John O’Neill

In 2016, when international test results for school pupils were released, Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw said: ‘Scotland used to be a beacon of excellence. It’s not anymore.’ Ten years later, things are worse. In the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) test results in reading, maths and science, taken by 15-year-old pupils last year, Scottish pupils’ average scores slipped in reading, from 493 to 488, and maths, from 471 to 467. (Scotland’s maths score was 491 in 2015.) Science scores rose by eight points to 491 – but pupils were around a full year behind their English counterparts. Performance in all subjects was, according to the Scottish government’s report, ‘significantly below that achieved in a number of earlier Pisa cycles’.

Andy Burnham says ‘we cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country’ that house refugees and asylum seekers – and ‘all parts of the country need to work, to play their part’. His comments came after Piddington, a publess, shopless 400-person village in Oxfordshire symbolically voted to secede from the United Kingdom over proposals to house 1,250 asylum seekers in a nearby Ministry of Defence site. England currently supports 85,000 asylum seekers in its 296 local authorities, an average of 14.5 for every 10,000 residents. Where are they – and is Burnham right that they’re only in the poorest communities in the country? There’s a great deal of variation: in some councils, the number approaches 50 per 10,000 residents.

In his short speech before going into Downing Street, Andy Burnham said his first instruction after passing through the door of No. 10 would be to ‘end rough sleeping in our country’. He made a similar promise in 2017 after winning the Greater Manchester mayoralty, when he promised to end rough sleeping in the area by 2020. To do that, he set up the Greater Manchester Mayor’s Homelessness Fund (to which he donated 15 per cent of his salary) and in 2018 promised ‘A Bed Every Night’. That scheme aims to help everyone who is rough sleeping or at risk of doing so, including people with no recourse to public funds, who councils do not legally have to help.

‘June heatwave killed 440 a day at its peak, say climate scientists’ was the Guardian’s splash this morning, while the BBC reported that ‘more than 2,700 people may have died in exceptional May and June heatwaves’. The stories are based on a paper from Imperial College London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Met Office, which estimates 2,736 ‘excess heat-related deaths’ across the May and June heatwaves in England and Wales, with 553 heat deaths from 21 to 29 May and 2,183 from 18 to 28 June. Dr Clair Barnes, the report’s lead author, said: ‘These are big numbers and we don’t want to see this many people dying.’ Of course we don’t.

The American right has developed a morbid fascination with Britain over the past two years, particularly after Elon Musk began tweeting about grooming gangs. Some European influencers have found it lucrative to present Britain and parts of the continent as having ‘fallen’, posting videos of crimes by immigrants and appearing on American podcast networks as weary ambassadors from broken countries to warn: ‘It could happen here.’  Yesterday evening the Joe Rogan Experience podcast released a two-hour interview with Rupert Lowe, leader of the Restore party. Was Lowe there merely to create content – or is Restore a serious political party? Some of his statements suggest it’s the former rather than the latter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Is the economy not just resilient but flourishing in the wake of the Iran war? GDP in the three months ending April was 0.7 per cent higher than the preceding three months – the fifth reading where growth has accelerated, and the fastest pace of growth since May 2024.  Unfortunately, this strength won’t continue. Month-on-month growth has been falling since February, and the economy shrank 0.1 per cent in April alone, down from 0.3 per cent growth in March. Services, which are about three-quarters of economic output, fell by 0.2 per cent, production was flat and construction grew by 0.1 per cent.

Reality Check verdict: False The Met were braced for one of the ‘busiest days for policing in London in recent years’ on Saturday, with both a Unite the Kingdom rally organised by Tommy Robinson and a pro-Palestinian Nakba day rally taking place. Some 4,000 officers were deployed, along with helicopters, drones, Sandcat armoured vehicles, dogs, horses and live facial recognition systems. The last Unite the Kingdom rally, in September, drew a crowd of 150,000 according to the police, three times what the Met expected – and organisers said this one would be ‘the biggest patriotic rally to grace this planet’.  Addressing the crowd at the event, Robinson said ‘we are here in our millions’ and that attendees were at the ‘biggest event in British history’.

Boris Johnson is trying to wash his hands of the unprecedented wave of migration that has seen more than one million people move to the UK in each of the last three years. He was confronted about this ‘Boriswave’ on the Triggernometry podcast yesterday and told the hosts that rather than being the result of his decisions, Covid and the Migration Advisory Committee were to blame. Are his explanations convincing? First, he said the bounce was due to people leaving the country in the pandemic and returning afterwards: ‘If you look at what actually happened, the numbers go down, we had a huge number of people leave the country because of Covid... You then have a lot of students coming back to complete their courses, who push up the numbers in that so-called wave.

Small boat crossings since the start of the year are at a record level. Yesterday 326 migrants arrived, bringing this year’s total to 3,224. Last year 2,983 migrants crossed the Channel over the same period. The number who have made the journey since Keir Starmer became Prime Minister, having promised to ‘stop the small boat crossings’, is 24,666. The figures are in stark contrast to the US, where Donald Trump recently announced that ‘the invasion of our country is over’ with attempts to illegally cross the US-Mexico border at a record low. Border agents had 8,326 encounters with migrants in February, Trump said; there were 190,000 in the same month last year.

A government consultation on restricting access to disability benefits was ‘so unfair as to be unlawful’, the High Court ruled today, putting £1.3 billion a year of benefit savings in doubt.  The Work Capability Assessment is the gateway to Universal Credit health benefits and up to £4,900 a year for recipients. The Tories planned to change parts of the assessment relating to moving around and getting out of the house to take account of the rise of home and flexible working. Reforms were due to start from September this year, growing to affect 420,000 people who would be assessed as having a less severe level of incapacity, and another 30,000 who would be found to be fit for work.

When Keir Starmer announced his ‘measurable milestones’ yesterday, he called them ‘the most ambitious and credible programme for government in a generation’. But are they really so ambitious? Many of them sound remarkably similar to the missions in the Conservatives’ Levelling Up white paper, published just under three years ago – only less detailed and lacking a focus on improving the worst-performing areas of the country. Starmer has six milestones compared with the white paper’s 12 missions and 51 metrics. On living standards, Starmer promised that they will be ‘higher in every region of the country’.