Politics
A grey matter? Nature, nurture and the study of forming political leanings | Biology
Where does our personal politics come from? Does it trace back to our childhood, the views that surround us, the circumstances we are raised in? Is it all about nurture – or does nature have a say through the subtle levers of DNA? And where, in all of this, is the brain?
Scientists have delved seriously into the roots of political belief for the past 50 years, prompted by the rise of sociobiology, the study of the biological basis of behaviour, and enabled by modern tools such as brain scanners and genome sequencers. The field is making headway, but teasing out the biology of behaviour is never straightforward.
Take a study published last week. Researchers in Greece and the Netherlands examined MRI scans from nearly 1,000 Dutch people who had answered questionnaires on their personal politics.
The work was a replication study, designed to see whether the results from a small 2011 study, bizarrely commissioned by the actor Colin Firth, stood up. Firth’s study, conducted at UCL, reported structural differences between conservative and liberal brains. Conservatives, on average, had a larger amygdala, a region linked to threat perception. Liberals, on average, had a larger anterior cingulate cortex, a region involved in decision-making.
In the latest study of Dutch people, the researchers found no sign of a larger anterior cingulate cortex in liberals. They did, however, find evidence for a very slightly larger amygdala in conservatives. The MailOnline declared evidence that conservatives were more “compassionate”, but later changed their headline noting that the study said nothing about compassion.
It is worth looking at the size of the difference the scientists found. When Dr Steven Scholte, a co-author on the study at the University of Amsterdam, did the calculations he found that the amygdala of a conservative was, on average, larger than that of the liberal by the volume of one sesame seed. That is three times smaller than the 2011 study found. In their write-up in iScience, the researchers said it was “critical to approach these findings with caution, to avoid fostering misconceptions and stereotypes”.
What, then, does it mean? Do people with larger amygdalas feel more threatened and so tend towards conservatism? Or do conservatives feel more threatened and develop a slightly larger amygdala as a result? “It’s impossible to know, using such correlational data, what causes what,” said Dr Diamantis Petropoulos Petalas, the first author on the study.
Social environment, clearly, is one of the most powerful shapers of people’s politics. Political values and beliefs can emerge in early life, particularly when children have politically engaged parents or carers. But political ideology continues to evolve with education and into adulthood as family influence declines. Higher education is consistently linked to more liberal views, especially on issues such as immigration, civil rights and gender equality.
Perhaps most intriguing is the role of genetics. Studies of twins show that political ideology is about 40% heritable. But again, what does that mean? These are population-level measures, after all. It is not that 40% of a person’s beliefs are shaped by genetics and 60% by environment. “It tells you the extent to which differences between people are due to genetic factors,” said Prof Aaron Weinschenk, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. “It’s not an estimate about an individual.”
How genetics affect people’s politics is similarly nuanced. Researchers have not, and do not expect, to find a Tory gene or a Democrat gene. Rather, says Tobias Edwards at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, genes work indirectly through personality and other factors such as how long people spend in education, their income and intelligence. “We should not expect there to be any specific genes for liberalism, or conservatism, but many genetic variants of infinitesimally small effects, acting indirectly through other traits,” he said.
Earlier this year, Edwards and his colleagues reported that genetics could be used to predict political leanings, with more intelligent siblings in families tending to more liberal politics. But the relationship with party allegiance is far more complex, Edwards said. As he points out, extraordinarily intelligent people are found on both right and left.
Another mistake would be to equate intelligence with sensible values and opinions. “Looking back across history, we can see intelligent individuals have been attracted to all sorts of different and often contradictory ideas,” Edwards said. “Intellectuals have flirted with and been seduced by dangerous ideologies and tyrannical regimes. Many smart people have believed ideas that are downright stupid.”
Politics
Why are so many people in Britain off sick? The answer is far more complex than you think | Gaby Hinsliff
Jamie used to love his job. Working as a hospital porter, helping sick people in need, he probably never expected to become a patient himself: at 50, he was still fit and healthy. But then he strained his back at work, and so began a long, downhill slide. He was given physio exercises to follow online, but couldn’t access them, and before long he was in such pain he was signed off work for good. Unable to keep active, and putting on weight, Jamie was referred to a diabetes prevention programme; but by now his back hurt too much to drive to the clinic, and public transport was a struggle.
Overwhelmed and isolated, he ended up retreating inside his damp, mouldy council house. Five years on, Jamie still isn’t working, but his back is almost the least of his problems. He’s diabetic, asthmatic thanks to the mould, suffering from coronary heart disease, and if he isn’t depressed yet then he probably soon will be.
There are countless Jamies out there, many suffering from what some doctors privately call “shit life syndrome”: getting dealt a string of bad cards, lacking the money to bounce back from any of them, and sinking deeper with every passing day. They’re genuinely sick, often with multiple diagnoses, but sick in a particularly complex, tangled way that medicine alone can’t magically solve. And herein lies this autumn’s toughest political battleground, as a new Labour government attempts to kickstart economic growth by getting people who are long-term sick back to work.
These are worrying times for many people living on disability and sickness benefits. Keir Starmer’s warning in Liverpool that those who can work should has done little to quell anxious speculation about what this autumn’s budget means for welfare spending, especially as ministers have yet to spell out exactly what they’ll do about planned disability benefit reforms set in train by the outgoing Tory government. Starmer has stressed that he knows there will be “hard cases”, who physically can’t work no matter how much they try, and that Labour wants to help rather than force people back into jobs. But it’s difficult to relax when the roads to previous welfare crackdowns have been paved too often with reassuring words.
Enter Jamie, who isn’t a real person, but a representative example of countless very real patients devised by the NHS Confederation and the Boston Consulting Group’s Centre for Growth to illustrate their joint report on a more benign way to get half a million long-term sick Britons back to work. Their analysis skilfully separates tabloid myths about skivers and sicknotes from hard facts. Yes, Britain has 2.8 million adults economically inactive because of long-term illness, up by a startling 900,000 since 2020. No, this isn’t some unavoidable global hangover from the pandemic – economic inactivity has fallen elsewhere in Europe – but it’s also extremely unlikely to be because a life on welfare is just too cushy here. The introduction of universal credit, if anything, left many disabled people worse off than before.
The simple explanation is that Britons as a whole are sicker than we used to be, with a third of working-age adults admitting to at least one health condition; that economic inactivity is in some ways a canary down the mine, pointing to lives that are making too many people stressed and ill. Tellingly, the report concludes that the kind of social and environmental factors that so often underpin shit life syndrome explain more of the variation in health outcomes between different parts of the country than more obvious factors such as diet and exercise, with deteriorating living conditions and rising crime particularly closely linked to avoidable deaths.
But it also shows how little it would have taken to halt Jamie’s downward slide; how different things might have been if he’d been offered the chance to retrain for a desk job, or cheap transport to his various appointments, or a better roof over his head. The take-home message is that getting sick people fit for work again requires the whole of government uniting around a common purpose – or mission, to use the Starmer buzzword – to reach the parts doctors can’t, backed up by employers doing more to keep staff healthy.
There are reasons to be hopeful that ministers broadly get that. Wes Streeting’s announcement that “crack teams” to cut NHS waiting lists will be deployed first not in places with the longest waits, but in those with the highest rates of people off sick, is a promising sign of different bits of government pulling in the same direction. The promise by the housing secretary, Angela Rayner, to make private landlords tackle damp and mould swiftly wasn’t billed as a public health measure, but is potentially a life-saver for people with respiratory diseases. The promise by the work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, of “no more writing people off, then blaming them just to grab a cheap headline” reflects a genuine desire for less noisy tub-thumping, and more practical focus on results – including giving more freedom to local mayors and councils to run back-to-work initiatives on the ground.
But the NHS Confederation’s hopes of creating a virtuous circle – where upfront spending to improve the nation’s health ultimately leads to lower welfare and healthcare bills, freeing up billions for everything else – requires something bolder than a “Treasury says no” approach focused stubbornly on upfront savings. There must be money to match good intentions, or Labour risks making already tough lives still tougher.
Politics
Which Battleground State Voters Could Sway the Election?
It’s no secret that the political sentiments of Americans follow lines of race and ethnicity, education and age. But what makes presidential elections so competitive is how these demographic groups often balance each other out.
In 2024, this delicate equilibrium is key to understanding the seven battleground states where, according to the polls, the presidential race is closest. Last election, several of these states were decided by fewer than 40,000 votes. Since then, together they’ve added about 1.3 million potential voters, and the smallest shifts in sentiment or turnout among certain groups could be enough to alter the outcome of this election.
To better understand the demographic forces at play in the battlegrounds, The New York Times conducted a granular review of the 2020 contest and compared precinct-level results with census data to estimate who cast ballots and how they voted. We examined race and ethnicity, age, education and geography to identify trends and key groups in each state. (Gender is another growing factor in partisanship but was not part of this analysis.)
What to watch President Biden’s winning coalition relied heavily on Latino voters, who made up nearly a quarter of those who voted in 2020, a figure that will likely rise in this election. But while Latino voters in the state have typically favored Democrats, no group is a monolith.
Experts say Latinos have weaker party attachment than other nonwhite groups and could be persuaded to change their votes. Moreover, a significant share of this group is made up of U.S.-born, young Latinos who will vote for the first time, and their sentiment is less predictable. Recent surveys have shown former President Donald J. Trump making inroads with young people and voters of color.
Mr. Trump’s biggest support in 2020 came from white voters aged 35 and older. This group accounted for half of the ballots cast, due in part to the outsize number of white retirees in the state.
For Democrats, there are potentially more votes to gain. In 2020, there were more ballots cast for the Democratic Senate candidate than for Mr. Biden. “Those voters who voted for Mark Kelly but decided not to vote for Biden or Trump could have decided the outcome of the race,” said Samara Klara, a political science professor at the University of Arizona.
What to watch Democrats in Georgia have long been guided by the “30/30 rule,” a term made popular by the University of Georgia political scientist Charles S. Bullock III. It says that in order for Democrats to win, Black voters must make up 30 percent of all voters and at least 30 percent of white voters must vote Democratic.
Black voters, who cast nearly a third of the ballots in 2020, overwhelmingly favored Mr. Biden — by almost 90 percent. But that reliable base of support appeared to be slipping earlier this year, and it’s a group that experts say Vice President Kamala Harris must energize and excite. About 850,000 Black Georgia residents did not vote in 2020.
“If you have anemic turnout among Black voters, that will spell doom for the Democratic ticket,” said Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University.
Both parties will also be looking to appeal to a growing share of white voters with a bachelor’s degree, a group whose votes were split nearly evenly between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump in 2020.
What to watch In 2020, Mr. Biden won Michigan handily — at least by the standards of a battleground state.
But Mr. Trump performed very well with white residents in suburban and rural communities, who made up nearly two-thirds of the voters in the 2020 election.
Democrats’ strong performance among nonwhite voters and in the suburbs of Detroit helped erase Republicans’ advantage in the suburbs around smaller cities in 2020. But even though Black voters overwhelmingly supported Mr. Biden, they were a relatively small group — just 14 percent of those who cast ballots. And experts say that Black support for Democrats could be waning in Michigan.
“There’s definitely an attitude that they aren’t represented, in comparison to their population and their outsize role in the Democratic party,” said Matt Grossmann, a political science professor at Michigan State University. He pointed to Detroit, a majority-Black city that does not have any Black representation in Congress. “The feeling is, how much attention are you paying to us? And how much are you taking us for granted?”
Disillusionment among the estimated 3 percent of Michigan voters who are Muslim and Arab American — a traditionally strong Democratic constituency — could also make a difference this year. Many of these voters have voiced their anger and frustration with the Biden administration’s support for Israel in the war in Gaza, and some have said they may choose to sit out this election or cast ballots in favor of a third-party candidate.
What to watch Nationally, education is a major political fault line, with college-educated voters far more likely to support the Democratic Party and less-educated voters favoring Republicans. But Nevada is the major exception to this rule: Democrats have won there in the past four elections, despite the state having a relatively low share of college-educated voters.
That’s because educational attainment divides mostly white voters, and many of Nevada’s less-educated voters are not white. Mr. Biden won half of the vote among voters without a four-year degree in Nevada, atypical for the nation as a whole.
Over the last several years, inflation has hurt working-class voters, and concerns about the economy could make it easier for the Trump campaign to eat into the Democratic advantage with blue-collar voters of color.
“Nevada is a little bit of a different animal,” said David Damore, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, pointing to the state’s low voter turnout, high diversity and more transient population. “This all means that there are a lot of potential untapped voters that could be mobilized.”
What to watch In 2020, North Carolina gave Mr. Trump the narrowest lead of any state he won. Voters in rural areas, who accounted for nearly a fifth of the total, helped deliver Mr. Trump his victory.
But North Carolina also has many small cities with a strong partisan divide between city-dwellers, who favor Democrats, and suburbanites, who favor Republicans.
For Democrats to flip the state, they must lose fewer votes in rural areas and increase voter turnout in smaller cities, like Greensboro and Asheville, said Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University.
“If we see a marginal movement away from Trump in rural areas, that’s really important,” he said. “The map will still show these places as red, but those differences can be the difference between winning and losing.”
What to watch As it does in other states, education plays a big role in the partisan divide in Pennsylvania. White voters without a bachelor’s degree made up nearly half the total, and they favored Mr. Trump three to one in 2020. Even so, that wasn’t enough for him to overcome the coalition of white voters with a college degree and voters of color who delivered Mr. Biden a victory.
The other big factor is geography.
Mr. Trump dominated the state’s rural areas and small towns, as well as the Pittsburgh suburbs. But Mr. Biden had a strong showing in Pennsylvania’s cities and in the Philadelphia suburbs, areas that accounted for more than 40 percent of the votes in 2020.
Wisconsin saw a similar geographic divide among voters. The bulk of Mr. Trump’s support came from the state’s more than 1,000 small towns and the outer suburbs of Milwaukee.
But the fastest-growing part of the state is an area that increasingly favors Democrats: the suburbs of Madison, home to the main campus of the University of Wisconsin.
In 2020, turnout in Dane County, which includes Madison, was 89 percent.
“It is among the highest turnout counties in the country,” said Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll. “The question for Democrats here is, is it even possible to squeeze more votes out of Dane County?”
Politics
Lack of ICU capacity was ‘political choice’, Chris Whitty tells Covid inquiry – as it happened | Politics
UK went into Covid with ‘very low’ intensive care capacity compared with other rich countries, Chris Whitty tells inquiry
The UK went into the Covid crisis with “very low” intensive care capacity compared with other wealthy countries, Prof Sir Chris Whitty told the Covid inquiry this morning.
Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, has given oral evidence to the inquiry in previous hearings, dealing with pandemic preparedness and government decisions taken during the emergency, but today he is being questioned as part of module 3, which is looking at how the NHS was affected.
He told the inquiry this morning:
Taking ICU [intensive care units], in particular, the UK has a very low ICU capacity compared to most of our peer nations in high income countries. Now that’s a choice, that’s a political choice. It’s a system configuration choice, but it is a choice. Therefore you have less reserve when a major emergency happens, even if it’s short of something of the scale of Covid.
Whitty also said, without trained staff, ICU capacity could not be scaled up quickly. He explained:
The key thing, which is the rate limiting thing for scale up, is people, trained people,
You can buy beds, you can buy space, you can even put in oxygen and things. And I think we learned some lessons from, for example, trying to set up the Nightingale hospitals, about the difficulties of doing that.
But fundamentally, the limit to that system, as to any system, is trained people and there is no way you can train someone in six weeks to have the experience of an experienced ICU nurse or an experienced ICU doctor. It is simply not possible.
So if you don’t have it going into the emergency, if it’s an emergency of this speed of onset, you should not have any illusions you’re going to have it as you hit the peak.
Key events
Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, has told the Covid inquiry that Britain went into the pandemic with “very low” intensive care capacity compared with other wealthy countries and that this was “a political choice”. (See 12.35pm.)
Today the House of Commons Library has published its final, most comprehensive analysis of the general election results. If you have any political geek tendencies, it’s a must read.
At the election 263 of the MPs elected (40%) were women – the highest number and proportion ever. This chart is good on which of the parties were best and worst in terms of the proportion of candidates who were female.
And this chart is interesting too, showing, among other things, that more than half of Labour MPs are newly-elected, and that the Lib Dems have more women MPs than the Tories do. If you enjoy data like this, there are 128 pages of it here.
At a meeeting at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, John Healey, the defence secretary, renewed the Aukus submarine defence pact partnership with his Australian and US counterparts. They agreed an updated Aukus statement. According to an MoD news release, it means:
Hundreds of Australian defence and civilian personnel will be upskilled in nuclear reactor expertise in 2025 by specialist Royal Navy engineers. The first such course concluded earlier this month, with 250 personnel learning the skills necessary to own, operate, maintain, sustain and regulate a nuclear-powered submarine.
The NHS should have done more to encourage people with serious, non-Covid illnesses to keep going to hospital during the pandemic, Prof Sir Chris Whitty told the Covid inquiry today.
The chief medical officer for England said there was never going to a “perfect balance” between asking people to stay away if possible, so as not to overburden the NHS, and persuading them that they should still go to hospital if seriously ill. But he said he felt the point that non-Covid patients in need of treatment should still go to hospital in an emergency could have been stressed more.
He told the inquiry:
I am confident what we didn’t do, was to identify over and over again – you couldn’t say it too often – that the NHS is open, in particular if it’s an urgent and emergency life threatening situation, you must go to hospital, as you usually would.
And there is reasonable evidence, in my view, for example, that the number of people who came into hospital with heart attacks was lower than you’d predict, I don’t anticipate there’s any reason that had been fewer. So some of those people were staying at home, who otherwise would not have done, and they would have had remediable conditions.
“So the bit of it, which is, did we get it across that people should still go to hospital? I think we didn’t get it across well enough. Two pensioners are seeking to take the Scottish and UK governments to court over the cut to the winter fuel payment, PA Media reports. PA says:
Peter and Florence Fanning, of Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire, have raised proceedings with the help of the Govan Law Centre against the Scottish government and the UK work and pensions secretary over the policy.
The judicial review – which has been raised at the court of session – now requires a judge’s approval to move to a hearing on the merits, with the Govan Law Centre seeking to expedite both the case and its application for legal aid to ensure a decision can be handed down before the winter.
The case asks the court to rule on whether the decision was unlawful, which would then allow the petitioners to ask the court to, in effect, set aside the policy and restore the winter fuel payment to all.
The case’s argument rests on the accusation both governments failed to adequately consult with those of pension age on the change and did not release an equality impact assessment on the changes. A freedom of information request revealed an abridged version of such an assessment had been carried out by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), with the UK government arguing a full study was not required.
Former first minister and current Alba party leader Alex Salmond was instrumental in putting the Fannings in touch with the Govan Law Centre ahead of the action being raised.
Speaking at the press conference on Thursday, Salmond said every person in Scotland “should be grateful” to the Fannings for raising the action, which he said should have been taken forward by the Scottish government in the first instance.
Rachel Moon, the instructing solicitor and a partner at Govan Law Centre, said: “Quite simply, (government) should have considered this rigorously. This policy and the decisions taken affect those with protected characteristics, including age and disability, and it affects 10 million people.” While campaigning organisations regularly try to challenge government decisions in court in this way, it is unusual for them to succeed, particularly if they are trying to overturn big fiscal decisions. Governments regularly announce changes to tax and welfare policy with minimal consultation.
Before Prof Sir Chris Whitty started giving evidence, the Covid inquiry heard evidence from Prof Kevin Fong, a former clinical adviser in emergency preparedness, resilience and response at NHS England. As Andrew Gregory reports, Fong said dealing with the Covid crisis was, for NHS staff, like having to respond to a “terrorist attack every day”, with infected patients “raining from the sky”.
Keir Starmer told US business leaders at a breakfast meeting in New York today that he wanted to “turbocharge” the economy.
After saying that discussions with business helped shaped Labour’s policies, he said: Because if we can get into the question of what works, what doesn’t work, how to get the economy to really turbocharge, what are the ambitions for investment, that really helps us shape our working.
Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, is still giving evidence to the Covid inquiry about the pandemic’s impact on the NHS. Here are some more lines that have emerged.
Whitty said it was arguable that health chiefs overstated the risk from Covid at the start of the pandemic, rather than understated it. Asked if the government should have placed more emphasis on the risk from long Covid at the start, he said:
I worried at the beginning – I still worry, actually, in retrospect – about did we get the level of concern right? Were we either over pitching it so that people were incredibly afraid of something where, in fact, their actuarial risk was low or were we not pitching it enough, and therefore people didn’t realise the risk they were walking into? I think that balance is really hard.
And arguably some people would say we, if anything, overdid it, rather than under at the beginning. So I’m not certain loading an additional risk on would in itself be useful.
I think we probably should have been swifter off the mark in spotting long Covid as it emerged, although I think we were relatively quick and it wasn’t obvious, we could have done something different as a result.
The main thing we could do at the beginning, before we understood it slightly better, was to reduce the amount of Covid. If you don’t get Covid, you don’t get long Covid.
He criticised a tweet by the World Health Organisation (WHO) from March 28 2020, which said: “#COVID19 is NOT airborne.” Asked about this, he said:
I think what was wrong about this was the degree of definitiveness that was put into this tweet ..
I don’t actually think tweeting is a very good medium for trying to put forward really difficult science. Jeremy Hunt, the Tory former chancellor, has said that Treasury officials always told him that higher borrowing would lead to interest rates staying higher for longer. He posted this on social media, in response to reports that Rachel Reeves is considering changing the way debt is defined in her fiscal rules to allow more borrowing.
With all the discussion about Labour changing the fiscal rules to borrow billions more money (so much for ‘fully funded’ commitments), it’s worth noting that the Chancellor explicitly ruled out doing so last year. My advice from HMT officials was always very clear on this: more borrowing means interest rates stay higher for longer.
Severin Carrell The information commissioner is investigating an alleged data breach involving WhatsApp messages held by one of Scotland’s most senior civil servants.
Unredacted messages held by Alyson Stafford, the Scottish government’s director general for Scottish exchequer, were sent by government officials to a mental health campaigner with the names and numbers of junior officials fully visible. Peter Todd, a campaigner based in northern Scotland who received Stafford’s messages last week using freedom of information legislation, has complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which investigates data breaches.
He said the messages, written to and from Stafford at the height of the Covid crisis, included confidential conversations, gossip and information about the government’s finances during the pandemic which should have been redacted.
The ICO confirmed it was assessing Todd’s complaint.
The Scottish government said it had alerted the officials affected, and took the “accidental release” very seriously. However, it is understood it does not believe the data breach is significant enough to require it to notify the ICO. Scottish government officials told Todd they were “content that we handling it in line with our statutory duties.”
Todd said the unredacted names, phone numbers and messages were sent to him by officials in a bundle of documents, most of which had been carefully redacted.
The visible names, numbers and messages came to him highlighted in yellow, as were notes alongside them on which parts of Scotland’s freedom of information act required their redaction.
He was angry about the data breach because he believes his medical information had been mishandled by the NHS on earlier occasions, and that insufficient care is taken by public bodies. “The Scottish government should have strong procedures in place to prevent glaring data protection errors like this happening,” he said. “I trust all those affected are being swiftly informed.”
A Scottish government spokesperson said: “We are aware that some information intended for redaction was released in error in response to a freedom of information request and those affected are being made aware.
“Any accidental release of information is treated very seriously and is subject to review so that appropriate action can be taken to prevent future incidents.”
Road deaths in Britain remain “unacceptably high”, campaigners said today. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) was commenting after the Department for Transport published road casualty figures for Britain in 2023.
James Broun, research manager at RoSPA, said:
While we’re pleased to see road fatalities fall by 5% on 2022, sadly 1,624 people still died on the roads last year – an unacceptably high figure following years of stagnation in fatality reduction. We are particularly concerned that when we include the number of people seriously injured on the roads, the overall figure (29,711) has shown virtually no improvement over the last year.
It’s important to put this into context. Although it’s good to see that road fatalities have decreased by 9% over the past decade, this is a marked slowdown compared to the 47% reduction achieved in the previous ten years. Taking a longer view, it’s clear that without a comprehensive road safety strategy in place, momentum has been lost.
RoSPA also said the figures for 2023 showed pedestrian fatalities up 5% on the year before. Here are the road death figures for 2023.
Knife crime rose 4% in England and Wales in the year ending March 2024, according to a report from the Office for National Statistics today.
The ONS says:
Offences involving knives or sharp instruments recorded by the police rose by 4% (50,010 offences) in YE [year ending] March 2024, compared with the previous year (48,409 offences). Of these offences, 22,167 (44%) were for assault with injury, or assault with intent to cause serious harm, and 21,226 (42%) were used in a robbery. These figures exclude the Greater Manchester Police.
These knife crime statistics come from recorded crime figures – police records from when a crime is reported. The ONS report also covers figures from the crime survey, which measures crime rates by asking people about their experience of crime (whether or not it was reported to the police), and it says that, on his measure, the overall rate of violent crime was about the same in the year ending March 2024 as in the year before. It says:
In YE March 2024, approximately 0.5% of people aged 16 years and over experienced violence with or without injury where the perpetrator was an acquaintance, and 0.7% experienced this where the perpetrator was a stranger. There were no statistically significant changes, compared with YE March 2023.
Afternoon summary
Whitty says NHS should have done more to say hospitals still open for non-Covid emergencies during pandemic
Two Scottish pensioners launch legal challenge to try to block winter fuel payment cut
Doctor in tears at Covid inquiry says what NHS staff saw was ‘indescribable’
Whitty says it’s arguable health chiefs overstated risks from Covid at start of pandemic
Hunt says, if Reeves changes fiscal rules to allow more borrowing, interest rates will stay higher for longer
Campaigners says latest figures show road death figures for 2023 still ‘unacceptably high’
Knife crime in England and Wales rose by 4% in year ending March 2024, ONS says
Politics
Take it from me (and Keir Starmer) – you should never pretend to be more working class than you are | Polly Toynbee
“I’m not working class any more,” Keir Starmer told LBC’s Nick Ferrari this week. Of course that’s the case. As the Daily Mail rushed to point out, he has just paid off his mortgage on a £2m house, and earned a lot as a barrister and as the director of public prosecutions. The right loves to probe the hypocrisies and the “champagne socialism” of Labour people. The Bollinger Bullingdon Club members, meanwhile, are just fine as they don’t pretend to do good.
Tool-maker father, nurse mother, a childhood in which at times they struggled to pay bills – this we know about Starmer. Politicians do need to talk about their origins because it tells us where they’re coming from, in every sense. Why else were those infamous Bullingdon photos suppressed that displayed those young masters of the universe David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson, among other luminaries, at their arrogant worst? Class origins matter.
This cabinet is the most working-class in history, with some from backgrounds of grinding hardship. Wes Streeting’s remarkable autobiography tells of a family where neglect and crime were commonplace. He came up via good teachers pushing him to go to a summer school at Cambridge and there was no looking back from there. Angela Rayner’s story is harsher: a single mother at 16 in Stockport, no qualifications, she worked as a carer before rising up through the trade union movement. Bridget Phillipson’s single mother was poor in Sunderland. David Lammy and Steve Reed came up the hard way. And so on.
Roughly 46% of the cabinet had parents with working-class occupations – well above the average for the rest of the working population, according to sociologists Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman’s new book, Born to Rule: the Making and Remaking of the British Elite. According to the Sutton Trust, only 4% were educated privately, which is significantly lower than previous Labour cabinets and in another world to Rishi Sunak’s cabinet, of which 63% were privately educated.
But no, of course they aren’t working-class now: MPs earn £91,346 and cabinet ministers an extra £67,505, while the national median wage is £35,000. But where they come from matters a lot. Looking at the latest Who’s Who – a catalogue of the most influential people in Britain – Reeves and Freidman examined 3,000 of its entrants and found “British elites from working-class backgrounds tend to tilt to the left politically and socially” and “are more likely to favour increasing taxes on the rich, to emphasise reducing poverty, and to think Britain is a racist country”.
These days, among the successful there is often a hankering to inflate your authentic working-class roots. I enjoyed a recent LSE survey of those in professional or senior managerial jobs that found an astonishing 47% of this well-paid cadre call themselves working class. Starmer is right to avoid that trap. A quarter of those in the survey actually had parents in middle-class occupations yet they still called themselves working class, referring back to grandparents or even great-grandparents’ occupations. The reason they feel they need that good working-class origin story is to prove they have earned their privilege. The right approach is to recognise that very large numbers of us in good jobs had a great boost, financially and educationally, because of our childhood backgrounds.
Admitting to being middle class can be embarrassing. That’s why I have tried in my memoir, An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals, to be honest about how privilege is passed down the generations, benefiting from the self-confidence, the security, and the second and third chances if you mess up. My family of successful professionals have all been on the left, and were all confounded by the question of how to square their advantages with their beliefs; always painfully aware of falling short, and the remedies sought were sometimes comical. It’s painful to fess up to a background of every advantage: I searched for a working-class ancestor, but found not a twig of the family tree with which to claim I had earned my place. I watch with amusement others who have academics or doctors for parents who affect working-classness. Everyone wants to show they have the merit to deserve their status.
This cabinet takes over a country in which social mobility has gone backwards and the gap between rich and poor keeps widening. People are less likely to escape their roots than when I was born. Starmer and all of the new government talk earnestly of opportunity and fulfilment for every child, and they mean it. Every Labour government improves the lot of the poor, of children and pensioners: undoubtedly, this one will too. By how much, we don’t know.
Against an onslaught from the Tories and their pliant press, they have said they will take VAT relief from private schools, when no other Labour government dared touch them for fear of being accused of “the politics of envy”. The seriousness of their intent is beyond doubt and their backgrounds mean they know exactly what an extra £20 a week on benefits means to families on the edge, because they’ve seen it themselves. That is the £20 uplift that Sunak would later whip away after Covid, a man whose only disadvantage he could think of was that he went without Sky TV in his Winchester childhood. Best not to claim, as Kemi Badenoch foolishly did, that she of middle-class background “became working class” when she worked as a student at McDonald’s.
The Tories and their press will continue to slam Labour people over class. Rayner gets it non-stop: whether for going to the opera or for dancing in Ibiza, she can’t seem to win. Mostly, they seek out hypocrisy, which makes it essential that anyone on the left is absolutely honest about their background. Never pretend. The working-class background of this cabinet is likely to do more for the people and places of their past than they have dared propose so far.
Politics
Britain wants spending and a better NHS, not this obsession with growth. That’s why there’s big trouble ahead | Aditya Chakrabortty
To grasp the real threat to Keir Starmer, ignore the chat about freebie specs or Sue Gray. Tune out the now shuttered party conference, with its secure zone of paid babblers. Listen instead to those in a group avowedly loyal to the new prime minister, because they can see the dangers in plain sight.
Labour Together gets called a Westminster thinktank, but that cap doesn’t quite fit. Rather than a policy shop, its expertise is polling and focus groups – the very tools relied upon by a previous boss, Morgan McSweeney, in his strategy to make Starmer Labour leader. Those same instruments are also at the heart of its latest investigation – called How Labour Won – into why and how the party just got into Downing Street.
You might imagine that a bunch of Starmeroids doing a debrief on their own historic landslide would simply puff out their chests and pat their own backs, but no. There’s the odd V-sign flicked in the direction of Jeremy Corbyn, inevitably, yet what’s most striking about their analysis is its tone of frank anxiety. Here is an organisation at the heart of the Starmer project, and it is already worried about how long it’s got left.
The election may have been won by Labour, note the authors, but it was primarily thrown away by the Tories through “their corruption and incompetence”. This goes way beyond gilt wallpaper and Downing Street parties. “Britain’s democracy is not delivering. A majority of voters for all parties have little faith in politicians’ desire to help ordinary people.”
Then comes the most telling line of all: “This Labour government has been cautiously hired, on a trial basis, liable to prompt dismissal if it deviates even slightly from its focus on voters’ priorities.”
So what are those priorities? Drawing on interviews with 10,000 voters, the report breaks them down by party allegiance. Staunch Labour supporters say their top concerns are the NHS, the need for change and the cost of living. Liberal Democrats choose the same three, and in the same order. Ditto for those who switched to Starmer after backing Boris Johnson in 2019. Whether red or yellow or faded blue, the agreement is striking.
For all the front pages and phone-ins, immigration comes way down the list for all voters apart from Tories and Faragists. Everyone else is going to judge this government by two things: whether they and their loved ones can see a doctor, and how far they’ll be protected from the rising cost of housing, food and fuel. What’s more, they want action fast: asked how long they will wait before there’s “a noticeable difference to the cost of living”, half of Britons give it till 2026.
Just two years. Forget “a decade of renewal”: Starmer is on borrowed time. Indeed, these findings make nonsense of many of the nostrums of conference week. The SW1 roadshow currently touring select provincial convention centres may demand Labour “get a grip” on the running of No 10, but voters may prefer ministers to get a grip on the markets that demand they pay so much for heating, eating and the roofs over their heads. Economists get excited about an accounting trick that could allow Rachel Reeves to build more infrastructure. A fund that gets crumbly concrete off our classrooms is a great idea, but it is no substitute for recruiting and paying the teachers to staff those classrooms – or indeed upping the universal credit and other benefits needed by parents of the kids.
Westminster analysts so often act as if politics is what politicians say and do, and then miss things like Brexit, or the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, or the return of the far right. Their excitement comes when the prime minister makes a speech in his new back garden, not when the watchdogs announce that the average annual heating bill will rise to more than £1,700. Meanwhile, voters in post-Brexit Britain look upon the great democratic paradox of prime ministers with bumper majorities, right and left, who protest they can’t deliver what they promised because of forces beyond their control. The Gullivers of SW1 play at being as helpless as us Lilliputians. Much more of this and the two-party system will collapse.
Starmer’s team can see some of this, which is why he talks about a “government of service” and the stage set in Liverpool blared “Change begins”. Yet it still places economic growth ahead of more money in pockets and public services.
As Labour Together and others point out, the public demand one thing: investment in their health service and in their households. Meanwhile, Downing Street offers something else. Its number one mission, as conference visitors were reminded, is to secure the highest sustained GDP growth of all the G7 countries. This is economic nonsense: short of physically controlling the economies of the US, Japan and the rest, the UK can’t guarantee to grow more than them.
It also sounds like nonsense to voters. Survey after survey shows that more than half the public don’t understand the very term GDP. As one study from 2020 showed, Britons often get it confused with GBP or GDPR.
However many speeches chancellors make, most of the gains from economic growth do not end up in the pockets of most people. Of all the growth in take-home pay between 1999 and 2020, the top 10% of earners made off with 25%, while the bottom 10% got only 3%. These figures come from the Foundational Economy collective of researchers, and they bear out the old dictum: the rich get richer, the poor get sod all. It’s why in the Brexit referendum the heckle began, “That’s your bloody GDP. Not ours.”
Starmer and his ministers should heed the hecklers. As Brexit illustrated, in that gulf between the governed and the governors can grow all manner of dangerous politics – dangerous not just to a few careers, but to the entire Westminster system. The observant can already spot the resentments or conspiracy theories: about an out-of-touch political class living it up in free holiday homes, or about how immigrants get handouts while Britons are given a cold shoulder.
The public are demanding the redistribution of resources into their everyday lives – and they want it now. The government should stop talking about GDP and start to listen.
Politics
UK politics: Winter fuel allowance cuts could reduce pensioner poverty by raising benefit take-up, says minister – as it happened | Politics
DWP minister claims winter fuel allowance cuts could eventually reduce pensioner poverty, by raising benefit take-up
Stephen Timms, a welfare minister, has said that over time the winter fuel payment cuts could actually reduce pensioner poverty, because it is encouraging pensioners to claim pension credit.
Speaking an an interview with Radio 4’s World at One, broadcast after Labour delegates voted for a motion saying the cut should be reversed, Timms, the minister for social security and disability, said:
The chancellor has made decisions which need to be made to sort out the very serious problems in the government finances which we’ve been left with.
And I’m hoping that, over time, this measure will actually reduce pensioner poverty by increasing the take-up of pension credit.
We have seen quite a big boost in the number of people applying for pension credit over the last few weeks, and I think that is likely to continue.
The only pensioners who will continue to get the winter fuel payment, which can be worth up to £300 per household, are pensioners on pension credit, a benefit paid to those with the lowest incomes.
According to the latest government figures, only 63% of pensioners who are eligible for pension credit claim it. The government said earlier this month up to 880,000 pensioners could be missing out, and it has launched a campaign to encourage them to claim. Three weeks ago the government said applications were up 115%.
But a DWP equality impact assessment published on 13 September said that the department expected take-up to rise by just 5 percentage points. It said:
Out of the total c.10m who will lose out in the 1st year of the policy, we estimate that around 880k of these will be pensioners who would be entitled to pension credit if they claimed it, but have not done so. The modelling underpinning the policy costing assumes a 5 percentage point “loss aversion” increase in PC take-up (from 63% to 68%), reducing this to around 780k and increasing the PC caseload by around 100k.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a thinktank focusing on poverty, has said that means-testing the winter fuel payment, in the way that the government is doing, could push an extra 100,000 pensioners into poverty.
According to an analysis by Steve Webb, a former Lib Dem pensions minister, for Lane Clark and Peacock, pensions consultants, there are about 1.9 million pensioners living in relative povery. Only about 300,000 of them are getting pension credit. Of the other 1.6m, only around half of them might be eligible for pension credit, he says. He says the other 800,000 do not qualify for pension credit, but pushed below the poverty level by housing costs.
If all pensioners eligible for pension credit were to claim it, the government would not save any money from the winter fuel payment cut. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has claimed she would not mind this outome, because it would mean poorer pensioners were benefiting.
Key events
I do understand how, you know, colleagues in the Labour movement feel about this.
This is clearly a difficult decision but a motion at conference doesn’t dictate government policy. Stephen Timms, a welfare minister, has said that over time the winter fuel payment cuts could actually reduce pensioner poverty, because it is encouraging pensioners to claim pension credit. (See 2.25pm.)
In interviews today Keir Starmer has for the first time given a detailed explanation as to why he chose to accept an accommodation donation worth £20,000 around the time of the general election. (See 9.49am.)
But if he expected the opposition to accept his explanation and let go of the story, he’ll be disappointed. The Conservative party has just issued a fresh attack on Starmer over this, in the form of a statement from Kevin Hollinrake, the shadow business secretary. He said:
This row isn’t about the preferential treatment he has given his child during their education, whilst taxing the schooling of thousands of others; nor is it about him and his wife being lavished with designer clothes whilst pensioners face the choice between heating and eating this winter.
This is about Keir Starmer, and his top team, thinking the rules don’t apply to them. They have become utterly addicted to luxury clothing, holidays and services provided by their mega donor whilst expecting everyone else to tighten their belt. Why does he always think he’s a special case?
Labour promised to be a government of service but all they’ve offered is a government of self-service. According to polling by YouGov, 80% of Britons do not think politicians should be allowed to accept gifts like clothes or concert tickets.
That figure includes 29% of people who think that it was acceptable for politicians like Keir Starmer to have accepted donations like this, because that was within the rules, but that the rules should be changed to stop this; and 51% who said accepting gifts should be banned, and that even knowing the rules allowed it, it was wrong for the politicians who did accept gifts to do so.
The Labour MP Rosie Duffield has posted a message on X welcoming the conference vote calling for the winter fuel payments cut to be reversed.
I‘m glad that Labour Party Conference and @CWUnews have voted to keep #WinterFuelAllowance. Our Party was created to protect the most vulnerable, and today it has determined that it must never step back from that mandate. I trust the Govt can now keep our pensioners safe & warm.
Another Labour MP, Rachael Maskell, has posted a message on her account with the same wording.
Rowena Mason Keir Starmer has arrived at the UN general assembly where he will have various meetings on the Middle East and Ukraine, before making a speech later.
Asked for his message to Britons in Lebanon, he said they should not wait to be evacuated at a later date and should “leave and leave immediately” via commercial flights.
He said: I am very worried about the escalation. I’m calling for all parties to step back from the brink, to de-escalate. We need a ceasefire so this can be sorted out diplomatically.
But I have a very important message for British nationals in Lebanon which is: the time to leave is now.
The contingency plans are being ramped up but don’t wait for those, there are still commercial flights. It’s very important that they hear my message, which is to leave and to leave immediately.
Michael Gove, the former cabinet minister and one of the leaders of the Vote Leave Brexit campaign, has been named as the new editor of the Spectator magazine, weeks after the GB News backer Sir Paul Marshall completed a £100m takeover of the politically right-leaning magazine, Mark Sweney reports.
Stephen Timms, a welfare minister, has said that over time the winter fuel payment cuts could actually reduce pensioner poverty, because it is encouraging pensioners to claim pension credit. Speaking an an interview with Radio 4’s World at One, broadcast after Labour delegates voted for a motion saying the cut should be reversed, Timms, the minister for social security and disability, said:
The chancellor has made decisions which need to be made to sort out the very serious problems in the government finances which we’ve been left with.
And I’m hoping that, over time, this measure will actually reduce pensioner poverty by increasing the take-up of pension credit.
We have seen quite a big boost in the number of people applying for pension credit over the last few weeks, and I think that is likely to continue.
The only pensioners who will continue to get the winter fuel payment, which can be worth up to £300 per household, are pensioners on pension credit, a benefit paid to those with the lowest incomes. According to the latest government figures, only 63% of pensioners who are eligible for pension credit claim it. The government said earlier this month up to 880,000 pensioners could be missing out, and it has launched a campaign to encourage them to claim. Three weeks ago the government said applications were up 115%.
But a DWP equality impact assessment published on 13 September said that the department expected take-up to rise by just 5 percentage points. It said:
Out of the total c.10m who will lose out in the 1st year of the policy, we estimate that around 880k of these will be pensioners who would be entitled to pension credit if they claimed it, but have not done so. The modelling underpinning the policy costing assumes a 5 percentage point “loss aversion” increase in PC take-up (from 63% to 68%), reducing this to around 780k and increasing the PC caseload by around 100k.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a thinktank focusing on poverty, has said that means-testing the winter fuel payment, in the way that the government is doing, could push an extra 100,000 pensioners into poverty.
According to an analysis by Steve Webb, a former Lib Dem pensions minister, for Lane Clark and Peacock, pensions consultants, there are about 1.9 million pensioners living in relative povery. Only about 300,000 of them are getting pension credit. Of the other 1.6m, only around half of them might be eligible for pension credit, he says. He says the other 800,000 do not qualify for pension credit, but pushed below the poverty level by housing costs. If all pensioners eligible for pension credit were to claim it, the government would not save any money from the winter fuel payment cut. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has claimed she would not mind this outome, because it would mean poorer pensioners were benefiting.
The Green party says it backs Unite’s call for the government to impose a wealth tax as an alternative to cutting the winter fuel payment. (See 11.21am.) In a statement following the Labour conference vote against the cut, Carla Denyer, the Green party’s co-leader, said: Today’s vote at Labour party conference leaves Labour ministers out in the cold. There is a groundswell of support – from opposition parties, unions, many Labour MPs, health workers, disability groups, charities supporting pensioners, as well as others – for ensuring millions of pensioners keep warm this winter.
Targeting some of the most vulnerable to fix the supposed black hole in the public finances is cruel and unnecessary.
There is another way. A fairer way. As the successful motion by Unite makes clear, taxing multi-millionaires and billionaires a little more would not only easily cover the cost of winter fuel payments for all pensioners but also generate additional funds for much needed investment in our health and social care services.
Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, confirmed that extra childcare places in new school-based nurseries in England will be available to families from next year in her conference speech.
As PA Media reports, working parents of all children older than nine months are now able to access 15 hours of funded childcare, before the full roll-out of 30 hours a week to all eligible families in September 2025. In its manifesto, Labour said it would open an additional 3,000 nurseries through “upgrading space” in primary schools, to deliver the extension of government-funded hours families are entitled to.
Phillipson told the Labour conference:
Today I can tell you that change begins, delivery begins: those extra places start opening next year. The first phase of our new nurseries, of high-quality early education, boosting life chances for children and work choices for parents.
From next month, schools will be invited to bid for a share of £15m capital funding, with capacity in the programme to deliver up to 300 new or expanded nurseries in this first round.
As Phillip Inman reports, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has significantly increased its growth forecast for 2024. He explains: Describing the UK’s economic growth as “robust”, the OECD upgraded its growth for 2024 to 1.1% from a forecast of 0.4% made in May, as the country recovers from a mild recession at the end of last year. The forecast of 1.2% growth in 2025 was maintained.
In the May forecast, the UK was behind all other nations in the informal bloc but is now expected to outpace Japan, Italy and struggling Germany. Britain is now on par with Canada and France but behind the US.
Rishi Sunak, the former PM, and Jeremy Hunt, the former chancellor, have both been posting about this on X. They dispute Labour’s claim that the Conservatives left the economy in a poor state, and they argue that these figures show they left the economy in a strong state.
This is from Sunak.
Labour inherited the fastest growing economy in the G7.
But the Prime Minister and Chancellor constantly talking the economy down has already had a damaging impact on consumer and business confidence. Time to stop playing politics and put country first, party second.
And this is from Hunt.
The OECD data today yet again shows that Labour were left a strong economic inheritance, despite their desperation to say otherwise. The Chancellor’s choices at the Budget will be hers and hers alone.
The OECD figures are about the state of the economy generally. Labour’s main complaint about the Tories has been about the state of the public finances (and the £22bn gap it claims to have found between what the Tories were planning to spend this year, and the money they had to fund this), although Labour also argues the economy has been underperforming for years.
Stephen Flynn, the SNP leader at Westminster, has said that Keir Starmer should listen to his party conference and reverse the winter fuel payments cut. In a statement after the Labour conference vote, he said:
Keir Starmer must finally listen to voters, admit he got it wrong, and U-turn on the Labour government’s damaging cuts to the winter fuel payment for millions of pensioners.
The fact that the prime minister’s own party members feel obliged to speak out, and demand he reverse these cuts, should tell him just how angry voters are at his cuts.
Ellie Reeves, a Cabinet Office minister and the Labour party chair, has just closed the speech with a speech quoting John Smith, saying all Labour asks is the chance the serve. The British people have given us that chance. We will not let them down.
Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, told the conference in her speech earlier that Labour would bring in “a new era of child-centred government — building a country where children come first”.
Explaining what this meant, a Labour briefing said:
Labour’s child-centred approach will focus on breaking down barriers to opportunity beyond the school gates, as well as those in the classroom, including mental ill health and child poverty through measures such as additional mental health counselling support in schools and developing a comprehensive child poverty strategy through the Child Poverty Taskforce. Labour will publish the Children’s Wellbeing Bill in the coming months, which will put children and their wellbeing at the centre of the education and children’s social care systems, and make changes to ensure children are safe, healthy, happy and treated fairly.
Afternoon summary
Tories accuse Starmer of being ‘addicted to luxury’ in fresh attack on his record accepting donations
80% of people think politicians should not be allowed to accept gifts like clothes and tickets, poll suggests
Starmer urges Britons in Lebanon to leave immediately
Michael Gove named as Spectator editor after GB News backer’s takeover
DWP minister claims winter fuel allowance cuts could eventually reduce pensioner poverty, by raising benefit take-up
Green party backs Unite’s call for wealth tax as alternative to winter fuel payments cut
Sunak and Hunt claim OECD growth forecasts show Tories left ‘strong economic inheritance’
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