Andrew Tettenborn

This week Baroness Royall, supported by Lords Kinnock, Patten and Blunkett, reintroduced an amendment – to make voting compulsory – to the Representation of the People Bill, currently making its way through the Lords. Subject to a few excuses such as illness, disability or absence abroad, failing to return a ballot paper at a general or local election would be subject to a penalty of £10. Such a change, Lord Kinnock said yesterday, would reinforce democracy, prevent distorted results and increase political accountability. It’s certainly true that in other countries where compulsory voting applies, including Australia and Belgium (where it remains in Wallonia, though partly abolished in Flanders), turnout is higher than in the UK.

The ugly scenes in Middlesbrough over the last week would not look out of place in a war zone. In the early hours of Saturday, five youths and two police officers died in a head-on crash on the A66 on the outskirts of the city. The collision, and the events leading up to it, have shone a light on a murky world of organised crime and lawlessness in Middlesbrough. Locals are, understandably, terrified by what is unfolding on the streets that they call home Before the crash, another car was seen ramming properties. One of the houses that was targeted belonged to the father of a teenager, Cole Worthy, 17, who died in the accident on the A66. Since the crash, nine men and three women, aged between 18 and 61, have been arrested across Teesside.

The Home Office’s pamphlet for asylum seekers published last Wednesday rightly attracted derision. It amounted to a rather pointless reminder of the bleeding obvious: that sex equality mattered in Britain, and that if while here you committed rape, had underage sex, or bullied your family, you could go to prison and might prejudice your chance of getting asylum. Social media had a predictable field day. Spoof government pamphlets popped up everywhere reminding people that we had funny little rules against cannibalism, grooming little girls, stabbing and beheading people, and waging jihad.  One might have thought this was the cue to forget this Home Office sodden squib and move on. But no. Andy Burnham and Lucy Powell earnestly doubled down on the need for the exercise.

Just before Andy Burnham jetted off to the sun this week, his junior minister for victims Alex Davies-Jones announced that he might be willing to set up a new public inquiry into the activities of Jeffrey Epstein and Mohammed al-Fayed. And matters could go further: there was, for example, mention of the allegedly dubious behaviour of David Sullivan, the owner of West Ham FC – something Sullivan denies.  The stimulus for this move, which has the air of a proposal intended to be plausibly deniable if the going gets rough, comes from an internal Labour document produced by campaigners on violence against women and girls. This was artfully bounced on Burnham when he was packing up for the summer recess: hence the announcement.

There’s something reassuring about Nigel Farage’s promise to stop the boats by sending in the Navy to return rescued migrants forcibly to France before they can land here. The migrants wouldn’t have much to complain about. If they genuinely want to be rescued at sea – rather than levy moral blackmail on the UK government – they can’t complain at being deposited back where they came from. And after all, what is a navy for if not to, well, stop boats invading our shores? Unfortunately, scratch the surface and things get much less simple. The first thing is that it’s not clear the Navy has the ships. It’s all very well to talk of using landing craft or River-class patrol boats: but we don’t have many of either.

The need to think seriously about our membership of the ECHR gets more glaring daily. Some time ago, a Gazan woman was given refuge here with her three children. She then asked the Home Office to bring in 18 more people from Gaza: her parents, three siblings, two of their spouses and their children. They do not have any other connection with this country, and many speak no English whatsoever. Met with an understandable refusal, the relatives sued. This week they won in an immigration appeal tribunal. Why? The right to family life, as enshrined in Article 8 of the ECHR.

We should have seen this coming. It was patent from the start that last year’s ‘one in, one out’ agreement with France was a toothless pact designed for show, that left all the immigration cards in France’s hands and most of the more undesirable would-be migrants in ours. We could also have foreseen that a sniping lawfare campaign against even this limited effort would start then and there. And so it proved. This week, Mr Justice Sheldon in the High Court peremptorily stopped the removal to France of three boat arrivals who, rather implausibly, alleged that they had been trafficked. The details are boringly legal, but they matter. Any irregular arrival who claims to stay on the basis that they are the victim of modern slavery or trafficking is immediately interviewed.

Oxfordshire County Council stamped down hard on Raise the Colours’ flag-flying operations this week. Having complained that flags on lamp-posts and painted on roads were a safety hazard and a source of intimidation, on Tuesday the Lib Dem-controlled body sought – and got – an interim High Court injunction against any flagging of street furniture or roads anywhere in the county. From now on, any Raise the Colours enthusiast who affixes a flag to a lamp-post, or for that matter anyone else who knowingly disobeys the order, will be in contempt of court – and could end up in prison.

The government’s announcement today of a ban on social media for under-16s doesn’t show it in a good light. The three-month consultation that preceded it was frankly a sideshow, the decision in principle having been taken much earlier; the announcement was clearly rushed out precipitately with one eye on the Makerfield by-election; and there is something very rum about the choice to target X, Youtube and Reddit but to leave the young free to drink their fill from centrist dads’ hangout Bluesky (which, incidentally, has its own darker corners: see for example here). It is also a bad idea.

Scotland faces a housing disaster. Rents are ballooning, especially in Edinburgh and Glasgow; incomes are stagnant; and while its house prices would make a Londoner laugh (the average over Scotland as a whole is less than £200,000, and even in Edinburgh under £300,000), they are up by some 10 per cent since 2023. The Scottish government is determined to do something about it. Unfortunately, there is every reason to think that its remedies, straight out of the left-wing SNP rulebook, will make things rather worse. The whole caboodle enriches builders, real estate developers and comfortably-off property owners. And the people it is meant to help, young workers needing a leg up?

Just when things couldn’t get much worse for Keir Starmer’s premiership, they have. Last week the Telegraph exposed Lord Hermer’s continued support for the Al-Sweady claims between 2008 and 2013 against our forces in Afghanistan, despite clear indications that they were a try-on aimed more at devilment than justice (as established in the 2014 inquiry under retired judge Sir Thayne Forbes). Now more correspondence has emerged. This time it reveals embarrassing details about the real Lord Hermer. This week’s disclosures demonstrate something vastly more damning about Lord Hermer After the inquiry had heard damning evidence about the Iraqi claims, Hermer made abundantly clear his personal view.

There is much to like in the Fulford report on the Southport affair. It is spot-on in damning the pressure on teachers and police to treat an aggressive knife-toting schoolboy as a black victim in need of help rather than a public menace calling for firm action. And Sir Adrian had the courage not to mince his words about Axel Rudakubana’s parents. If attentive child-rearing is the best antidote to juvenile devilment, their supine condonation of his ghoulish bedroom activities gave about the worst example possible. Go beyond this, however, and doubts start to creep in.

When Labour came to power, it assured us that Brexit was safe. It never promised, however, to refrain from efforts to sabotage Britain's departure from the European Union. Leaked plans revealing that EU single market rules could be imposed on Britain without a full vote in Parliament expose Keir Starmer's true colours. Jars of marmalade could have to be sold as 'citrus marmalade' under the government's planned EU food deal The Prime Minister’s so-called EU reset involves a series of agreements to align ourselves once more with EU rules covering large swathes of our commercial life.

As you may have noticed, we’ve seen rather more wokery than greenery from the Green party since Zack Polanski took the helm. If you’re wondering why, a party policy document on transport, revealed by the Mail, might give you a clue. The party wants to reduce motorway and dual carriageway speed limits to 55 mph, impose Welsh-style 20 mph limits in towns and (according to some sources) slap on a default 40 mph elsewhere. The party would hike fuel taxes, make parking more difficult even outside one’s own home, and bring in a more demanding driving test including such things as knowledge of how a car works, and impose it on drivers every five years. Driving would explicitly be made a privilege and not a right.

Immigration has come back to bite the government big time. Shabana Mahmood’s sage campaign to set up Labour as the party of effective immigration control by making it much more difficult to get indefinite leave to remain apparently got official approval and certainly showed signs of electoral promise. But the Home Secretary's plan seems to have been carefully sabotaged. Keir Starmer was tellingly noncommittal about it this week, suggesting that the proposal to require ten years of reasonably well-behaved residence would be ditched – at least in favour of those already here and approaching the current five-year deadline.

Last week Reform UK scandalised Whitehall. If they take power, they said, they would take a hard look at the top civil servants they inherited, and if necessary swap them out for their own external or internal hires. Although this idea is not entirely new (something like it was floated in Reform’s 2024 manifesto and trailed again last year by Danny Kruger), it has caused predictable outrage. Critics immediately labelled it an ideological purge – a Trump-style attack on traditional civil service political neutrality. Parts of Whitehall are excellent. Much, however, is bloated, obsessed with process and diversity, and highly unproductive These critics have a point – up to a point.