Politics
Cody Harper: another victim of two-tier policing
This week, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decided to drop the charge against 20-year-old Cody Harper of assaulting an emergency worker.
Harper, a white man, had been arrested and charged after an incident in Birmingham in the early hours of Sunday 21 June. In video footage, which has since gone viral, he is seen being pushed to the ground by a black man, while another black man tries to punch him in the back of the head. Before Harper can properly regain his footing, a female West Midlands Police (WMP) officer slams him up against a shop shutter. Harper then swings his arms and appears to strike the officer in the head – possibly before he realises that the person in front of him is a police officer.
Harper’s arrest occurs seconds after he is assaulted by the two black men. The police officers attending the incident would almost certainly have seen who used physical violence first. However, they appear to let the aggressors walk away while they arrest the victim. For good measure, the arresting officer swears at Harper and calls him a ‘dick’, which isn’t very professional.
If we’re being generous, it could be said that the officers on the scene failed to distinguish between a deliberate assault and a chaotic reaction from a young man who had just been attacked, knocked down and (as Harper possibly saw it) pushed into a shutter by a number of black men. More likely, however, is that the case of Cody Harper is yet another example – as if we needed it – of two-tier policing. The officers saw what happened, yet instinctively chose to arrest the white man rather than the black men.
WMP has since revealed it had identified the two men who attacked Harper, but that neither was charged and were instead given ‘out-of-court’ disposals. This is precisely the kind of disparity that fuels public anger. A young white man at the centre of a confused incident faced the serious prospect of prosecution for assaulting an emergency worker, while others, who appeared to have instigated the violence, and who were black, received much more lenient treatment.
It is now obvious that there is something rotten at the heart of English policing. When the very culture of the institution is permeated with progressive ideology (with the truly appalling quango, the College of Policing, at its heart), is it any surprise that police behave in this way? DEI language slaps trainee officers around the face the moment they cross the training threshold. They then must adhere to this dogma if they have any hope of career advancement or even keeping their job. We saw this at its most disturbing and tragic in the case of Henry Nowak.
Policing has become too inconsistent, too image-conscious and too willing to pursue cases that appear ‘progressive’. They do this at the expense of restoring and maintaining order on the streets – the role that the public overwhelmingly wants them to perform. When the police are applying the law differently depending on a person’s ethnicity, political views or the nature of a protest, it undermines the principle that everyone is equal before the law.
Police officers work in difficult, fast-moving and sometimes dangerous conditions. But difficulty isn’t a blank cheque. The public is entitled to expect discipline, proportion and even-handedness from those entrusted with coercive power. When the police get it wrong, they should say so plainly rather than shelter behind formulaic statements about procedure.
Assaults on police, paramedics and other emergency workers are serious and should be punished where the evidence supports this. But respect for the police is not strengthened when weak or questionable cases are pushed forward because of hard-wired, ideological values. Public trust depends on fairness, sound judgement and – crucially – impartiality.
Paul Birch is a former police officer and counter-terrorism specialist. You can read his Substack here.
MCALLEN, Texas — Just miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, Ken Paxton is trying to inherit President Donald Trump’s historic gains with Hispanic voters.
The Texas GOP Senate nominee, speaking to hundreds of supporters last week at his first campaign rally in this region that’s almost entirely Latino, revealed how Republicans believe that’s possible: by touting Trump’s closure of the border and hitting Democrats over the head with the culture war — while ignoring the drag his mass deportations have had on the region.
The GOP faithful, clad in signature MAGA red and a few scattered Trump 2028 hats, gathered at a beer hall outdoors in 100-degree heat to greet the Republican Senate nominee and other candidates. Attendees ate up the Republicans’ constant jabs at Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico. Eric Flores, the challenger to Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, called Talarico a “gay vegan” and “low T.” Paxton belittled Talarico, a seminarian student and critic of Christian nationalism, for referring to himself as a “Christian who hates Christianity.”
It’s an approach key to Paxton’s strategy, as Republican Senate nominee, to slice into Talarico’s widening polling lead with Hispanic voters, who could prove decisive for who wins the competitive Senate seat and a litany of other races that will determine which party takes power in Washington come November.
“Once this community knows what [Talarico’s] views are on transitioning boys into girls, and girls into boys, and boys and girls sports, they’re not going to support it,” Paxton told reporters after the rally, in response to a question of how he intends to keep Hispanic voters in the fold after they swung toward Trump in 2024.
This has worked before for the Texas GOP. Sen. Ted Cruz blitzed the airways in the 2024 Senate race with attack ads against former Rep. Colin Allred about transgender youth participation in sports. Republicans branded Wendy Davis “abortion Barbie” following her successful protest against an anti-abortion law in the state legislature.
But outside the carefully choreographed event is a community getting pummelled by the president’s increasingly unpopular immigration agenda — a reality that’s given Democrats a strong opening with Latinos as they attempt to end a decades-long losing streak in statewide races. Interviews with local lawmakers, business leaders and voters on both sides of the aisle reveal that Democratic candidates like Talarico and gubernatorial nominee Gina Hinojosa have so far been successful at appealing to Hispanic voters feeling the economic strain under Trump.
Talarico, who appeared in McAllen for an event 16 hours after Paxton’s, kept his pitch focused on the cost of living, handing out hot plates of food and calling for a reversal in health care cuts under the GOP budget bill enacted last year.
“He’s pretty steady and focused on the issues that matter to families,” said Democratic state Sen. Juan Hinojosa, whose district spans Corpus Christi to McAllen.
“Democrats get sidetracked on all these cultural issues, and they need to stay focused on what I call the bread butter issues, issues that impact families directly, the kitchen table issues,” he said. “Democrats need to stay away from biting the hook that’s being put out by Paxton.”
A community being squeezed
The Rio Grande Valley is buckling under the weight of Trump’s policies, and the economic strain is visible in McAllen.
Deportations have dried up workforces in critical industries like construction that drive the local economy, leaving cement slabs half-poured. A traffic chokehold at the border has slowed business in retail and restaurants as Mexicans have been deterred from hopping over to the U.S. for the day.
The entire border is being squeezed. Laredo, located more than 150 miles from McAllen, is one of the nation’s top trade hubs, and its leaders are warning that Trump’s tariffs and his threat to eliminate the USMCA trade agreement stands to devastate international commerce that flows through the city.
“When the U.S. doesn’t provide economic opportunity for the people at the border, it will create this situation,” said Laredo Mayor Victor D. Treviño, a Democrat, in an interview.
The Paxton campaign dismissed concerns of Democrats’ gains with Latinos, especially in the Rio Grande Valley — and once again emphasized the culture war, which Republicans say resonates with socially conservative Latinos.
“Look, Hispanic families aren’t voting for a woke vegan who says God is nonbinary and wants to Latinx our children,” said Alex Alarcon, director of Hispanic outreach for the Paxton campaign, in a statement. “We’re proud of our culture and our faith, and Ken Paxton has spent his career fighting for us: a secure border to protect our families, a cost of living we can actually afford, and the freedom to live by our values.”
Still, the tide seems to be turning toward Democrats.
A dozen residents along the border said in interviews that they are satisfied illegal border crossings have dropped to record lows, a realization of one of Trump’s top campaign promises and one of the reasons he won over Hispanic voters in the region. But they also believe the crackdown has gone too far. More than 60 percent of Hispanics said Trump’s mass deportations campaign — including his widespread deployment of ICE agents across the U.S. — has been too aggressive, according to a July POLITICO Poll.
In McAllen last week, the community was still aghast over a nun who was recently arrested by ICE while walking to church. She was later released after GOP Rep. Monica De La Cruz and Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar intervened, but interviews with residents revealed they still live in fear: Even U.S. citizens are checking their pockets for ID before venturing out, and they try to steer clear of the border if possible.
Across Texas, one in five Hispanic business owners said they’ve had an employee deported in the past year and 70 percent have been impacted by Trump’s tariffs, according to a June survey commissioned by the U.S. Hispanic Business Council and shared first with POLITICO. Talarico holds a seven-point lead over Paxton among those surveyed — even though a plurality of them self-identified as Republican.
A national Republican close to the race, granted anonymity to speak freely, countered that Paxton stands to benefit from some of the most competitive House races taking place in South Texas — where Republican Tano Tijerina and Flores are trying to oust Reps. Henry Cuellar and Gonzalez, respectively, and Rep. Monica De La Cruz is fending off a challenge from Tejano music star Bobby Pulido. GOP campaigns have stood up multiple field centers in those districts drawn to favor Republicans under a new Congressional map, a ground game that is expected to boost Paxton at the top of the ticket, the person said.
They added that internal message testing shows some of the attacks on Talarico, specifically those regarding his past comments on gender, “is unlike anything we’ve ever seen with Hispanic men, just in terms of the amount that it moves them.”
Daniel Garza, president of the LIBRE Initiative, a grassroots conservative group based in South Texas, said Trump’s closure of the border has affirmed Hispanic’s support for him, and Democrats aren’t offering viable pro-growth economic plans.
“Democrats have failed to give Latino voters something to vote for, and that they’ve only focused solely on something you know for us to vote against. And that’s not good enough,” he said. “[Latinos] want less tax burden, less regulatory burden, more energy production.”
Talarico’s pitch to Hispanics
Talarico was also in McAllen, just one day after Paxon’s rally, to host a fundraising benefit — the final stop on a 750-mile bus tour hitting small towns along the border to deliver a message about lowering costs and creating jobs. In an attempt to cast himself as a tough-on-immigration Democrat, Talarico unveiled a border security plan that includes hiring more Border Patrol agents, a major employer in South Texas, and adding immigration judges to reduce the asylum backlog.
It’s part of his attempt to widen his current edge over Paxton with Hispanics, with a New York Times poll in June showing Talarico is winning the demographic by a 61 percent to 29 percent margin — a significant shift after Trump won 55 percent of Hispanic voters in Texas in 2024.
“You could drive a truck through the margin of error on the Times’ subsample,” Alarcon, Paxton’s Hispanic outreach director, said. “The fact is nobody is winning Hispanic voters by default this cycle. We’ll be in Spanish-language media from the Valley to Dallas, talking about groceries, gas, health care and a secure border.”
Still, Talarico’s lead has given Democratic party leaders hope amid their national tug-of-war with Republicans over Hispanic voters: If Talarico can hold onto Texas’ large Latino population by these margins through November, that would prove gradual gains over the past decade for Republicans were a temporary blip ahead of the 2028 presidential race.
Under the midday sweltering sun in McAllen, Talarico handed out hot plates of food to a line of people who had donated to a local woman struggling to pay for cancer treatment. The Democratic Senate nominee, while speaking to reporters later, dismissed Paxton’s attempts to appeal to Hispanic voters by making personal attacks against him.
Republicans are attempting to divide people, Talarico said, “so we don’t notice that they’re picking our pockets, that they’re closing our public schools, that they’re gutting our health care, that they’re raising taxes on working people while they cut taxes for billionaires. It’s the oldest strategy in the world.”
Talarico’s campaign is leaning hard into its outreach to the Hispanic community, including efforts like running a Spanish-language ad during the World Cup talking about his background as a teacher, plans to defend Medicaid and social security, and push to raise taxes on billionaires. He also ran an ad during the Mexico vs. Panama soccer match and launched a Spanish-language social media channel.
Local Democratic party officials have begun targeted organizing efforts to turn out Hispanic voters throughout the Rio Grande Valley. But the challenge, they say, is convincing Hispanics running away from Republicans to instead run toward Democrats and not stay home in November.
Democrats are heartened by an uptick in primary turnout in the region, which in March saw more than double the number of primary voters than in 2024. Trump carried all four counties in the RGV that year, the first time in history a Republican has won them at the presidential level, but Democrats won at every level down ballot.
“We’re hoping to carry that momentum,” said Hidalgo County Democratic chair Richard Gonzales, referring to the high primary turnout. “Republicans beat us because they made it seem like they could solve the problems. They got in and then they just created more problems.”
The post Too ‘triggered’ to run the country? appeared first on spiked.
4 min read
The new Prime Minister is wise to focus on the cost of living. That is the issue that will define his premiership.
I have seen six prime ministers since I ioined joined Ipsos in 2019. That turnover raises an obvious question: how confident should Andy Burnham be that he will last longer than those who came before him? And can he avoid the mistakes of his predecessor?
First impressions count
For now, the new Prime Minister appears focused on one thing above all else: demonstrating that his government really understands the pressures facing ordinary households. His first week has seen the announcement of a raft of measures aimed at easing the cost of living.
These include plans to scrap VAT on electricity bills, cap bus fares and raise a glass to much-loved pubs with an eye-catching reduction in business rates.
This focus makes sense.
Ipsos polling has consistently shown economic pessimism at historically high levels in recent years. Meanwhile, our new report, Understanding Society: From Walkmans to WiFi to What?, finds that only 53 per cent of Britons are satisfied with their standard of living today, compared with 72 per cent in 1989. At this year’s local elections, the cost of living was also the number one issue on the minds of English voters.
Burnham and his team will know that any PM promising change must persuade voters he “gets it”.
The importance of starting well
Anyone who follows Ipsos long-term trends will be conscious of the need to start well.
Recent Ipsos analysis of Keir Starmer’s premiership showed that his honeymoon period was remarkably short. Starmer began his premiership with a net favourability rating of +7 in July 2024 but by October had fallen to -26.
Early controversies, including the so-called freebies row and the backlash over means-testing winter fuel payments, proved politically damaging and created an impression of a government struggling to connect with public concerns. Burnham will be hoping to avoid a similar fate.
A pessimistic public
Yet he enters office facing a public that is arguably more pessimistic than at any point in recent decades. Our report shows that 83 per cent of people believe Britain is heading in the wrong direction today, compared with 55 per cent in 1989.
When people are asked what is bad about life in Britain, concerns about the cost of living and dissatisfaction with government feature prominently.
That dissatisfaction runs deep. Almost half of the public (47 per cent) now say the system of government in Britain needs a great deal of improvement – more than three times the proportion saying the same in the early 1970s. Trust in traditional politics has weakened significantly, helping to fuel the rise of challenger parties on both the left and right.
The electoral consequences have been profound. For much of the post-war era, more than seven in ten voters backed either Labour or the Conservatives.
Today, support for the two main parties combined is often closer to four in ten. The fragmentation of British politics means governments can no longer assume they will automatically be given the benefit of the doubt.
Meeting the challenge
That is the backdrop against which Burnham begins his premiership.
His instinct to focus on the cost of living appears politically sound. He is meeting the public where they are, with more than 7 in 10 concerned about the cost of living for them personally.
The issue matters to voters and offers a clear opportunity to demonstrate that his government can improve people’s lives. Starmer’s failure to establish a positive narrative early on proved difficult to reverse.
The challenge for Burnham is that he faces a public which is deeply sceptical not just about politicians, but about whether politics itself can deliver meaningful change.
But “the benefit of the doubt” clearly seems to be there for now. Exclusive data for PoliticsHome shows that a significant chunk of voters (42 per cent) has neither a positive nor negative view of him at present. And 54 per cent did not express a view on whether he would do a good job or a bad job on the cost of living specifically.
Whether it still exists in six months will depend on whether voters feel their lives are starting to improve.
That, more than any announcement made during his first week, is likely to determine whether Burnham’s premiership succeeds where Starmer’s ultimately failed.
Keiran Pedley is Director of Politics at Ipsos
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer endorsed Rep. Haley Stevens in her state’s contentious Democratic Senate primary on Friday, wading into one of the highest-profile ideological battles within the Democratic Party.
“As governor, I have one strategy: Get things done. And that strategy informs everything that I do, and that’s why I’m endorsing Haley Stevens for the U.S. Senate,” Whitmer said in a video posted to Stevens’ account.
Stevens and former public health official Abdul El-Sayed are the two major Democratic candidates competing in the Aug. 4 primary to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters.
El-Sayed’s candidacy has galvanized progressives, while Stevens has backing from more mainstream Democrats and the tacit support of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
The post The two-tier policing of BLM Britain appeared first on spiked.
Putin will be over the moon. Caves in Iraq will echo with the laughter of whatever remains of ISIS. For a new poll has found that a measly six per cent of Britons would take up arms if we faced an ‘imminent invasion’. Armies of mad Islamists could be amassing on our beaches and just one in 17 of us would ask for a gun. ‘We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be’, said Churchill. Not anymore, we won’t.
The YouGov survey is a sobering read. And a scary one. There were 2,300 respondents. Just six per cent said they would volunteer to fend off a looming foe. Fifty-two per cent said they can’t fight because of age or disability. No doubt this includes many folk who really are too old for war. But I bet it also includes silver-spoon twats who’ve been convinced by TikTok that they have ADHD or some other bullshit malady.
Fourteen per cent said they would serve if they were called up. That’s good to know – they won’t volunteer to defend our sceptred isle but they’ll give it a whirl if the alternative is jail. But 17 per cent said they wouldn’t fight for Blighty even if ordered to do so. What a testament to our nation’s decay: more people would rather rot in the stagnant security of a jail cell than risk a hair on their head in a battle for Britain’s future.
Think about how insane these stats are. As a writer for the Spectator points out, around six per cent of Brits think we should be allowed to eat dogs. So fighting for your country is now as batty and eccentric a notion as chowing down on dog meat. A couple of years ago, a poll found that nine per cent of Brits aged 18 to 24 had a ‘favourable’ view of Hamas. God help us if Hamas should ever land on our shores: more young Brits would be fanboying over the Islamofascist invaders than trying to fend them off.
As with all surveys, caveats are called for. It’s possible that if an invasion really were imminent – if we could see warships at Dover – then minds would be sharpened and guns reached for. Hell, even some of our ‘neurodivergent’ youths might crewcut their blue hair and peel themselves away from Warhammer to prep for real war. An invasion isn’t imminent. Russia isn’t on our doorstep. There’s no Luftwaffe overhead.
And yet, it would be suicidal folly to not take seriously a poll like this one. For it points to a cavernous spiritual decay in our once great nation. Indeed, what is the point of a nation whose own people would not fight for it? If a country isn’t worth fighting for in the eyes of its own young, then surely it has surrendered its right to exist? The nation that cannot summon the spirit of its citizens to defend it against foreign foes is dead already – it’s just waiting for a strong enough military breeze to put it out of its misery
Here’s the frightening thing: I know where the pre-emptive draft-dodgers are coming from. My initial horror at the thought of Britain becoming a defenceless realm, our young more interested in figuring out their gender identity than fighting for the land of their forebears, swiftly gave way to understanding. I get it. Why would people fight for this Britain? What would they be fighting for?
Who would lay down their life for a land of vape shops and fried chicken and cunts on buses playing their music out loud? Why would anyone take up arms for a country where the high street stinks and litter piles up and you can’t go 10 metres without seeing a woman in a medieval cloak from the 7th century? Who would risk life and limb for a nation where illegal immigrants are setting up tent cities and the authorities do damn-all about it? The other day, I walked past one such encampment in Warren Street and one of the inebriated inhabitants showed me his anus. His literal arsehole. Surely, as a freeborn Briton, I deserve the liberty to traverse my capital city without being exposed to the rectal opening of a foreign panhandler?
Indeed, given the virtual erasure of our borders by rich officials who crave cheap labour from overseas to make their coffee and wipe their arses, where even is this nation we’d be expected to defend? If people have got the idea that our borders aren’t worth manning, can you blame them? After all, almost every day hundreds of young men from God knows where spill on to our shores and we’re called racist scum if we complain about it. Are you sure we wouldn’t also be called racist if we tried to fend off a literal army of gun-toting Koran bashers?
What would Brits be called upon to defend, exactly? A glorified airport lounge that was once a kingdom? A supposedly Christian country where Christians are arrested if their preaching offends ‘queers’ or Muslims? The birthplace of religious liberty where now mothers are publicly shamed by mobs of bearded men if their kid scuffs a page of the Koran? This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England where you can’t even fly the goddamn national flag lest it upset plummy leftists and their asylum-seeker au pairs?
Then there has been the wilful decommissioning of patriotic feeling. A core crusade of the anti-working-class intelligentsia has been the borderline criminalisation of national pride. Britain, they tell us, is a nation born from the sin of colonialism, a nation morally scarred by its historic crimes. Popular culture is awash with the self-regarding self-loathing of a cultural elite that hates its own country and the oiks who inhabit it. Little wonder that a survey of Gen Z last year found that half think Britain is a ‘racist country’. Who’s going to fight for a racist country? Let it die, no?
When will the ruling classes learn that their moral dereliction is having the most dreadful consequences? That it is making everyday life more shit and our future more perilous? That it is weakening the national spirit and emboldening those who hate us? I hate that my fellow citizens think our nation is not worth fighting for. I hate even more that I fully understand why.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.
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Politics
The House | It will require a huge collective effort to make the PM’s pledge to end rough sleeping a reality
Image by: PA Images / Alamy
4 min read
Andy Burnham is singing from the Big Issue hymn sheet – but it will require some clever problem solving to help pull-off his ambitious plan to end rough sleeping
I was astonished when, fresh from his trip to Buckingham Palace, Andy Burnham stood in front of Downing Street and named the eradication of rough sleeping as his first priority as Prime Minister.
It’s a preoccupation that has obsessed us at the Big Issue since the September 1991 creation of magazine. In one moment, the 35 years of pushing to rid us of rough sleeping in particular – and homelessness in general – seemed as if it’s paid off.
Burnham has the very best of intentions, but critics and friends alike will point out his plan is easier said than done. All cautious of hope before delivery – promising the earth and delivering a flowerpot. Isn’t Burnham promising way more than he could possibly achieve? We’ve heard similar rhetoric before, including when another mayor turned PM, Boris Johnson, bounced into No 10 in 2019.
I remember when rough sleeping became an increasing reality. In 1961 as a 15-year-old runaway dodging the police, you would not, or could not, sleep rough. You would be arrested. Strict vagrancy and ‘no fixed abode’ laws were used liberally. Instead you hid in derelict or abandoned buildings, away from the public eye. You might call it social cleansing. The social dislocation of homelessness was kept away from scrutiny.
But by the mid-1960s something had changed. Begging and rough sleeping seemed to be ignored by the police. Gradually streets in the centre of our cities, principally London, took on a new reality. The dispossessed became visible. So what started off as a social cleansing system was allowed to fall apart. The vagrancy laws remained in place until only a few weeks ago, but they were used less often. Usually you could wrap your self up in something and sleep where commerce traded and the public wandered.
Burnham, at long last, looks set to prioritise this social injustice, and we thank him for that
A new ingrained reality became acceptable. A human rights abuse became visible. More people fell between the cracks of a once all-encompassing welfare system and straight down onto the cold, hard pavement.
Social sores were displayed as government washed its hands of responsibility. The problem was largely passed onto charities. An attitude of “You sort it out” seemed to emanate from police, local authorities and central government. And while this mindset has shifted somewhat in the years since, levels of rough sleeping have continued to wax and wane, and today the crisis remains stubbornly present in our towns and cities.
Burnham, at long last, looks set to prioritise this social injustice, and we thank him for that. From my place in the House of Lords, and in the pages of the Big Issue, we will offer our support and advice on how he can make his vision a reality. Because ending rough sleeping will require a huge collective effort. It needs strong leadership by government but must be done arm-in-arm with local authorities, businesses and the third sector.
It also requires some clever problem solving. For a start – how do you rollout Housing First nationwide when we still have a chronic lack of homes? Perhaps Burnham could look to unlock the 300,000 long-term empty homes sitting pretty across Britain. Funding councils to bring these properties back into use is the sort of long-term ‘spend to save’ measure we need to fix the country.
This pledge centres homelessness as a blight on the face of society. There are other blights. The biggest to me is the 40 per cent of governmental income going on maintaining people in poverty. We need to shift to a prevention mindset when it comes to breaking the cycle of poverty. As of yet the delivery of clear and cogent poverty dismantling thinking has been poor. But I live in hope.
Lord Bird is a crossbench peer and founder of the Big Issue
3 min read
Over the past decade, political shocks like Brexit and Covid have combined with longer-term political, social and technological change to put the UK’s constitutional arrangements under pressure.
The Constitution Unit’s newly published report – Safeguarding the Constitution: Key Steps to Strengthen UK Democratic Resilience – lays out a set of practical reforms to respond to these challenges.
Most obviously, these include measures to address known vulnerabilities or loopholes. For example, key ethics regulators should now be given a statutory footing so that they cannot be undermined or abolished at a prime minister’s whim. The process for appointments to the House of Lords should be reformed, ending the unconstrained power of patronage that currently allows a prime minister to appoint as many people as they wish, with no requirements for fair party balance and no enforceable propriety constraints.
In some cases, institutions and processes also need to evolve to match the changing context in which they operate. The arrangements for parliamentary scrutiny of international agreements, for example, have changed little in the past 100 years; the limited role they afford MPs is increasingly out of kilter with the scope and impact of modern treaties.
Similarly, political finance rules have not kept pace with parties’ growing reliance on major donors, and the corresponding risk that a small group gains disproportionate political influence. The government has already promised some welcome changes in response to the Rycroft Review on foreign financial interference, and has requested a review of spending limits from the Electoral Commission. Detailed work on donation caps should take place alongside that.
Strengthening our constitution does not only mean safeguarding institutions: the ultimate check on power in any democracy is its citizens. This makes work to improve the information environment and support civic education vital.
Statutory codes of conduct could require social media platforms to mitigate democratic risks, while the government could invest in the provision of high-quality information. The new National Curriculum, to be delivered in English schools from 2028, offers opportunities to improve and expand Citizenship education.
The most significant constitutional changes need careful policy work and wide consultation, to deliver results that last and that meaningfully contribute to trust in the democratic system. For a new government with countless demands on its time and attention, some of these may appear low priority.
But now is the time to begin these reviews, so that detailed proposals can be worked up in time for the drafting of the next general election manifesto. Meanwhile, there are plenty of things the Burnham government could do quickly to meaningfully strengthen the constitution.
The Representation of the People Bill is currently before Parliament. It has already been amended to increase the Electoral Commission’s independence, but more could be done. The legislation on removing peerages promised in the King’s speech could be broadened to address House of Lords appointments.
Many reforms can be delivered without legislation. Some would require standing order change – for example, to increase MPs’ influence over the Commons agenda, and more fairly allocate Commons time between opposition parties.
Others can be done by the government alone. Civil servants are working on a new edition of the badly outdated Cabinet Manual, and a process for future regular updating could be established at the same time. A duty to uphold democratic health could be included in the BBC’s promised permanent charter. The government’s lobbying transparency releases could be improved, as recently recommended by the Ethics and Integrity Commission.
Burnham has advocated a more collaborative approach to politics, and a less centralised state. Our proposed reforms offer practical ways of delivering those goals – and of safeguarding the UK constitution.
Lisa James is a Senior Research Fellow at UCL’s Constitution Unit
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