Lara Brown

After 16 months of this Labour government, it’s easy to catalogue the litany of bad decisions made by ministers. The disastrous budget that caused an uptick in unemployment. The tax imposed on family farms passed down through generations. Or the Education Secretary’s latest attempts to sabotage decades of successful policy.  Yet often overlooked, are the pains that Labour have gone to in the last year to ensure they aren’t making decisions at all. One aide famously said of the Prime Minister: ‘Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.

In May 2015, the newly elected MP for Birmingham Yardley gave her maiden speech in the House of Commons. Jess Phillips vowed to improve Britain’s ‘response to victims of domestic and sexual violence and abuse in all its forms’. In the years since, Phillips has certainly made a lot of noise about discrimination and sexual abuse. She has attacked select committees for not having enough female chairs; threatened to resign from the Labour party over its response to sexual harassment allegations against her colleagues; and, annually, read out the names in Parliament of every woman killed by a man in the previous 12 months.

Keir Starmer did not want to hold an inquiry into grooming gangs.  He did everything that he could to ignore the rape and torture of children which has scarred towns across England. Louise Casey’s audit of group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse was almost certainly commissioned to get him out of a tough spot and get calls for an inquiry out of the papers.  It was only after Labour were left with absolutely no choice in the matter, damned by the scale of abuse documented in Casey’s report, that an inquiry was finally commissioned.  It should therefore be no surprise that before the inquiry has even begun, it is being undermined.

‘Come undone’, the billboard reads. Two hands are clasped together. On another a blonde-haired woman lies prone on a fuzzy peach mattress, her hands tightly gripping the sheets. ‘Drive me mad’, implores the caption. In theatres Valentine’s Day 2026. Despite appearances, this isn’t the latest boilerplate steamy romance for women to drag their boyfriends to in February, but the official marketing for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. The trailer, released on Thursday, sets the tone for an apparent massacre of Emily Brontë’s magnum opus. It opens with a shot of Aussie heart-throb Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, sucking the fingers of erstwhile Barbie Margot Robbie while her not-insubstantial breasts heave out of an anachronistic corset.

After Reform promised to repeal the Online Safety Act, it didn’t take long for Labour to defend internet censorship. ‘And get rid of child protections online? Madness,’ Labour MP Chris Bryant tweeted. ‘Why would anyone want to grant strangers and paedophiles unfettered online access to children?’ asked Mike Tapp. Science Minister Peter Kyle went one step further, declaring that anyone opposing the Online Safety Act – including Reform leader Nigel Farage – is ‘on the side of Jimmy Savile’. Labour’s latest attack ad reads: ‘Farage’s Reform party would scrap laws keeping children safe online’. How dare Farage try to turn back the tide of progress like this, returning the UK to the dystopian hellscape of... last week?

Henry Cole, the first director of what would become the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), could never have imagined that in his place would follow a man who seems determined to rail against the safeguards that have helped keep the museum's collection intact. But this, sadly, appears to be the task Tristram Hunt is committed to. Hunt knew the law before he took the job Hunt, director of the V&A since 2017, has declared the 1983 National Heritage Act which prevents him from returning artefacts to their country of origin, to be ‘outdated and infantilising’. In fact, it is a key reason why collections, including the V&A's, have been maintained. Britain is home to several thousand museums.

Sir Keir Starmer claimed in January that those who were concerned about the systematic rape and abuse of little girls were ‘calling for inquiries because they want to jump on a bandwagon of the far right’. Yesterday, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, promised that victims would finally get the full national inquiry which campaigners have been demanding for so many years. If Starmer has any sense, he will bring out his party’s bodies willingly before he is forced to Cooper’s statement in the Commons was relatively encouraging. She conceded that much of the (admittedly shoddy) data around child grooming points to ‘clear evidence of overrepresentation amongst suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage men’.

Who says that student activism is pointless? Setting up a tent, donning a keffiyeh, and camping out on your university’s front lawn might look like a waste of time, but at Cambridge it's a strategy that pays off. King's College – which has been repeatedly targeted by pro-Palestinian protestors – has agreed to cut ties with arms companies. The college announced that it will divest money from weapons manufacturers after its governing body voted to 'adopt a new responsible investment policy'. King's College – which has been repeatedly targeted by pro-Palestinian protestors – has agreed to cut ties with arms companies In an email sent to students on Tuesday, King's College said it will now take a ‘principled approach to investments with the values of our community’.