confused with the Ten Amendments in the Bill of Rights.
Texas will be instructing “thou shalt not kill” even though it has the death penalty, “thou shalt not steal” even though its Attorney General, Ken Paxton, paid a $300,000 settlement last year to avoid criminal securities fraud charges, and “thou shalt worship no other gods before me” even though the mascot for the main state university is an enormous Longhorn steer named Bevo, the living manifestation of a golden calf, or at least an orange one.
This isn’t the first time a state government has gone full Mount Sinai on the public school system. Louisiana and Arkansas have tried posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms, but the courts have struck down those laws. Texas is a much bigger catfish.
The Texas law comes at a moment when the religious morality police are educationally ascendant. The state constantly roils with annoying controversies over the content of public-school libraries, with conservative parents, though not just Christian ones, arguing that schools shouldn’t be exposing their children to narratives like the one in Maia Kobabe’s admittedly squidgy graphic memoir Gender Queer.
The Supreme Court just upheld parental rights in those matters in their Mahmoud v. Taylor decision. With a 6-3 majority, the Court argued that Maryland’s Montgomery County School District had no right to force kids to read LGBTQ-friendly picture books “designed to present certain values and beliefs as things to be celebrated, and certain contrary values and beliefs as things to be rejected.” On her Substack, Georgetown Constitutional law Professor Asma Uddin argues that the Mahmoud decision shows that “accommodation is not always required – but when schools fuse moral messaging with mandatory participation, procedural safeguards matter.”
But if trans-friendly picture books are moral messaging–and the Supreme Court has ruled thusly – then the Ten Commandments are definitely moral messaging. This doesn’t mean that the messaging is wrong, but it’s coming from a very specific religious point of view. Though the Commandments belong to the Old Testament, the Texas Legislature isn’t exactly loaded with Jewish representatives. This is a conservative Christian play, a clear rebuke to woke progressive educators who are trying to queer the system. It’s also a bold middle finger to true civil libertarians, who rightly argue that the founding principle of the United States isn’t Christian morality, but religious and intellectual pluralism, based in the separation of church and state.
The irony is that Greg Abbott, and the state of Texas writ large, doesn’t seem to want public education to exist at all. Another bill the Leg passed this year establishes a school voucher system that will allow families to use public funds to establish education savings accounts to pay for private school tuition or homeschooling expenses. They can get up to $10,000 per students, or up to $30,000 for students with disabilities.
Arguments exist for school vouchers. The Texas public education system, like the public education systems elsewhere in the country, is bad – sclerotic and inflexible. The state seems to want to pick away at that system, student by student. But in the meantime, for those who choose, like the losing side of the Brexit vote, to Remain, the state intends to force their kids to eye-glaze at the Ten Commandments from their desks.
Meanwhile, a lawsuit is already in the works. Several “faith leaders” and Christian families have sued in federal court in Dallas, arguing that the state will be forcing religion on students. One woman says she’s concerned that the posting of the Ten Commandments will force her to explain some very grownup concepts to her young children. She, the lawsuit states, “does not desire that her minor children be instructed by their school about the biblical conception of adultery.”
If you thought Gender Queer was bad, wait until kids learn about David and Bathsheba. Or about Ken Paxton, a major driver of the Ten Commandments push, whose wife, we recently learned, has filed for divorce on “Biblical grounds”. Looks like Paxton needs to go back to school.
The mask slips at Socialism 2025
From college campuses to the media, socialism is increasingly getting repackaged as a solution to every problem: homelessness, housing, policing and education. For a generation grappling with high rent, student debt and political distrust, the collectivist utopia may sound like the moral, modern choice.
But it isn’t – and this year’s Socialism 2025 conference in Chicago proved just why it is doomed to failure.
The conference brought together scholars, activists and self-styled revolutionaries to sketch out what a “just” society might look like. The vision was as radical as it was impractical. Professor Lorgia García Peña offered community-building strategies rooted in the idea that “capitalism sucks,” the collective should care for everyone and we can still somehow focus on individual needs. Geo Maher, a leftist academic who resigned from Drexel University under public pressure after tweeting satirical comments about “white genocide,” called for the abolition and reconstruction of the state.
And that was just the warm-up.
Other speakers proposed eliminating police from campuses, abolishing test scores and even replacing the nuclear family with alternative community structures. The overarching belief is clear: America’s systems – capitalism, policing, meritocracy, marriage – are all inherently oppressive and must be torn down and replaced with something “equitable.”
This isn’t just intellectual playacting. These ideas are gaining traction with young voters, nonprofit organizations and activist movements. But while the packaging may be new, the content is painfully familiar.
At its core, socialism demands conformity. It doesn’t nurture freedom – it replaces it with the illusion of fairness. And in that process, it always comes for the very people it claims to protect.
Let me offer a basic example. Imagine you’re a responsible, hardworking American. You save throughout your life, build up your 401(k), and prepare for retirement. But under a socialist regime, your wealth isn’t just your own – it belongs to the collective. If there’s a growing population of sick or elderly citizens who need care, the state could decide that your retirement savings are better used elsewhere. You sacrificed. You planned. And now the reward is redistribution in the name of equity.
This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s the natural outcome of collectivist thinking. When everyone’s needs are “shared,” the idea of personal ownership becomes a privilege – one the state can revoke at will.
Now consider the push to eliminate test scores. Some on the left argue that standardized testing is racist or outdated. But in any system of learning– math, medicine, music – you need a way to assess progress. You need a standard that shows who is learning, who is struggling, and who needs help. That’s how real growth happens.
But in the socialist imagination, disparities equal injustice. If some students perform better than others, the problem isn’t addressed by tutoring or hard work. Instead, the test must go. The scoreboard is the enemy.
That’s the central flaw of socialism. When the collective is all that matters, the individual must shrink to fit the mold.
Even the family is not safe. Several speakers at Socialism 2025 questioned whether the traditional family unit still “meets the needs of the people.” One suggested that marriage could become an unfair advantage – something to be restructured or even abolished. And in a socialist system, that’s not just rhetoric. If the family is viewed as a source of inequality, the state has every incentive to discourage it – by revoking tax breaks, reducing support and prioritizing communal living instead.
To some, these ideas may sound like liberation. But dig deeper and you’ll see the truth: this is about control, not compassion.
What about capitalism? Is it perfect? Of course not. But let’s be honest – capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in human history. If you are poor and want to become middle or upper class, capitalism is your best bet. It rewards hard work, innovation and resilience. It doesn’t guarantee success, but it does offer the opportunity – and that’s more than socialism ever has.
As a black conservative, I find it laughable when critics claim capitalism is inherently racist. That’s a lazy argument that avoids real solutions. The problem isn’t the system – it’s access. Fix education. Improve hiring pipelines. Encourage entrepreneurship. But don’t burn down the house just because the plumbing needs work.
Socialism cloaks itself in virtue, but once the layers are peeled back, it’s just another excuse for elite planners to micromanage the lives of ordinary people. And it always ends the same way: with less freedom, fewer choices and a ruling class that insists they know what’s best for you.
So the next time someone offers you socialism as the answer, ask yourself: who gets to define what’s fair? Who decides what you deserve? And once you hand them that power, what makes you think they’ll ever give it back?
Because in the end, the collective doesn’t care who you are. It only cares what you owe.