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At the heart of it was the outdated “aim to permit” principle in the Gambling Act 2005.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.

Strategic Airheads All Round

The “Shahed-like” drone that hit RAF Akrotiri has been confirmed as not having originated from Iran, so ask yourself who else might have had both such a device, and a desire to make it look as if the Iranians had done such a dastardly deed. See also the bombing of the Saudi Aramco refinery in Ras Tanura. As Mark Curtis and Phil Miller write:

Britain has used its major air base on Cyprus to move sensitive equipment without scrutiny, declassified files show.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) wrote in a formerly secret 1993 file that RAF Akrotiri plays a “key role in support of the Priority 1, Category A intelligence and communications effort” on Cyprus.

It added that “this secure airhead enables MOD and OGD [other government departments] to move sensitive equipment to and from Cyprus secretly and without scrutiny.”

Cyprus is “one of the few areas where the UK can make a substantial and unique contribution to the UK/US intelligence exchange”, an MoD official wrote in another file from 1993.

The reason was that “its location gives access to certain intelligence targets not otherwise accessible”, though it did not specify these targets.

British bases on Cyprus are just 120 miles away from Lebanon and 220 miles from Gaza.

The discovery comes as Britain plans to build 136 new military antennas at Akrotiri by confiscating 450,000 square metres of marsh land currently used by Cypriots within the so-called Sovereign Base Area.

Speaking at a protest outside RAF Akrotiri on Saturday, local Kourion mayor Pantelis Georgiou told Declassified that British authorities had quietly increased the proposed number of masts from an initial 20.

“They definitely tried to hide information” about the true scale of the project, Georgiou said.

‘Strategic airhead’

Akrotiri was used by Britain for hundreds of surveillance flights over Gaza in aid of Israeli intelligence during its genocide.

The government says the flights were only intended to help find hostages held by Hamas.

The files, available at the National Archives but some of which remain partly censored, suggest the Cyprus base could have played a greater role in British operations than previously divulged by the government.

It will add to further suspicions that Cyprus has been used by Britain to covertly supply other intelligence support or arms to Israel during the genocide, as was reported by newspaper Haaretz in October 2023.

Haaretz noted at the time that over 40 US transport aircraft, 20 British transport aircraft and seven heavy transport helicopters have flown to RAF Akrotiri carrying equipment, arms and forces.

By November 2023, Declassified had found four US Air Force military transport flights that departed from RAF Akrotiri in the previous 12 days destined for Israel.

When asked in parliament, the UK government refused to comment on US military operations from its Cyprus base.

The secret 1993 file was written by the secretary of the Chiefs of Staff Committee in its 1993 “Cyprus Garrison Review”.

It noted in reference to Akrotiri that “the need to maintain a strategic airhead and forward operating base in the Eastern Mediterranean is of continuing importance.”

Conniving with Cyprus

The files further show that the UK government connives with its Cypriot counterpart to understate its intelligence activities from its Cyprus bases.

A classified note from an MoD official to then defence secretary Malcolm Rifkind’s office in May 1993 stated: “It remains important to our relationship with the Cypriot government that we do not embarrass them by revealing publicly the extent of intelligence activity in the sovereign base areas.”

At the time some 4,500 British military and civilian personnel were on Cyprus working “in units operating the communications and intelligence facilities”.

Cyprus has long hosted a wide range of UK and US intelligence facilities notably RAF Troodos, Britain’s spy station on the summit of Cyprus run by GCHQ, the UK’s largest intelligence agency.

Another file, also marked secret, makes clear the importance of Cyprus to the UK intelligence relationship with the US.

“Through this the UK can repay the US for the enormous amount of intelligence received free from other collection systems around the world”, the note added.

Dominic Chilcott, private secretary to Rifkind when he later became foreign secretary, wrote in February 1996 that the maintenance of the Cyprus bases “remained an overriding national interest”.

“Our possession of them”, he added, “contributes significantly to the transatlantic relationship”.

Britain has two “Sovereign Base Areas” on Cyprus – known as Dhekelia in the east of the island and Akrotiri in the west – which are large, highly secretive military and intelligence installations comprising 3% of the island’s land area.

More than half of voters in Cyprus want to shut down British military bases on the eastern Mediterranean island, a recent poll found.

Leave Zia At Home

Sean O’Grady writes:

I’m no psephologist, but I cannot help feeling that every time Zia Yusuf appears in the media he shaves another slice off Reform UK’s increasingly fragile poll ratings.

Rarely, even in these polarised times, even on the hard right, has a personality emerged onto the political stage who is quite so unlikeable, quite so rebarbative, and just so sneery as Reform UK’s self-styled “shadow home secretary” (not yet even an MP). He rarely smiles. He cannot bring himself to be graceful to his opponents. He doesn’t listen. He talks over everybody when he’s on panel shows such as Question Time (where they seem to have given him a season ticket).

Like Nigel Farage, who had appeared to have sort of adopted Yusuf as some sort of heir apparent, he appears to hate being interviewed by the mainstream media, though he’s not as specifically rattled by the sight of a female interlocutor as Farage seems to be.

Perhaps he’s been actually been trained to go on the attack and belittle and impugn the motives of journalists as a way of avoiding the more awkward questions and getting the nasty messages across. Or perhaps he’s just permanently angry. Perhaps even when he’s brushing his teeth or watering his potted plants he’s seething with resentment about the Boriswave or Keir Starmer’s phytosanitary Brexit reset. I imagine must be difficult company in the green room: “Going away this summer, Zia?” “No Yvette, not until the evil people who’ve destroyed this great nation have been made to pay for their crimes.” “Oh, Ed and I were thinking about Tuscany”.

Farage, obviously, chooses his moments to lob inflammatory grenades of “pure cold rage” into a combustible situation. Robert Jenrick, too, though he’s quietly nudging Reform’s economic policies in a distinctly Tory-ish direction to realise his (hopeless) dream of uniting the right under his leadership. And as for Suella Braverman, prone to such crippling vaulting ambition, surely she must sometimes wonder whether she really believes in the stuff she comes out with.

Whatever, as Yusuf would say. But I do take particular exception to him insulting Ben Wallace, former Tory defence secretary, for being a “moron” and a “traitor”. This, it must be added, after someone has been charged with the murder of a former MP, Ann Widdecombe, and after Yusuf himself called for the abusive political rhetoric to be cooled down. Wallace was a captain in the Scots Guards, did tours in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, and was mentioned in dispatches for his distinguished service.

The explosive row within Reform UK has burst into the open after the party’s leader Nigel Farage publicly slapped down one of his key allies for calling a former Tory defence secretary a “traitor”.

Farage himself said his home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf had gone “over the top” in the attack on Ben Wallace, a former soldier who served in Northern Ireland.

What, Zia should ask himself, is the usual punishment for someone who is a traitor? What does Yusuf think should be done with Wallace just because this well-experienced politician thinks Reform UK’s policy of sending foreign prisoners “home” or to El Salvador is utterly bananas?

Being a part of the mainstream media, I like to be fair. I’ve no doubt that, in their own ways, the Reform lot are patriots, even if they are misguided. I’m sure they think that only Reform can fix Britain because scores of people in their other parties are too gutless or too stupid, or both, to implement the oh-so obvious policies that Reform think are such easy, simple remedies. The party is as entitled as anyone to present their bonkers manifesto to the British people, and for it to be covered properly – with due scrutiny. I concede Reform remains popular, at least still in second place in the polls, though their support is broad rather than deep and seems to have recently bounced off quite a low ceiling.

Sadly, Reform also seem to think figures such as Andy Burnham, Keir Starmer, Ed Davey, Zack Polanski and Kemi Badenoch don’t love their country too – which is offensive and a mistake. The good news, for us centrists, is that Reform and its politicians are so toxic that while they have been successful in cultivating a cult, they have also terrified other people so much that they can’t win elections.

From Caerphilly to Manchester, it is now routine to see an anti-Reform coalition of tactical voters uniting behind whatever other party has the best chance of stopping them – Plaid Cymru, the Greens and Labour have been the beneficiaries in recent months, and the unlikely figure of Count Binface is doing so in Clacton right now.

So I wonder what would happen, when the second Clacton by-election comes around, after the standards commissioner finishes his enquiries into the famous £5m gift. What if in that campaign it suddenly becomes quite clear that the best way to kick Farage out of Parliament would be for everyone – Labour, Green, Lib Dem – to vote for the Conservative candidate.

People such as Yusuf scare the hell out of me. Nigel should probably leave Zia at home when he embarks on his next, and quite possibly final, campaign to hang on to his seat and his career.

And Fraser Nelson writes:

Throughout his career as a political entrepreneur, Nigel Farage has tended to steer clear of the type of politics that Reform UK has now ended up with. I can see why he decided to experiment during the great vibe-shift after Trump’s re-election. If old taboos have gone, if social media has replaced the press as a mediator of political conversation, then how far is too far? This used to be Farage’s speciality: recognising and policing the boundary that separated his outfits from the unelectable hard right. But his parties, then, were a one-man band. Reform UK is a far greater operation with more people. And he finds himself tugged towards the extremes by two centrifugal forces: social media and Zia Yusuf.

His policy chief is, in so many ways, a man of huge talent. A man of undoubted achievement and eloquence, a strong broadcast performer in spite of having no previous experience in front of microphones. I disagree with most of his views but I’ll say of him what he’d never say of his opponents: he’s intelligent, accomplished and energetic. The question is whether he is now putting those talents in the service of a destructive agenda which in my view is now starting to toxify Reform UK - crossing the line from muscular to rabid.

A few examples:

‘Traitors’. He presents Reform UK as the only legitimate voice of ‘the people’ and its opponents as enemies of the people, even traitors. A classic authoritarian position. He has made no secret of his dismay over the arrival of former Tories (which, oddly, he was until 2024).

Mass deportation. He has overcome Farage’s objections to mass deportation and committed Reform UK to tracking down and deporting every single undocumented migrant. Two million, he says, if need be. “You’d better believe it.”

“Trump mark two”. Such deportation would need a massive police squad and a British version of ICE - which he actively welcomes. “It’ll be much more like Trump mark two than Trump mark one,” he told The Times.

Domestic enemies. He proposes to build detention camps for migrants in the constituencies of people who did not vote for Reform UK, especially Green seats. This sets up a notion of internal conflict. Until now, politicians of all parties have said they will serve supporters and foes alike. Yusuf sees his deeply-unpopular immigrant detention centres as a kind of punishment to be meted out to Brits who disagree with his politics. He seems to regard a lot of his countrymen as his enemy.

Personal hostility as a signature style. He sees political civility as a deplorable cosiness, boasting that he never spends time in TV green rooms talking to opponents before debating them. The usual dynamic of democratic civility - disagreeing with opponents but respecting their motives - is one he actively and regularly rejects.

Islam. Oddly for a practising Muslim, he can talk about Islam as if it’s a threat to Britishness and proposes to ban disused churches from being used as mosques. This hardly ever happens, but such policy is intended to reinforce an Islam-vs-Christianity narrative.

Sikhism. He proposes making the UK one of the few democracies in the world to ban the kirpan, a ceremonial knife worn by all initiated Sikhs. You can argue that banning the burka for Muslims is more about dress than faith, but banning the kirpan is a direct infringement of religious liberty. The risk is that the Jews start to see a patten, and wonder who might be next. As is is already happening in America and with Restore UK, which is already gunning for kosher food.

So many of the above now seem like signature Reform themes that it’s hard to distinguish between the party and the Yusuf machine. But this is becoming the problem.

It was brought to a head by Yusuf’s reaction to Ben Wallace yesterday. Calling a Tory a ‘traitor’ is hallmark Yusuf, but he chose the wrong target with the former Defence Secretary. Before politics, Wallace was a Captain in the Scots Guards and was mentioned in dispatches while deployed in Northern Ireland. Yusuf made his money selling jaunts to plutocrats - taking them fighting with ninjas in Japan or tracking snow leopards. All through a company he ended up selling for £250 million. His segue from billionaires’ gofer to a denouncer of elites has been a bit rich. But to accuse a veteran and former Defence Secretary of being a traitor is too much even for Reform members.

Tim Montgomerie, one of Reform UK’s higher-profile signings, says he has raised this issue privately and repeatedly with Farage and Yusuf. He has now gone public with his criticism.

“Opponents are opponents... they aren’t enemies... or ‘morons’. One of the biggest question marks over Nigel Farage’s leadership is whether he brings Zia under control.” Yusuf, he says, “is a man of huge talents but too much of his social media output is intemperate and reinforces Reform’s number one problem: our negative tactical voting challenge.”

The tactical voting is the issue: Reform has moved so far to the authoritarian end of the spectrum (it’s not a move to the right) that there are people on the right, left and centre now united in their main political desire: to vote for whoever, locally, will stop Reform. They’d rather see Andy Burnham in No 10 than someone like Yusuf in the Home Office.

Montgomerie’s post says what a lot of Reform supporters think: that Yusuf, for all his eloquence and talents, now looks out of control. And is starting to damage a party that needs to build alliances if it stands any chance of power. Some Tories even joke that Yusuf (a former Tory member) is a sleeper agent. So why doesn’t Farage take action?

Some argue that Yusuf was one of Farage’s original sugar-daddy donors, getting in there before the crypto kings and that he has a hold over Farage that puts him beyond discipline. I think it’s something else: Yusuf is very popular with the party’s membership. His framing - ‘we speak for the people, they’re all traitors’ - fits with how Reform’s most dedicated members see themselves. Lord Ashcroft is the only pollster to have gauged opinion on who members would most like to see succeed Farage, and found Yusuf clearly above Richard Tice and (a far less popular choice) Jenrick. Perhaps Yusuf is preparing for exactly this contest.

But how is Farage supposed to lead the party? Is Reform for or against mass deportation? Farage thinks against. This was one of the points of departure for Rupert Lowe, whose Restore party has now run with the ethnonationalist ideas cooked up on Reform’s fringes. The Daily Telegraph is now going hard after Lowe for his ambiguity over whether the King, being born to a Greek father, is White British - and it’s a significant campaign. This bizarre, toxic theory - that White British people will be in the minority by 2063 - was launched last summer by Matthew Goodwin, a GB News presenter and Reform by-election candidate. He cooked up the 2063 figure by assuming no child or grandchild of a migrant can or would want to classify themselves as White British, and by disregarding the well-documented trend of migrant birth rates converging on the mean. At the time, it was ignored as a weird, fringe figure - but the firepower the Telegraph is now devoting to it makes clear where it draws the line. And Allister Heath is explicit: Reform needs to be on the right side of that line, rather than maintain an ambiguous position on ethnonationalism.

During the Makerfield by-election, Reform responded to the rise of Restore by adopting racial politics, presenting whites as victims of UK government policy. Jenrick even ended up advocating the death penalty. This served only to harden strategic votes against Reform - Tories said the rejected racial grievance politics of the woke left and the ‘woke right’. This is what happens when you go over a line. It’s not about caustic editorials in newspapers: it’s about voters deciding that their number one priority in an election is to stop you.

Would Yusuf’s detention-camp plan to deport up to 2m work? Of course not. But would you want to live in a country where he is Home Secretary, trying to implement Trump mark two? If not, then you vote for whoever is most likely in your constituency to stop Reform. This is already starting to happen, and it is depriving Farage of his most powerful weapon: the idea that he stands a serious chance of taking power at the next election.

Farage has discovered where the pale lies in British politics, and is discovering what happens to parties who move beyond it. Either he reins in Yusuf - or decides, if his policy chief cannot be dialled down, whether to part company with him entirely. Yusuf is prone to resignation: he quit as party chairman in a huff, then quit as head of Reform’s DOGE unit when it became clear it would not deliver the savings promised. It’s conceivable that he quits again.

But if he doesn’t - and keeps up his social media campaign denouncing people like Ben Wallace as ‘traitors’ - then Farage will have to end his strategic ambiguity and do something.

Farage has spent decades testing the limits of British politics, but he has also understood those limits rather better than most. Yusuf represents one possible future for Reform: furious, uncompromising and convinced that moderation is betrayal. All of this can generate high online engagement and loyalty: bread and circuses for the party faithful. But it can also generate something more powerful still: a coalition of voters determined to stop you.

“I'm not going to get dragged down the route of mass deportations or anything like that,” said Farage in Sep24. “If I say I support mass deportations, that's all anybody will talk about for the next 20 years. So it's pointless even going there.” But he was, in the end, dragged down that route - and Yusuf did the dragging. The question now is whether he can make his way back, or whether Reform slowly perishes where it is.

Farage’s great achievement was to make Reform look not merely like his latest protest project but the most likely next UK government. His own crypto-money scandal has dented this momentum. But if he can overcome this and recover his recent achievement, he will have to get back to doing what he used to do best: drawing and policing boundaries. And making clear to Yusuf where those boundaries lie.

Distinct Decline?

Can this be true? Four-year undergraduate Masters degrees in science were a different matter, as were Scottish MA Honours degrees, with both having the same classification system as a BA. But around the turn of the century, the pass mark for an English postgraduate MA was 60, or at least it was at Durham, and a distinction was presumably awarded from 70 up, although we never thought about it, and I cannot remember one. It was taken as read that you were a big boy or girl now, so you would either get your MA or you wouldn’t. You certainly either got a distinction or, in fact, you didn’t. There was no bronze medal.

Yet it has been suggested that there now existed a distinction, 70 or above, like a First; a merit, 60 or above, like a 2:1; a pass, 50 or above, like a 2:2; and a borderline pass, 50 or above, like a Third. At postgraduate level. At least there is no equivalent of a pass degree. The man who first called me “a populist, not an academic”, not that I have ever claimed to be either, went on to take a 2:2 to my 2:1 in the same year of the same BA, and then failed to be awarded the MA that I hold, the only person of whom I have ever heard to have handed in an MA and just have it failed outright. Even he, though, will not have scored as low as 39. So these days, he would have his MA. Can that be true?