Indefinite No More?

Imprisonment for Public Protection was introduced by Andy Burnham’s mentor, David Blunkett, who now takes a very different view. Alex Croft and Amy-Clare Martin write:

The UN has condemned the detention of UK prisoners trapped on indefinite jail terms as “arbitrary” and accused the British government of presiding over a form of psychological torture.

In a scathing 16-page document, the Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has lashed out at Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) jail terms as “inhumane treatment” due to the “mental anguish of being subjected to continuous uncertainty of a release date”.

It follows a complaint made by campaigners last year on behalf of five men who have served a combined total of 84 years incarcerated under IPP terms, including for minor crimes, as reported by The Independent.

The document stated that all five individuals are entitled to compensation and other reparations as a result of their unjust confinement.

The IPP jail terms fail on the principle of lex certa - a core principle of the Rule of Law which mandates that criminal laws must be clear, precise, and unambiguous - because it “authorized indeterminate detention without specifying any criteria that could make its endpoint foreseeable to the sentenced person or the court”, the document said.

The case was lodged in September 2025, and included a bombshell letter from former justice secretary David Lammy showing he agrees the jail term is a “grave injustice” which causes “simply horrendous” mental trauma - a letter he wrote while he was shadow justice secretary in 2021.

Although the IPP sentence was scrapped in 2012 following a damning ruling from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), it was not abolished retrospectively, and successive governments have resisted calls to resentence more than 2,500 still languishing without a release date.

The five tragic cases being sent to the UN, which have all been highlighted by The Independent over the past 18 months, include:

• Leroy Douglas, 43, who has served almost 19 years without release for street robbery of a mobile phone
• Abdullahi Suleman, 42, is still in jail 20 years after he was handed an IPP for a laptop robbery, having been recalled for missing a hospital appointment
• Shaun Anton Lloyd, 39, who has been hauled back to prison four times and served 12 years and four months for two street robberies committed when he was 18 
• Wayne Williams, 37, 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
• Joshua Mcrae died in his cell last year, aged 34, having served more than 16 years for a four-year tariff for grievous bodily harm

The document states that the detentions, even if there were a domestic legal basis, fail the requirements set out by the UN’s Human Rights Committee as regards on liberty and security of person.

“The causal link between the original conviction and the continued detention has been broken by the disproportion between the gravity of the index offences and the duration of detention,” it wrote.

It notes that parole reviews are not truly independent of the government, given the power of the justice secretary to intervene. The recall system, it adds, means prisoners are being returned into indefinite custody for minor breaches, with 70 per cent of recalls concerning non-compliance or poor behaviour rather than new serious offences.

The original claim, brought by campaign group IPP Committee in Action, alleged the open-ended jail term is irredeemably flawed and the length of the prisoners’ incarceration bears no relation to the original crimes.

It further alleged that England and Wales are breaching international law because of the mental anguish for prisoners and their families, after 94 prisoners have taken their own lives after losing hope of being freed.

Shirley Debono, who founded the campaign group after her son, Shaun Lloyd, was handed an IPP sentence for stealing a phone, previously said: “This is the greatest miscarriage of justice. Our loved ones are suffering psychological torture, locked up in arbitrary detention.

“Our government condemns such treatment in China and Russia, yet is committing the same act here in the UK.” 

The family of Mr Mcrae, who died last year, said urged the government to act.

“Josh's suffering is over, but ours continues, as does the suffering of thousands of other prisoners and families still trapped by this injustice,” they said in a statement.

That was echoed by Bernadette Emerson, partner of Mr Suleman, who said: “My hopes on what I would expect to see from the government to resolve the IPP crisis, would be for them to urgently resentence IPP prisoners and urgently implement independent aftercare provision for them in the community. This grave injustice needs to be put to and end once and for all.” 

The UN special rapporteur on torture, Dr Alice Edwards, has previously condemned the jail terms as “psychological torture”. 

The complaint also alleges the UK remains in breach of the 2012 ECHR decision, which resulted in the sentence being abolished, with many IPP prisoners still waiting months to access courses needed for their release or facing a chaotic system of Parole Board delays. 

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “It is right that these sentences were abolished, and as the IPP annual report shows, we have significantly improved support for these offenders, with greater access to rehabilitation and mental health support.

“We are determined to make further progress towards safe and sustainable releases for those on this sentence, but not in any way that undermines public protection. We will respond to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention formally in due course.”

Normal, Healthy, Ordered, Living

David Lammy’s punishment was the sack, but Sarah Sackman’s is to keep her job. There seems to be nothing yet on the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court, but see here:

The Chair of the Bar Council has welcomed Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s indication that he may scrap controversial plans to reduce access to jury trials.

Speaking at an event at a leisure centre in Sheffield on Friday, the new Prime Minister said he wants to “look in detail” at the proposals - but that his instincts are “not to reduce access to jury trial”.

He said he has drawn on his own personal experience, particularly relating to the Hillsborough disaster, and indicated that he is “probably looking for changes” on the plan he inherited from former PM Sir Keir Starmer.

Kirsty Brimelow KC, Chair of the Bar Council, said: “Relying on a bit of my own Northern bluntness, it is encouraging if common sense is prevailing. One of my first actions was to write to the Prime Minister urging him to back away from the jury reduction course of the previous administration.

“Examination of the evidence shows that reducing jury trials is not required to reduce the backlog of cases and, in fact, could be counter-productive.

“The Prime Minister’s recent comments give me hope that he is listening. Disappointingly, a letter to the previous Prime Minister, signed by 3,200 barristers and retired judges, went unanswered.

“Trial by jury is one of the defining features of our justice system and a constitutional safeguard that has stood the test of centuries. It embodies the principle that justice is not administered by the state alone but with the participation of 12 citizens. They bring independence, collective wisdom and a diversity of experience to their deliberations, helping to ensure that verdicts command public confidence.

“The Bar Council stands ready to work constructively with the Prime Minister and his government to reduce the waiting for those in the criminal justice system.

“Crucially, the passage of time is showing that our proposals, including opening empty courts and targeted listing by judges, are reducing the backlog of cases.

“The indications from the new Prime Minister give me optimism that our voices will be listened to.”

The Bar Council of England and Wales - which represents more than 18,000 barristers - launched its ‘Justice needs juries’ campaign in response to the previous government’s plans to curtail jury trials through the Courts and Tribunals Bill.

As part of the campaign, working with the Criminal Bar Association and circuit leaders, the Bar Council has submitted written and oral evidence to the Public Bill Committee, drafted and tabled 28 amendments to the Bill, and have been mentioned at least 73 times during parliamentary debates on the topic.

In March 2026 the Bar Council coordinated an open letter calling on Sir Keir Starmer to stop planned restrictions to jury trials. The letter was signed by more than 3,200 lawyers including more than 300 KCs, 22 retired judges, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, and current and former politicians.

Still, the fight goes on, as George Monbiot writes:

No more resistance in the US. The era of human rights is over, and dissent is once more forbidden. This is what certain billionaires and their concierges want, and this is the model they’re also seeking to project across the world. If we fail to resist, if our new prime minister is as weak and suggestible as the last one, this is what we will get. In fact, we are halfway there already.

Why? Because successive governments in the UK have succumbed to a global campaign to cancel our fundamental freedoms, a campaign led by oligarchs and corporations, the media they own and the junktanks they fund. A campaign that has become definitional for the second Trump presidency.

At a global summit convened by the US government earlier this month, the Trump administration officials Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller and Scott Bessent explained that they were redirecting counterterrorism efforts away from Islamic jihadism and towards “the political left”. Most of the examples they cited to justify this shift were more than 30 years old. Several times they had to dig down to the 1970s to find a sufficiently menacing threat. You could hear the barrel being scraped.

Without producing a shred of evidence, Rubio, the secretary of state, claimed that the Cuban government is “inextricably linked to the far-left groups and movements across and beyond the west”. The following week, his department sought to justify this claim with a report containing a long list of leftwing legislators, journalists and activists that attempted to link them to Cuba in ways that ranged from the tenuous to the hilarious. This is a well-honed tactic, used prolifically by the Nazis among others: they claimed dissenters, by definition, were part of an international communist conspiracy. They insisted, as Rubio did, that “it is time to crush this evil for ever”.

That wasn’t the only crude reminder. Miller, Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, maintained that when you see antifascist protests, “not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way – in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism … their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.” I’m just surprised he didn’t say “untermenschen”. The US government, by contrast, promotes “normal, healthy, ordered living”.

But what hit me even harder was Miller’s attack on “jury nullification”: jurors acquitting people who, he said, were “obviously guilty”. Shutting down this possibility has been an aim of illiberal governments and conservative judges around the world. We saw it in the UK in the prosecution of Trudi Warner and others for holding signs that state an ancient principle in English law: “Jurors have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to their conscience.”

We see it in the astonishing prosecution, being pursued at the moment, of Rajiv Menon KC, who reminded jurors of this right at the trial of the Palestine Action campaigners he was defending. He became, as a result, the first lawyer in English history to be charged with contempt of court for a closing speech. If convicted, he faces up to two years’ imprisonment and will be struck off. Prosecuting lawyers for defending their dissident clients is more or less the definition of authoritarianism.

We also saw it in the assault Keir Starmer launched on jury trials as a whole, greatly curtailing, without any coherent justification, our strongest defence against injustice.

Starmer was a weak man, without a clear vision of his own, who was rolled by any powerful state or corporate lobby. He was no match for a well-funded and highly effective international campaign. A network of groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, funded by corporations and billionaires, has been producing “model legislation”. The groups test these laws in sympathetic jurisdictions. If they are found to work, they then press for their adoption elsewhere. The result is a sustained assault on our rights to protest, to political equality and to a habitable planet.

The globalisation of this attack on our fundamental rights is a key conservative aim. As capital operates everywhere, so should its ability to crush our objections. The long series of vicious anti-protest laws in the UK is an outcome of sustained lobbying by junktanks, the media and other governments. The result is a country that now keeps hundreds of political prisoners, a country in which you can get six months in jail for marching slowly down the street.

These oppressive laws have culminated – so far – in an act of parliament passed in April that enables the police to shut down any protest they deem to have a “cumulative” impact on the community. The only protests that have ever succeeded are those with a cumulative impact. Protest is acceptable as long as it’s useless. Let the people have their say, but only if we can’t hear them.

The new laws have been accompanied by that age-old trick, traditionally associated with fascist regimes, of smearing leftwing dissidents as terrorists. As the rights group Liberty has pointed out, the definition of terrorism here has greatly expanded, to incorporate tactics formerly regarded as civil protest. This is what enabled Starmer’s government to ban Palestine Action.

The judge who referred Menon for contempt, Mr Justice Johnson, was also the first – at the same trial – to use the extraordinary powers quietly inserted by the Conservatives into the Sentencing Act 2020. These enable someone tried for one crime to be sentenced for another. The four Palestine Action protesters were convicted of ordinary crimes. But, without informing the jury, Johnson marked the case as having a “terrorist connection”. He then sentenced them for terrorist offences, which means much more prison time.

Already, his example has been followed by another judge: a different group of pro-Palestine protesters, who sprayed red paint and broke some windows of a branch of Barclays Bank, are about to be sentenced as terrorists, though neither they nor the jurors were told of this possibility during their trial for criminal damage. This means, of course, that they were unable to defend themselves against this far more serious charge.

Nothing is safe from the billionaire assault on humanity. None of our rights, however ancient and familiar, are impregnable. Fight for them now or lose them, perhaps for ever.

False Choice

Even the Fabian Society, for which Rhoda Grant writes:

My Labour colleague Lauren Edwards has announced that she intends to revive the assisted dying bill in parliament this term. I believe that would be a mistake. Several Labour MPs have already warned that reopening the issue now would create unnecessary division, and others who previously supported the bill have made clear they do not back any attempt to force it through using the Parliament Acts.

When I, alongside 16 of the other 19 Scottish Labour MSPs, voted against assisted dying in Holyrood, it was because of our left-wing values, not in spite of them. Too often this debate is lazily framed as compassionate progressives on one side and socially conservative opponents on the other. That caricature bears little resemblance to the debate we had in Scotland. Some of the strongest opposition came from people shaped by the Labour tradition: solidarity, equality, disability rights and the duty to protect vulnerable people from economic and social pressure.

Assisted dying forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: what happens when the state offers death in a society that still struggles to guarantee dignity in life?

The Labour movement was built on the belief that people are not truly free when hemmed in by poverty, insecurity, isolation or structural disadvantage. That belief underpinned the creation of the NHS: a moral declaration that dignity and basic rights should never depend on wealth, status or perceived productivity.

Assisted dying risks undermining that principle.

Supporters often present these laws as empowering choice. But choice does not exist in a vacuum. A decision made by someone with excellent care, secure housing, strong family support and financial stability is not the same as a “choice” made by someone who feels like a burden, unable to access adequate care, fears loneliness or believes their needs are exhausting their family.

That is why so many disability campaigners remain deeply uneasy about assisted dying legislation. In unequal societies, pressure does not always look like coercion. It can be cultural, economic and emotional. The absence of real support can quietly narrow a person’s sense of what choices are available.

During Scotland’s debate, many of us became concerned that assisted dying was being presented as progressive simply because it expanded autonomy in theory. But the left has always understood that freedom means little without protection behind it. In Canada, reports have emerged of disabled and vulnerable people seeking assisted death amid poverty, insecure housing or inadequate support. Even where formal safeguards exist, the broader message can become dangerous: that some lives are too costly, burdensome or lacking in dignity to sustain.

Marie Curie Scotland’s report, Dying in the Margins, shows the reality of terminal illness and poverty. It reminds us that the priority should be ensuring people can live their final days with dignity, care and support, regardless of personal wealth. Those days are precious to individuals and their loved ones. Our task should be to improve them, not to make death easier to access because life has been made harder to endure.

The pandemic offered a warning. Elderly and disabled people were encouraged in some cases to sign ‘do not resuscitate’ declarations amid fears that the NHS could be overwhelmed. That experience should make us cautious about assuming our systems can always provide the careful governance such a profound legal change would require.

I understand that many who support assisted dying are motivated by compassion and a desire for autonomy. Some have the financial security and personal support to make that feel like a genuine choice. But many do not. When we make law, we must make it for the whole of society, not only for the fortunate few.

Many Scottish Labour MSPs concluded that assisted dying sits uneasily beside the founding values of the welfare state. A society committed to equality and collective care should be wary of laws that may, however unintentionally, place pressure on vulnerable people to end their lives. Those of us who want a society of equals should support legislation that promotes life, care and hope rather than death and despair. I urge Labour colleagues in Westminster to follow Scotland’s lead and resist attempts to bring back this bill.

The Root Causes

Here:

The union representing the UK's 35,000 Prison Officers is calling for urgent action to address prison violence. The call came following the publication of the latest Safety in Custody statistics from the Ministry of Justice in England and Wales.

New figures show that an average of 27 assaults on Prison Staff are recorded each day, with 9,833 incidents representing 230% increase since 2010’s 2,977 figures.

While the number of deaths in custody fell by 42 to 359 deaths in custody in the year to June 2026, the number of serious assaults has risen to 3,419 in the past year - an average of 14 serious assaults a day - an increase of 141.8% since 2010 when 1,414 serious assaults were recorded.

All recorded Prisoner-on-prisoner assaults reached 21,245 (58.2 a day), up 3.3% on the year to March from 20,574. This is an 81% increase since 2010, which recorded 11,736 prisoner-on-prisoner assaults. 

POA General Secretary Steve Gillan said:

“The level of violence in prisons across the country is completely unacceptable - it is endemic.

“It is being fuelled by drugs and contraband, the influence of organised crime gangs and a prison system that is overcrowded and understaffed.

“The POA will continue to campaign for urgent action from the Government and the Ministry of Justice to address the root causes of high levels of violence in our prisons.”

Mark Fairhurst, POA National Chair said:

“Prisoner-on-prisoner and prisoner-on-staff assaults are making the UK's jails one of the most hostile working environments in Europe.

“The POA has repeatedly called on the UK Government to take preventative action to protect both prisoners and Prison Officers.

“The introduction of stab-proof body armour, taser trials and PAVA in the youth estate are a result of the POA’s campaigning work. Every time we meet the Secretary of State, Civil Servants and Prison Service officials we raise the issue of prison violence and the need to protect our members. We will step up that campaigning work until we see lasting, positive change.”

As Mark S. Gold M.D. writes:

If you carry a genetic or neurobiological vulnerability to psychosis, using cannabis may increase the likelihood that psychosis will emerge, particularly during adolescence and young adulthood. Cannabis-induced psychosis is not always temporary. Numerous studies have shown that many affected individuals develop schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.

Few investigators have done more to shape contemporary thinking about cannabis and psychosis than Deepak D’Souza, M.D., the Vikram Sodhi ’92 Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine. His work demonstrated that delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the principal psychoactive component of cannabis, can induce transient psychotic symptoms in healthy volunteers and worsen existing symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. For more than two decades, D’Souza’s research, scientific publications, and public statements have challenged assumptions about the psychiatric safety of cannabis.

D’Souza’s trailblazing research helped move the field beyond the simple observation that cannabis use and psychosis are associated. The more important question became whether cannabis could cause psychotic disorders. His studies also found that abstinence reduces relapse risk, whereas continued cannabis use is associated with poorer clinical outcomes and a diminished treatment response.

Today, D’Souza is asking a different question. Amid concerns about increasingly potent commercial cannabis and unprecedented levels of THC exposure, he’s raised the possibility that cannabis may trigger a lifelong psychosis in some individuals. Recently, D’Souza and colleagues published a study comparing patients hospitalized with first-episode psychosis who had documented cannabis exposure with similar patients who had no evidence of cannabis exposure.

The study examined 119 men hospitalized with first-episode psychosis, including 66 with toxicology-confirmed cannabis exposure and 53 without cannabis exposure. Patients in the cannabis-associated group exhibited fewer negative symptoms, such as affective flattening and loss of motivation, while showing comparable levels of hallucinations and delusions. They also displayed more depressive and manic features, denoting a clinical presentation differing from classic deficit-form schizophrenia.

While both groups entered the hospital with similar levels of cognitive impairment, only the cannabis-associated group demonstrated significant cognitive improvement after four weeks of treatment and cannabis abstinence. The investigators also detected distinct EEG patterns that may reflect differences in cortical excitation and inhibition. Together, these findings suggest cannabis-associated psychosis may differ from non-cannabis-associated psychosis in ways that extend beyond clinical symptoms alone.

D’Souza summarized the evolution of his thinking in a recent conversation with me:

“Schizophrenia (SCZ) or, as Bleuler in 1911 appropriately coined, the “group of schizophrenias”, is heterogeneous on a number of levels, including its phenomenology and clinical manifestation, environmental risk factors, micro-scale molecular genetics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and macro-scale alterations in brain structure, function, and connectivity. Several attempts have been made to identify and tease apart SCZ subtypes based on clinical manifestations, genetics, and biomarkers. It is a bit too early to make any definitive conclusions, but our findings raise the fascinating possibility that there may be a cannabis subtype of psychotic disorders.”

D’Souza’s study, however, included only men and followed patients for just four weeks. The long-term trajectory of cannabis-associated psychosis remains unclear. Some cases may evolve into schizophrenia-spectrum or mood disorders, whereas others may not. Whether cannabis-associated psychosis represents a distinct subtype of psychotic illness remains an open question.

No single research finding has yet proven that cannabis-associated psychosis is biologically distinct. However, stellar investigators at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, including Marta Di Forti and Robin Murray, have provided clear evidence linking cannabis exposure to psychotic disorders. Their studies demonstrated that daily use of high-potency cannabis is associated with markedly increased odds of developing psychosis and showed that a substantial proportion of first-episode psychosis cases are attributable to exposure to potent cannabis products.

What is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss is the possibility that cannabis-associated psychosis represents more than a temporary drug-induced syndrome. It may, in some individuals, constitute a persistent psychotic illness triggered by cannabis exposure. As D’Souza told me:

“Our findings need to be replicated. Furthermore, it is important to collect longer-term follow-up data to understand whether the long-term course and prognosis of this proposed subtype is distinct.”

Earlier debates about cannabis and psychosis regularly revolved around polarized positions. One camp argued that cannabis merely unmasked schizophrenia in genetically vulnerable individuals. Another viewed cannabis-induced psychosis as a transient intoxication-related phenomenon fundamentally distinct from schizophrenia. Increasingly, the evidence suggests neither formulation is entirely adequate. Nevertheless, the convergence of clinical, cognitive, and somatic differences raises the possibility that cannabis exposure may be associated with a recognizable psychosis subtype rather than simply serving as a trigger for conventional schizophrenia.

Several high-quality epidemiologic studies support D’Souza’s concerns and challenge the longstanding belief that cannabis psychosis is usually benign and self-limited. A Danish registry study found cannabis-induced psychosis had one of the highest conversion rates to schizophrenia-spectrum disorders among substance-induced psychoses, with approximately 41 percent of affected individuals later receiving a schizophrenia diagnosis. Meta-analyses have similarly demonstrated substantial progression rates from cannabis-induced psychosis to chronic psychotic illness.

Individuals with substantial cannabis exposure regularly develop psychosis at younger ages than non-users. Some studies have found fewer negative symptoms and better cognitive functioning than in patients with non-cannabis-associated schizophrenia. Reviews by Yücel and colleagues and Løberg and Hugdahl suggest the pathway to psychosis in cannabis-exposed patients may involve less severe neurodevelopmental impairment than typically seen in primary schizophrenia. Cannabis-associated psychosis may not be ordinary schizophrenia.

The strongest epidemiologic support for a novel cannabis-related psychosis pathway comes from the fact that high-potency cannabis is associated with markedly increased odds of psychotic disorder, meta-analyses documenting a dose-response relationship between cannabis exposure and psychosis risk, evidence that abstinence reduces relapse risk, and continued cannabis use is associated with poorer clinical outcomes and diminished treatment response.

What psychiatry currently labels “schizophrenia” may represent a final common clinical pathway reached through multiple genetic and environmental routes. Cannabis could plausibly be one of those routes. If so, the key question becomes whether cannabis-associated psychosis differs meaningfully from schizophrenia occurring without cannabis exposure.

D’Souza’s findings are particularly relevant today, with earlier cannabis initiation, more frequent use, and commercial products containing THC concentrations far higher than those available in the past. Complementing these observations, studies from the London groups have shown that daily use of high-potency cannabis is associated with substantially increased odds of developing psychosis. These findings raise concerns that modern cannabis products are contributing to the increasing incidence of psychotic illness.

The treatment implications are equally important. Existing evidence suggests cannabis-associated psychosis responds to antipsychotic medications as primary psychosis does. However, continued cannabis use substantially increases the risks of relapse, rehospitalization, medication nonadherence, and treatment failure. These findings also underscore the importance of cannabis cessation and treatment of cannabis and other co-occurring substance use disorders.

Cannabis use is consistently associated with an increased risk of psychosis and with exacerbations of psychotic symptoms in both healthy individuals and people with psychotic disorders.

Rather than asking whether cannabis can produce psychosis, we may need to ask what kind of psychosis it produces, in whom, and under what circumstances. Psychiatry must also move beyond the simplistic question of whether cannabis “causes” schizophrenia. The more important questions concern cannabinoid-system mechanisms, individual vulnerability, and timing of exposure. Cannabis may not create an entirely separate disease entity, but growing evidence suggests it can dictate the timing, expression, and long-term course of psychotic illness in vulnerable individuals.

The Drug Report has seen the future, and indeed the present:

For a century, the daily cigarette smoker was the face of American addiction. According to the federal government’s own data, he has just been replaced.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration released the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health on Monday, and buried in its appendix tables is a milestone no federal survey has ever recorded: 21.4 million Americans now use marijuana daily or almost daily. That is more than the 19.9 million who smoke cigarettes daily, and well more than the 17.2 million who drink daily or almost daily.

The agency’s press materials led elsewhere, with encouraging trends among adolescents. The daily-use figures appear nowhere in the 157-page national report. They sit in Section 9 of the detailed tables, where the survey’s own significance testing marks nearly every marijuana measure that matters as a statistically significant increase since 2021.

The Numbers

[You will have to follow the link.]

The trend lines are moving in opposite directions. Since 2021, daily cigarette smoking has fallen by 7.6 million people and daily drinking by 5.3 million, the continued payoff of decades of public health work. Daily marijuana use rose by 3.7 million over the same four years. Nearly half of everyone who currently uses marijuana (48.8 percent) now uses it daily or almost daily.

America’s Second-Largest Addiction

The survey counted 19.3 million Americans meeting clinical criteria for marijuana use disorder in 2025, roughly one in three past-year users. That places marijuana second only to alcohol (25.7 million) among the nation’s substance use disorders, and nearly five times ahead of opioid use disorder (4.0 million).

The gap at the top is closing. Alcohol addiction has declined by 4 million since 2021; marijuana addiction has grown by 2.7 million. Both shifts are statistically significant. Four years ago the distance between America’s first- and second-largest addictions was 13 million people. It is now 6.4 million.

Among young adults aged 18 to 25, one in seven (14.1 percent of the entire age group) has marijuana use disorder.

The Teen Story Has Two Halves

Adolescent marijuana use fell again: past-year use among 12-to-17-year-olds dropped from 10.9 percent in 2021 to 8.7 percent in 2025, a significant decline that legalization advocates promoted within hours of the release.

The same tables complicate that story in two ways. First, the decline is not marijuana-specific. Teen alcohol use fell at a statistically indistinguishable rate over the same window, down roughly 20 percent, alongside nicotine, tobacco, and prescription-drug misuse. Youth use of virtually everything is falling.

Second, the teens still using marijuana are using it far more intensively. The share of adolescent past-year users consuming daily or almost daily jumped from 9.5 percent in 2023 to 14.7 percent in 2025, with every earlier year in the trend window significantly below 2025. More than one in three current teen users (36.8 percent) used daily or almost daily in the past month. And because heavy use held steady while casual use fell, the raw count of teen daily users, 327,000, is the highest in the five-year window. Half of teens who used marijuana in the past year already meet criteria for marijuana use disorder.

Perception is moving the other way: just 36 percent of adolescents see great risk in smoking marijuana weekly.

Elsewhere in the Survey

Past-year marijuana use reached 61.6 million Americans (21.2 percent), up significantly from 2021 though down from its 2024 peak. Adults 26 and older remain the engine of growth, up 24 percent since 2021, with daily use in that group up 33 percent. Past-month use among pregnant women rose from 5.1 percent to 6.7 percent, a change that did not reach statistical significance but will bear watching. And 10.3 million people reported driving under the influence of marijuana in the past year, approaching the 12.6 million who drove under the influence of alcohol.

The 2025 survey, drawn from interviews with roughly 70,000 Americans, is the fifth consecutive year of comparable data since the survey’s 2020 redesign, making this the first release in which four-to-five-year trends can be tested with confidence across the board. What those tests show is consistent: every major indicator of heavy marijuana use and marijuana addiction is significantly higher than in 2021.

The milestone itself required no test at all. The national report never mentions it; Table 9.38A states it plainly: in 2025, America’s most common daily drug habit is no longer tobacco.

The Most Ambitious Statement of Economic Intent

Dominik A. Leusder writes:

Last Monday, Andy Burnham delivered what was perhaps the most ambitious statement of economic intent since 1997. Standing outside Downing Street, the Prime Minister spoke of “a new political model and a new economic model”. The idea, he said, was to put “life’s essentials back under stronger public control” and to reindustrialise Britain “using public procurement to back British industry”.

This certainly sounds ambitious. But rhetoric is cheap and it has so far proven difficult to pin down Burnham on specific policies. He took a week to end speculation about scrapping council taxes and stamp duties and replacing them with a flat property value tax, clarifying that “nothing immediate” on the issue was in fact planned. This was just a day after he walked back an earlier suggestion about raising personal income tax allowances.

With this in mind, it is not clear how to interpret the Prime Minister’s announcement on Wednesday that the Government will look into financing a reform of Britain’s long-neglected social care system, potentially with tax hikes. But following the old adage that personnel is policy, perhaps one can infer Burnham’s actual priorities and preferences through his staffing choices.

On matters of economic policy, Burnham’s court of ministers, advisers and aides can be divided into roughly three camps: Brownites with a regionalist and national security bent who are broadly aligned with the Treasury orthodoxy; soft-Left mandarins and policy experts with a long paper trail of criticising it; and progressive think-tankers with cautiously radical reform ambitions.

The Chancellor falls squarely into the first camp. John Healey’s resignation over his predecessor Rachel Reeves’s budget was not a sign of heterodoxy but of its opposite: a complaint that the Treasury would not fund rearmament, not that it ran the country by rulebook. His formation is the purest Brownism left in frontline politics. He came into Parliament from the campaigns directorship of the Trades Union Congress, co-wrote Labour’s first paper on regional economic policy with Ed Balls in 1998, and spent five years as a Treasury minister under Brown before the housing brief made him the party’s most persistent advocate of council house building.

Last week, Healey told Treasury staff in his first speech that “fiscal control must be the first duty” of the office and promised to meet the rules “in lockstep” with Burnham while “ensuring there’s a buffer also for uncertainty”, a sentence that commits him to running larger margins than Reeves ever enjoyed. The distinctive Healey move is to weld the doctrine to the flag: fiscal credibility, in his telling, is “the bedrock of economic stability and national security”. Tellingly, his new political team, drawn largely from his defence operation and chiefed by Will Straw (another product of the Brown Treasury), contains not a single economic adviser.

The intellectual warrant for this position comes from Richard Hughes, the former chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility, whom Burnham included as one of his fiscal advisers ahead of the expected leadership challenge. Hughes is the nearest thing British fiscal policy has to an internal auditor: a career Treasury official who ran the 2007 spending review, did fiscal surveillance at the IMF, and at the Resolution Foundation wrote the case for rules that recognise the state’s assets as well as its debts, the intellectual ancestor of the net financial liabilities measure the government now targets. His verdict on the UK’s current fiscal framework inverts the common complaint: the rules are not too tight but “among the loosest the UK has had in its history”, he told the Lords in January; the British disease is “how frequently we abandon” them, and the gaming of targets that are met in letter and violated in spirit.

Ranged against Healey and Hughes, at least on paper, are the two most senior economists in Burnham’s orbit: Jim O’Neill and Andy Haldane. They are both Sheffield economics graduates of a certain vintage as well as long-standing critics of the framework their government has just re-embraced. O’Neill, tipped as chief economic adviser, took the scenic route to Manchester patriotism: after two decades at Goldman Sachs, where he coined the term BRICs and chaired the asset management arm, he oversaw the Royal Society of Arts’ City Growth Commission, making an agglomerationist case for metro devolution that George Osborne bought wholesale, hiring O’Neill to deliver the Northern Powerhouse. He has called the fiscal rules “petty and arbitrary”, dismissed Starmer’s welfare squeeze as “playing around with small amounts of savings” to satisfy them, wants council tax and stamp duty replaced outright, and confirms that devolving income tax is being examined “in a serious way”.

Haldane, the former Chief Economist of the Bank of England, arrived at similar conclusions from inside the state: after 32 years at the Bank — where his speeches on the financial sector’s mirage of measured productivity and the share buyback culture of the equity market remain the establishment’s best account of why profits stopped becoming investment — he chaired the Industrial Strategy Council and helped to write the Levelling-Up white paper. He has attacked the “fiscal straitjacket”, called the case for changing the rules “overwhelming”, and blamed last autumn’s “fiscal fandango” of tax speculation for flatlining growth.

Burnham’s talk of putting “life’s essentials back under stronger public control” bears the watermark of some of his more progressive advisers, including figures from influential think tanks, the New Economics Foundation, IPPR North and Common Wealth. Miatta Fahnbulleh, NEF former chief executive and now Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, is among Burnham’s closest confidantes. She describes her politics in the terms of the cooperative tradition of the Left, favours “common ownership of public goods and essential infrastructure”, and has explored taking water into public hands on the costless model Louise Haigh used for rail. IPPR North’s Zoë Billingham is a natural pick as the head of one of the institutional homes of the devolution and regional rebalancing agenda. Common Wealth’s founder, Mathew Lawrence, was the co-author of a recent paper, published through the Burnham-aligned Mainstream group, extending Manchesterism to British capitalism at large. It advocated public intervention wherever investment has dried up and rents inflate the price of primary needs.

This is the only wing of the Burnham court with a sophisticated theory of public ownership, one that is framed in terms of fiscal prudence too. Nonetheless, the current fiscal framework prices their programme as ruinous, since rules that net off financial assets but not physical ones make renationalising a water company look like fiscal incontinence and a minority stake look like prudence.

Indeed, the priorities of Burnham’s three different camps militate against each other: accepting the notion that the UK’s fiscal position necessitates an enforcing of the rules is ultimately not compatible with planning for industrial revival and renewed public control of key goods provision. These ambitions imply a decade of investment, public and private, in plant, grids, housing and skills before any of it returns a penny of revenue. The current rules that treat such outlays as identical to consumption ration precisely the spending on which future output depends. And reasserting public ownership compounds the offence: perversely, borrowing to acquire a controlling stake in a revenue-generating utility registers as pure fiscal deterioration, since consolidation extinguishes the offsetting financial asset and the physical estate counts for nothing against the debt incurred. Above all, persistent fiscal constraints depress the aggregate demand on which private investment decisions hinge, so productivity continues to stagnate, the growth rate and tax revenue disappoint, and the rules tighten again. This vicious circle that the UK has drawn since the financial crisis is not conducive to any programme of economic transformation.

If this seeming contradiction has to be resolved one way or another, then Healey’s appointment, with Hughes lurking in the background, suggests it won’t be in favour of the progressives. Healey’s first speech as chancellor suggested that his quarrel with Reeves wasn’t doctrinal but specifically about the refusal to accommodate more defence spending. That’s why he named fiscal credibility as “the bedrock of economic stability and national security”. On the evidence of the Government’s first fortnight, Haldane and O’Neill, neither of whom hold confirmed posts, have already lost the argument.

Whatever his rhetoric, then, one might conclude that this signals Burnham’s revealed preference for continuity. More cynical tongues might suggest that any perception of a political sea change reflects the Prime Minister’s penchant for savvy social media stage management. But though his personnel and fiscal doctrine are Brownite, Burnham is distancing himself from Whitehall. While Brown’s model made the Treasury the strategic brain of government, Burnham’s “beefed-up No. 10” with a “malleable” Chancellor is built to do the opposite. The extent to which more transformative policy ideas have any purchase on his decision-making will depend on this new model actually working as intended. It is noteworthy, however, that it was Burnham and not Healey who sought Hughes’s counsel.

But what is more conspicuous about Burnham’s economic worldview are the elements that are absent. There is little to suggest that Britain’s new leader realises how strange the country is, in macroeconomic terms. Though “Manchesterism” produced consistent above-national-average employment and output growth, income growth remained weak. That is because real wages have grown poorly everywhere, not just because cost-of-living pressures have persisted but because productivity growth has not budged, in no small part due to investment being consistently low. On these metrics the UK is a strange outlier among its peers.

But as some of the response to Burnham’s moderately ambitious proposals suggests, there is little appreciation for this fact. The reaction to his social care proposal this week was telling. He accurately pointed out that social care workers, often immigrants, live on “poverty pay”, while almost two million elderly Britons need to qualify for state aid given the low threshold, and often face having to sell their homes. But many commentators suggested that the UK can’t afford any more social spending and that middle-class households are already overtaxed. The Resolution Foundation had already taken to sounding the alarm based on Burnham’s proposals so far, claiming Burnham’s pledges had reduced the “fiscal headroom” to as little as £8 billion.

What is absent from the conversation is how UK spending measures up internationally. First and foremost: the UK is not a heavily taxed society by any standard. As of 2024, total tax revenue including social security contributions as a share of GDP was at 34.4%, only just above the OECD average and well below the EU average of 39.3%. And the tax wedge, that is how heavily the state taxes a full-time single worker on an average salary, was at 29.9%, placing Britain dead last in a group that includes all EU countries and the United States. When including average council taxes, the wedge increases by a few percentage points, keeping the UK well below the EU average of 44.1%. This reflects the fact that median income households in the UK are in fact less taxed than elsewhere, and significantly so.

Meanwhile, the most recent figure for the UK’s net social expenditure was at 22.8% of GDP, below both the EU and the United States. Any worry that the country’s welfare bill is too high seems misplaced. It is equally hard to understand why the much maligned triple-lock on Britain’s modest state pension attracts so much vitriol and media attention: precisely because of the reliance on capital income to fund pensions, the magnitude of gross old-age benefits is minimal, amounting to just over 7.6% of GDP in 2023. The same OECD data suggests that the UK relative position doesn’t change even if the triple-lock persists until 2040.

Whatever the reason the UK economy underperforms relative to its wealthy peers, it is hard to find fault in social programmes whose public spending footprint pales in comparison. There is little to suggest that the senior government and its current crop of advisers and official appointees realise that the country’s economic policy discussions are profoundly insular and out-of-tune. Perhaps the biggest inference we can make about Burnham is that he lacks the ability to formulate a response to the opponents of his economic vision. This would go a long way to explaining why he has invited some of them into his government.

But an opportunity now presents itself, as Paul Knaggs writes:

BP putting its North Sea operation up for sale is not a corporate triumph of “disciplined capital allocation,” no matter how many times the press release repeats the phrase. It is a retreat. A global giant drew decades of private profit from a national asset, and now that the fields are ageing and the easy money is gone, it is walking away. For the British public, this should read as a historic door left open, not a crisis.

After all, have we not always cried out for the means of production? Not as a slogan chanted at a rally, but as a plain question any working household would recognise: who owns the machinery that powers a nation, and who profits when it changes hands? The instinct in Westminster and the City will be to let this pass to a private equity syndicate or a speculative operator, who will promise lean management and efficiency. Britain has watched this film before, in water, in rail, in the care sector. Sweat the ageing kit, thin the workforce, extract the cash, and leave the public to cover the clean up once the value is gone.

The alternative is not radical. It is a purchase. Some on the left, and much of the Green movement, will recoil from any argument that keeps a drop more oil flowing, and the climate clock they point to is real. But there is a difference between opening a new field and deciding what happens to one already producing. BP is not asking anyone’s permission to drill somewhere new. It is asking someone to buy what already exists. The honest choice was never between extraction and abstinence. It sits between a private buyer who lifts what remains and banks the proceeds abroad, and a public one who lifts the same oil and spends the proceeds building the wind farms, the storage and the grid that replace it. Refusing the sale does not put a single barrel back in the seabed. It only decides, by default, who gets to spend the money.

The Great British Energy Heist

And this is not a small find going begging. The Clair field, west of Shetland, is the largest oilfield on the UK continental shelf, the largest hydrocarbon accumulation in Western Europe: seven billion barrels in place. Only a fraction has ever been recovered, and BP has been working towards a third development phase. Whoever buys this business buys the door to that oil for decades to come.

Britain has stood at this door before and closed it. In the 1970s Tony Benn built the British National Oil Corporation to give the public a direct stake in its own reserves, and wanted it to take over BP’s North Sea holdings outright. Harold Wilson refused him, judging it a step too far. Benn’s case was not sentiment; he argued plainly that public ownership meant more money for the country and more control of the oil. Wilson blinked, and the decade that followed sold Britoil and the government’s own BP shareholding, spending the tax windfall as fast as it arrived. A sovereign wealth fund started then would be worth over half a trillion pounds today.

Half a century ago, almost to this same summer, Britain lived this exact moment once before. In June 1975 the first oil from the North Sea was pumped ashore, and Tony Benn, the energy secretary who stood and watched it land, understood immediately what he was looking at. He called it “exactly as significant as the first run of Stephenson’s Rocket… It is a turning point.” He was right, and Britain spent the following decade proving him right in the worst possible way, selling off the very company built to hold that turning point rather than using it. Opportunity on this scale does not knock twice. It knocked in 1975 and was shown the door. It is knocking again now, and the only question left is whether this generation answers it.

Norway ran the experiment we refused, on the same sea. The Norwegian state still owns two thirds of Equinor, and the fund built from the proceeds passed two trillion dollars this year, the largest in the world. Keir Starmer once understood the shape of that failure, promising Labour would not again “fritter away the wealth from our national resources.” That promise gave us Great British Energy, publicly owned and sat in Aberdeen. Widening its remit to hold oil and gas is paperwork next to what this government has already managed. Sixteen days ago it nationalised British Steel, from Act to ownership, inside nine weeks.

None of this should be dressed up as easy. The basin is old, and decommissioning the rest of it will cost the country an estimated forty four billion pounds. Any public bid needs BP’s books open first, every liability accounted for, before a penny changes hands. But look honestly at who carries that cost today. Decommissioning already comes with tax relief running to a third or more, so the public underwrites the clean up whoever owns the platform. Private ownership hands us the bill and hands someone else the oil money. Public ownership gives us the bill we already carry, and the oil money with it.

That choice sits with Andy Burnham now, because his own government has already loosened the ground beneath it. He told Donald Trump he would take a pragmatic line on the North Sea, adding “there is a resource there. When people are struggling we can’t ignore that.” His energy secretary calls the basin “a vital national asset”. Fine words, and true ones. But a vital national asset a country declines to own is only a slogan with a price tag on it.

For a hundred years we were told the means of production could never be ours. On a Friday morning in July, a corporation put them up for sale and proved that was always a choice, not a law of nature. If a country does not own its energy, it does not own its future or its security. If there is any lesson to be taken from Ukraine or Iran, it is that.

Technically Speaking

Commendable though it is that the Prime Minister says “different from”, his Southern miseducation is evident from his reference to a “graduation cap”. A Durham man would have known that that headdress was an academic square, “vulgarly called a mortarboard”, and that it was never, ever to be worn to one’s degree congregation.

But no doubt like Andy Burnham, I was 14 when I chose an entirely academic path. Why not allow a 14-year-old to choose an entirely technical one? Though considerable, the practical obstacles are surmountable. Yet there is a problem in principle with this proposal.

A curriculum determined by “local employers” would be confining even if those were not vape shops, phone shops, nail bars, carwashes, Turkish barbers, and American candy shops, none of which is objectionable per se, but the proliferation of which in certain localities is, well, this time last year I was in HMP Durham. I know.

Britain Has Made Its Mind Up About Nigel Farage

That The Spectator has published this is as significant as the point that Stephen Daisley makes:

No. 10 (North and South alike) will be heartened by polling suggesting that the more the British public sees of Andy Burnham, the more they like him. Leader approval research by More in Common shows Burnham on a rating of plus 19 after just over a week in the job – almost double Keir Starmer’s high point at the end of 2024.

That these numbers are soft should not need saying. The metric that matters is not the public mood during the Prime Minister’s honeymoon but what they think of him once he’s a known quantity, has had to make hard decisions, and is asking for another five years in his own right. That is when we will learn how much of an electoral asset Burnham is to the Labour party. 

I write here to make another point entirely: just look at those Nigel Farage numbers. The same polling gives the Reform leader an approval rating of minus 32. This makes him far and away the most unpopular party leader in Britain, with even the Greens’ Zack Polanski eight points ahead of him. This is Farage’s lowest rating of this Parliament, a relative concept since not a single More in Common poll in the past two years has recorded a net positive rating. Recent reporting on his financial affairs might have contributed to the latest slump, but that wouldn’t account for his long-term, consistent unpopularity.

Farage could escape scrutiny over this while Reform was leading in the polls on voting intentions, but now that Labour seems to be re-establishing a lead, Farage becomes vulnerable. There is a segment of Reform’s base that is essentially a Farage fan club. They will happily overlook questions about donations received and some will even continue to back him if Reform slips into second place – or lower. These are Reformers who find Farage’s anti-woke persona appealing, or rather his perceived facility for riling up Reform’s opponents.

But here lies Farage’s limitations as a potential prime minister: you can’t trigger-the-lefties your way into Downing Street, not when you are this unpopular with the voters. Brits will vote in a prime minister they don’t know – see, for example, Starmer – but will they elect one they don’t like? I can’t think of the last time that happened.

There can be some snottiness around leader approval ratings. ‘It’s not a popularity contest, you know.’ Actually, it is – at least functionally. Elections aren’t moral or intellectual exercises; they are simply a show of hands. We have two solid years of polling – and plenty before that, too – that shows people will not put up their hands for Farage.

In the latest survey, 55 per cent of Brits say he is ‘doing a bad job’, but break that number down further and you will see how dire the polling is for him: among the majority of voters who think Farage is doing a bad job, three-quarters believe he is doing ‘a very bad job’. By contrast, 24 per cent rate him as doing a good job and just 6 per cent reckon he’s performing very well. Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch is sitting on 31/32 good job/bad job, which is nothing to throw a parade over but at least indicates that the public hasn’t written her off entirely.

Reform doesn’t want to face up to this but will eventually be forced to accept that the British public has long since made up its mind on Nigel Farage. He might poll well with blokes over 55 but, unfortunately for Reform, the rest of the country gets to vote too, and they will not vote for a party led by him. What’s more, they will go out of their way to vote for whoever is best placed to keep Reform out in their constituency.

Farage doesn’t just rub people up the wrong way, he drives them into a tactical-voting frenzy. We talk about red walls and blue walls but the sturdiest barrier in British politics is the ‘anyone but Farage’ wall that Reform keeps banging its head against day after day.

It’s not as though there isn’t a market out there for populism, it’s just that the face of populism can’t be someone so wildly unpopular with the British electorate. Just as the only thing holding back Corbynism was Corbyn, all that stands in the way of Faragism is Farage.