Dark Blue, Indeed?

Baroness Falkner of Margravine and Akua Reindorf KC tear to shreds the draft Conversion Practices Bill. Still, perhaps they are just more delicate flowers at Oxford, or perhaps it is because his students are scientists, but Matt Rattley would have been only moderately eccentric if he had been teaching an arts degree at Durham in better days.

I have never set foot in the City of Oxford, and although I visited the City of Cambridge a few times when an aunt and uncle lived nearby before retiring back to Saint Helena, they had no connection to the University. So I have no boat in the race. I merely observe that Nathan Cofnas, whose only field is not the study of race realism but the thing itself, is obviously trying to relaunch himself at Oxford, where he shows no sign of being rebuffed, specifically by the college from which Lola Salem was suspended. Her story was suppressed over the summer by the distraction of attention to Jason Arday, whose only serious error turns out to have been that he called the Police and Carter Ruck. That was hardly a reason to hound him to his death.

If Cofnas can get in at Oxford, then so can James Orr, sacked as Head of Policy for Reform UK and removed from anything very responsible at Cambridge. Although the restrictions that Orr’s compound is alleged to breach would have been laughed out or met with bemusement even at Durham back in the day. No such strictures existed when most undergraduates were not possessed of the age of majority. How do the Oxbridge authorities think that their colleges originated?

Not that the infantilisation is to stop there. Not only are parliamentary candidates to be “vetted”, bearing in mind that every member of the gigantic 2024 Labour intake had been vetted by Peter Mandelson, but elected MPs and their choices of staff are to be given Enhanced DBS checks, so every morsel of malicious gossip that the Police had ever heard and every anonymous allegation ever sent through the post, before being subjected to “anti-harassment training”. What would count as “harassment”? Stating the reality of biological sex? Insisting on the presumption of innocence in rape cases? What if you failed?

The more pressing need is for drug testing, since in December 2021 cocaine was found in 11 out of 12 powder rooms in the Palace of Westminster on the same randomly chosen evening, Mr Speaker Hoyle promised “full and effective action”, and then nothing happened. But they will not rest until they have a Lanyard Class HR Department that managed MPs, including by allocating their staff out of a central pool of the socially and politically monolithic. Resist.

Enough To Tell You How This Case Is Going To Go

Craig Murray writes:

I am in London at the UK Supreme Court for Huda Ammori’s appeal against the proscription of Palestine Action. Three Jewish groups have been granted intervention rights by the Court (two of them pro-genocide) but no Palestinian group. One of the strongest grounds to contest the proscription was that it entails discrimination against Palestinians. That ground was dismissed at the permission stage and appeal on that ground has been denied throughout.

So the Court will refuse to hear any argument on anti-Palestinian discrimination, a key part of the case, but will hear argument on alleged anti-semitism, which was never in the case and has been brought in by the Court. That, I think, is enough to tell you how this case is going to go. There is in any event almost no chance of a win in the Supreme Court as at present constituted under the right-wing Lord Reed. He has made no secret that he does not believe the courts should contradict the Executive and has excluded from the Court for the last eight years any judge who did not share this view. Forgive my immodesty if I say that my article on this is absolutely essential reading.

I am not sure I will get into the court to report. As the petitioner in the parallel Scottish case which is sisted pending this decision, I applied to the Court that I need to be there to hear the arguments, and asked them to reserve me a seat in the gallery. I received a very dusty reply telling me to stay at home and watch the livestream. I shall try to arrive early to queue for the public gallery, but have been told there may be no seats allocated to the public. If this appeal fails, the government will go ahead with its plans to process the 4,000 people facing terrorism charges for holding placards or wearing T shirts supporting Palestine Action, through juryless kangaroo courts in batches of five, with 36 minutes allotted to each individual, including process and the prosecution case. The UK is bringing more terrorist charges per head than any other country in the world, the majority against aged pacifists. This is absolutely a choice by the Labour Friends of Israel government. Burnham does not have to do this. They do not have to fight the Supreme Court case tomorrow. The interests of the people are utterly subordinate in the UK State to the interests of the State of Israel.

We are still short of money for the Scottish leg of the judicial review. I am sorry to have to keep asking, but I have no choice. The legal bills currently exceed the amount raised to date, largely due to the government succeeding in having our legal crowdfunder closed down. Other donation methods are currently still available even though the CrowdJustice route has been closed. Obviously we now need funds more than ever to carry on.

Beneath Contempt?

As Donald Trump ends aid to Israel while the Democrats get the vote out for Abdul El-Sayed, congratulations to the Labour Party on being far to the right of both main parties in the United States.

Who is behind that? The spooks? MI5 is to be investigated by the Police for misconduct in public office. Still, if lying to three courts was not contempt, then Rajiv Menon KC has certainly not committed it, either.

Picking At The Scab

The stocks are sold, the Press is squared, the middle class is quite prepared for the only thing even worse than being back in the EU, namely being bound by its rules without having so much as the tiniest say over their content. We are to be a colony, a satrapy, a vassal state, back in the Customs Union and in Margaret Thatcher’s Single Market. If Switzerland is indeed to be the model, then we are even going to be joining the Schengen Area. There will of course be no referendum. We are ruled by people to whom the vote is a nice thing to have, but who got their way by other means every day, so they did not really need it. If 60 per cent of the laws to which they were subject were made without the formal participation of their elected representatives, well, those were still going to be the laws that they themselves wanted, because that was how the world worked. We on the Left have been telling you this forever, as Paul Knaggs still is:

Andy Burnham did a great job picking at the scab, and social media is the new frontline where the Brexit wound refuses to close. A decade on from the referendum, the die-hard Rejoiners are still weeping into their timelines, crying “Bregret” and sneering about “Brexshit” as if their surface-level understanding of the European Union were an intellectual badge of honour. Their historical amnesia is almost comedic. It was Ted Heath and the Tory establishment that dragged Britain into this neoliberal architecture in the first place, yet a certain brand of comfortable liberal still treats a corporate, right-wing trading bloc as if it were an international peace commune. Their contempt is not really for a treaty. It is for the people who dared to vote the wrong way.

There is a peculiarly British arrogance that only surfaces when the establishment loses an argument to the public. It retreats immediately into the small print. The loudest voices no longer sit in Whitehall committee rooms; they lurk on social media, clutching the word “advisory” with the smug satisfaction of a clerk who has found an expired parking voucher. You know the profile: the constellation of yellow stars, the “Still European” bio, the reflex reply insisting the 2016 vote was merely a glorified opinion poll. Leaving a treaty organisation no more makes you un-European than resigning from a Pall Mall club removes you from London. But this was never about geography. It was about belonging to a professional class that wears its virtue as a badge and its defeat as a personal insult.

Ask yourself a straight question: suppose Remain had scraped over the line by a single postal vote in Oxfordshire. Would these same voices have spent ten years demanding that Parliament rip up the result? Would they have dismissed their own victory as an “advisory” suggestion? Not on your life. A Remain victory would have been declared the settled will of the nation, carved into granite and placed permanently beyond appeal. The crime of 2016 was that the working class broke the script. The former pit villages and steel towns, written off by polite society for forty years, walked into polling stations and voted the wrong way. From that moment on, the asterisk became more sacred to the establishment than the ballot paper.

THE PROMISE IN THE SMALL PRINT 

Since the Rejoiners are so fond of facts, let us deal with theirs. Yes, the referendum was legally advisory. The European Union Referendum Act 2015 contained no clause compelling the Government to act on the result. Nobody serious disputes it. But before a single vote was cast, David Cameron’s government spent £9.3 million of public money sending a leaflet to households across the country. It said, in plain English: “This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide.” It did not say “we will take your views into account”, nor “subject to approval by people who know better”. It said implement.

Parliament then did exactly what the constitution requires. After the Supreme Court ruled in the Miller case that ministers needed Parliament’s authority to trigger Article 50, MPs passed the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017, by 498 votes to 114 at second reading. Theresa May invoked Article 50 on 29 March 2017. Weeks later, both main parties fought a general election on manifestos pledging to respect the result. That is not a mob trampling the constitution. That is the constitution working. A vote can have no automatic legal force and still carry full democratic legitimacy. The Remoaners have spent a decade pretending not to know the difference.

THE BUS, THE MARGIN AND RUSSIA 

Push a Remainer past the advisory argument and the arithmetic, and you get three more excuses: the bus, the margin and, when all else fails, Russia.

The Arithmetic

The arithmetic of the sore loser, endlessly recycled online: “only 37 per cent of the electorate voted Leave.” Correct, 37.4 per cent. And 34.7 per cent voted Remain, a figure that never makes it into the thread. The 27.8 per cent who stayed at home voted for nothing, yet we are invited to file their silence under Remain. Of those who did vote, 51.9 per cent chose Leave, a margin of almost 1.27 million votes, on a turnout of 72.2 per cent. That turnout was higher than at any general election since 1992. Apply the Rejoiners’ test consistently and no modern British government survives it.

The Margin 

Then the margin. Fifty-two to forty-eight, we are told, is far too narrow for constitutional upheaval. The European Union itself was built on less. In September 1992, France ratified the Maastricht Treaty, the treaty that created the EU, by 51.05 per cent to 48.95, a thinner margin than Brexit. Three months earlier, Denmark had rejected it outright, by fewer than 47,000 votes. Brussels did not treat that as the sacred will of the Danish people. Denmark was handed a package of opt-outs and asked to vote again, and in May 1993 it gave the right answer. A narrow vote, it seems, is a solid foundation when it builds the European Union and a constitutional outrage when it leaves it. Labour’s 2024 landslide rested on roughly one registered voter in five. Strangely, nobody called his government advisory.

The Bus 

Every campaign has its slogans, and the £350 million on the side of a bus was one of them. It was hardly a secret weapon. The UK Statistics Authority publicly called the figure misleading weeks before polling day, and the bus was picked apart on the news night after night. To claim that 17.4 million adults heard all that and still voted on the strength of a bus is not analysis. It is contempt with a footnote. And if campaign exaggeration voids a result, the Remain side should look at its own record. The Government spent £9.3 million of public money pushing its case through letterboxes. George Osborne stood in a DIY warehouse and declared that “a vote to leave will push our economy into a recession”, with half a million jobs lost and a punishment budget of tax rises and spending cuts to follow. The recession never came. Philip Hammond scrapped the punishment budget within weeks of taking over at the Treasury.

The Russians

Which brings us to Russia, the Remainers’ last resort. Very well, let us talk about Russian money and the British press in 2016. Two newspapers told their readers to vote Remain: the Independent and the Evening Standard. Both had been bought by Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB officer once posted to the Soviet embassy in London, and both were run by his Moscow-born son, Evgeny. Nobody sensible thinks that made Remain voters Kremlin stooges. But apply the Remoaners’ own rule, under which any Russian connection anywhere near a campaign is proof of a plot, and they have some explaining to do. Strangely, the rule only ever seems to point one way.

As for the material case for our departure, one could fill volumes citing the socialist giants who warned for decades that the European project was an engine of corporate power, from Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan to Tony Benn, Peter Shore, Barbara Castle, Michael Foot and Dennis Skinner. They understood that you cannot build a democratic socialist commonwealth if your economic policy is permanently policed by an unelected commission in Brussels. But strip away the constitutional theory, and the core of the matter remains what it has always been: it is the economy, stupid. The working class did not vote to defend abstract statutes; they voted against forty years of managed decline, wage stagnation and the deliberate sacrifice of domestic industry to global capital.

Dislike the result if you must. Campaign to reverse it, and win the argument if you can. That is your democratic right. What you are not entitled to do is pretend that one word in a statute cancels a government’s promise, an Act of Parliament and the votes of 17.4 million people. In the Remoaners’ democracy, the people are sovereign when they vote correctly and merely advisory when they don’t. The ballot was never their problem. The voters were.

Uncivil Partnerships

Carla Lockhart resigned from the DUP 40 years to the day after Ruairí Ó Brádaigh had led his supporters out of the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis to constitute the Republican Sinn Féin that has one council seat in Galway and no other elected representation anywhere. There is a message in that somewhere. And such walkouts seem to be in season. Never mind whether Haley Stevens now agreed with Mike Rogers. What do he and the Republican Party find so welcome about any endorsement by her?

Similarly, since Labour is prepared to collapse the local government of 11 council areas, including the tenth largest city in the country, out of loyalty to a foreign state, then many people might reasonably ask why it had previously found the Green Party an acceptable coalition partner. But at least as good a question is why the Greens had been prepared to do so such deals with Labour. And the answer is that, again rather like Sinn Féin, as soon as they are in office rather than in opposition, then they vote giddily for cuts and austerity. Their conduct of successive bin strikes was so union-busting that anyone would have thought that Brighton and Hove was a Labour council at the time.

The state without whose approval the governing party of the United Kingdom refuses to enter into municipal cooperation still supports the Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands, having armed Argentina during the Falklands War. On 1 April 2024, it killed James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman, unarmed British veterans who were delivering humanitarian aid, whom it bombed three times to make sure that they were dead, as could not have been an accident.

Britain has named and condemned the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, an ideology that gave rise to ethnic cleansing must by definition be racist, Britain has welcomed the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, Pillay chaired the Commission of Inquiry that found Israel to be committing genocide in Gaza, an ideology that gave rise to genocide must by definition be racist, and an ideology that forbade coalition with parties for which the wrong ethnic group had voted is racist no matter how many people adhered to it.

In any case, Jews are half of one per cent of the United Kingdom’s population, and a third or more of that tiny minority does not identify with Zionism. There are no more than 200,000 Zionist British Jews, less than a fifth of the 943,598 votes for the BNP at the 2009 European Elections. Yet the Labour Party did not allow that to dictate its arrangements for the administration of any local authority. Think on.

And The Bill Comes Home To Us

Reform UK shows that it knows that its supporters are not the strivers of the petit bourgeoisie and the skilled working class. As with the 2024 summer rioters, look at the Blackshorts of Daniel Thomas and you just know that neither you nor anyone else would employ them, as no one did, since they had nowhere else to be.

Labour also knows its base. During the pandemic, £1.7 billion was spent on PPE from VIP lane suppliers. One billion pounds’ worth of it was found to be unfit for use. Remember that most Conservative of VIP lanes as we watch the traffic along the most Labour of them, the much shorter period to qualify for indefinite leave to remain if you were paid an oddly precise £50,271 per year or more, at least for now. On what those VIPs will bring, Paul Knaggs writes:

A bed in a British care home now costs a family about £1,300 a week. The woman who washes, feeds and turns the person in it earns £12.71 an hour. Somewhere between those two numbers sits the owner. The last time anyone forced the books open, the biggest private equity chains were paying £102 a week on every bed just to service their debts, much of it owed to their own related companies offshore. That is not a care system. It is a toll booth on the last years of our parents’ lives.

On Monday the Home Secretary told the Commons that overseas care workers who have met their visa conditions will keep their five-year route to settlement. She praised those who “worked hard and answered our call when we needed them.” In March, Shabana Mahmood told the Institute for Public Policy Research that unless she rewrote the settlement rules, Britain would “see a £10 billion drain on our public finances”. On Monday, in the Commons, she rewrote them the other way. The Tories called it a surrender.

What the £10 billion actually measures 

The figure comes from a Home Office research note published on 5 March. It takes the Migration Advisory Committee’s estimates of the lifetime fiscal impact of care workers who arrived in 2022/23. That works out at roughly £36,000 net cost per worker and £67,000 per adult dependant. The note then multiplies those figures by the number expected to settle between 2026 and 2030: about 117,000 care workers and 79,000 adult dependants. The result is £9.5 billion, spread across the rest of their lives.

That is not the price of Monday’s decision. The Liberal Democrat MP Max Wilkinson asked the UK Statistics Authority to examine the claim. The Authority confirmed with the Home Office that it is the lifetime cost of this group under the existing rules. It added that a clearer statement would have shown the figure is not an estimate of the fiscal savings associated with delaying settlement. To be fair to the Home Secretary, the Authority also concluded that her speech met its standards. 

In plain terms, the £9.5 billion compares these people settling with these people not being here at all. A 15-year wait would never have saved that sum. At most it would have postponed some entitlements, and only for workers still in the country after a decade and a half of insecurity. The Commons needed one number: the cost difference between the five-year route and the 15-year one. Nobody has published it.

The estimate is also lopsided over time. According to the Migration Observatory, health and care workers become a net fiscal cost only after about 30 years. The bill arrives in old age, as pensions and NHS treatment, as it does for anyone. When the IPPR applied the Home Office’s own method to all skilled workers due to settle in the same period, it found they will put £115 billion more into the public finances than they take out.

For a day Westminster argued about the carers. Nobody mentioned the Care Home owners. That silence is the story. Britain didn’t stumble into dependence on overseas care workers. It sold its care homes, starved the people working in them, imported a cheaper and more compliant workforce to fill the gap, and has now sent the public the bill. Every step was a political choice, and both main parties made them.

Care Home Privatisation: How the State Walked Out 

In 1979 councils and the NHS provided nearly two-thirds of Britain’s residential and nursing home beds. By 2012, according to research drawn together by SOAS, the state’s share had fallen to around 6 per cent. The turning point was Margaret Thatcher’s NHS and Community Care Act 1990, which made councils buyers of care rather than providers. Labour and the coalition both kept the model running.

Once care became a market, finance followed. Southern Cross grew by selling its homes and leasing them back. In 2011 it collapsed with 752 homes, 44,000 staff and 31,000 residents, whose fate passed to its landlords. Nobody went to prison, and the model didn’t die. It grew.

The Centre for Health and the Public Interest examined the accounts of more than 830 care home companies. It found that the five largest chains backed by private equity had borrowed £35,072 for every bed they owned, often from related companies in Jersey, Guernsey and Luxembourg, at interest rates that turned public fees into tax-deductible payments to their owners. Across the whole independent sector, the CHPI estimated that £1.5 billion a year leaked out as rent, interest, profit and directors’ pay. Now the buyers are bigger still. In October 2025 the American property trust Welltower bought Barchester’s care home portfolio for £5.2 billion, the largest care home deal in history, alongside the whole of HC-One for £1.2 billion. The Barchester homes are rented back to their operator on a lease with rent rising 3.5 per cent every year. A British investment minister welcomed it.

Migrant Care Workers: How the Sector Came to Depend on Them 

Something had to give, and it was the wages. Councils pay providers below cost, and families paying their own way cover the gap: the competition watchdog found self-funders paid 41 per cent more than councils for the same bed. Owners collect their rent and interest whatever happens. The squeeze falls on the payroll. A care worker with five years’ experience now earns, on average, 10p an hour more than someone who started last week. British workers did the sensible thing and left. Last year there were 140,000 new British starters in the sector, down from 255,000 five years earlier, while 175,000 people walked out.

The government’s answer wasn’t to raise pay. In 2022 Boris Johnson’s government opened the health and care visa to care workers. Between March 2022 and March 2024, around 185,000 people started direct care jobs after arriving from abroad, and another 50,000 followed in 2024/25. Each visa was tied to a sponsoring employer. A worker who complained could lose the right to stay. The Home Secretary says about 1,800 employers have since lost their licences for exploiting the people they recruited. Cheap labour and compliant labour went together. In 2025 the door was closed to new recruits. The workers already here were left as a political problem, and on Monday Mahmood decided what to do with them.

How They Sent Us The Bill 

She made the right call on the people. These workers kept their side of a bargain the British state offered them. Moving the goalposts years after they arrived would have been shameful, and this paper says so plainly. But the decision deals with the workers and leaves the business model untouched. That’s why the public is paying again, and in more ways than one.

We pay at the front door. Families sell homes to meet fees that rise faster than pensions, and in doing so subsidise the council-funded residents next door. Councils pay from council tax and grants. In just three English regions, the North East, South Yorkshire and the West Midlands, private care providers took £256 million in profit between 2021 and 2024, including £45 million in dividends and £33.6 million in interest. Up to 60 per cent of that interest went to private equity and tax-haven owners.

We pay for the clean-up. Under Monday’s plan, the state will help workers abandoned by rogue sponsors find “a legitimate provider”, and run the extra visas and checks needed to do it. The private failure is tidied up at public expense.

And we pay at the end. The Home Office’s own £9.5 billion figure, which the Tories are waving about, is not the cost of Monday’s decision. The UK Statistics Authority has confirmed it is the lifetime cost of this group settling under the existing rules. Most of it is the pension and NHS care of people who spent their working lives on the legal minimum wage. It isn’t the price of migration. It’s the price of poverty pay, collected decades after the owners banked the savings.

Against all that, the government has promised a Fair Pay Agreement backed by £500 million in 2028/29. Spread across the workforce, analysts estimate it comes to roughly 20p an hour. One American property trust spent ten times that on a single British care chain. Look at who is asked to give something up. The workers wait for their settlement. Families pay their fees. Councils make cuts. The owners give up nothing: no clawback from failed sponsors, no levy on extraction, no duty even to say where the money goes.

This is the model, and care homes are only the end of it. The post-war settlement promised the working class security from the cradle to the grave. The market has kept the phrase and changed its meaning. Nine of the ten largest childcare providers are now backed by private equity. The competition watchdog has warned that the companies running children’s homes are carrying heavy debts while charging councils high fees. At the other end of life, the same financial engineering runs through the care home. From the nursery to the deathbed, every stage at which a human being needs looking after has been turned into a revenue stream, and every vulnerable person into a yield. 

Somehow we must find a way of taking the care of people back out of the market, and of saying that some things are not for sale: the raising of a child, the comfort of the dying, and the dignity of the people who do that work. That isn’t sentiment. It’s a choice about who owns the places where we begin and end our lives, and it can be made again.

Public Ownership Is Cheaper: The Case Stated 

The defenders of the market will say private capital built the beds when councils couldn’t, and that many small family-run homes operate honestly on thin margins. Both points are true, and neither answers the charge. Private capital came because the state was forbidden to build. Private equity borrows at interest rates far above what the state pays on its own debt, then charges the public for the difference. Public ownership isn’t nostalgia. It’s cheaper. 

So start where the case is strongest. When an operator fails or is caught extracting, its homes should pass to councils or to not-for-profit ownership, not to the next fund in line. Councils should be given back the capital to build and run homes of their own. Any provider taking public money should open its books, and related-party loans charged against care beds should be outlawed. And caring should be paid as the profession it is, with a national pay scale that rewards experience and training paid for by the state. If we call it a vocation, we should pay it like one.

We built council homes and a national health service when this country was poorer than it is now. Looking after the generation whose shoulders we stand on is not too hard for us. We simply sold it. We let the market take our care homes and then imported the people to work them. Now the carers stay, the owners walk away, and the bill comes home to us.

The Pits

Camilla Turner writes:

Andy Burnham has been accused of betraying miners over a pension scheme U-turn. Ministers had indicated to backbenchers that a £1.2bn payout to surviving miners and their widows from the controversial Guarantor’s Fund pension scheme would be announced in the Budget. The fund was set up in 1994 after the Government intervened to underwrite miners’ pension payments following the privatisation of British Coal. In return for providing a guarantee, the Government gained half of any surplus generated by the scheme’s investments, a deal that had netted the state almost £8bn by 2024. 

Labour has long backed calls for the Government’s share to be paid out to miners. However, in an apparent last-minute about-turn, ministers declined to sign an agreement allowing the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme (MPS) payout to be released immediately. A letter signed by a dozen Labour backbenchers criticised the decision: “We understand the fiscal pressures on the Treasury, however, in light of the facts, we cannot see a justification for withholding money that belongs to scheme members alone.” 

Before becoming Prime Minister, Mr Burnham called the situation “a disgrace and an injustice” and pledged that if he were in a position to do more he would “keep fighting to make sure every promise is honoured and every penny reaches the people it is meant for”. In its 2024 election manifesto, Labour promised to “end the injustice”, and subsequently returned £1.5bn to the 100,000 surviving members of the MPS. It also handed back £2.3bn to around 43,000 members of the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme (BCSSS), who had been managers, engineers and safety officers in the coal-mining industry. The £1.2bn that remains in the Guarantor’s Fund is the balance of what accrued to the Treasury over three decades. 

‘Political distress’ for coalfield MPs

Jon Trickett, a veteran Labour MP and one of the letter’s signatories, told The Telegraph: “I didn’t find the explanation given to me by the Treasury to be plausible. We need an immediate resolution to this matter. Miners and their families are telling me that they feel betrayed.” Another Labour MP said: “There is obvious frustration among Coalfield MPs that this wasn’t sorted. We had been led to believe it had been sorted. They have sorted the BCSSS one.”

A third backbencher added: “Not doing the payout has really caused a lot of political distress for those of us with mining constituents. All the signalling to the MPs and the pension trustees was that they will get the £1.2bn. At the last minute, we got told that it counted against the headroom so couldn’t be done.” Mr Burnham was understood to be “blindsided” by the Treasury’s last-minute decision. On Friday, he insisted that a “big step was taken” in the Budget towards resolving the issues surrounding the MPS. The Prime Minister told broadcasters:

“The commitment is in no way diminished. We will come to a full solution that is about fairness and justice for the miners. The only thing I would say is that, obviously, the Budget didn’t give us all of the room for manoeuvre that we would have wanted and we have been operating in a changing climate. It does have to be scored on the public balance sheet and that is part of the challenge that we’ve got, but there is full commitment here from me, from the Chancellor, to deliver everything that people have waited a long time for, but also what people deserve. And we will. I understand these issues. It wasn’t right for that swipe to be taken from their pension part all of those years ago. We will work and keep going at this until we’ve got a full solution that delivers.”

In a statement, the MPS said: “What the Chancellor has said [in the Budget] is that the Government will ‘ensure the full transfer’ of the undistributed surpluses to members. The trustees are cautious that this is not a guarantee to either do this, or a commitment to a specific timescale.” They added: “The trustees feel strongly that, once again, MPS members are not being treated equally and are receiving a second-class deal.” The Treasury declined to comment.

There is a lot of this sort of thing. For example, Mark Thomas writes:

A fight born from collapse

If you ask most people what they were doing 24 years ago, they will probably struggle to remember. For John Benson and Phil Jones, the answer is immediate: “We were fighting and campaigning for our lost pensions.” These proud Welshmen, now in their eighties and facing ill-health, are still fighting after the collapse of their works pension fund following the failure of their Cardiff-based employer, Allied Steel & Wire (ASW), in 2002. John, Phil and around 1,000 fellow workers lost promised retirement funds when a £21 million pension shortfall was uncovered. It began an epic Dafydd v Goliath battle between determined Welsh steelworkers and successive governments. They have now worked through nine Prime Ministers and numerous Pensions Ministers, including James Purnell, now Burnham’s Chief of Staff. 

From Cardiff to Westminster

Their battle has also coincided with the early history of Wales’s devolved democracy. With Rhun ap Iorwerth, they are now on to the seventh First Minister. In that time, thousands of emails have been sent, petitions submitted to the Senedd, UK Parliament, House of Lords and Number 10, and protests held in Cardiff, London, Brussels and Luxembourg. It is difficult to comprehend the workload they have absorbed, or the mental strength needed to keep going as a small voluntary group. They received many cross-party assurances that their pensions would be restored and justice served. In their view, those commitments were never properly fulfilled. They see echoes of their struggle in the experiences of Post Office workers, WASPI pensioners, victims of contaminated blood, and Grenfell and building safety campaigners.

Protection without full justice

Public pressure eventually led the UK Government to launch the Financial Assistance Scheme and the Pension Protection Fund, securing up to 90% of victims’ basic core pension values. But the payments were not index-linked. Without proper inflation-proofing or coverage for pre-April 1997 service increases, the real-term value of their pensions eroded dramatically. The latest chapter has seen the new UK Labour Government introduce the Pension Schemes Act 2026, addressing pre-1997 service increases with Consumer Prices Index uplifts capped at 2.5%, scheduled for January 2027. But John argues that, compared with what they paid into their ASW scheme, the proposed adjustments still fall far short of full restitution.

The human cost of delay

John and Phil’s determination, despite huge setbacks and what they see as political failures, marks them and their fellow campaigners as exceptional. Their goal is simple: to secure what was rightfully theirs — a decent pension they could live on. Instead, proud colleagues struggled to find work in later life, many forced into low-paid jobs in their 70s and 80s. John himself stacked shelves in Marks & Spencer and loaded passengers’ luggage at Cardiff Airport to make ends meet. Between such jobs, his time was absorbed by campaigning and lobbying. As the years have passed, many colleagues and campaigners have died, often leaving widows to struggle financially. Still, John, Phil and their dwindling band battle on. Like other long-running social justice campaigners, they believe their continued presence is uncomfortable for a political class that may prefer the issue to fade from view. So, they persist, exuding a dignity and camaraderie seldom seen in today’s industrial and commercial world.

A difficult Whitehall meeting

Earlier this year, John and Phil travelled to London to meet the new Pensions Minister, Swansea’s Torsten Bell, to discuss the ongoing crisis and the Government’s response. It was an unusual summit: two elderly former steelmen from Wales’s lost industrial heritage meeting a young policy thinker at the heart of the UK Labour Government. In Whitehall, they were supported by independent Senedd MS Rhys ab Owen, one of the ASW workers’ most eloquent advocates, who had initiated the meeting. Rhys was following in the footsteps of his late father, Owen John Thomas, who had campaigned forcefully for ASW workers in the early years of devolution. It is striking that two generations of Senedd MSs have sought justice that remains unfulfilled. 

Campaigners bound by injustice

John and Phil were joined by Richard Nicholl and Terry Monk, who lost company pensions in a similar scandal. Like them, they have devoted huge parts of their lives to fighting for fellow workers and pensioners. That team spirit, and burning injustice, has bound these men together for so long. The meeting did not go well from the campaigners’ perspective. Bell acknowledged the injustice and agreed that what had happened to the ASW workers was wrong, but his final message was not what the group had hoped for. The response left them disappointed. John later described Bell’s attitude as “arrogant” and says Bell is among the most disappointing Ministers he has encountered in 24 years. His team were also frustrated to learn that Bell would continue in his role as Pensions Minister under the new Burnham administration.

Letters that fall short

In a letter sent in January this year to Mark Drakeford, then Welsh Finance Minister, Torsten Bell accepted the shortfall of the new Government’s response: “I appreciate that this proposal may not go as far as some would like.” In August, the new Secretary of State for Wales, Stephen Kinnock wrote to Phil Jones and acknowledged “that many former ASW workers remain disappointed that the changes do not go further”. It’s difficult to comprehend the crushing impact that these letters have on campaigners. Their sense of understatement is testimony to a government machine that after 24 years, is still able to sidestep a widely acknowledged social injustice.

John contrasts these latest Government responses with a letter he received from former Secretary of State for Wales Cheryl Gillan, written after she left office in 2012. “Dear John, I am so sorry I could not do more for you and your colleagues. IT IS SO WRONG.” John and Phil met her by chance years later in Westminster’s Portcullis House while meeting Labour MP and trade unionist Jack Dromey. John recalls Dame Gillan saying she still thought about ASW Cardiff and could not understand why the workers had been treated so unfairly.

Two decades of political promises

Talking to John, Phil, Richard, Terry and Alan Marnes, another long-standing campaigner, you realise they have met a “who’s who” of the last two political decades. In Wales alone, the names include Natasha Asghar, Mick Antoniw, Andrew RT Davies, Mark Drakeford, Nick Bourne, Jane Dodds, Mike Hedges, Jane Hutt, Eluned Morgan, Darren Millar, Sam Rowlands, Bethan Sayed and Leanne Wood. In Westminster, they have enjoyed support from Julie Morgan, Jenny Willott, Jonathan Evans, Elfyn Llwyd, Hywel Williams, Liz Saville Roberts and Lord Dafydd Wigley. 

John and Phil are particularly positive about Wales’s new First Minister, Rhun ap Iorwerth, with whom they have previously engaged. But it remains to be seen whether he can change Westminster’s response when so many before him have failed. John’s frustration is often directed at Westminster Labour and Conservative politicians, whom he believes have repeatedly let down his fellow workers. Across the UK Labour and Conservative parties, there is hardly any senior politician they have not lobbied or met. With nine Prime Ministers and numerous Pensions Ministers in the background, their fight is truly epic. John argues that ASW could probably have been saved with a relatively small cash injection to update the plant, contrasting this with recent government support for jobs at Port Talbot and Scunthorpe.

Why some injustices move faster

They also point to the UK Government’s transfer of a £1.5 billion investment reserve back to members of the Miners’ Pension Fund, providing an immediate 32% pension boost. In the campaigners’ view, successive governments have still failed to resolve the ASW injustice. It raises a difficult question about why some causes receive more political attention than others. 

A dwindling band still fighting

For John, Phil and their tight band of campaigners, the fight goes on. Many are now battling the effects of age and ill-health. John recalls a meeting with Pensions Minister Steve Webb at the Welsh Office in London: “Of the seven ASW members who attended, four of those brave fighters have already passed on.” It is still hoped that, after so much effort and pain, the new UK Government will find a way to bring closure to what campaigners regard as a deeply painful case of injustice. As each year passes, the estimated cost appears to decrease, but with so many politicians already come and gone, it remains to be seen. John and Phil fear the latest responses are not encouraging.

Recognition for outstanding Welsh citizens

It is also hoped that some form of official recognition will be shown to John, Phil and fellow long-serving campaigners Richard, Terry and Alan. Their lived demonstration of camaraderie, community and respect for fellow workers sets them apart as outstanding Welsh citizens. None seeks such recognition; their single-minded focus remains the full restoration of their pensions. But whatever the outcome, Wales is a better place for their determination, community loyalty and selfless endeavour.

As for any safety net, let Albert Toth disabuse you:

Nearly 200,000 families will be pushed into poverty or deeper poverty due to Labour’s decision not to end the freeze on housing benefits at the Budget, leading charities have warned. In an open letter to prime minister Andy Burnham, seen by The Independent, groups including the Trussell Trust, Generation Rent and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation say that maintaining the measure will “critically undermine” his commitment to end rough sleeping.

The formula used to calculate housing benefit levels – the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) – has been frozen since April 2024. The mechanism is designed to ensure benefit levels are in line with at least the lowest 30 per cent of rents in any local area. But as market rents have continued to surge, the shortfall between LHA rates and affordable rent hit a record 23.3 per cent in October. This means a shortfall of around £200 a month for renters in London, and £100 a month for the rest of the UK.

She told The Independent: “Basically, you don’t have a life, you’re just existing because all your money is just going to live. It just takes every penny, and especially now with the energy... It gets you down very much because you don't know what's going to happen from one month to the next.” Private renters will be around £700 worse off per year by 2029 without action, figures from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation showed, pulling 50,000 into poverty for the first time. Around 60,000 will also be forced into deep poverty, and 80,000 into very deep poverty, the research indicates.

In the UK, households are in poverty if their income after costs is below 60 per cent of the national average, falling to below 50 per cent for ‘deep poverty’ and below 40 per cent for ‘very deep poverty’. The 19 signatories, also including Shelter and The Salvation Army, have urged Mr Burnham to reconsider the continued freeze, and spend the £1.7bn needed to end it, alongside the introduction of an inflation-linked rent cap to limit rising costs. The letter says: “You have been clear that tackling homelessness is a top priority. These two steps would bring your vision within reach by tackling the cost of rent and ensuring that housing support for those who need it actually covers the cost of a home.”

Holly Williamson, chief executive of Generation Rent, said that it is “hugely disappointing” that the government maintained the LHA freeze. She added: “When housing benefit doesn’t cover the rent it forces families into impossible decisions, traps them in poverty and leaves them vulnerable to homelessness, with councils picking up the pieces. This decision also brings into question the government’s goal of ending rough sleeping, as it will mean there are very few affordable long-term homes for people currently sleeping rough.” 

Joanne, who lives with her 22-year-old daughter and works 10 hours a week at a local supermarket, suffers from fibromyalgia, spondylitis, and is recovering from breast cancer. She says she can’t afford to move to a bungalow because it would cost her even more. “It doesn't take a genius to work out, you know, the landlords are allowed to put their rent up every year, but the price cap doesn't go up. It’s so unfair,” Joanne said. “I just wish whoever makes that decision just lived a couple of months in our shoes, and they'd realise it's not working, it doesn't work.” She has been supported by Citizens Advice, whose research team recently found that more than half (58 per cent) of all privately renting households across Great Britain receiving housing benefit now are not getting enough support to cover their rent.

Ahead of the Budget, the prime minister announced a further £432m towards his pledge to end rough sleeping at a summit with several leading campaigners and frontline charities. This brings the total funding commitment to £874 million, coming alongside an extra £1.5bn for the government’s affordable housing programme. While both announcements were welcomed by experts, many continue to warn that the continued LHA freeze is exacerbating the UK’s housing crisis by pushing more people towards homelessness. There were a record 135,580 families living in temporary accommodation as of March 2026, the most recent official figures show, housing 177,530 children. Councils in England spent a record £2.9bn on temporary accommodation in the year to April, equating to just over £8m a day and marking another record high.

Signatories of the open letter tell the PM that around 8 in 10 (78 per cent) of low-income private renters receiving housing support are now going without essentials, adding that “this reality becomes untenable and they can no longer afford to stay living in their homes, and councils are left to pick up the pieces.” A government spokesperson said: “We’re determined to turn the tide on poverty and ensure people can access secure, affordable homes. That’s why we increased Local Housing Allowance rates in 2024 at a cost of around £7 billion over five years, while also investing over £40 billion in affordable and social housing and launched a £1 billion Crisis and Resilience Fund. Alongside this, our landmark Renters’ Rights Act will protect tenants from unfair rent hikes and bidding wars, while we’re building the homes this country needs to help tackle the root causes of housing affordability pressures.”

And the fact that even Britain’s merely middling level of welfare spending by OECD standards still translated into near-bottom individual benefit generosity and value, is a significant factor in the Poundland crisis in which Robert Jenrick has sought to intervene. In between that and his denunciation of the Boriswave, that member of the Government that denied that any wrong had been done in relation to Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme now tweets:

Today, Reform UK calls on the Government to finally settle the mine workers pension scheme (MPS) and pay its members before Christmas; if it fails to do so, Reform UK commits to doing so within 100 days of entering Government. To the dismay of many, the Chancellor failed to set a clear and unambiguous timetable for resolving the MPS in the Autumn Budget. The Prime Minister was also unable to provide the clarity miners deserve when subsequently questioned.

Enough is enough. Miners and their families have waited too long. Tragically, 18 ex-miners die every day without the fair resolution of this matter they deserve. The members must now be paid by Christmas. If that does not happen, a Reform UK government will end surplus sharing and the standstill mechanism and immediately transfer the undistributed surplus funds (including the Guarantor’s Fund) to MPS members. No more messing around. Miners can be assured that they will get the resolution they have been denied until now under a Reform UK Government.

Rt Hon Robert Jenrick MP, Reform UK Shadow Chancellor 

Lee Anderson MP, Reform UK Chairman