John Power

BBC Verify is in retreat. Last June the Beeb launched the ‘Verify Live blog’ as part of its push for ‘greater transparency’. But already the blog has gone quiet. This morning the Times reported that Verify’s executive editor has emailed staff to announce that the blog had been ‘put on pause for the last few weeks’ and would not be restarted. Verify lives on in a neutered form within the wider BBC News website.

On Sunday, the Health Foundation published new analysis of ONS data, finding that between 2012/14 and 2022/24 the average Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE) has dropped by two years. The think tank suggested that poor quality housing, poverty and Covid-19 could be causal factors, and concluded that ‘the UK’s health is declining’. The Guardian described this development as a ‘grim picture’. GB News suggested that this new evidence proved that plans to raise the state pension age are unfair.

Yesterday, Zack Polanski told Sky News that ‘the war on drugs has clearly failed over and over again. In fact we have the highest drug deaths in Europe and for the past 14 years every single year drug deaths have increased.’ He made these two claims in response to criticism that his party has received for its policy on illegal drugs, which is, according to the Greens’ website, to ‘end prohibition and replace it with a system of legal regulation’. On the first point, other countries in Europe have higher death rates. In 2023, England and Wales saw 93 deaths per million people overall, compared with 135 per million 15- to 64-year-olds in Estonia, 130 per million in Latvia and 94 per million in Norway.

On Monday, the House of Lords threatened to derail the government’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill by reintroducing an amendment which would ban social media for the under-16s. The Commons will vote on amendments today. This is the third time that the Lords have attempted to force this amendment into the legislation. On each occasion that it has been added, the government has whipped its MPs to reject the amendment. The Prime Minister wishes to delay the implementation of a social media ban until a consultation that he commissioned into online harms for teenagers concludes this summer.

The premature death of two young people from meningitis after an outbreak of the disease in Kent is a tragedy. Susan Hopkins, the CEO of the UK Health Service Agency has called the speed at which this particular infection is spreading ‘unprecedented’. But thanks to the concerted efforts of successive British governments, tragedies related to this disease are becoming rarer and rarer. Since 1998, the number of deaths in England caused by invasive meningococcal disease in the UK has fallen by around 86 per cent. That long-term progress is important context for what is happening in Canterbury and London. The outbreak, linked to the University of Kent, has so far involved 20 suspected cases of MenB, a strain of meningitis.

On Tuesday, Reform UK held a press conference in a petrol forecourt near the spa town of Buxton. The party paid for motorists to receive a 25p discount on their petrol, warning that the return of the final 5p fuel duty cut – scheduled by Rachel Reeves – amounts to a rise in ‘petrol prices at the worst possible moment’. In 12 years, the price of petrol has barely changed at all Undoubtedly people are struggling with the cost of living at the moment for a whole host of reasons. But in the grand scheme of things, the amount that we pay for petrol in fuel stations is, by historic standards, actually very reasonable. In April 2012, the average weekly price of a litre of petrol was 142.17p. The average at the start of this month was 137.8p.

The crowded market place emerging on Britain’s right is bewildering. Nigel Farage and Reform UK appeared to have successfully colonised the space for positions more robust than those offered by the current Tory party. They have been ahead in the national opinion polls for months now. But the launch of Restore Britain, a new party founded by the former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, suggests that Farage himself now faces a threat on his exposed flank. No party to the right of Farage has posed a substantive electoral threat since the British National Party virtually disappeared in 2015. But that could be about to change. Restore claims to have 90,000 members. Lowe has a significant social media presence and the backing of Elon Musk.

I asked the novelist and dissident Boualem Sansal, recently released from Algerian prison, how he would like to be remembered. He did not hesitate. Not as the French Salman Rushdie – to whom he is often compared – but as the Algerian George Orwell. Orwell was not just a novelist but a prophet, who saw how a peaceful society could morph into a system of oppression. ‘Every day in Algeria,’ Sansal told me, ‘is like Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ Sansal was speaking to me after he had just given a speech in London, at the Policy Exchange think tank – his first public interventions in Britain since leaving prison in Algeria, where he had been jailed after a sham trial, where there were no witnesses or legal defence.