Thank You For Paving The Way

Peter Oborne, no less, writes:

We are seeing today a surge in heretical media outlets including Novara, Doubledown News, Drop Site, Byline Times, Middle East Eye – and of course Declassified UK. 

We have emerged thanks in part to a growing appreciation that the mainstream media is broken, cannot be trusted, and is far more likely to disseminate falsehood than tell the truth. 

So it is only fair to wish a happy 25th birthday to the earliest of these dissident outlets – Media Lens. 

Media Lens first published in July 2001. The timing was perfect, with George W Bush starting to mobilise ahead of the Iraq invasion.

Media Lens recorded how Bush’s United States softened up reporters and editors as Tony Blair made the ‘moral case’ for war. 

It showed how journalists had played down the mass deaths of Iraqi children from sanctions and ignored the devastating effects of bombing infrastructure (such as the wrecking of schools and power plants). 

The Daily Telegraph dismissed the impact of sanctions as an ‘allegation’ dreamt up by “Left-wing activists, Arab nationalists and Muslim extremists”. 

Vindication?

When foreign secretary Jack Straw and US President Bill Clinton claimed that Saddam Hussein had booted the weapons inspectors out of Iraq, with few exceptions British reporters went along with the lie.

Authoritative sources, such as the former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, strongly challenged the official narrative. They were ignored. 

And when the tanks finally rolled into Baghdad, British journalists worked overtime to hail the ‘vindication’ (the term used by Mark Mardell and Nicholas Witchell of the BBC as well as John Irvine of ITN) of Tony Blair. 

Andrew Marr stood outside Downing Street to proclaim that Tony Blair “stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result.” 

Media Lens recorded all of this (and much more) in regular bulletins. It also wrote emails to reporters asking for an explanation of why their reports had omitted relevant facts, promoted obvious falsehoods or told only one side of the story. 

These letters were polite and thoughtful, and all the more deadly for that. Some recipients failed to answer, some engaged (they tended to lose the argument) and others resorted to abuse. 

In 2007, Media Lens won the Gandhi Foundation International Peace Award. John Pilger explained that “Without Media Lens during the attack on and occupation of Iraq the full gravity of that debacle might have been consigned to oblivion and to bad history.” 

Libya

After the invasion of Iraq, Media Lens documented the lies peddled about Libya, including the unevidenced claim from US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice that Colonel Gaddafi was supplying viagra to his troops to facilitate a campaign of mass rape, and the discredited warning that the Libyan dictator was planning a genocide in Benghazi. 

When the Gaddafi regime fell, mainstream journalists duly noted that David Cameron, architect of the fiasco alongside Nicholas Sarkozy, had been ‘vindicated’ (the inevitable term deployed Ian Pannell and Norman Smith of the BBC). 

The BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson voiced the same sentiment as Andrew Marr, though with different language: “Libya was David Cameron’s first war. Col Gaddafi his first foe. Today his first real taste of military victory.” 

Media Lens went on to expose the lies, falsehood and hypocrisy employed by British journalists against Jeremy Corbyn. It documented the smear campaign against Julian Assange. 

Media Lens has been accused of being ‘useful idiots’ for taking the side of dictators. They responded that although “we hold no candle whatever for Gaddafi, and had never expressed a scintilla of support for him, [it] mattered not at all.”

Exposing liberal bias

Media Lens mainly ignored the blatantly biased reporting of the right-wing press repeating official propaganda. 

Instead of these easy targets like the Daily Mail, they focussed on progressive or centre left media which boasted of its objectivity and impartiality, especially The Guardian and the BBC. 

Here, Media Lens was performing an important function. Mainstream media plays an important role in shaping public understanding of events, yet there has long been an unwritten rule (“dog does not bite dog”) that journalists do not challenge colleagues.

For quarter of a century Media Lens has held sloppy or biased reporting to account. This made it very unpopular. 

Its work has never been more relevant than today in the wake of the momentous reporting failures of the Gaza war and the US/Israeli attack on Iran that have left many British broadcasters and newspapers complicit in war crimes. 

It is a remarkable achievement for a two man team, neither of whom has a background in journalism.

David Edwards is a former teacher while his colleague David Cromwell holds a doctorate in solar physics, is an expert in oceanography and at one stage worked for oil giant Shell. 

His scientific knowledge gives special credibility to a long standing focus of Media Lens work; climate change. 

It has long sought to challenge the media failure to take the existential threat posed by climate change at all seriously, or to expose the financial backers of campaigns for climate change denial. 

As usual one prime target has been The Guardian. As with foreign affairs, Media Lens has been, to coin a phrase, vindicated. 

I want to acknowledge a personal debt to Edwards and Cromwell. When they started out I was an occasional target of their courteous but deadly bulletins. 

There is a good rule in life that while praise is pleasant, you can learn from criticism. 

So I studied their analysis carefully and concluded that, more often than not, the rebuke was well-deserved. 

Over time Media Lens has educated me to become more sceptical and reexamine my instinctive belief that Britain was a force for good. 

Recent history shows they have been correct about most of the great issues of our age. From the Iraq War to Climate Change, from Assange to the NHS, Media Lens has made the right call. 

Meanwhile the British media, security and political establishment have made a habit of being calamitously wrong. 

Thank you, Messrs Edwards and Cromwell, for paving the way.

On Past Experience, However

Even in The Guardian, Nils Pratley writes:

Anybody who followed the supposed “clampdown” on bankers’ bonuses after the great financial crash in 2008 knew what to expect when water company bosses became a similar target for a bash in the bonus department. We would see the waterbed principle in action: when you push down in one area of remuneration, such as the performance-related stuff, another tends to go up.

Back in the day, banks invented “role-based allowances” – salary top-ups – to “compensate”, as they put it, their top earners for being subject to EU caps on bonuses. No executive was seriously inconvenienced by forgoing the chance of an astronomical (but not guaranteed) bonus and getting a smaller (but still hefty) increase in fixed pay instead. Some even preferred greater certainty over what they would take home.

In water-land, the Labour government arrived in 2024 promising to “ban the payment of bonuses to polluting water bosses until they have cleaned up their filth”, which generated a few pleasing headlines. But the flaw in the resulting Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 was obvious. While the regulator for England and Wales, Ofwat, was given powers to block performance-related bonuses at the worst environmental and financial miscreants, it could do nothing formally about other payments.

Thus – surprise, surprise – salary increases, allowance awards and, most of all, retention payments have proliferated. After the English and Welsh companies published their annual reports last month, this newspaper found that overall reported pay packets rose by 1.5% to £25.3m for chief executives and chief financial officers for the year. It was the second year in a row that a bonus ban had resulted in higher overall pay across the sector.

One can usually rely on Thames Water to muddy things further, and its post-annual report contribution was the news that the chief financial officer, Steve Buck, who was paid £591,000 in the financial year to March, got a delayed £1m signing fee at the end of July. As for retention payments for other executives that were “paused” after a political kerfuffle a year ago, the company has “entered into 14 agreements” to “resolve its liability for any potential claims”.

The government is shocked, or pretends to be. “It is unacceptable that one of the worst-performing water companies is handing out huge payments to its executives when it should be focusing on improving performance and rebuilding public trust,” a spokesperson for the environment department said.

Again, though, one must ask: what did ministers think would happen? It’s easy to agree that executives of underperforming monopolies are grossly overpaid but it was fantastically naive on the part of politicians to think a ban on bonuses would not result in alternative wheezes. It was predictable.

Water companies in general have deployed the retention manoeuvre in less-than-transparent – or just shameless – ways, it should be added. Helen Campbell, the interim executive director of Ofwat, was clearly correct last month when she complained that customers’ trust is harmed when remuneration committees make decisions that “give the appearance of circumventing the rule” or aren’t explained.

The point, though, is that the government left the door wide open to such behaviour. If ministers were relying on remuneration committees to obey the “spirit” of their reforms, they were born yesterday. Restricting bonuses is not the same as restricting overall pay. And Ofwat can use only the powers it was given by parliament.

The dance now moves to the regulator’s review, due in the autumn, of whether the rules should be strengthened. Maybe it will yield something different in the prime minister Andy Burnham’s undefined era of “greater public control”. On past experience, however, believe it when you see it.

Incorporating the Labour and Trade Union Review

Labour Affairs opines:

In his speech in Manchester on 29th June, Andy Burnham made some interesting proposals.

He wants all parts of the UK to be able to take greater public control of essential services like water, housing, energy and transport. He also pledges 10-year plans to bring down the cost of these essentials to individuals, families and businesses.

He proposed that regions would be supported to set clear and credible industrial ambitions, with support to achieve them, encouraging more cross-UK partnership between places with complementary industrial clusters. He also wants to shift public procurement so British-based companies are in a better position to win contracts and to protect sovereign manufacturing and production capability across the country in critical sectors like steel, defence, energy, food and farming.

He plans the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period, using vacant public land to reduce costs. This is framed around adopting a national Housing First philosophy pioneered in Finland, plus higher density residential development in towns and business rates reform to support community-building pubs and high street businesses. He linked this to childhood memories of a “secure” council home as a foundation of working-class aspiration that has since been lost.

On education, he calls for ending a school system configured almost entirely around the university route, building instead genuine parity between academic and technical education. He also wants more 45-day work placements and apprenticeships for young people.

Would the outgoing Starmer/Reeves administration have had much disagreement with proposals like this? Probably not with the objectives themselves, but it would have had grave concerns about the methods used to deliver them. According to Burnham, the overarching mechanism is a new “No. 10 North” operation based in Manchester, intended to redistribute power from Whitehall to the regions and nations of the UK.

It is certainly true that progress in improving living standards outside London has been dismal. Burnham associates this failure with the concentration of power in a remote and poorly informed Westminster and Whitehall. Yet this mistakes the symptoms for the underlying cause.

The central problem is not that too much power resides in Westminster. It is that Westminster has voluntarily made its own power dysfunctional by adopting a set of fiscal rules that prevent it from using the capacities that come with issuing the nation’s currency. These rules are a political choice rather than an economic necessity. They treat the British government as though it were financially constrained in the same way as a household, a business or a local authority. It is not.

We saw this clearly with Reeves’ first Budget, where it was argued that winter fuel payments for most pensioners had to be abolished because otherwise the fiscal rules would be breached and confidence in the economy undermined.

Reeves’ entire argument has been that she would like to do many worthwhile things but unfortunately “there is no money.” This ignores the constitutional reality that the United Kingdom is a currency-issuing state. The British government can never run out of the currency that only it can issue. It can always meet liabilities denominated in sterling. It is therefore not financially constrained in the way households, firms or councils are.

This does not mean there are no limits to public spending. There certainly are. But the relevant question is not “Where is the money?” It is “Where are the workers, the skills, the materials and the productive capacity?” The real constraint on a currency-issuing government is the availability of real resources and, ultimately, the risk of inflation if public spending outpaces the economy’s ability to produce goods and services.

Once this distinction is understood, the limitations of Burnham’s proposals become much clearer.

Indeed, an argument could be made that there has already been too much devolution in Britain. Under Margaret Thatcher, and successive Conservative and Labour administrations, much of the state’s capacity to shape economic development has effectively been devolved to private markets, often with disappointing results. The consequences are visible in stagnant regions, deteriorating public services and the growing electoral appeal of parties such as Reform and Restore.

The Bank of England is legally required to ensure that payments authorised by Parliament are settled. Parliament is the legislature of a currency-issuing state. It never has to ask whether sterling is available before authorising expenditure.

Devolved institutions occupy an entirely different position. Councils, combined authorities and any new regional institutions are currency users. Before they can spend, they must first obtain sterling from taxation, borrowing or transfers from central government. Unlike Parliament, they cannot create the currency they spend.

This distinction is fundamental. Devolution may redistribute administrative authority, but it does not redistribute monetary sovereignty. Unless Westminster provides the necessary financial resources, devolved institutions remain constrained by budgets over which they ultimately have little control.

Burnham largely glosses over this distinction. He speaks approvingly of “sound public finances” and of operating within “our current fiscal rules.” Yet these concepts are appropriate for currency users, not for the issuer of the currency itself. For the British state, the relevant question is not solvency but inflation and the effective mobilisation of real resources.

One has the impression that Burnham recognises there is some tension here but has yet to resolve it. By accepting the existing fiscal rules as fixed constraints, he inadvertently accepts the very doctrine that has starved the regions of investment over the past fifteen years.

When implementing the New Deal during the Great Depression, President Roosevelt faced a related administrative question. Large sums were allocated by the federal government to states and counties, but local institutions frequently administered the programmes themselves. Administrative decentralisation proved entirely compatible with monetary centralisation because the financing always came from the federal government, the issuer of the dollar.

One suspects that Burnham has something similar in mind. If so, he must remain absolutely clear about where the money comes from. It comes from the central government, and only the central government, as the issuer of sterling, can focus primarily on mobilising the nation’s real resources rather than worrying about finding the money in advance.

There are at most three years until the next general election. Creating the network of devolved institutions Burnham envisages is far from a trivial undertaking. One suspects that a groan may have gone through the hearts of working people in the impoverished regions when they learned that they would have another layer of bureaucracy to deal with. Many people living in Britain’s struggling regions may reasonably wonder whether another layer of bureaucracy is what they most urgently need. They want secure employment, affordable homes, reliable public services and opportunities for their children.

Devolution may improve democratic accountability and enable policies to be adapted to local circumstances. But it cannot by itself overcome Britain’s economic malaise if the institutions receiving these new powers remain financially dependent upon a central government that continues to behave as though it were financially constrained. 

The decisive question is therefore not where administrative authority is exercised but where monetary sovereignty resides. Unless Westminster abandons fiscal rules that treat the issuer of sterling as though it were merely another currency user, no amount of constitutional redesign will produce the transformation that Burnham seeks. The deeper risk is that, by accepting those rules as immutable facts of economic life rather than political choices, Burnham ends up legitimising the very doctrine that has prevented Britain’s regions from flourishing.

And:

If Andy Burnham is to have any hope of reversing the decline of the Labour Party he needs to have a fairly simple but compelling story. One good story would be inequality. He could say that he is going to reverse the inequality that has developed in the UK in the 47 years since Thatcher first came to power and set about destroying the post WWII political consensus of full employment and good public services.

Such a story would have an immediate appeal to those sections of the working class who are drifting in desperation but somewhat reluctantly towards Reform. It’s also a story in which there is a lot of interest at the moment. Readers will likely be aware of the numerous podcasts by ex City trader Gary Stevenson on the matter. 

Stevenson’s message is that all the assets of society (houses, water, energy, transport etc.) are being bought by the super-rich who then give working people access to these resources at the maximum rent they can extract from them. The super-rich have wealth far in excess of what they can spend in consumption. They use their excess wealth to buy anything that’s for sale. If you sell your house, a super-rich person will always be able to outbid anyone else who’s interested in buying it and then let you live there at an exorbitant rent. Stevenson argues for a wealth tax as a first step towards reducing the inequality that he believes is destroying British society.

Stevenson’s message has been taken up by Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party which seems to favour a wealth tax. Stevenson and Polanski both promote the works of the French economists Gabriel Zucman and Thomas Piketty in this area. Indeed Zucman has just produced a book with the name ‘We need to tax billionaires” in which he proposes an annual wealth tax of 2% on wealth above £100 million.

A tax on the super-rich would certainly be seen as fair. But it would not reverse Labour’s decline unless working people saw a real improvement in their standard of living. There is no obvious reason why a wealth tax would improve their standard of living.

How will a wealth tax allow people to own where they live or to rent good accommodation at a fair price? How will a wealth tax give people secure well paid employment? How will a wealth tax provide the infrastructure that communities need – affordable energy, good transport links, good education and health services?

It won’t. It may reduce the consumption and asset buying powers of the rich a bit, and that is to be warmly welcomed, but it won’t build houses, it won’t make energy cheaper, it won’t refurbish schools and reduce NHS waiting lists. These are problems that can only be addressed by reclaiming the state as a central organizing force in society. Thatcher handed the organization of the essentials of society over to the private sector. The private sector failed to deliver in many areas. Working people have wonderful communication devices but nowhere to live. Burnham must reclaim the role of the state if he is to seriously reverse Labour’s decline. A wealth tax would be a small part of any solution.

In fairness to Burnham, reclaiming the role of the state does seem to have been an important part of the way he went about solving problems in Manchester. His powers to do that would have been limited in Manchester where he would have been financially constrained. In other words, resources may have been unemployed but he would not have had the money to acquire them. But now as the prime minister of a currency creating state he is not financially constrained.

His problem is not where does the money come from. Any expenditure approved by Parliament will be made by the Bank of England. In Manchester, Burnham could see unemployed resources that he did not have the money to employ. Now his problem is where are the resources to do all the things that need to be done to reduce inequality and improve the lives of working people. Where are the builders, plumbers, electricians, roofers to build new homes? Where are the doctors and nurses to improve NHS care?

Rachel Reeves’ great failure was that she saw little role for the state in solving these problems. She relied almost completely on the private sector. She justified the inability of the state to do anything by saying she had no money. Working people saw little improvement in their prospects and in the prospects of their children under Reeves’ tutelage. They registered that fact in the May local elections and within a matter of months Starmer and Reeves will have gone from high office.

Consider the matter of making energy affordable. It should first be noted that energy prices have increased because of the war in Ukraine. That war is a result of the eastward expansion of NATO. The cost of energy has been further exacerbated by the US and Israeli attack on Iran. It would make sense for the UK to try to wrap up the Ukraine war. It is unlikely that Burham will have the ability or inclination to counter the Russophobia that grips the political elite. Burham probably supports the eastward expansion of NATO and agrees that Britain needs to rearm against a revanchist Russia. A first real test for Burnham will be the “Moscow test” – whether he goes further into turning the economy into a war-time one or commits to focussing on social spending. Burnham’s social agenda will be seriously damaged if he does not address the total costs of the UK’s participation, active and passive, in imperial wars.

Consider the matter of making home ownership and renting affordable. A huge home building program would be required. Who would organize it? If Burnham relies on the private sector then homes for the super-rich will be built. Does Burnham have the ability and inclination to reclaim the role of the state in ensuring that there are sufficient good quality affordable homes available? Here we think he may well have the inclination to do something useful. But only if he recognizes that the problem is resources, not money.

Burnham should insist that every secretary of state should have Keynes’ famous dictum hanging on their office walls: “Anything we can actually do we can afford,” meaning that if the resources required to do something exist and are unemployed then the state can always afford to buy them and put them to good use.

If the resources exist but are being used by the private sector what should the state do? For instance if the state needs builders to build social homes but they are all being used by the private sector to build luxury homes for the rich, the state could simply outbid the private sector for these workers. But that would have inflationary consequences which are best avoided. The correct thing is to use regulation or taxation to reduce the demand for these builders by the private sector. It’s often not a simple matter to free up the resources that the state needs to implement what it sees as desirable policies. But the first step is to recognize that it’s a resource problem and not a financial problem.

A lot of what is needed takes time e.g. training construction workers, regulating private house building etc. This is not to say they should not be done but the working class will expect to see some positive results coming through quickly. Among these could be an emergency work programme for unemployed young people and a rapid improvement in bus services. People will notice this and it will make a difference to their lives. Restoring the education maintenance allowance for 16+ youngsters might be a winner along with a campaign to get more SMEs to offer apprenticeships (60% of the workforce, 37% of apprenticeship places).

Burnham should make ending inequality his main public agenda. But he must understand that reclaiming a primary role for the state is his main tool for realizing that agenda. If Burnham makes the same mistake as Reeves, if he refuses to reclaim a much bigger role for the state in organizing the resources of society then the decline of the Labour party under Burnham will continue.

While Damian Smith is being deliberately more, well, see for yourself, but he still makes some important points:

Alarm bells are now ringing loudly over new prime minister Andy Burnham’s lack of any detailed vision for Britain. Yet amid the vague promises of ending the politics of division, and the usual platitudes that Burnham has somehow managed to rebrand as ‘doing politics differently’, he has offered one relatively clear new proposal. Namely, that the UK would have a second No10 in Manchester, and Whitehall’s power would be decentralised and dispersed across the regions. It is, in short, a vision of a devolved and federalised English state.

This is a peculiar prescription for the nation’s ills. No one has asked for such a radical constitutional shake-up. Nearly 30 years of national devolution in the UK have achieved little beyond emboldening regional nationalists who loathe England and Westminster intensely. And beyond Andy Burnham himself, few see local government as benevolent, and certainly don’t want to give it more power.

Indeed, local government is renowned among the British public for its inefficiency, unaccountability and pettiness. I speak daily to hundreds of members of the public in my job in broadcast media, and people certainly get vexed by, say, the senseless handing over of the Chagos Islands, or the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador. But it’s the issues that materially affect people’s day-to-day lives that really get people angry: infrequent bin collections, overzealous parking restrictions sold off to detestable third-party enforcers, 20mph zones, ULEZ, low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) and being fined for pouring coffee down a drain. And yet it’s the bodies responsible for these policies that are to be given more control over our lives under Andy Burnham’s Labour.

I suspect that there are very few members of the general public who want to increase local-government power. Once people realise that Burnham’s devolution plans entail exactly that, they will soon run out of patience with a PM who promises to do things oh-so differently.

Burnham’s plans for English devolution will also further fragment the nation, one already struggling with regional disparities in industry, population, wealth and resources. The reasons why certain towns and areas are poorer than others are complicated, multifaceted and historic. It’s not clear how Burnham’s devolution vision will change this. What sets back Middlesbrough, Blackpool and Redcar now will not change when councils or regional mayors have the ability to tax local residents further.

Furthermore, the consultation process for councils to inform and ask the public what they think of the proposals is desperately wanting. Councils are not required to advertise the consultations, nor are they legally bound to follow the public’s findings. A broken local-media landscape means there will be even less accountability.

Britain is in trouble. The economy is seemingly endlessly stagnant, and sources of common national identity are increasingly thin on the ground. Devolution for Scotland and Wales, and the endless erosion of England’s institutions, mean there is even less to unite the regions today. Burnham’s ultra-regionalised national project will surely only make that situation worse.

The risks of these devolution plans are myriad. If MPs want to get a sense of them, they could do worse than look at the fate of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia over three decades ago. While Britain and England are very different historically, culturally and politically to Yugoslavia, the break-up of the latter during the 1990s should still serve as a partial warning.

In the mid-to-late 20th century, Yugoslavia faced some of the same problems that England faces today. As the Yugoslav economy struggled during the 1960s, Yugoslavia’s leader, Marshal Tito, set up a centrally planned federal wealth fund which slowly ate the country alive from the inside. Wealthier regions paid extra in taxes to give dispensation to the poorer regions. Over time, this simply increased the gap between the rich and poor. Moreover, the wealthier regions of Slovenia and Croatia began to resent the poorer eastern and southern provinces, where abject poverty persisted. By 1980, Tito was dead, and with him a belief in Yugoslavia, and its regional and federalised structure. He left a nation whose constituent parts were increasingly at odds with each other. The writing was on the wall, long before the bloody break-up of the 1990s.

And so a nation vanished, amid economic decline and a rapid deindustrialisation that the state could no longer support. The People’s Republic failed its people and gave way to a vicious ethno-nationalism.

Burnham, of course, is no Marshal Tito, and Britain and England are not Yugoslavia. But in an economically challenged nation, riven with regional disparities and tensions, Burnham’s plan for devolution is only likely to power those forces that would tear us apart.

Permit To Aim

Much is made of the fact that Andy Burnham was a protégé of David Blunkett, but less attention is paid to his having sat at the feet of Tessa Jowell, which makes it almost miraculous that Dawn Butler writes:

How much gambling do you want in your high street? Are you happy with all the betting shops, the problems they cause, the effect on your environment?

It’s worth asking because for years, local councils have been expected to say yes to new gambling venues, even when communities made clear they did not want them. Now, under new rules announced on Monday, that’s about to change. And about time.

Speaking to local residents I hear a clear message time and again: people are fed up with seeing so much gambling where they live, while having little say over whether new venues open.

I knew grappling with this issue would be an uphill battle. The gambling industry is lucrative and deeply embedded in our communities. When I looked into why councils were struggling to stop new betting shops, casinos and adult gaming centres opening, I discovered the problem.

At the heart of it was the outdated “aim to permit” principle in the Gambling Act 2005. It meant councils were effectively working against a presumption that gambling premises should be permitted, leaving them limited ability to say no. This one principle is the root of the crisis on our high streets: it has stripped local people of any real power to shape their own communities, and let the industry expand largely unchecked.

So in 2021 I started my campaign to put power back where it belongs: in the hands of councils and local communities. Today, after years of campaigning, I’m delighted to say that we’ve won.

The government has announced it is scrapping aim to permit, giving councils and communities greater power over what happens on their high streets. This is a huge victory for London, and for communities nationwide. But it took years of pressure and persistence to get here. 

I took a minister to Harlesden high street to see the reality for themselves. I launched a petition so Londoners could make their voices heard. I organised a cross-party letter backed by more than 280 MPs, councillors, mayors and gambling reform advocates, including the then mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham. I took the campaign into parliament too, raising it at prime minister’s questions and leading a debate.

During my summer tour last year, I took the campaign into communities across London, listening to what people wanted to see on their high streets, and meeting families affected by gambling harms, such as the campaigner Jackie Olden, who watched her mother’s life spiral out of control thanks to a slot-machine addiction.

It was a shock to discover how much gambling machines generate: B3 (higher-stakes) gambling machines – essentially slot/fruit machine-style games, found in places such as betting shops, adult gaming centres and casinos – generate an average of £35,000 in gross gambling yield per machine each year – more than the roughly £26,400 a year earned by someone aged 21 or over working 40 hours a week on the national living wage. The scale of the problem is clear in Brent, where gambling premises outnumber supermarkets in 17 of Brent’s 22 wards. We have 81 licensed gambling venues across the borough. For my constituents, this is about improving the places they live and raise their families. People want to be proud of their high streets again.

The consequences of gambling-related harm can be devastating. A 2023 report estimated there could be between 117 and 496 gambling-related suicides in England each year. I’ve worked with campaigners and advocates with lived experience of gambling harm, and highlighted organisations such as Gambling with Lives and Gambling Harm UK, whose expertise helped make the case for reform.

I’m grateful to residents who signed my petition, representatives who backed my campaign, councils including Brent council that pushed for this change, and every reform advocate who helped build momentum. I’m also grateful to Andy Burnham, who followed through on his support by committing to make this bold change.

Our high streets should work for local people – not for companies profiting from harm. No longer should residents feel powerless when they see changes on their doorstep. That is why scrapping aim to permit matters: it will make a real, tangible difference to people’s lives.

With the support of Londoners and campaigners across the country, we fought, organised and delivered. So, this is your chance: take back your high streets. Get involved, hold your council to account – use these new powers to demand and shape the neighbourhoods you deserve.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth or the poor were in a state of stupefaction.

But we have already limited online gambling to five pounds per spin, we have already banned gambling with credit cards, and now this. Next, we need to insist on the use of this new power, to ban Fixed Odds Betting Terminals, and to end the advertising of gambling other than at venues such as casinos and betting shops.

Declined To Quantify

Amy Borrett and Sam Fleming writes:

Long-term sickness may be keeping fewer Britons out of work than previously thought, the Office for National Statistics said, citing early estimates from its overhauled survey of the UK labour force.

In an update on Tuesday, the statistics agency said estimates of types of economic inactivity were responsible for the “largest differences” between its current survey of the labour market and the so-called Transformed Labour Force Survey.

The latter, which the ONS is now aiming to fully introduce at the end of next year, is showing lower levels of inactivity due to long-term sickness than the existing Labour Force Survey, which is used to produce the UK unemployment figures, it said.

The ONS declined to quantify the differences but the findings mirror a 2024 report from the Resolution Foundation think-tank, which concluded that a sharp drop in response rates had led to “an overly pessimistic picture” of the UK jobs market.

The scale of the issue will not be known until the ONS publishes more detailed analysis next year. This is a blow to policymakers who rely on the survey for employment data and to Bank of England officials who use it as a key factor in interest rate decisions.

James Benford, the ONS director-general for economic statistics, said the ONS had changed its survey design to help improve its estimates of why people are out of the workforce.

He said early indications suggested the TLFS was giving “a more clearly defined and lower estimate” of the number of people reporting being long-term sick.

However, the ONS said it needed to conduct more analysis of the estimates as the two surveys use different definitions of long-term sickness.

The ONS has been struggling to repair long-running problems with the existing jobs survey, including a falling response rate. This fell abruptly when Covid lockdowns disrupted face-to-face interviews and stood at 25 per cent in the first quarter of this year.

The ONS said the TLFS was showing “improved performance” with higher response rates, fewer surveys that are only partially completed, and a marked decline in the amount of time required to respond to the questionnaire.

It will decide midway through next year whether to give the green light to a long-delayed switch to the TLFS as the basis for official employment and economic inactivity figures.

Hannah Slaughter, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, said an assessment of the significance of the discrepancies would have to wait for the publication of the underlying data from the TLFS. But she stressed that other indicators point to long-term sickness being a genuine problem and not just a “data quirk”.

“If this is a better measure and long-term sickness is lower that is a good thing — we all want a healthy population — but given the other measures on ill health this is not a reason for policymakers to think it is not an issue.”

Benford was appointed last June to help lead a turnaround at the ONS in the wake of a series of damaging errors in critical economic indicators. He has been working on plans to cut the statistical output to focus on quality over quantity, prioritising investment in a small number of core, market-sensitive datasets.

The UK government has still not appointed a national statistician, more than a year after Sir Ian Diamond stepped down from the role.

The ONS said that the cost of running two surveys on the labour force simultaneously was “increasingly constraining data quality and limiting the ONS’s ability to invest in wider statistics improvements”.

Warnings about budget pressures come as the agency scales up its work on the 2031 census, which will be more costly than expected after the ONS was forced to abandon plans to switch to admin-based estimates last year.

The Country Does Not Need To Be Asked

Paul Knaggs writes:

There is a particular sound a government makes when it has decided to do nothing. It is the sound of listening.

For the rest of this month, the Prime Minister will be moving between market squares, community centres and small business premises, and officials say he will be in “listening mode” as he travels the country to discuss the cost of living. A spokesman promises he will be “getting out of Westminster and meeting people where they are”. The declared subjects are hidden fees, rip-off pricing, tired high streets, everyday hassle. It will all feed into a ten-year plan.

We have seen this exact performance before, and it is worth remembering how it ended. In January 2019, with the gilets jaunes into their ninth weekend, Emmanuel Macron opened his Grand Débat National with a long open letter to the French people. More than ten thousand meetings were held and close to two million contributions gathered. An impressive machine, and a bounded one. Macron had ruled out restoring the wealth tax before the listening began, which is to say the central demand of the people doing the shouting was excluded from the conversation convened to address their shouting. The conclusion, when it arrived, was that the French were exasperated by taxation. The consultation discovered precisely what the consultation had been built to permit.

Burnham’s version has the same architecture, and a tighter deadline.

He does not need to be told what is wrong. He ran Greater Manchester for nine years, and he has had a decade of constituents and small traders telling him, in words of one syllable, that it is the energy companies. He said so himself on television before he had the job. Which is what makes the timing so telling: on 26 August, four days before the tour ends, Ofgem publishes the price cap for October to December. The listening stops. The bill lands. Nothing said in a Wigan shopping precinct in the third week of August will move that number by a single penny, and every person arranging the photographs knows it.

Cost of profit crisis: the name they won’t use

So let us call the thing by its real name, because the name we have been given is a lie of omission.

This is not a cost of living crisis. It is a cost of profit crisis, and that distinction is the whole argument. A cost of living crisis is weather. It happens to you. Nobody is responsible, nobody can be blamed, and that is exactly why the phrase has outlasted four prime ministers. A cost of profit crisis is different. It has beneficiaries. They file accounts. And we can name every one of them.

You can see it for yourself if you just follow a pound out of a working class pocket and watch where it stops.

It goes into a gas bill, and a share becomes profit for a company that owns the pipe. It goes into a water bill, and a share becomes a dividend for a fund in Toronto or Abu Dhabi. It goes into a mortgage payment, and a share becomes a bank’s lending margin. It goes into a shopping trolley, and a share ends up with BlackRock or Vanguard, who own slices of nearly everything on the shelf and the shelf itself. At every link somebody takes a cut, and every cut is booked as success, reported as strong performance, and returned to shareholders.

And here is the part nobody in Westminster wants said aloud: those shareholders are not all in Riyadh. Some of them are in Surrey. On 31 July the FTSE 100 closed at a record high of just under 10,970, driven by oil and mining shares rather than any improvement in the British economy, with energy stocks up more than 15 per cent across the month. AJ Bell forecasts £88.8 billion of FTSE 100 dividends this year and around £40 billion of buybacks.

That index is not an abstraction. It is the middle class pension. It is the ISA, the SIPP, the workplace scheme, the savings account paying decent interest because the Bank of England is holding rates up to fight the very inflation the war created. A comfortable household in the Home Counties has watched its grocery bill rise and its portfolio rise faster. The markets love chaos. Chaos is priced in, hedged, and distributed upwards.

Which is why, when Burnham says the country is struggling, you have to ask which country he means. There are two of them now, and one is having a rather good year.

The other one is where the wheels keep turning and the bills keep climbing. The pint costs more because the brewery’s energy costs more, the pub’s uncapped business tariff costs more, and the wholesaler’s diesel costs more. The loaf costs more for the same reasons. There is no separate food crisis, no separate housing crisis, no separate high street crisis. There is one crisis with one shape, and the shape is extraction.

The energy accounts: £56bn in profits, 86p in relief

If that sounds like an accusation, then let us open the accounts, because this is a crisis that leaves receipts. And since energy sits underneath everything else, start there.

BP reported an underlying replacement cost profit of $5.7 billion for the second quarter, against $2.4 billion in the same quarter last year. Across the Atlantic the numbers stop being results and become records. Chevron posted the largest quarterly net profit in its history at $12.1 billion, while Exxon’s $14.5 billion and Shell’s $10.8 billion were their best quarters since the onset of the war in Ukraine. Chevron’s chief executive Mike Wirth told CNBC the company was “firing on all cylinders, which is good, because the world needs it”.

Now, the industry’s trade body will stop you there. Those are global profits, it says, not British ones, and only UK operations count. Fair enough. Use their measure. In the first three months of the war with Iran, energy firms made around £3 billion on their UK operations alone, which is £102 of profit taken from every household in this country in a single quarter. Not from Texas. From the meter in your hallway.

And that is only the loud money. Closer to home the extraction is older and duller, which is exactly why it survives unnoticed. Centrica’s half-year operating profit of £497 million was actually down on last year, and that tells you how normalised this has become. The running total is what matters. Researchers for the End Fuel Poverty Coalition put British Gas and Centrica profits since privatisation forty years ago at more than £56 billion, while Scottish Power’s owner Iberdrola took £909 million from its UK network monopolies in six months.

That word, monopolies, is the one to hold on to, because it shows you where the money is really taken. Common Wealth has been through the price cap and found roughly a quarter of every household energy bill is profit. Break it down and the shape appears. Ofgem allows retail suppliers a margin of 2.5 per cent. Network companies averaged pre-tax margins of 37.3 per cent, licensed generators 32 per cent.

So the extraction is not where you were told to look. It is not in the shop window at British Gas, the bit that faces competition and takes the abuse. It is in the pipes and the wires: regulated monopolies with no rivals, customers who cannot leave, and a rate of return set by a regulator. Ofgem does not fail to stop those margins. Ofgem awards them.

And beneath even that sits the rule nobody will touch. Britain prices every unit of electricity at the cost of the most expensive generator running at that moment, which is nearly always gas. The wind farm off the Yorkshire coast costs the same to run today as it did in January. But when a missile closes a shipping lane four thousand miles away, that wind farm is paid the war price anyway. Which is why British households pay more for electricity than every country in the European Union bar Germany, while paying 28 per cent less than the EU average for gas.

The cheapest gas in Europe and nearly the dearest power. That is not a war. That is a rule, written by people we could name, and a prime minister could rewrite it.

From the meter to the till: they’re all taking their cut 

This extractive model reaches well beyond the energy meter, which is what makes a tour about hidden fees close to insulting. Once you have learned to read the pattern in your gas bill, you start seeing it everywhere.

Water runs the identical model with a captive customer and no exit. Around £78 billion has been paid out of the English water companies in dividends since privatisation, against £190 billion spent on infrastructure over the same period. We covered the endgame of that at Thames Water yesterday and will not repeat it. The point is simply this: a family in arrears to a water company and a family in arrears to an energy supplier are not suffering two misfortunes. They are paying two instalments of the same rent.

The same logic runs through the banks. War raises oil, oil raises inflation, inflation keeps interest rates high, and high rates are the raw material of a lending margin. In the first half of this year Barclays, NatWest and Lloyds booked roughly fourteen billion pounds between them, and all three sent large sums straight back to shareholders. Some of that is investment banking rather than your overdraft, and it should be said. But deposit margins widen when rates stay high, and rates stay high because a war has put a premium on gas. The shock that empties the meter fills the vault.

And it ends, as it must, at the checkout, where the profits are real but the margins are genuinely thin, which is the whole point. Tesco returned £2.4 billion to shareholders last year and has started another £750 million buyback, on an operating margin a little over four per cent. The grocers are not the villains. They are the transmission belt. Every energy cost, haulage cost, packaging cost and bank charge enters the supply chain and comes out again at the till, and the family standing at the till has no margin at all.

Which brings us to the heart of it. Everyone in the chain protects their return. The household is the only participant with nobody left to pass it on to. That is the whole system in a single sentence. 

War is a racket, and Britain is paying for it 

Now, at this point you might reasonably say that none of this is anyone’s fault, that it is all just the war, forces beyond any government’s control. Let me stop you there, because that excuse is the oldest one in the book, and it is always convenient for the same people. 

Smedley Butler, twice awarded the Medal of Honor, published a short book in 1935 with a title that has never needed revising. He meant something exact by it. The men who fight and the people who pay are never the men who profit, and the profit is not an accident of war but one of its dependable products. 

You can see it if you look at what these wars actually built. The energy crisis did not start with Russian tanks. By October 2021, four months before the invasion, wholesale gas had risen around 250 per cent in a year and thirteen British suppliers had already gone under. The invasion did not light the fire. It gave the fire a name that nobody in Westminster would have to answer for. 

And what the Ukraine war built, in the end, was a market. The United States is now the largest LNG exporter on earth, and supplied 93 per cent of the entire growth in global supply in 2025. Europe more than tripled its American imports between 2021 and 2025 and takes two thirds of its LNG from the United States this year, with forecasts of 80 per cent of EU imports by 2028. We broke a dependency on Russian pipelines and bought a dependency on American tankers, priced on a spot market, at rates set by other people’s emergencies. 

Now watch the second war do the identical work. Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and a fifth of its LNG passes through the Strait of Hormuz. The strait closes, European gas hits a three year high, British bills rise 13 per cent in July, and in the very same quarter Chevron records the largest profit in its history and its American production hits an all time high of 2.08 million barrels a day. 

So there is nothing mysterious here. The interruption of one country’s exports is the pricing power of another’s. It is a supply curve, and men in offices drew it on purpose. 

And lest you think the beneficiaries are all overseas, some of them sit in our own parliament. Research for the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, given to the Morning Star, found at least seven lords and one baroness whose holdings in Equinor, Chevron, Shell and others rose after the shock, with Lord Agnew of Oulton’s Equinor stake up by around £28,000 in the first hundred days. 

None of this is hidden, and none of it is popular. Survation found 74 per cent of the public believe it is morally wrong for companies to profit from a war driven energy crisis. Hold that figure next to the tour for a moment. Three quarters of the country have already completed the listening exercise and sent in their answer. What is missing in Westminster is not information. It is appetite.

86p a week: the measure of this government’s ambition 

And appetite is exactly what the government’s response can be measured in, because it arrives in coins.

The centrepiece is the removal of the 5 per cent VAT on domestic electricity for six months from 1 October. That is worth around £45 a year off the average bill, which is 86 pence a week. A pint of milk. Gas keeps its VAT, and gas is where the increase is coming from, so Channel 4’s FactCheck ran the arithmetic and found that combined bills will still rise by roughly £49 a year once the 24 per cent gas increase is counted. The relief is smaller than the rise it was announced to answer. 

Then there is the bus fare, and here the history matters, because the press release does not carry it. The £2 cap was introduced by the Conservatives in January 2023. Rachel Reeves raised it to £3 from January 2025. Burnham now restores the £2 fare, backed by £454 million, funded in part by converting international climate grants into repayable loans, and it does not begin until 1 January 2027. Not this winter. Next winter. The family shivering through the January that follows October’s price cap will be paying the £3 fare this government set. 

Nobody is lying to you here, and that is what makes it worse. They are doing the sums in public, in the open, and trusting that you will not do them too.

Five things a government that meant it would do 

So what would a government that actually meant it do? Nothing exotic. Five things, all of them available now, none of them requiring a single village hall. 

Break the link between the gas price and the electricity price. Other countries have moved on this. Marginal pricing is a policy choice, not a law of physics, and it hands renewable generators a war premium they did nothing to earn. 

Take the standing charge off the bill. It is a flat levy of roughly £300 a year, charged identically to a pensioner in a one bed flat and a household with a heated pool, and it is the most regressive line on any bill in Britain. Move those costs into general taxation, where they can be paid according to means.

Legislate a permanent social tariff, so that the poorest households stop depending on emergency payments announced in November and quietly withdrawn in April. 

Cap business energy. The pub, the chip shop, the bakery and the corner shop have no protection whatsoever, and every pound they are overcharged reappears on the shelf behind them. 

And then the thing he already believes. Burnham told Channel 4 News during the Makerfield campaign that we should put more things back under stronger public control, naming energy, housing, water and transport. He is now the one person in Britain in a position to do it, and his own programme rules out full public ownership of energy. There is no purer definition of a listening tour than a prime minister crossing the country to hear an argument he has already made and declined to act upon. 

The tour will succeed on its own terms. There will be good photographs, warm quotes, and a ten year plan with something in it for everyone. Then on 26 August the cap arrives, in October the bills follow, and come January the fare will still be three pounds. 

This country does not need to be asked. It needs somebody to act on the answer it gave years ago. 

A government that spends August asking the country how it feels to be robbed has already decided not to catch the thief.

This Barbaric Regime Must Finally Cease

Inside Time Reports:

Campaigners for the release of prisoners detained on IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) sentences have given a cautious welcome to the Government’s announcement of a review.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said on 4 August that he has told recently-appointed Justice Secretary Alex Norris to begin a review of IPP, as part of his look into the system of ‘earned release’ under the Sentencing Act (2026). Mr Norris had in the past himself challenged IPP in a Parliamentary question.

IPP was introduced in 2005 by the then Labour Government. It gave judges the power to add an indefinite sentence to one relevant to the crime committed. The prisoner would be given a minimum tariff, but would remain in jail until the Parole Board decided they were safe to be released.

This test often proved impossible to achieve. The sentence was scrapped in 2012, but the decision was not made retrospective and so all those already in prison under an IPP sentence remained on it. Ever since then, families and reform groups have campaigned against IPP, while close to 100 IPP prisoners have taken their own lives in custody. After release, the licence conditions were strict, and people were liable to being recalled for matters as trivial as missing appointments.

Today there are more than 2,200 people in custody under IPP sentences today, of whom more than 800 have never been released. Of these, more than 99 per cent are beyond their tariff dates, while 80 per cent are at least 10 years beyond it. The remaining 1,400 current IPP prisoners have been released then recalled, of whom 81 per cent were recalled despite not having reoffended. The average time a recalled IPP prisoner spends back in custody is 26 months.

The House of Commons Justice Committee in 2022 undertook a major review of the sentence and concluded it should be ended. It proposed a resentencing exercise. In 2025, a working group established by the Howard League for Penal Reform and led by former Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas proposed giving all on IPP a fixed date at which they would leave prison, and said that support be arranged for them in the community. Both recommendations were rejected by the governments of the day. Successive governments have claimed that changes to the licence system, to make it easier for released IPP prisoners to have their licences terminated, couple with an IPP Action Plan intended to help IPP prisoners to progress through the prison system towards relief, were having an impact.

In recent weeks the United Nations Committee on Human Rights has condemned IPP as a form of psychological torture, and recent decisions by the Court of Appeal after IPP cases have been referred to it by the CCRC have seen people having their sentences changed with the indefinite clause removed.

Campaigners for abolition have issued a cautious welcome to the PM’s statement. Shirley Debono of IPP Committee in Action told Inside Time that perhaps “finally the blight on British Justice will be ended”, while Stacey Clough of organisation The Injustice of IPP said: “I hope and pray this comes to something.”

The campaign group UNGRIPP said: “We welcome the review but will judge it by what it delivers. A review that does not lead to a fair and independent route to resentencing will simply be another chapter in a story that has gone on too long. The people still trapped in an abolished sentence do not need another promise to examine the problem. They need a fair route out of it.”

And Amy-Clare Martin writes:

The government is facing legal action after the United Nations concluded prisoners trapped on indefinite jail terms are being unlawfully detained, The Independent can reveal.

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called for Britain to urgently act in a scathing legal opinion, issued last month, which found five men handed Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) jail terms had been wronged by the state.

The human rights watchdog said that their long incarceration beyond their original tariff amounts to arbitrary detention under international human rights law and they are entitled to compensation and other reparations.

It followed a complaint made by campaigners on behalf of the men who served a combined total of 84 years incarcerated under the controversial jail terms, which were outlawed in 2012.

Lawyers are now preparing to submit a rare habeas corpus legal challenge to the High Court, which will force the government to justify the prisoners' continued incarceration to senior judges.

In a letter before action sent to justice secretary Alex Norris today, human rights lawyer Karen Todner said the British justice system had been “shamed” by the UN’s findings.

She told The Independent it has rendered the IPP jail term “indefensible”, adding: “It’s hugely significant and very damning for the UK government to receive such a condemnation of our justice system.”

She called for the government to finally bring an end to the scandal after Andy Burnham promised to review the jail terms amid a row over the government’s early release scheme and prison overcrowding.

The prime minister has asked Mr Norris to “work through further options” to free up cells so he can keep some of the most serious offenders in prison after a backlash against the early release of two of the killers of PC Andrew Harper.

Options being considered include reviewing indeterminate sentences, speeding up the deportation of foreign criminals and looking at jail terms for women.

“I think it’s about time everyone just realised that the whole procedure, the whole sentencing regime [IPP] is unlawful and unfair and it needs to stop,” Ms Todner added.

Four of the five tragic cases condemned by the UN are still incarcerated, including Leroy Douglas, who has served almost 20 years without release for street robbery of a mobile phone; Abdullahi Suleman, who is still in custody 20 years after he was handed an IPP for a laptop robbery; Wayne Williams, who has spent more than 19 years in prison without release for a 23-month jail term for attempting to injure a police officer in a fight; and Shaun Lloyd, 39, who was recently hauled back to prison for the fifth time, having served more than 12 years for two street robberies.

Sadly, Joshua Mcrae, died in prison aged 34, having served more than 16 years for a four-year tariff for grievous bodily harm.

The open-ended punishments were scrapped in 2012, but not retrospectively, leaving thousands languishing in prison without a release date for years beyond their tariff, including some for minor crimes. Once released, many find themselves trapped in a cycle of indefinite recall for minor breaches of strict licence conditions.

Despite 96 prisoners taking their own lives in custody after losing hope of ever getting out, successive governments have resisted calls to resentence those still on the jail term.

However, the UN’s ruling criticised the “structural circularity” of the punishment, which means the psychological harm inflicted by the hopeless sentence is then used as evidence of further risk when prisoners are assessed by the Parole Board.

They also hit out at systemic Parole Board delays and repeated prison transfers which hamper rehabilitation.

They also found Mr Suleman is being discriminated against due to his mental health because his parole hearings have been suspended while he is in a secure hospital.

The working group said the government should treat the findings as a matter of the “highest urgency”, calling for them to “ensure a full and independent investigation of the circumstances surrounding the arbitrary deprivation of liberty of the five individuals and to take appropriate measures against those responsible for the violation of their rights”.

Their legal opinion comes after the UN special rapporteur on torture accused the government of perpetuating human rights abuses and warned the jail term may amount to psychological torture.

In her letter, Ms Todner has given the government three days to respond to the UN’s findings, warning she intends to instruct Alun Jones KC and Muin Boase of Great James Street Chambers to submit an application to the High Court within two weeks.

She added: "The damage caused by these sentences is internationally recognised and has been rightly condemned. While it is clearly right for the Government to seek to review the sentences of all those impacted by the cruel and inhumane IPP sentences, these cases have gone on for too long for those impacted to wait for the state to resolve a two-decade-old injustice that it itself caused.

“We will therefore be applying to the High Court on behalf of our clients to have their ongoing detention declared unlawful, in line with the United Nations Working Group’s scathing criticism of both the individual sentences and wider ongoing IPP detentions. This barbaric regime must finally cease.”

A government spokesperson said: “While we cannot comment on individual cases, it is right that IPP sentences were abolished. As the IPP annual report shows, support has significantly improved for these offenders, with greater access to rehabilitation and mental health support. We are now looking at what more can be done.”

Next up, the Single Justice Procedure, and the power of a judge to sentence anything as terrorism even without that possibility’s having been put either to the defendant or to the jury.