3 min read45 min

PoliticsHome understands that the new definition, announced on Monday as part of a wider social cohesion strategy, was amended during the writing process to be as robust as possible in the face of an expected legal action, with one government source saying that the wording had been put through the “legal ringer” in preparation for judicial review.

The government asked an independent working group, led by former Conservative cabinet minister Dominic Grieve, to advise on whether a new definition of Islamophobia was needed in response to a rise in hate crimes against Muslims.

Ministers received a template definition from the group in September and spent the subsequent months finalising the wording.

During the process, as PoliticsHome reported in October, the government decided to drop the term Islamophobia and instead refer to anti-Muslim hostility.

The adopted definition focuses on anti-Muslim hostility as “violence, vandalism, harassment, or intimidation, whether physical, verbal, written or electronically communicated” towards Muslims. 

The government decided not to include a clause identifying Muslims as a race, explaining that Muslims come from a range of racial backgrounds. Instead, the definition sets out how hostility towards the group includes prejudiced stereotyping based on perceived markers of being Muslim, like appearance, dress and names.

Speaking on Monday, the cabinet minister leading the work, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Steve Reed, said: “Crucially, this definition protects the fundamental right to freedom of speech while protecting people from unacceptable abuse and violence.

“A special representative on anti-Muslim hostility will also be appointed to support action to strengthen understanding, reporting and response.”

The definition was welcomed by the Chair of the British Muslim Trust, Shabir Randeree, who said it would “help guide institutions that have too often been too slow or too weak in their responses to incidents a tolerant and respectful country like ours must never accept”.

Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of Humanists UK, said his organisation was pleased that the wording seeks to combat hostility towards Muslims “while explicitly protecting speech that is critical of religious ideas, in line with international human rights standards”.

However, on Tuesday, The Telegraph reported that the Free Speech Union (FSU) was preparing a pre-action letter and threatening legal action.

FSU founder, Conservative peer Toby Young, argued the definition is illegal because it would result in criticism of Islam being censored. “Bringing a judicial review against a secretary of state isn’t cheap, but we believe this is a vitally important free speech issue. Blasphemy crimes were repealed as far back as 2008 — let’s keep it that way,” he told PoliticsHome.

There is confidence in Whitehall that any legal challenge brought by free speech campaigners will be unsuccessful.

Government sources familiar with the definition-writing process told PoliticsHome there are three broad reasons why it took six months to produce the final wording, with one being ensuring the definition would stand up to a legal challenge.

The second was making sure it could be applied in public sector settings like the NHS and the police as simply as possible, while the third was an effort to make sure the government was sufficiently engaged with Muslim communities.

Lord Walney, former extremism adviser, told PoliticsHome: “Already people are signalling they will use this definition to try to silence criticism of Islam, which must be allowed in a free society.

“So the government must monitor this situation closely and be prepared to reverse their decision if the definition has the chilling effect many of us fear it will.”

PoliticsHome has contacted the government for comment.

Israeli fascist minister Bezalel Smotrich’s son, Benya Hebron, is in critical condition after just minutes of fighting in Israel’s war of aggression on Lebanon. Hebron, a member of the notorious Golani Brigade, was wounded by Lebanese resistance shelling. Smotrich said:

Shrapnel penetrated his back and abdomen.

He continued:

He was rushed to the hospital … one of the fragments tore the liver and stopped at the wall of the largest blood vessel in the abdomen. Had it, God forbid, been damaged, the situation would’ve been far more serious.

Smotrich is a central facilitator of Israel’s latest crimes in Lebanon as well as of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The occupation’s latest attacks on Lebanon have murdered almost 500 people and forcibly and illegally displaced almost 700,000 people.

Israeli generals have admitted being shocked by the intensity of resistance to the occupation’s invasion.

Featured image via the Canary

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James Fisk works in digital communications and is Director of Communications for the Next Gen Tories.

Why does the Government have Instagram?

The answer that has likely popped into your head is “to communicate with younger people”, or “to bring the state into the 21st century.” or even, “to reach a bigger audience”.  These are very fair answers, and the attempt by the Civil Service  to evolve its communications, and endeavour to more effectively communicate policy and information is noble.

The problem, however, is that the methodology and success metrics deployed by the Civil Service for departmental social media accounts, risks fundamentally undermining the relationship between the individual and the state. In short, we need to ask if it is right for the Government to ‘go viral’.

Cast your mind back to 1st October 2025. For those not as chronically online as me, this is the day that the Department for Education posted a video promoting Labour’s new free school breakfasts policy, where Civil Servants interviewed a variety of parents asking questions about how the policy will benefit them.

The video, from a technical standpoint, is good. The edit is smooth, the hook is engaging, and it certainly got a lot of views, but it went down like a cup of cold sick.

The most common criticism, on our side of the aisle, was expressed in comments such as “why am I being taxed so these lazy parents can go to coffee mornings with their mates” – a valid point, based on a genuine answer in the video. Meanwhile, on the left, the video was widely criticised for being too “middle class”, having been shot entirely in London, and not “telling the working class story”. It’s fair to say, if a policy about giving schoolchildren free food is criticised from the left and the right, the comms has probably failed.

This is not a criticism of the DfE Digi team, far from it. In fact, the reason I picked this video is because I was put in a very similar position myself last year. I have spent my career working in digital communications, and when working in the Caribbean for a political party, they introduced a free school breakfast policy. To tell the truth, I had a lot of similar ideas to the DfE digital team, and I found it quite amusing to see similar video ideas deployed by the British state and a foreign governing party.

The difference, however, is that the creative risks I took were taken from the account of a political party. My objective was not just to communicate a policy, but to win votes. The state is not in that position, and shouldn’t be, ever. That is why I believe this video is emblematic of everything wrong with the way the Civil Service runs departmental social media accounts. In their noble attempts to look good online, they naturally risk looking bad and adding to the ever growing sense of the government being out of touch.

The problem at the heart of the Civil Service’s approach, is that they are using tired, old school metrics to measure success. The success of a Digital team in Government departments is measured mostly in reach. Their job, in essence, is to ensure that as many people as possible are informed about Government policy, their methodology is to create online content that gets more views. If a video gets a lot of views, the more people see it, and the digital team is successful.

Here is why that doesn’t work: The free school breakfasts video got a lot of views, millions more than the average DfE video. Yet a social listening analysis of online sentiment on the day that this video was released, shows that the volume of negative posts about the free school breakfast policy increased by nearly 900 per cent after the video was posted.

Furthermore, in the previous month, across all of social media, ‘free school breakfasts’ had a sentiment reading of 56% positive, this means that a majority of online discourse about one of Labour’s key manifesto pledges was favourable. After the video was released, the same term had a reading of 90.4 per cent negative.

What’s more, on the day that the video was released, the percentage of negative posts about the Government, not a Minister or political party, but the institution of Government itself, increased by 4 per cent. So we are in a situation, where a team in Whitehall has decreased the popularity of a government’s manifesto policy, made people more annoyed at our institutions, and yet have likely moved closer to hitting a KPI.

So why is this so damaging, and why do we need to fix it? We know that the British public is losing trust in the state’s institutions, there are multiple reasons for this, and most are far more important than civil servants making memes (yes, they’ve done this too). But, in a digital world, Conservatives have to understand that the relationship between the individual and the state, the very essence of the social contract, exists not just in visible policing or the tax on your payslip but, develops every single time you interact with the Government on your phone.

As a Conservative, I am naturally against the state encroaching too much into my life, and I believe this logic should exist online. The individual’s perception of the social contract is, for better or worse, is now forged every time one has to reload Gov.uk, or has to scroll past a Home Office ad on TikTok, or sees a taxpayer funded videographer forgetting to clean their lens.

If the Conservatives are serious about changing the state, and governing effectively, we have to make sure that the British state is not annoying people on Facebook, because it can critically undermine the perception of government, and democratic policy, if it is done badly.

So how do we do this? Firstly, we need to redefine the metrics for successful online communications from Government Departments. Politicians and parties need to have complete creative license to try and win votes online, make people support policies, and take the risk of being disliked by certain demographics for doing so. The institution of Government cannot afford to take that risk, so it shouldn’t.

We need to take a small state approach to the Government’s presence online. It should be for future Conservative Ministers to win public support for policy online, and the Civil Service run, Departmental accounts need to be sources of information, not viral videos. We need to focus on providing clear, useful and informative information online, not going viral. It should be for Ministers to communicate policy announcements online; nobody wants to watch a video from the Home Office during their evening scroll.

Any incoming Conservative Government needs to ask serious questions about the way the state interacts with individuals online. Does DESNZ need an Instagram, do citizens really want to see DEFRA using social media trends? How many people, realistically, who are in need of information from the state are opening TikTok?

A good online state looks like a Government whose website is the envy of the world, that protects us from online misinformation, and gives us accurate information from accounts we have no reason to distrust. As someone of the generation who has grown up in a world of online fake news, I am always sceptical of what I see online – it is the state’s job to counter that, not exist as an actor within it.

We cannot fall into the trap that Labour have. So let Ministers communicate free school breakfasts, and let the DfE tell us when GCSE results day is. Otherwise, we risk letting the civil service blunder its way to creating distrust in future Conservative policies.

Robert Grainier with his daughter, Kate | Image courtesy of Netflix | © 2025 BBP Train Dreams. LLC

4 min read57 min

In previous times of major crisis, the United States provided hope, sometimes even mythologised, as rescue for the world. Today it can at least still offer stories of self-examination and solace. If the 20th was the American century, cinema was surely its great art form.

In Train Dreams – Clint Bentley’s 2025 film inspired by Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella – the simple life of woodsman and itinerant labourer, Robert Grainier, becomes the story of the country itself, from his birth in the 1886 of horses and carts to his death amidst the space race in 1968. In this respect, it might appeal to fans of the previous year’s The Life of Chuck by Mike Flanagan. This time, however, the form is more rural elegy than science fantasy.

Grainier is an orphan who drops out of school and lives a hard and hermit-like existence until he meets his future wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones). His orphanhood represents both the dislocation and stoic heroism of a migrant pioneering nation. Played with quiet but captivating pathos by Joel Edgerton, his precise ethnicity seems ambiguous.

Issues of race come to the fore on at least three memorable occasions. First, when Robert is complicit in a brutal incident involving a Chinese logger, Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing). This episode forever haunts him and he feels cursed as a result of it. Secondly, when an African American cowboy arrives to avenge the racially motivated murder of his brother. Finally, Robert is befriended by Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand), a Native American who seems to understand both him and their surroundings better than so many others.

As so often in fine cinema, the score plays an essential part

The nobility of rural life is explored both via its various dangers and privations and in the way that neighbours embrace natural duty, travelling considerable distances to check on one another.

The environment is a major theme of the film, with some stunning locations cherished by Adolpho Veloso’s exquisite and rightly Oscar-nominated cinematography. We see it change over the years and one night around the campfire on a “cut”, the veteran explosives expert (played by the impeccably understated William H Macy) expresses his regret at what they have been doing to the forest all their working lives. The forest almost appears to exact her revenge by way of the various casualties that result from tall fallen trees and large branches. The animal kingdom is also represented by way of the relationship between Robert and his dogs in particular.

As so often in fine cinema, the score plays an essential part. Bryce Dessner has been understandably lauded for a string-based soundtrack using period-appropriate instruments, enhanced by modern synthesisers. There are nods to Philip Glass and Michael Nyman. Both the harshness and beauty of the landscape is evoked alongside the intrusion of industrialisation in the form of the all-important railway. Indeed, the music joins the best tradition of train sounds and rhythms, almost magically conjured for the screen experience by way of acoustic instruments. The title song, co-written by Nick Cave, receives another of the film’s worthy Academy Award nominations. 

Whether Oscar glory follows or not, I recommend Train Dreams as one of the most thoughtful and memorable films of the last year.

Baroness Chakrabarti is a Labour peer

Train Dreams

Directed by: Clint Bentley

Broadcaster: Netflix

Yet more Zionists – this time the Alexander brothers – have been exposed as child rapists. However, ‘mainstream’ reporting on their conviction makes no mention of their prominent support for the Zionist occupation colony. The BBC, for example. And the Guardian.

The three Alexander brothers – Tal 39, Oren 38 and Alon, also 38, are well known in the US for their ‘luxury’ real-estate deals – and for their huge donations to Israel and Zionist causes. But now they are well-known sex criminals convicted of drugging, raping and trafficking dozens of women. And, just like that, their support for Israel has become invisible in legacy media.

The BBC reported that:

During the five-week trial, 11 women – including several who said they were minors at the time of the incidents – testified against the brothers, alleging they gave them gifts and flew them to locations and parties where they fed them drugs before assaulting them.

Prosecutors said the brothers “surreptitiously” put drugs in women’s drinks, and told jurors that they “physically restrained and held down their victims during the rapes and sexual assaults and ignored screams and explicit requests to stop”.

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Alexander brothers support the IDF

Ironically, it takes an Israeli paper to put both their sex crimes and their Zionism together in one article. Haaretz reported:

The Alexander family reportedly raises and donates large sums of money to Zionist causes, including millions of dollars to support Israel Defense Forces.

Eleven women, several of whom were under-age at the time of the crimes, gave evidence that the brothers plied them with gifts before flying them to parties in various locations, feeding them drugs and assaulting them. After the verdicts, US Attorney Jay Clayton described the verdict as:

an important step in our fight against sex trafficking. The jury saw the Alexanders’ conduct for what it was – calculated, brutal sexual abuse that, unimaginably, the defendants celebrated.

All three brothers were found guilty of all ten crimes with which they were charged. These included sex trafficking and sexual exploitation of a minor. They will be sentenced on 6 August and could face life in prison. However, on the US’s track record it would be entirely unsurprising for them to be allowed to escape to Israel.

An endless stream of sex criminals

The Alexander case is just the latest in a seemingly-endless line of Zionist paedophile and sex-offender cases, in the UK, US and Israel itself. In the UK, right-wing Israel fanatic and former Labour councillor Liron Velleman pleaded guilty in January 2026 to a series of sex offences against a 13-year-old girl, after being caught in a police ‘sting’.

In January 2025, former Blair minister Ivor Caplin was arrested in a sting operation as he allegedly attempted to meet a 15-year-old boy for sex. Local police went after local left-winger Greg Hadfield for exposing the explicit content Caplin posted on his X feed – Hadfield defeated the ‘vexatious’ charge in November 2025. However, no charges have yet been brought against Caplin and a court did not impose bail conditions after his initial bail expired. Despite the ongoing police investigation, Caplin was recently invited to speak on LBC about Keir Starmer’s (quickly disastrous) move to block Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham’s bid to stand in a parliamentary election.

Hackney councillor Tom Dewey, an organiser in pro-Israel group ‘Labour First’, admitted possession of the most serious category of child rape images in 2023. The party knew of his arrest when it allowed him to stand for election. After his conviction, it blocked local women members from its systems to prevent them discussing the case.

In March 2025 Sam Gould, who worked for Starmer’s health secretary Wes Streeting, quit as a Redbridge councillor after being convicted on two separate counts of indecent exposure to a 13-year-old girl. The following month Dan Norris MP was arrested over allegations of rape, child sex offences and child abduction. Avon and Somerset Police says its investigation is still ongoing.

In the US, as well as the still-emerging crimes of Israeli spy and serial child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein and his circle of paedophile traffickers and probably murderers, the US state has been caught enabling Israeli paedophiles to flee to Israel for refuge. In August 2025, it allowed Israeli cyberwar official Tom Alexandrovich to fly back to Israel after he was caught in a police paedopohile sting.

Widespread?

Hundreds of Zionist sex criminals have been allowed to escape justice in the US by claiming citizenship in Israel. Israel is currently ignoring well over 2,000 extradition requests for alleged and convicted paedophiles. A CBS News investigation found that:

many accused American pedophiles flee to Israel, and bringing them to justice can be difficult.

But its child-raping monsters are home-grown too. In April 2025 Shoshana Strook, the daughter of Israel’s far-right settlements minister fled to police and asked them to protect her, accusing both her parents and one of her brothers of raping her as a child, over a period of years, and filming the rapes.

Israeli psychotherapist and trauma expert Dr Anat Gur, head of the Bar-Ilan University trauma therapy program, has said that she believes organised child rape in Israel is widespread:

Organized child rape is one of the most horrific things I’ve encountered. It’s likely much more widespread than we think. It’s happening in places we least expect.

Even money, then, that the Alexanders ‘somehow’ find their way to Israel before their sentencing hearing.

Featured image via the Canary

This article has been developed and funded by Chiesi UK&I

The true burden of COPD

COPD affects around three million people in the UK, yet nearly two million remain undiagnosed.¹ Symptoms such as breathlessness, fatigue and persistent cough are often dismissed as ageing or lifestyle-related, meaning many are only diagnosed once their condition is advanced. COPD exacerbations are the second leading cause of emergency hospital admissions in the UK and a major contributor to winter pressures on the NHS,^2,3 costing the NHS approximately £1.9bn annually.⁴

The burden of COPD is not evenly distributed, with health constituency data showing that the highest prevalence is concentrated in the North of England,⁵ and likely higher due to the number of people living with undiagnosed COPD.

Rethinking the case for COPD screening

The UK has a strong track record of delivering targeted screening programmes in areas of high need. Three national cancer screening programmes exist for bowel, cervical and breast cancers, and now a lung cancer screening programme is being rolled out across England.

The UK NSC is currently reviewing screening for COPD in the general adult population. Given the breadth of the NSC’s review, it is unsurprising that the committee recommends against population-wide screening for COPD.

This is not a new position. In 2018, the UK NSC determined that population-wide screening did not meet the recommendation criteria, citing uncertainty around cost-effectiveness and clinical benefit.⁶ Whilst that assessment remains reasonable, population screening is not the only option to achieve improved outcomes for people living with COPD symptoms but who are undiagnosed and potentially untreated.

Importantly, the committee has expanded its remit to consider targeted screening, mirroring the approach in lung cancer, where the NHS does not screen the entire population but instead focuses on defined high-risk groups such as people aged 55-74 with a history of smoking.^7,8 The Welsh Government has also committed to introducing a similar national targeted lung cancer screening programme, confirming this will include standardised protocols for managing incidental findings of other conditions, such as COPD.⁹ The current consultation represents a timely opportunity to evaluate how a targeted approach could improve COPD outcomes.

Learning from lung cancer screening

In England, the NHS Lung Cancer Screening Programme is identifying large numbers of people with suspected COPD through incidental CT scan findings, which are detailed scans that can help identify problems in the lungs.¹⁰ Of the approximately 1.2 million lung health checks completed to date, over 7,000 lung cancers were diagnosed, and, incidentally, over 100,000 cases of emphysema were also found.¹¹ While people with lung cancer entered specific care pathways, no consistent pathway exists for diagnosing and managing suspected COPD. This means that for every patient receiving a lung cancer diagnosis and treatment, 13.5 people with emphysema are not getting the opportunity for the same level of care.

A strong case for targeted screening

Recognising the challenges with timely COPD diagnosis, Chiesi is working with the NHS to understand the feasibility and value of targeted case finding in high risk groups through hospital-based and neighbourhood programmes. One example is our FRONTIER Hull programme, a collaborative working project with Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, which invites individuals identified through the NHS Lung Cancer Screening back for COPD assessment.

Nearly 50 per cent of people assessed were diagnosed with COPD.¹² Health economic modelling also suggests that targeted COPD case finding could save the NHS an estimated £33m over 10 years.^13,14 Beyond cost savings, earlier identification enables earlier intervention, shifting care from avoidable exacerbations and emergency admissions towards prevention, proactive management and improved outcomes.

“Data generated as part of our FRONTIER Hull project clearly demonstrate that case-finding among high-risk individuals with features of disease, rather than population screening, identifies a significant number of people with undiagnosed COPD. COPD is a progressive disease that becomes highly debilitating over time – these patients are often unable to work and struggle with simple day-to-day activities such as walking up the stairs. Earlier identification and diagnosis can enable people to access evidence-based treatments to improve their outcomes.”  

– 

Professor Michael Crooks, Consultant in Respiratory Medicine at NHS Humber Health Partnership and Professor of Respiratory Medicine, Hull York Medical School, University of Hull.

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Looking forward

This approach doesn’t require new systems. As the FRONTIER Hull project demonstrates, COPD assessment can be integrated into existing services, with other community models also emerging.

As Lung Cancer Screening and Community Diagnostic Centres expand, we have a pivotal opportunity to align respiratory care with the NHS shifts from hospital to community and from sickness to prevention. The question isn’t whether to screen everyone, but how to scale targeted approaches for those most at risk.

This consultation offers a timely chance for the UK NSC to refocus by conducting a new evidence map that explores targeted screening over a population-wide approach.

Find out more about FRONTIER Hull here.

March 2026                                                                                             UK-CHI-2600116

References

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1. NICE Clinical Knowledge Summaries. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: Prevalence and incidence. Available at: https://cks.nice.org.uk/topics/chronic-obstructive-pulmonary-disease/background-information/prevalence-incidence/. Last accessed: March 2026
2. The Health Foundation. Variation in patient pathways and hospital admissions for exacerbations of COPD: linking the National Asthma and COPD Audit with CPRD data. Available at: https://www.health.org.uk/funding-and-fellowships/projects/variation-in-patient-pathways-and-hospital-admissions-for. Last accessed: March 2026.
3. NHS England. Respiratory disease. Available at: https://www.england.nhs.uk/ourwork/clinical-policy/respiratory-disease/. Last accessed: March 2026.
4. NHS England. Respiratory high impact interventions: Available at: https://www.england.nhs.uk/ourwork/prevention/secondary-prevention/respiratory-high-impact-interventions/#:~:text=The%20annual%20economic%20burden%20of,the%20UK%20%C2%A311billion%20annually. Last accessed: March 2026.
5. House of Commons Library (2025) Constituency data: health conditions (How healthy is your area?). UK Parliament. Available at: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/constituency-data-how-healthy-is-your-area/. Last accessed: March 2026.
6. UK National Screening Committee. (June 2018) Screening for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in the general adult population: External review against programme appraisal criteria for the UK National Screening Committee. Solutions for Public Health. Available at: https://view-health-screening-recommendations.service.gov.uk/document/86cb8a05-d1d5-4dcd-84ec-e848631bb4ba/download
7. UK National Screening Committee. Updated definition of targeted screening will help clarify remit of expanded UK NSC. Available at: https://nationalscreening.blog.gov.uk/2022/05/26/updated-definition-of-targeted-screening-will-help-clarify-remit-of-expanded-uk-nsc/. Last accessed: March 2026.
8. NHS. Lung cancer screening. Available at: https://www.nhs.uk/tests-and-treatments/lung-cancer-screening/. Last accessed: March 2026.
9. Welsh Government (2025). Written Statement: A National Lung Screening Programme for Wales. Available at: https://www.gov.wales/written-statement-national-lung-screening-programme-wales. Last accessed: March 2026.
10. NHS. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD): Diagnosis. Available at: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/chronic-obstructive-pulmonary-disease-copd/diagnosis/. Last accessed: March 2026.
11. UK Parliament. Written question 67321: Lung Cancer: Screening (answered 25 July 2025). Available at: https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2025-07-14/67321. Last accessed: March 2026.
12. Chiesi Ltd. FRONTIER Hull data reveals 50% diagnosis rate in COPD case‑finding programme… Available at: https://www.chiesi.uk.com/media/press-releases/frontier-hull-data-reveals-diagnosis-rate-in-copd
13. Brindle K, Watkins K, Gilroy-Cheetham J, Maxted C, Niazi-Ali S, Crooks M (2025). The burden of undiagnosed COPD among lung cancer screening participants. Presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Congress 2025.
14. Chiesi UK and Ireland. Data on File.

Polly Billington MP (Photography by Dinendra Haria)

9 min read47 min

Polly Billington is something of a Westminster lifer – she spent several years as a BBC political reporter before becoming an adviser to Ed Miliband, including during his time as Labour leader.

But now, at the second time of asking, Billington is a player herself rather than a journalist or adviser. And since her election as Labour MP for East Thanet, the 58-year-old has positioned herself as a champion of coastal communities.

Psephologists may argue about why it was that Labour won so many coastal seats. Was it really down to ‘Whitby woman’ switching to Keir Starmer – or just the type of seat profile where the vote split evenly between Reform and Conservatives? If Labour wants to hold any of them, however, it had better deliver meaningful change to coastal voters.

It’s a message the former journalist is pushing hard, while also representing backbench concerns to the party’s leadership as a Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) committee rep. But she is vocal too in her defence of her former boss. Miliband, she says, was right before his time on the key political questions of the day. And, as battle lines begin to be drawn up over AI and the environment, Billington is prepared to question just how much we should sacrifice to energy and water-hungry big tech.

We’ve now got more coastal Labour MPs than we’ve ever had

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“I set up the Coastal PLP again for the first time since the New Labour government because we’ve now got more coastal Labour MPs than we’ve ever had, even in 1997 and especially in 1945 when Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate did not go Labour,” she says, name-checking the towns which make up her seat.

“So, we’re a considerable chunk of the PLP, and that gives us not only an electoral opportunity but also a policy obligation and a delivery obligation,” she adds. “Labour’s majority is partly rooted in those communities and we therefore need to deliver for them.”

Nine out of the top 10 areas in 2025’s English indices of multiple deprivation, she points out, are in coastal areas. Seven of those 10 alone are in Blackpool. Life expectancy can often be significantly lower, and public transport links poorer.

Billington insists the group is not simply playing “deprivation bingo”. Rather, she and her colleagues are arguing that their constituencies contain untapped economic potential and can make a key contribution to the government’s growth mission.

The MPs want to see the government produce a bespoke coastal strategy that recognises the nation’s seaside as a “strategic economic region” in its own right. In the absence of that strategy, less well-off coastal areas like Billington’s risk being lumped in with affluent parts of inland Kent.

“I’ve got more in common with Lowestoft, Scarborough, Blackpool, Worthing, Bournemouth, Truro, than I have with Tunbridge Wells and Sevenoaks,” she says. “That’s why we need to start seeing those places as having a specific economic strategy and approach.”

Billington also wants to see the creation of a coastal minister, though she refuses to say whether she is volunteering for this post herself.

“Listen, those decisions are absolutely ones for the Prime Minister, not me.”

 Would any of her colleagues do a good job of it?

“I’m not going to name anybody, am I?” she replies, before adding: “I am pitching the role, but I think the discussions about personnel need to be done with the people making the decisions – not in The House magazine.”

The Coastal PLP has already secured some wins, she argues, as the recent schools white paper contained a ‘Mission Coastal’ commitment, while the National Cancer Plan pledged to “rebalance cancer and diagnostic medical training places to remote, rural, and coastal areas”. Changes to the Treasury Green Book are a further source of optimism.

Billington now wants to see ministers use “other economic levers” to generate growth on the coast, especially where funding has already been allocated or institutions already established.

“The National Wealth Fund, GB Energy, the British Business Bank. How can they, like the Green Book, be rewired in order to be able to prioritise growth in our coastal communities?”

The MP also hints at possible future tax changes that may benefit the hospitality sector on which many coastal economies depend. Currently, once a business’ taxable turnover exceeds £90,000 in any 12-month period, they are suddenly required to register for VAT. According to Billington, “ministers themselves will acknowledge” that this threshold “drives fraud and keeps businesses small”. 

“I’m not expecting a massive VAT cut. We continue to talk about how the VAT regime, and particularly the VAT threshold, causes unintended consequences and perverse incentives. Ministers are not unalive to that.”

After 15 years as a BBC journalist, Billington left the corporation to become Miliband’s special adviser in Gordon Brown’s government, then worked on Miliband’s leadership campaign, and finally advised him on communications during his first 18 months as leader.

Ed [Miliband] was right, really early on, about the squeezed middle and intergenerational fairness

Despite his failure to win the 2015 election – and her own failure to win the marginal seat of Thurrock that year – she remains convinced that Miliband was ahead of his time in his diagnosis of the nation’s ills.

“Ed was right, really early on, about the squeezed middle and intergenerational fairness,” says Billington.

“I remember him doing a speech very early after he’d got elected as leader. He was talking about this anxiety that he had about the country, that people no longer had confidence that their children would have a better life than they did.

“Even some of his greatest supporters were scratching their heads and saying, ‘I don’t know really what you’re talking about’. That’s 16 years ago, and he saw then the big economic trends which were causing these levels of intergenerational unfairness…

“There’s the housing crisis, but not only the housing crisis. Pensions, social care and so forth – those things Ed saw a long time ago.”

Her time working for Miliband also taught her that “being right is not enough – especially in opposition”.

Now a member of the Energy Security and Net Zero Select Committee, Billington is tasked with scrutinising the man she used to advise – and the work of his department, which is trying to achieve its clean power target by 2030.

But concerns have been flagged over recent weeks about whether the government’s plans to rapidly grow the number of AI data centres across the country could put that target at risk. At a January select committee meeting, Billington pressed Miliband’s junior minister, Michael Shanks, on whether the government is open to data centres using gas power to get around grid connection delays. He suggested those discussions were ongoing.

“We’ve got to have a national conversation about this,” says Billington. “You can’t have a situation where you have data centres asking to be powered by gas, which is clearly counter to the government’s overall decarbonisation plan.”

She then raises a more fundamental issue with the UK’s race to become an AI superpower.

“We have to ask some questions about whether we want data centres which take up an enormous amount of water, and an enormous amount of electricity, and don’t create very many jobs.

“We can hurtle towards a data centre future, but is that overall in the best interests of the country? For the kind of jobs that we want, the kind of growth that we want and for our natural resources, like water and how we want to manage our energy supply?”

As well as holding Miliband’s department to account, Billington is also vice-chair of the PLP and sits as one of six Labour parliamentary committee reps, tasked with relaying concerns from the backbenches to the party’s leadership.

What does she make of complaints from longer-serving MPs that she and the other reps – most of whom were first elected in 2024 – are not being robust enough in passing on those complaints to the Chief Whip and the Prime Minister?

“I think anyone who were to be a witness to those meetings certainly wouldn’t come to that conclusion,” she replies. “We feed back, where we can, to the people who raise those questions.

“We have worked on a number of different ways of making sure that we have constructive feedback loops, but I think what is most important about that is that the first people to know about what happens in parliamentary committee are members of the PLP.

“We as backbench committee reps take it extremely seriously to ensure that it is our colleagues who are the first to know, not members of the press.” The now gamekeeper clearly feels the need to keep her former fellow poachers in their place.

Billington is also clear that, following Morgan McSweeney’s departure from No 10, more fundamental changes will be needed to overhaul what some have characterised as the “boys’ club” in Downing Street.

“Personnel is one thing,” she says, “but culture, and understanding about how misogyny works, is another.

“That’s why myself and many of my colleagues in the women’s PLP were delighted to hear Keir say that there was such a thing as structural misogyny.

“We look forward to, and continue to engage with No 10 about, seeing a plan to change things significantly, to challenge that structural misogyny.”

But she emphasises this will be “a lifetime-long battle”, adding: “You don’t smash misogyny by one sacking, one resignation… This is not something that happens quickly or easily, or simply with a few movements or reshuffles.

“This has to be a different way of exercising power, of conducting professional politics, because without that change, we will not have the kind of transformed, fairer, more respectful, equal society that those of who came into politics for the Labour Party actually want to see.”