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Currently in the Lords, the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill will determine the funding, responsibilities, and relationships between all tiers of local government.

My county of Surrey has benefited from a successful tapestry of governance, with one county equalling eleven districts and boroughs currently reorganising into two unitary authorities. As an MP, I love working with all forms of government – each brings a different perspective to community engagement.

The Devolution Bill presents huge opportunities to reshape how public services are delivered and how local places and people are supported. However, caution is needed as there are huge potential risks from devolution if implemented poorly.

For me, the most apparent issue is the lack of clarity demonstrated so far around parish and town councils, and their place in this new system. Thankfully, a recent report has outlined how Surrey is leading the way, and how the rest of the country can follow suit.

The Surrey Association of Local Councils (SALC) has outlined how the 80+ town and parish councils in the county play a central role in governance – delivering better services, creating more vibrant places, and building stronger, more resilient communities.

The report also sets out the staggering contribution that parish and town councils make to communities. In Surrey alone, these councils have invested more than £11 million a year, directly into their communities. This has funded a variety of community-based projects. The results of these have been incredible – reducing anti-social behaviour, managing community spaces, reducing pressure on public services by supporting volunteers, befriending schemes, and community networks, as well as cutting pollution.

Taking the example of Surrey nationally, it’s clear that when it comes to English devolution, early planning and genuine collaboration with parish and town councils will be essential to sustain the community services that residents rely on every day. This is clear in the report.  

SALC noted just how beneficial parish and town councils can be for other forms of government. For example, in just one year, improving access to parks and open spaces can generate around £115,000 in health and social care savings, while investing £300,000 in youth services can return an estimated £960,000 through better health outcomes and reduced crime.

These figures show local councils are not a cost to be cut, but one of the smartest investments taxpayers can make.

With elections taking place in 2026, ahead of the unitary councils going live in 2027, SALC is calling for early, proactive partnership working between the new authorities and town and parish councils.

The report outlines practical next steps, including local “deals” to support the transfer of services to town and parish councils where appropriate, and support for communities that wish to create new town and parish councils.

By working together from the outset, SALC believes Surrey can avoid essential community services and assets being lost, and residents feeling remote from the new, much larger authorities – and instead ensure communities continue to feel heard, supported, and proud of where they live. This is also the case for the rest of the country.

As England’s governance is on the cusp of being reshaped, the report is clear: strong, vibrant communities are built from the ground up – and collaboration with town and parish councils is key to making local government reform a success.

In recent days, Israeli media outlets revealed plans by prison authorities to inaugurate an execution facility—nicknamed the “Israeli Green Mile.” These facilities will resemble death chambers, reserved for Palestinians accused of terrorism.

Their death sentences will reportedly be carried out within 90 days of the final judicial decision.

This step represents a new escalation of violence against Palestinian detainees. Israeli outlets are concerned—as they say—with the psychological burden on executioners, with no regard for the innocence of those wrongfully detained. Israeli agents of death, who participation will reportedly be ‘voluntary,’ will reportedly undergo psychological and operational training—murder dressed up as due process.

Legalised killing grounds

The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club has warned of the danger of transforming prisons into “legalised killing grounds”. They contend that Israeli prisons are no longer detention sites, but have been transformed into spaces for torture, starvation and slow execution, as part of a retaliatory policy that legalises murder.

Prisons as tools for systematic killing

Since October 7, 2023, Palestinian detainees have endured horrific abuse at the hands of Israeli guards. Their treatment has reached new depths of depravity. Detainees are routinely denied medical care, deprived of sleep, shackled by their limbs, and subjected to sexual violence and a litany of sadistic torture methods. Collective humiliation is also part of the Israeli play book — forcing Palestinians to chant Zionist slogans, or kiss the Israeli flag.

Israeli Channel 13 quoted Israeli sources saying that the law will initially be applied to prisoners from elite battalions of the Islamic Resistance Movement—Hamas in other words—accused by Israel of carrying out the 7 October attack. It will later be rolled out in the occupied West Bank.

Execution without due process

This escalation is based on a bill submitted by the Jewish Power party, led by the fascist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. They proposed amending Article 301(a) of the Israeli Penal Code to allow the death penalty to be imposed on anyone accused of killing an Israeli for ‘hostile or nationalistic’ motives. This will be without the possibility of pardon.

The bill also grants military courts in the West Bank the authority to issue death sentences without unanimity and oversight.

Following the bill’s approval in its first reading, Ben-Gvir said that:

the only sentence awaiting those who kill Israelis is execution.

His remarks lay bare the retributive nature of the bill.

International warnings and Israeli disregard

UN experts are calling on Israel to withdraw the bill, stressing that the application of the death penalty in the occupied territories violates international humanitarian law and that the Israeli military legal system lacks legitimacy under the rules of occupation.

However, the right-wing Israeli government continues to push the bill as part of a broader package led by Ben-Gvir. Under the false banner of ‘strict deterrence’ they intend on reinforcing policies of repression and collective punishment.

Pundits also view the bill and state-backed push for execution wards as a response to Israel’s failure to achieve its military objectives in Gaza. As a direct consequence, Israel is desperately appealing to, and appeasing, the extreme right in Israel. Where will they draw the line?

Featured image via the Canary

If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the British press constantly moaned about the ‘nanny state’ in the New Labour years. This is the term for when the government interferes in people’s every day business to an unhealthy degree. And as we’ve seen this week, Nigel Farage is going to be the nanny state personified if he becomes PM.

First he was going after work-from-home; now he wants to tell you what you can and can’t call oat milk:

When I first made this TikTok video in 2024 you all laughed at me.

Well, today the Supreme Court has ruled that ‘oat milk’ can no longer be called milk.

You’re not laughing now are you! pic.twitter.com/WFQaEgNulO

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— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) February 11, 2026

How about minding your business, feller?

We are laughing now, to be fair

Farage is referring to the Supreme Court ruling which decided you can’t call oat milk ‘milk’ anymore. We have two thoughts on this:

• We’re really spending time and money on this?
• We’ll continue to call it oat milk out of habit, but we don’t care either way – we have more important things to worry about.

In the video above, Farage says:

So I’m in a smart hotel in London; I’ve got a cup, I want some milk. Let’s have a look. We’ve got semi-skimmed, I don’t like that. Oat milk? What on Earth’s that when it’s at home. Almond milk. All I want’s proper bloody milk, not left-wing options – proper milk. What’s wrong with me asking for that?

You are an old man in a public breakfast room shouting at the coffee table; this isn’t normal.

We’re going to print this in big, bold letters so that it gets through:

IF THE THOUGHT OF OAT MILK UPSETS YOU, YOU ARE TOO EASILY UPSET.

This is absolute snowflake behaviour.

It’s possibly the most snowflake anyone has ever been since Lee Anderson celebrated the conviction of his heckler.

And going further, there is nothing ‘left-wing’ about oat milk. Almond milk did not feature in the Communist Manifesto. Organised labour have never gone on strike to secure the right to coconut milk. Cashew milk is not a key tenet of Xi Jinping Thought.

Farage is doing two things here:

• Thinking that anything which wasn’t common in his childhood is wrong by default because his brain is decaying.
• Thinking that anything he doesn’t personally enjoy is ‘left wing’ because he’s right wing.

As we mentioned, Mr Nanny is also telling people where they can and can’t work. HG reported for the Canary:

Nigel Farage is going after work-from-home, in a hypocritical attempt to make it look like he’s ever worked a day in his life.

Of course, Nigey isn’t telling us that he previously employed his wife to work from home.

To make matters more infuriating, Reform UK also happens to employ people who work from home.

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These people are going to be all up in your business while telling you to mind yours.

This your guy?

As is obvious from Farage’s tweet, he’s spent the past two years stewing on this. Do we really want this petty, small-minded dweeb in charge of the country?

Because let’s be real – at this point, he’s gonna want revenge for a lot more than just his opinions about milk.

Featured image via Trademark Room

‘Nandy criticises Starmer’s appointment of peer linked to paedophile’ is not, at first glance, a surprising headline in this morning’s Daily Telegraph. The Mandelson story isn’t going to go away anytime soon, after all.

And then you realise Mandie has nothing to do with it. There is another peer, and another paedophile.

I don’t know if British politics has ever had reason to exhibit this particular rule before, so maybe I’m wrong, but I posit that the number of second-degree political connexions to different paedophiles a prime minister can survive is fewer than two. It was almost certainly fewer than one, but definitely fewer than two.

Sir Keir Starmer is, politically speaking, a dead man. He may perhaps keep twitching long enough to fulfill his highest ambitions for office and give away the Chagos Islands, but that’s about it. And notwithstanding my warning from Monday, it is hard to see his downfall as unjust.

This government’s back was long broken; having stated that its top priority is ‘growth’, it has once again underperformed the OBR’s underwhelming forecasts; the best Rachel Reeves’ can manage, instead of scrapping the Employment Rights Bill or the Renters’ Rights Act or any other economically self-harming bit of her own agenda, is to bleat about closer relations with Europe. Naturally, she has taken this as an excuse to limit her ‘deregulatory drive’, whatever that was supposed to have been, even as Germany’s Olaf Scholz calls for a “regulatory clean slate”.

Again, it’s not necessarily that today’s politicians are an order of magnitude worse than their predecessors. It is simply that the forward momentum imparted to the British economy in earlier, better days, and which allowed several cohorts of the inadequate generation to convince themselves they had done a passable job of running it, has run out. When Starmer complains about pulling the levers and nothing happening, the lever in question are “taking the path of least resistance”, and the promised result “everything working out for now”.

If anything, the problem with the whole ‘Two Degrees of Humbert Humbert’ situation the Government now finds itself in is that it is so compelling an explanation for the downfall of a prime minister that Labour will convince itself that the rest of it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the anaemic growth, the soaring taxes, the many and manifest failures in office. It was Mandelson, and Doyle, and the unfortunate decision of a man with apparently no political instincts at all to elevate them to high office.

That comforting fairy story is not true, however weird it is to have to use the phrase “It wasn’t just the paedophiles” to put anyone’s problems in context. A new Labour leader would find that out soon enough, when the gulf between public expectations, the revenue expenditure accounts, and the tax base swallowed them hole. The best they could hope for is that Labour MPs decided to stick with them this time; even then, left-wing voters looking for someone to tell them what they want to hear will have the Greens.

The rest of us, meanwhile, will still have to live in the country they have proven utterly incapable of running. Do you think it haunts any of them, privately? How totally unfit they have proven for the burden of office? I don’t suppose it does – certainly, relatively few Conservatives (relative, that is, to the number who ought to) seem to harbour such doubts. The politics of “Play that same song!” remains popular on our side to have made Prosper UK happen, to whatever extent it is happening. And if the same narrow range of old ideas doesn’t deliver the goods anymore, well, you can always conclude that democracy is impossible.

Perhaps Labour will reach the same conclusion, once they try exactly the same thing without the nonces and find themselves losing anyway.

4 min read1 hr

The first (from Punch) showed a schoolteacher addressing his pupils: “Some of you students have urged me to teach that bourgeois society is corrupt, so here goes. Bourgeois society is corrupt. Returning now to the question of congruent triangles…” That one comes back to me occasionally in seminars: “Anyway, let’s get back to the subject of Early Day Motions…”

The second (by the great Tony Husband, maybe?) featured a man being questioned by a clipboard-armed pollster. “I am,” says the man, “less a don’t know, and more a couldn’t give a toss.”

That one came back to me recently while reading a fascinating new project examining the ‘Don’t Knows’. The chaff of opinion poll responses, most public polls simply discard them – along with the ‘Won’t Says’ and the ‘Couldn’t Give A Monkey’s’ – and report findings based on those who cough up a response. Yet those who don’t answer can often be considerable in number and they are not random.

It has, for example, long been known that the Don’t Knows are much more likely to be female. This new research shows just how much. In an impressive piece of work (which joins the growing list of projects I have often thought of doing, never got around to, and which are now, thankfully, being done by people much more able), researchers analysed every single question asked by the British Election Study (BES) over the last 10 years. That’s more than 2,000 questions, asked of almost 120,000 unique respondents.

In all 29 waves of the BES, women were more likely to say dunno, at roughly twice the rate of men, and around three quarters of those with a high proportion of don’t know responses were female. There were other differences too – education increases the likelihood of offering an opinion, for example – but sex appears to be the most significant factor.

Preliminary results appear to show this effect varied by both focus and format of questions. It was most pronounced when asking about people’s knowledge and/or about European politics. But although its scale varied, the effect remained, regardless of the topic, type or format being examined.

As so often with these sorts of findings, it’s important to remember the differences are probabilistic and at the margins. Women answer plenty of questions in surveys; plenty of men frequently say they don’t know. But one group is clearly more likely to do it than the other.

So, when we casually drop the Don’t Knows from a survey result, we are disproportionately dropping women. That might matter less if they genuinely don’t know – but, given that the project also found significant differences based on question formatting and wording, some of these differences aren’t genuine. Plus, there is almost no gender gap in eventual electoral turnout, so we are almost certainly dropping people who are still participating. 

Some of these gaps are already known to be caused by men’s tendency to give answers based on less certainty – and sometimes just to guess. Several years ago, there was an experiment in which respondents were set a series of unanswerable political knowledge questions – in that every one of the proffered responses was false.

Who said: “We shall fight them on the beaches?” A) John Lennon B) Boudica C) Rastamouse D) Don’t Know. (The real ones were more subtle than that, but you get the idea). The good news is that most people responded by picking option D. The less good news is that men were much more likely to give an answer regardless. Men were basically more likely to think they were right, even when they had to be wrong. Women never seem to be surprised by this finding.