Politics
The House | “A read worthy of its subject”: Sir David Natzler reviews ‘Walter Bagehot: Life and legacy’
1831: Walter Bagehot | Image by: History and Art Collection / Alamy
4 min read
Marking the bicentenary of his birth, the authors have delivered a balanced and lively examination of the life of the English journalist and constitutional authority
Last month was not only the 200th birthday of University College London but also of one of its distinguished early graduates: Walter Bagehot. Editor of The Economist at the age of 32, author of a seminal work on the British constitution and perhaps our first and finest financial journalist. His birthday has produced this endearing and lively tribute by former House of Commons Library stalwarts Janet Seaton and Barry Winetrobe. Now settled in England’s smallest town, Langport in Somerset – Walter’s hometown – they are justifiably keen to see him properly remembered, although not always admired. Their turn of phrase matches his. It is a fitting tribute, but not an encomium. At the outset they deal with one puzzle head on: how to pronounce his name; it is Badge-ut.
Bagehot has had surprising admirers: from Woodrow Wilson, who as a Princeton academic visited his grave while on a cycling tour of Britain – alas, no photos survive – to the editor of 15 volumes of his collected writings, the late Norman St John-Stevas, who left his collection of Bagehot bric-a-brac to Langport. (There is no proper picture in the book of St John-Stevas, but curiously there is a picture of Pope Paul VI, who admitted to St John- Stevas that he had never heard of Bagehot and mispronounced his name. One can hardly blame the pontiff.)
Bagehot’s reputation as a constitutional expert rests mainly on his 1867 book The English Constitution (meaning the British constitution). An academic or thoroughly researched work it is certainly not, but it is a shrewd and sardonic description from a London perspective of the role of the monarchy and legislature and how the whole machinery is (or was) organised by the cabinet as the effective organ of management. Bagehot was candid and quotable about the monarchy in particular and the importance of royal weddings. He loved a turn of phrase more than profound analysis. But I suspect he was the first constitutional commentator to publish a truly readable book – a long way from Erskine May.
He loved a turn of phrase more than profound analysis
Bagehot was quintessentially a man of business who commented on politics and economics from a position of mid-Victorian consensus. A scion of the firm of Bagehot and Stuckey (who controlled the Parrett river trade of west Somerset and the big West of England banking house of Stuckeys), he wrote influential articles on banking controversies in The Economist while still a salaried employee of, and substantial shareholder in, Stuckeys Bank. He also produced Bagehot’s Rule on the lending duties of a central bank in a banking crisis, which central bankers still quote, even if they do not rely on.
Bagehot lived the life and died the death of a character from a Trollope novel, or at some moments from the provincial settings of George Eliot. He came from sound Unitarian stock: married the daughter of the founder of The Economist; enjoyed hunting; had an enormous and concealing beard; was a poor orator; and employed William Morris and William de Morgan to do up his house. He stood for Parliament once, possibly to please his mother, but was defeated. Some of his opinions, such as on social Darwinism and on a racial hierarchy, are now simply noxious.
The third and final section of this work looks at the ways in which he has been commemorated, including a fine stained-glass window in the church at Langport, which I finally managed to visit. This thorough and very balanced book can itself now be added to their list of commemorations, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it as a read worthy of its subject.
Sir David Natzler was clerk of the Commons 2014-19, honorary senior research fellow at the UCL Constitution Unit, and co-editor of the 25th edition of Erskine May
Walter Bagehot: Life and legacy
By: Janet Seaton & Barry Winetrobe
Publisher: Langport & District History Society
Despite the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) constantly spewing hatred about Universal Credit claimants stealing taxpayer money, disabled campaigners are reporting that some are being overpaid payments.
Disability News Service (DNS) reported that disabled researcher and campaigner Caroline Richardson was contacted by multiple claimants who’d been overpaid.
DWP absolutely useless, again
Campaigners identified that over payments were made to people receiving both contribution-based employment and support allowance (ESA) and Universal Credit. Basically, the DWP is recording ESA payments as lower than the amounts actually being paid out. Therefore, Universal Credit is increased to compensate for the reduction through the DWP’s ‘transitional protection programme.’
This means claimants are overpaid Universal Credit and, as with the Carers Allowance scandal, there are fears they’ll be asked to pay it back without warning.
These errors are also affecting council tax. One claimant was told to pay an extra £546 a year because the council thought her universal credit had increased due to the DWP’s woeful bookkeeping.
Richardson told DNS:
I am struggling to understand how this has gone so catastrophically wrong, and whether it has gone wrong for everybody. This is going to cause disabled people an enormous amount of worry. It is just such a mess.
Richardson checked her online Universal Credit journal before she received her benefits in her account. This meant she was able to contact DWP and try to stop her own £388 overpayment.
However, because the DWP is a clusterfuck, Richardson was issued with both a correct statement. She then received a notification acknowledging the overpayment and noting it would need to be repaid to DWP in instalments.
Richardson said:
It just seems like the whole DWP is functioning so badly, and they are blaming claimants for their mistakes. The more universal credit is rolled out, the more the errors in the software are going to be exposed.
DWP already under fire for blaiming claimants
In February, the Public Accounts Committee also pulled the DWP up for not taking accountability for their own issues and instead blaming claimants.
They found that between 2024 and 2025, claimants were overpaid by £1 billion due to the DWP’s own errors. This is up from £0.8 billion in 2023-24. However, this is cancelled out by the fact that claimants were underpaid by £1.2 billion for the same reason 2024-25. This is up from £1.1 billion in 2023-24.
The report said:
The DWP has carried out some work to tackle the root causes of fraud and error – but this has focused on those committed by claimants, rather than errors by officials.
DNS also spoke to disability activist Flick Williams, who has already repaid a £289 overpayment. However, she is still expected to pay £546 in extra annual council tax because her council thinks her benefits have increased too.
Williams said:
How many people would let their universal credit go into their account, not check it and just assume the money in their account was theirs to spend?
Another scandal brewing
This comes as yet another Carers’ Allowance inquiry could be on the cards. The department is still chasing unpaid carers for repayments after their case was discredited.
Debbie Abrahams, Chair of the Work and Pensions committee told Stephen Timms that:
The failure to offer carers redress with due care would lead the public to conclude that [it] is not serious in its public commitment to do so, which is extremely damaging to the existing issues of trust with the department.
As the Canary’s Alex Cocker reported at the time:
Spoiler alert: we have already concluded that the DWP is not serious about righting its injustices. Because, you know, its injustices could fill around 2,244 articles on a mid-sized indie news site.
Despite all this evidence, the DWP told John Pring that:
it would be wrong to describe the overpayments as a developing scandal, and insisted that it took overpayments very seriously, was aware of this issue, and was working to resolve the cases of those affected.
With the DWP fraud and error statistics out later this week it will be interesting to see just how much overpayment has increased since the latest Universal Credit forced migration.
But it’s becoming ever clearer that the DWP is a joke of an organisation that doesn’t care about claimants. It’s time the whole thing was abolished.
Featured image via the Canary
Keir Starmer is clinging on to power despite dozens of Labour MPs joined calls for him to quit as prime minister.
Nearly 60 backbenchers had called on him to quit by Monday evening after a steady stream of MPs joined the rebellion despite Starmer delivering a speech pledging to turn around the party’s fortunes.
In a further blow for the embattled PM, ministerial aides to health secretary Wes Streeting, home secretary Shabana Mahmood and environment secretary Emma Reynolds all quit their jobs calling on him to resign.
Starmer once again vowed not to “walk away” from No.10 and said he would prove the doubters wrong, despite Labour’s drubbing in last week’s elections at the hands of Reform UK and the Greens.
He said: “This is nothing less than a battle for the soul of our nation and I want to be crystal clear about how we will win it because we cannot win as a weaker version of Reform or the Greens.
“We can only win as a stronger version of Labour, a mainstream party of power, not protest.”
Starmer confirmed the government will nationalise British Steel and pledged to put the UK “at the heart of Europe” by agreeing closer ties with the EU.
But his speech was dismissed as “utterly inadequate” by one former minister, and was greeted by a fresh wave of demands from MPs for him to set out a timetable for when he will leave Downing Street.
They included Gower MP Tonia Antoniazzi, who said: “Keir Starmer is a man of great integrity who has led the Labour Party through difficult times.
“There will be those that disagree with me but I think it is genuinely time for him to step aside as PM in an orderly manner.”
Markus Campbell-Savours, the MP for Penrith and Solway, said:“I have listened carefully to the prime minister’s speech. Sir Keir Starmer is a decent, principled and kind man. But his leadership is not working, and it is with genuine regret that I say so.
“His position is now untenable. Colleagues should have the courage to say publicly what many have said privately for months.
“Loyalty matters. Loyalty to him, to the party and to each other. But today loyalty lies with our elected members across the country and with the 1,500 who lost their seats last week. It does not lie in maintaining a course that is not commanding confidence.
“What the party needs now is leadership with a credible vision for the country, a clear sense of direction, purpose and ambition. Those skills exist within our ranks, and I am confident we can find a leader who has them.”
Catherine West, the former Foreign Office minister who on Saturday threatened to challenge Starmer herself, instead wrote to all Labour MPs asking them to support her calls for a leadership contest by September.
Under Labour’s rules, 81 MPs would need to support a candidate to trigger a leadership election.
So far, no one has put their name forward, but the likes of Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner are thought to be weighing up their options.
Meanwhile, speculation is mounting that an MP will give up their seat in order to give Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham the chance to return to Westminster and mount his own bid to become PM.
Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Labour-backing union Unite, told HuffPost UK that Starmer’s speech had not “cut the mustard” and said he should quit.
She said: “I don’t think it’s going to happen tomorrow, but there isn’t a cat in hell’s chance that Keir Starmer’s going to lead us into the next election. It would be the death knell if that happened.”
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Following Labour’s embarrassing defeat at the polls, business and trade secretary and friend of Israel, Peter Kyle, was the designated fall guy and sent out on the media round.
It was as serious a time as you’d expect, with Kyle saying Wes Streeting is not plotting to overthrow Keir Starmer. The labour ministers were too preoccupied with the release of the Devil Wears Prada 2.
The devil wears cheap Labour suits
For some reason, Peter Kyle was on Sky News this morning. When asked about inevitable Labour leadership bids, he spoke of a cinema outing with his chum, health minister, Wes Streeting, to see the Devil Wears Prada 2. So surely, he couldn’t be launching a leadership bid…
On X, Sky News anchor, Sophy Ridge, said that Kyle had said the following:
Wes and I last weekend we were out campaigning together in Ilford. And let me say, he achieved a stunning result with that whole team in Ilford. That shows what a great campaigner Wes is. After we campaigned, we went for dinner and we went and saw a movie together. Somebody who was planning to pull the plug and launch a leadership bid in a couple of days time, doesn’t go to the cinema with a friend.
When asked what film they went to see, Kyle said they watched Devil Wears Prada 2.
Ridge then asked whether they had spoken about Labour’s leadership, to which Kyle replied:
Wes and I talk about the leadership of the country all the time. Wes and I shared an office together for nine years, we spent so much time talking about the leadership of the country. We almost never spoke about the individual.
Wonder if the Labour duo ever spoke about Peter Mandelson…
Kyle carried on, saying:
Wes and I care so much about the future of the country. We have a very shared view of public services in the modern world. About what Britain’s potential is amongst our competitive countries. We both care deeply about the opportunities that young people have. Also, we were friends going to the cinema and we had a good laugh about other things as well.
If you’re unfamiliar with the film, it’s a series about backstabbing, bitchy cliques, and elitists sneering at working-class people. Sound familiar?
The sequel, in particular, focuses on how the media is being corrupted and how those grappling for power are swayed by those with real power — the fucking tech billionaires.
You can’t help but wonder if Wes Streeting was getting tips. Though, with all his private health care donors, he hardly needs it.
Kyle finished by describing him and Wes as ‘very good friends.”
Wes and I are very good friends but I’m not going to fall into the trap of being his spokesperson. But what I can tell you is that he, like me, is focused on the success of this government. His primary mission in government is making sure the whole government is a success, and he is there for Keir when he needs him.
Definitely, definitely not running
This story was, of course, taken very seriously.
Peter Kyle saying Wes Streeting can’t be planning a leadership coup because they went to see Devil Wears Prada 2 at the weekend is so ludicrous it borders onto homophobia
— Calgie (@christiancalgie) May 11, 2026
It looks to as if Wes Streeting and Peter Kyle have to wait until “The Devil Wears Prada III”…..
— Greg Hadfield (@GregHadfield) May 11, 2026
This wasn’t the only media appearance Kyle made. On the BBC4 Today programme, he said:
It’s one thing [to keep] open the option that you might try to become prime minister one day, and it’s a very different thing to try to unseat a sitting prime minister in the moment we’re in, and Wes Streeting is not doing that.
So that’s that then, he’s absolutely 100% not running. Well, maybe until tomorrow.
Featured image via the Canary
The voter turnout for the English local elections last week was 31.5 per cent (Alamy)
3 min read
The higher-than-expected turnout in these local elections showed voters were ready to demand change. Local leaders need more political and fiscal autonomy than ever to deliver for their residents.
England’s local political map has been transformed. But beyond the sweeping changes in local political control, one notable feature of last week’s local elections in England was that, in many areas, turnout tended to be above the usual low levels associated with local contests.
In my home council area of Calderdale turnout was 45 per cent, up by almost 11 per cent on the last local elections held here in 2024. The pattern was similar elsewhere.
While still not generally ‘high’ by any stretch (there’s much more to be done to improve electoral turnout both locally and nationally), higher than normal turnout is perhaps indicative of current public sentiment.
At first glance, higher turnout seems counterintuitive. Public trust in politics remains exceptionally low, and dissatisfaction with institutions is widespread. But increased turnout may indicate that many voters are increasingly willing to participate when they feel sufficiently motivated to register frustration or demand change.
The causes of voters’ discontent appear both national and local.
Undoubtedly, there’s dissatisfaction with the pace of change nationally, and growing impatience with stagnant living standards, stretched public services and the continuing cost-of-living crisis.
The message to the government in Westminster is clear: it must radically transform what it’s doing if it’s going to succeed. There is a growing demand for visible improvement in people’s everyday lives, particularly in communities that feel economically overlooked.
But interpreting these elections purely as a referendum on the government would miss a crucial part of the story. Beneath the national political turbulence lies a more localised crisis in confidence about the ability of councils themselves to deliver.
After more than a decade of cuts, many local authorities are operating under severe financial pressure, with local spending power much lower than it was in 2010, pre-austerity.
While the current government have provided additional financial support, councils across England remain constrained by a system that leaves them struggling to meet their statutory obligations and adequately fund other services. In many places, residents have seen libraries closing, parks deteriorating, roads going unrepaired, and their high streets declining.
These are the types of things that shape people’s daily experience of government most directly. For many voters, local government no longer seems capable of improving the places where they live. People feel they’re paying more council tax every year while getting less back in return.
As a result, there appears to have been a growing willingness to “roll the dice” electorally and replace incumbent administrations with alternatives promising disruption or change.
Beyond the introspection at the national level, therefore, another key takeaway from these elections should be that local leaders need more political and fiscal autonomy to deliver for their residents.
There’s a growing need to fundamentally reform local government finances so councils can act. This should mean radically reforming the council tax system, fixing social care provision, and delivering bold fiscal devolution.
This should go hand in hand with the government building on the progress it’s made on devolution and going further and faster on decentralising power so that local areas have greater control over things like economic development, transport, housing and public services.
This not only matters for delivery but also for enhancing local democratic engagement. International evidence shows that when local government has the power to genuinely change things, people are more likely to turn out to vote regularly and engage with it positively, enhancing local turnout over the longer term.
Rebuilding confidence in local government, empowering councils to deliver visible change and sustaining higher levels of democratic participation will be essential if trust in local and national politics is to be renewed.
Ryan Swift is Research Fellow at IPPR North, writing on devolution, local democracy, ‘levelling up’, and regional identity
Mike Hedges, one of the final nine Labour Senedd members, blamed the media for his party’s wipeout in a brush-by with ITV. Not taking it well…
Two things seem certain after last week’s local elections in England and parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales. The first is that the historically incompetent and unpopular prime ministership of Keir Starmer is beyond salvation. The second is that, if the quality of the candidates elected locally and nationally is anything to go by, so too is Britain.
For proof that nothing you say or do in modern times can get in the way of your political dreams, we need look no further than Eden Hills. ‘Cock is one of my favourite tastes’, the newly elected Green councillor said in a social-media post last year. ‘Not only that, but balls smell amazing.’ In a separate post, he said: ‘OKAY [I’m] bored of being woke now, [I] should get back to talking about COCK.’
Hills was one of many trans or nonbinary candidates successfully fielded by the Green Party of England and Wales. The Scottish Greens managed to get two transgender candidates elected to the Scottish parliament, both of whom have some rather questionable views.
Q Manivannan – a self-described ‘queer Tamil immigrant’ – was elected to the Scottish parliament as a member for Edinburgh and Lothians, despite only having lived in Scotland since 2021, the year he arrived in Edinburgh from India on a student visa. It is by no means certain that Manivannan will be able to remain in the country long enough to complete his five-year term.
‘I cannot wait [until] big lizard Lizzie kicks the bucket’, Iris Duane, another of the Greens’ new trans MSPs, said in a social-media post in 2022, referring to the late Queen Elizabeth II. ‘Not because she’s dead but because of the absolute meltdown it will cause [in] the British consciousness.’
Heading south, the interests of Greens’ politicians undergo something of a transformation. The London borough of Lambeth elected Saiqa Ali, who was arrested last month on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred against Jews. Ali is alleged to have posted pictures on social media of a blue-and-white serpent with a Star of David on its skin coiled around the Earth and to have said that ‘England has a government that is overrepresented with Zionist Jews’. Ifhat Shaheen, who was elected to the Hackney council, came under the spotlight for wondering if ‘Zionists’ might be ‘harvesting’ the organs of dead Palestinians.
Not that the Green Party had any kind of monopoly on dodgy candidates. Glenn Gibbins, who was elected as a Reform councillor in Sunderland, seems to be the incarnation of every fear that the liberal establishment has projected on to the populist right-wing party. His novel suggestion for, er, dealing with the ‘amount of Nigerians in town’ was to ‘melt them all down and fill in the potholes’.
There is much more that can be said about the quality of England’s local councillors. Abdul Monsur, elected to Tower Hamlets, publicly denied the Holocaust in a Facebook post in 2025. The mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, was returned to serve yet another term at the helm of the east London borough, despite a well-documented history) of vote-rigging and religious intimidation.
Once, there might have been a darkly funny side to this local-elections freakshow. But with the seriousness of the problems Britain is facing, from economic stagnation to societal Balkanisation, we surely have to ask: is this really the calibre of candidate we deserve?
Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.
For many households, the “cost of living crisis” has felt inescapable and never-ending.
And now, a PwC report has found that people seem to be bracing for yet another financial shock.
It said that UK consumer confidence has seen its lowest quarterly decline in four years (in 2022, or four years ago, inflation reached a then-41-year high of 11.1%; PwC point out this is the “sharpest quarterly decline in sentiment since the onset of the Ukraine war”).
It’s the lowest overall score since 2023.
“All age groups are concerned about the rising cost of living, with most people planning short-term cutbacks and sentiment among the under-35s the hardest hit.”
What are the most common concerns?
90% of respondents said they were most worried about the cost of living.
80% said they plan to cut household spending in the coming months (food price surges are reportedly expected by some in November 2026).
Twice as many respondents (12% vs 24%) said they planned to drive less to save on fuel costs in the April survey than they did in the January survey. And a majority of under-45s – 65% – said they were worried about their job security and/or prospects.
The 2,000-person-strong survey, conducted after the Easter bank holidays, also found that members of every age group felt less financially healthy than they did in the previous quarter.
“In contrast to previous cost of living shocks, the gap between more and less affluent households has narrowed, while the gap between the young and old has widened,” the accountancy firm said.
What has caused these concerns?
PwC said that “Food prices, which are already on the rise, typically have the biggest influence on cost of living perceptions, and are expected to climb further” later on in the year.
They also pointed out that pay rises are usually given in April. They speculated that if households haven’t been given those by now, they might have begun to budget for a leaner-than-anticipated financial year.
Then, there’s the fact that the energy price cap will be removed in July. Many are expecting price hikes post the closure of the crucial shipping channel, the Strait of Hormuz.
Politics
The Union is weaker after the Welsh Senedd, Scottish Parliament and English local election results. Starmer’s myopic speech ignores the danger.
Sir Kier Starmer’s speech on Monday morning painted an almost apocalyptic picture of the future of his country, were he to be ousted from the Prime Ministership. He said “our country will go down a dark path”. Referencing the gains by Reform UK and the Greens, he stated that Labour is “battling the despair upon which they prey”. “Change cannot come quick enough”. “People need hope”. “Incremental change won’t cut it”.
Starmer described “a battle for the soul of our nation”. There’s the rub. He is Prime Minister of a multi-national country. There was no focus on Scotland, Wales nor Northern Ireland. Indeed, England wasn’t referenced. It didn’t need to be: for Keir Starmer and the Labour bigwigs, Englishness and Britishness appear interchangeable. This was a speech by a decent Englishman which had no resonance for the non-English UK nations.
The election results have seen the annihilation of the old British unionist parties in Wales and Scotland. Together, the Labour and Conservative parties won 22% of Scottish seats, and 17% of Welsh seats. (Remember that, unlike the English-local or Westminster elections, the Scottish and Welsh electoral systems are proportional.) Nothing like this has been seen before, electorally.
These two old parties are sclerotic. They cannot imagine a British government that doesn’t include one of them. They are majoritarian by nature. They won’t trust the people of the UK with a proportional electoral system, believing themselves above the people. They see nothing wrong with a party that gains one-third of the vote winning two-thirds of the seats, as happened in 2024. Their hubris will result in a farrago of Faragistas running the UK into the ground and the departure of Scotland and, possibly, Wales. (Politico poll of polls currently has Scottish independence running at 51% – 46% in favour of independence, the second-highest margin since the 2014 referendum.)
What happens to NI/NoI if the hubris of Labour and Conservatives results in a Reform UK government that antagonizes Scotland sufficiently to lead to its secession and the end of British identity? Reunificationists urgently need to craft a vision for the future of this island that truly cherishes all identities. The failure of separatist violence to achieve unity – and the immense suffering it has caused – must be addressed and acknowledged in a way that is genuinely cathartic for unity-desirous, unity-agnostic and unity-hostile voters. Is that possible? If it is not tried, what will we sleepwalk into?
Philip McGuinness taught at Dundalk Institute of Technology, plays mandolin with the Oriel Traditional Orchestra and loves to walk around and over the wee perfect hills of the Ring Of Gullion.
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Labour MPs can’t decide if Keir Starmer is coming or going even as his premiership hangs in the balance.
Despite the party’s horrendous performance in the local elections, the prime minister has made it clear he has no intention of stepping down.
That means it is up to the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) to try and unite behind an alternative candidate to oust the PM.
But MPs cannot decide what course of action they want to take, and so the party seems to be falling apart – in public.
1. ‘Wholly Unserious’
Backbencher Catherine West threatened to pose a leadership challenge to Starmer if she got the required backing of 20% of the parliamentary party.
However, after Starmer’s make-or-break speech on Monday, West changed tactics and sent a letter to fellow Labour MPs.
She asked them to back her letter calling on the PM to step down in September.
Fellow Labour MP Sean Woodcock then shared his email response to her on X, writing: “I think this is a wholly unserious way of going about this.”
He added: “Please stop.”
2. ‘By September’ Or ‘With September’?
West’s demand for Starmer to step down caused major confusion over a significant technicality: what was the deadline?
The backbencher’s initial email said she wanted the PM to resign “in September”, but she has since claimed she meant “by September”.
That sparked one of the signatories to withdraw immediately.
3. Who Will Stand Aside For Burnham?
Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham is considered to be one of the main rivals to Starmer.
However, he needs a seat in parliament to successfully challenge Starmer.
That has fuelled speculation that a Labour MP could stand aside, giving Burnham a chance of winning the subsequent by-election.
The so-called “King of the North” is rapidly accumulating support – but not many people are willing to actually give up their jobs, it seems.
As Paula Barker, MP for Liverpool Wavertree, told the BBC: “I would be delighted if a seat could be identified for Andy Burnham.”
But, when asked if she would give up her seat for him, Barker said firmly: “No.”
After an awkward pause, she was asked if that meant she was hoping someone else would give Burnham their seat. Barker said: “Yes.”
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