Politics
Peter Franklin: Our shallow and simplistic debate over energy policy is a threat to national security
Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
Can we have a grown-up conversation about energy please? Because right now, we’re not getting one. I’ll get on to the pro-green side of the debate in a bit, but let’s start with the anti-greens — seeing as they now control policy in both the Conservative Party and Reform UK.
If you were to ask Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage about the root causes of our energy insecurities, you can bet they’d reach for a two-word explanation beginning with “net” and ending with “zero”. Indeed, Net Zero has become to the Right what Brexit is to the Left — a general purpose whipping boy for everything that’s gone wrong with the British economy.
But that doesn’t help us with the latest surge in energy prices. After all, it’s not Greta Thunberg blocking the Straits of Hormuz, but an unpredictable, open-ended conflict with Iran.
Crude oil prices are forecast to hit $100 per barrel this week. And if Donald Trump doesn’t wrap this up pronto, there’ll be much worse to come. Even if Iranian missiles and drones don’t destroy the Gulf’s energy infrastructure, the squeeze on tanker traffic is already wreaking havoc. Oil storage facilities in the region are filling-up fast. That in turn threatens a massive shut-down in production and processing — which won’t be reversed easily or quickly. And remember, it’s not just oil. The Qataris are shutting down their LNG export terminals, which is why natural gas prices are spiking too.
But that’s the cost of relying on imported fossil fuels, especially exports from Russia and the Middle East. As well as enriching some of the world’s worst people, we’ve staked Europe’s security on a series of vulnerable bottlenecks — including Russia’s oil and gas pipelines; both ends of the Red Sea; and the aforementioned Straits of Hormuz. Since 2020, all of those have been choked-off — in some cases for months or even years. The harsh truth is that in weighing up the pros-and-cons of different forms of energy we can no longer assume the unimpeded east-west flow of oil and gas.
So when you hear someone urging the country to get real about the vulnerabilities of renewable energy, but without also acknowledging the fragilities of a hydrocarbon-based economy, the argument is either blinkered or made in bad faith.
Of course, the same applies in reverse. For instance, here’s the Business Secretary, Peter Kyle, using the current crisis to call for a “doubling down on renewables.” Well, I’m all in favour of doubling, tripling and quadrupling the deployment of wind and solar power. Not only is it clean and un-depletable, it’s also domestically produced — with obvious benefits for security of supply and our balance-of-payments. One little thing though: what happens when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine? Yes, we’ve kept the lights on so far, but the more wind and solar we deploy, the harder it becomes to compensate for its natural variability.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t find solutions. In fact, the technologies we need to store electrical power are making rapid progress. However, to minimise the costs of this transition, the last thing we ought to be doing is holding ourselves to an artificially accelerated timetable. But that’s precisely what’s happening thanks to Labour’s deranged plan to decarbonise the grid by 2030. Note that there’s no international treaty compelling the country to jump through this hoop. It’s an entirely self-inflicted policy, pushed — and obsessively pursued — by Ed Miliband.
But that’s the problem with our polarised energy debate. To see only the problems with your opponents’ policies leads to virtue signalling with regard to your own.
For instance, the 2030 target only makes sense as a demonstration of ideological correctness. The same goes for another Miliband policy: the ban on new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. Again, there is no international obligation on UK to make this sacrifice. Nor does is it required by Net Zero which is about consumption not production. Even within the constraints of the 2050 target we’ll still be consuming oil and gas for decades to come — albeit oil and gas we’d have to import instead of producing ourselves. There’s also the absurd inconsistency with the government’s belated efforts to boost production from existing capacity in the North Sea.
Perhaps Ed Miliband thinks his virtue signals are setting a good example, but no one in the world is looking at the costs, chaos and contradictions of British energy policy and saying: “I’ll have what they’re having”.
Sometimes, the natural reaction to excessive virtue signalling is to “vice signal” — that is, to deliberately defy the conventions of a prevailing, but failing, moral order.
Thus Kemi Badenoch has made a point of promising to reverse Labour’s ban on new oil exploration in British waters. Assuming that we can squeeze a few extra drops from the North Sea, this would be good for the public purse, our trade deficit and jobs. There’s also a modest environmental benefit in that extracting fossil fuels close to home tends to spew less carbon dioxide than importing the stuff from afar. Nurturing British expertise in marine engineering also produces transferable skills for offshore renewables.
But let’s not get carried away. Opening new fields will, at best, slow down the decline in North Sea production, not reverse it. Any impression to the contrary is a reminder that vice signalling, like virtue signalling, is just a gesture.
I fear that we’re falling into a similar trap in regard to new nuclear. The dangerous glamour of this technology makes tempting fodder for a vice signal, but the reality isn’t quite so titillating. There’s only one nuclear plant currently under construction in the UK and that’s Hinkley Point C in Somerset. Unfortunately there’s been yet another delay to the completion of the project and yet another budget-busting cost increase. In today’s money, the total projected cost now stands at £49 billion and that’s assuming no further bad news. Luckily, it’ll be the project owners picking up the tab for the overrun not the British taxpayer or bill payer (a fact for which we have my old boss, Greg Clark, to thank). But the same is not true of the proposed Sizewell C plant, which was recently given the go-ahead by Labour and for which the British state will underwrite a massive chunk of the construction risk.
In theory a “fleet” of new nuclear power stations could supply an abundance of home-produced, low carbon energy — but at £50 billion a pop, what we need to worry about isn’t the danger of a reactor meltdown, but the financial meltdown if it turns out we’ve paid the French or Chinese for a herd of white elephants. So I’m sorry neutron-fans, the fact is that we need some kind of technological breakthrough before we can sensibly take the nuclear bet. It may be that that Small Modular Reactors are the way forward, but before getting too excited about those wait for a final quote from the builders.
At this point I’d better stop my drive-by shooting of our energy options. There are others, from coal to fracking to energy efficiency, but they all have their problems too.
So if there are no easy answers, how about a hard answer? Well, in extremely condensed form, here are three things we ought to be doing:
Firstly, we need to work toward a full alignment of environmental and energy security objectives. Wherever contradictions crop up in the policy framework, let’s strip them out. That includes anything (or anyone) whose effect is to replace home produced energy with imports.
Secondly, it’s time to stop targeting given quantities of decarbonisation — especially by unnecessary deadlines. Instead, the machinery of the state should be reorientated towards a related, but distinct, objective — which is to relentlessly bear down on the cost of clean and secure energy. Whether this displeases the energy companies or the environmental NGOs is immaterial. The only guarantee of defeating global warming is if clean tech becomes so cheap and reliable that the world can’t afford not to use it.
Thirdly, and most importantly, we have to get serious about industrial strategy. Alongside our allies, we’ve agreed to spend 5 per cent of our GDP on defence and national resilience (the latter of which includes energy security). That is only affordable if we use these vast sums strategically to build-up our economy as a hi-tech manufacturing power house.
The parallel, intertwined effort to secure clean and affordable energy supplies must work with and not against that goal.
The debate on slavery reparations is showing no signs of dying down. Last week, the United Nations General Assembly voted in favour of a resolution urging members to apologise for the slave trade and to pay reparations to African countries.
The UK was one of 52 countries to abstain from the vote, which was proposed by Ghana and supported by 123 members. But should we not have voted against it, alongside the United States, Israel and Argentina?
The truth is that demands for reparations are opening a can of worms. Identifying which countries should pay up for slavery is more complicated than some might think. While it is true that European colonial powers including Britain participated in the slave trade, it is important that we revisit the very origins of the supply chain.
To begin with, the integral part played by exceptionally wealthy and powerful African kingdoms in selling slaves to European merchants should not be ignored. In the early 18th century, the kings of Dahomey – current-day Benin – established themselves as major players in the slave trade. King Gezo, who was King of Dahomey from 1818 to 1850, labelled the slave trade as ‘the ruling principle of my people’, being ‘the source and the glory of their wealth’. Indeed, there is a certain irony to Ghana proposing this resolution and Nigeria supporting it. The elites of the Asante and Yoruba kingdoms – in present-day Ghana and Nigeria respectively – also benefited a great deal from the slave trade.
It is undeniable that Britain was a leading slave-trading nation. But this fact should be qualified by the knowledge that so too was every seafaring nation or empire in history, prior to abolition. China, Arab states and indeed many African countries were enthusiastic participants in this evil practice. And, in many of these countries, slavery lingered on for many centuries longer than it did in Britain.
Indeed, Britain’s only unique contribution to the slave trade was in ending it before anyone else. In the early 19th century, Britain became the home of abolitionist campaigning, thanks to the efforts of leading philanthropist William Wilberforce. Britain then played a pioneering humanitarian role in suppressing the trade at great human and financial cost – especially to the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, which patrolled the coast of West Africa, capturing slave ships and freeing in the region of 150,000 Africans destined for the Americas.
This was a costly and arduous campaign, which lasted decades. The squadron ships were generally not as sophisticated, dynamic and well-equipped as many of the slave vessels, contributing to high mortality rates for the sailors and significant expenses for the Royal Navy. Have those who are part of the reparations lobby called for a compensatory fund for the descendants of these fallen sailors, who made the ultimate sacrifice in the name of fighting the slave trade? Of course not.
So the role played by Britain, and the West, in the slave trade is far from straightforward. It can also be said that the part played by Africa’s powerful elites and rich kingdoms in supplying slaves – generating considerable wealth in the process – is commonly overlooked.
Nor should we be entirely trusting of the motives of those now calling for reparations. Many African countries need to look within to better understand the root of ongoing failures. The quality of internal governance and rampant institutional corruption would be a good start. In this light, calls for ‘reparatory justice’ could even be considered a deflection tactic. Slavery was indeed a great evil, but it is not the sole reason, or even the primary reason, why African countries are impoverished compared with their Western counterparts.
We are just a few years away from the 200-year anniversary of abolition in the British Empire. Britain should not shy away from acknowledging its historical role. But when all of its victims and beneficiaries have been dead for generations now, it is surely high time we moved on. Certainly, we should not be paying a penny in reparations.
Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.
FRAUDTUITOUS: Gov. Kathy Hochul has spent the last four months beating the auto-insurance affordability drum and fighting the trial lawyers and unconvinced lawmakers who stand in her way.
She’s proposing limiting the ways car crash victims — especially those deemed at fault for the collision — can sue for damages, a move she says will cut the cost of auto insurance. She also wants to target insurance fraud and staged crashes.
It’s been a massive sticking point in negotiations to finish her now-late budget.
“If, God forbid, you are the majority reason that there’s an accident, you will no longer be entitled to pain and suffering,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie told reporters Wednesday. “That’s a pretty serious thing for people to accept. I mean, accidents do happen.”
But as Hochul hopes to draw the Assembly and Senate to her side, it just so happens that federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York dropped indictments this week targeting a close personal friend of former Mayor Eric Adams and alleging a massive car-crash-victim-fraud scheme.
Perfect! Timing!
“This alleged scheme is exactly the type of fraud Governor Hochul’s auto insurance reforms are designed to curb in New York State,” Hochul spokesperson Kristin Devoe told Playbook in a statement.
Her office is arguing that the scheme might never have happened had Hochul’s proposed changes been in place.
“The Governor’s proposals would strengthen enforcement, allow more time to investigate suspected fraudulent claims and crack down on the networks and providers that make this type of fraud possible in the first place,” Devoe said.
Our colleague Chris Sommerfeldt reported this morning that federal prosecutors dropped a superseding indictment Thursday in their fraud case against Zhan “Johnny” Petrosyants, the man who hobnobbed, dined and clubbed with Adams during his tenure, as Hizzoner tested New York City’s nightlife “product.” The superseder alleged businessmen Vladislav Stoyanovsky and Dmitriy Khavko participated in the scheme as well. All three men pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors claim the men had car crash victims in medical clinics undergo dubious procedures conducted by clinicians who were part of the scheme. The indictment also alleges the men behind the operation billed insurers for procedures that never happened.
Petrosyants, Stoyanovsky and Khavko then allegedly filed no-fault claims to the insurance companies, who, under state law, are required to pay out the claims in just 30 days. The scheme brought in tens of millions of dollars, prosecutors said.
Hochul’s office wants to change that. The governor says she’d give insurers more time to investigate whether a no-fault claim is fraudulent. Right now, if an insurer delays a payout, it can’t defend itself in court by saying it was busy investigating the claim. Insurers would still have to pay interest on delayed payouts. And if someone sues to force a reluctant insurer to pay up, the insurer would have to cover attorneys fees.
The cost of paying out bogus insurance claims is a main factor in the high cost of auto insurance in New York, contends Team Hochul. Last year, insurance carriers reported 43,811 incidents of suspected auto insurance fraud to regulators, an 80 percent jump compared to 2020.
The Trial Lawyers Association says Hochul’s proposals would give insurance companies more time to delay and deny claims.
“Stripping away consumer rights while insurers rake in record profit is a giveaway to the industry that leaves New Yorkers to pick up the tab,” association spokesperson Sabrina Rezzy said in a statement. — Jason Beeferman
From the Capitol
TIGHTENING ALBANY’S BELTWAY: The much-derided I-787 — an asphalt apron familiar to Capital Region drivers who commute downtown to the statehouse — is one step closer to a makeover.
Hochul announced Thursday the state is opening a community outreach center amid an environmental review focused on how to improve waterfront access. I-787 runs parallel to the Hudson River.
“Reimagining the I-787 corridor is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shape the future of downtown Albany, so it is imperative that the people who live and work in the area have a major voice in how this project progresses,” Hochul said. — Nick Reisman
FROM THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
BLACKBURN’S BONDI PAST: In 2016, years before she became one of the Trump administration’s most prominent and polarizing officials, then-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi had a young intern in her office named Conrad Blackburn.
That fact is now being seized on by Blackburn’s critics as he runs for a Harlem-based Assembly seat as a democratic socialist and unabashed enemy of Trump.
“It is unconscionable that Conrad Blackburn chose to work for Pam Bondi at the very moment she was leading the charge to keep more than a million Floridians, including one in five Black adults, permanently locked out of the voting booth,” Uptown Democratic Club President Donna-Marie Gibbons told Playbook, referencing Bondi’s effort to preserve a Florida law that made it difficult for felons to regain voting rights after serving time. “Anyone who signed up to work in that office while she was fighting to preserve this racist, Jim Crow-era machinery has questions to answer about their commitment to our community.”
Trump fired Bondi as his U.S. attorney general Thursday.
Blackburn, who grew up in Florida, said criticism of his stint with the attorney general there says more about his haters than it does about him.
He told Playbook he took the unpaid, two-month internship in Bondi’s criminal appeals bureau while in law school — and the experience drove him to become a public defender, a role he continues to serve in to this day.
“I did not need very long to say that the system was broken and I needed to spend my time working to protect Black folks from it, with actions, not just words,” Blackburn said.
“I am happy to debate my record on its merits,” he continued. “But harkening back to my days as a 1L, as a poor kid trying to work in the criminal appeals bureau of the Florida AG’s office as some kinda gotcha? That is everything wrong with politics now. If the powers that be in this district focused on the issues, they would have to explain the lack of meaningful change in the community…Heck, if the powers that be did their jobs, I may not be running in this race at all.”
Blackburn is facing off in June’s Democratic primary against Assemblymember Jordan Wright, the son of Manhattan Democratic Party head Keith Wright.
New York Focus reported today that Charlie King, a longtime aide to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, is launching a super PAC to boost Wright, whose district Mayor Zohran Mamdani comfortably won in last year’s election. — Chris Sommerfeldt
IN OTHER NEWS
— ARRESTS SURGE: ICE arrested more New Yorkers between November and January than in any comparable period since 2022, according to federal data. (Times Union)
— ONE MAN’S TRASH: Reports show that progress in New York’s composting push slowed after officials halted fines and enforcement efforts. (Gothamist)
— BLESS THIS MESS: Competing lobbying groups in Hochul’s car insurance reform fight are clashing over dueling clergy letters and even disputing who actually signed which. (City and State)
Missed this morning’s New York Playbook? We forgive you. Read it here.
Let’s just deal with this quickly.
Because the truth is that we should all be quietly sending BBC Scotland bouquets in appreciation for doing the independence movement a favour for once.
Belief in an independent Scotland IS as strong as ever, which is to say it’s pretty much where it’s been since 2014 – two or three points either side of 50%. But while it’s true, that fact certainly WASN’T demonstrated by last Saturday’s pathetic march and cursory “rally”, which at the very, very highest estimate was attended by just a twentieth as many people as used to regularly show up at such events.
“We are the 45”, a performer sang at one point to a crowd which numbered only slightly more than that.
“With strength in numbers, Scotland shall prevail”, he continued, leading any rational observer to conclude that Scotland’s chances of prevailing must be roughly on a par with those of our capturing the World Cup in America this summer.
The march was the latest in a series of similar embarrassments, which would have attracted nothing but mockery and pity if broadcast on the evening news. What it demonstrated was that the roughly 50% of people who support independence are as actively committed to making it happen as the roughly 50% of people who want to bring back hanging and the roughly 50% who want to get rid of Trident, two things which are just as far away from the current political agenda.
This is an extraordinary misunderstanding of news values from someone who used to be the editor of a national newspaper. The march was announced seven months ago, has been relentlessly promoted since then, was officially supported by the SNP (which the 100,000+ AUOB marches never were), took place in the runup to an election and featured the First Minister as its headline speaker AND STILL ALMOST NOBODY BOTHERED TURNING UP.
That’s the only thing even remotely and tentatively approaching being a news story here: Widely Promoted Event About Supposedly Incredibly Vital And Urgent Subject Supported By Half The Population And Government Party Who Will Win Imminent General Election Attracts Comically Low Attendance.
We should be weeping with gratitude that the BBC didn’t run that story. Even the march organiser didn’t show up, and nor did most of the SNP, who were focused on keeping their members on the gravy bus come May.
Breaking: 3,000 people mooching down the High Street for an hour and half of them climbing Calton Hill to listen to a desultory handful of awful speeches for another 45 minutes is NOT, in fact, “more than enough” to end the British state’s 300-year control of Scotland. (If it was, obviously, we’d have been independent by Monday.)
Once again: if it had really had the potential to do that, why didn’t more people turn up? At least 1.6 million Scots support independence. Yet fewer than two out of every thousand of them could be arsed with getting a bus or train to the nation’s capital on a bright sunny day to register their interest and have a nice social day out.
Not even SNP supporters think independence is on the political agenda.
And nor do they much care. Independence is not even in SNP voters’ top three priorities, because even people so dumb they’re still voting SNP know that the SNP have neither a strategy nor any motivation for achieving independence. The SNP’s interests lie entirely in maintaining the status quo, as the party’s last former CEO accidentally pointed out in The Courier this week.
And even if the SNP did want independence, we know how it goes by now.
[SNP wins election]
SNP: “We demand another referendum!”
UK GOVERNMENT: “No.”
SNP: “Okay then! See you in another five years!”
More to the point, Richard Walker knows that too. In the article, he just comes right out and says “We should deploy this strategy even though we know it won’t work and when it doesn’t work everything will be over”.
For the sake of brevity we’ll draw a veil over some of the more farcically ludicrous passages in the article. But the line below merits a brief mention, because it’s either a breathtakingly audacious lie or self-delusion on level that in less enlightened times would have seen someone put in a jacket whose arms fastened round the back:
Because on the evidence of last Saturday, the biggest favour UK media can possibly do the independence movement right now is to not draw attention to what a pitiful, withered, irrelevant and impotent state it’s in.
Parliament is in recess, and MPs are once again scattered across the country, back in their constituencies. In North West Essex, Kemi Badenoch will be pleased: once again, she tops ConservativeHome’s Shadow Cabinet League Table, with a net satisfaction rating of +82.1 (up 0.5 points).
It is the third Shadow Cabinet League Table in a row in which she has come first. The first time she reached pole position was shortly before Robert Jenrick’s defection to Reform UK. It underlines the marked shift from her earlier performances in ConservativeHome’s polling, when there were times that she was languishing on zero.
But it also reflects the way her personal polling has improved dramatically in recent months. Badenoch is now the most popular of all the party leaders. According to the think tank More in Common, the Tory leader’s net approval rating has risen to -9. That may not sound like much, but it puts her ahead of the pack. Sir Keir Starmer is on -42, while Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski are both on -16, with Ed Davey on -11.
Behind Badenoch in ConservativeHome’s league table is shadow justice secretary Nick Timothy (+67.6), who retains second place since joining the shadow cabinet. He has recently been at the centre of controversy after describing a Ramadan prayer event in Trafalgar Square as “an act of domination” from an “Islamist playbook”.
The Tory leader rowed in behind him, but some fellow Conservative MPs – including some in the shadow cabinet and the whips’ office – have privately raised concerns about Timothy’s comments and his subsequent doubling down, which one senior Tory described as “extremely unhelpful”. But it has done nothing to dent his standing with Conservative members.
This Shadow Cabinet poll was conducted after Timothy’s remarks, and he still sits above all his shadow cabinet colleagues bar the Tory leader herself. In fact, he has increased his rating from +56.9 to +67.6.
The rest of the top five is unchanged from our last league table: shadow chancellor Mel Stride remains in third (+60.7), followed by shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho (+56.3) and shadow home secretary Chris Philp (+56.2). Despite recent rumours – including in the Mail on Sunday – of a forthcoming reshuffle that would move Stride and Philp, both have held their positions since our last Conservative Home poll.
Another name that has surfaced in reports of a shadow cabinet refresh is shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel, who finds herself near the other end of the table, third from bottom on +16.6 — ahead only of shadow health secretary Stuart Andrew (+14.7) and shadow transport secretary Richard Holden (+10.4), who remains rooted to the foot.
Talk of a reshuffle seemed to lose some of its sheen as Parliament headed into recess. But I understand that, at senior levels within CCHQ, discussions are still ongoing about using a refresh as part of a broader plan to get the Conservative Party back on the front foot after the local elections.
And speaking of those elections: in the run-up to the Scottish and Welsh contests in May, things are not looking especially rosy for either Tory leader. In Scotland, Russell Findlay has slipped from +17 to +15.2 since our last survey. In Wales, Darren Millar is on +7.4, down only fractionally from +7.5. Still, the polls that matter are the ones coming next month.
The post Shadow Cabinet League Table: Badenoch extends her lead, Timothy holds second appeared first on Conservative Home.
I should have felt shocked when I read that one in eight parents now report that their child has a disability. That means that 12 per cent of British children – around 1.7million young people – are classified as suffering from a long-term illness, disability or impairment, according to figures just released by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
These figures have almost doubled since 2015, when around seven per cent of parents reported that their child had a disability. This massive expansion in the number of children deemed to be disabled has been driven by a dramatic increase in the number of kids diagnosed with so-called behavioural issues, such as autism and ADHD. According to the DWP, ‘behavioural issues’ now account for two-thirds of childhood disabilities.
The reason I’m no longer surprised by the rise and rise of childhood disability is that I have been tracking this development for well over three decades. Back in 1996, I remember when UK government officials discovered that between 1985 and 1996, there had been a 40 per cent increase in the proportion of British people who consider themselves disabled. According to the survey, the increase was much higher among teenagers between the ages of 16 and 19. It seemed that the younger you were, the more likely it was that you would have a disability.
The authors of that survey concluded that the difference between the 1985 and 1996 figures ‘appears too large to be explained by a real increase in the prevalence of disability’. This is hardly a surprise. After all, there had been no war or outbreak of serious disease in this period that would have rendered swathes of the population infirm. That the authors couldn’t explain this epidemiologically extraordinary figure in the 1990s is entirely understandable. Thirty or 40 years ago, society had a far more limited view of who was considered disabled.
The explanation for this unexpected rise in the number of young disabled people does not lie in the field of epidemiology, but in the realm of a culture that invites people to classify themselves as infirm. It is important to stress that how people cope with negative experiences is strongly influenced by the cultural and historical factors that shape the way people make sense of them. Such cultural factors may increase or reduce the ability of the individual to cope with adverse circumstances.
In recent decades, the meaning of disability has undergone a dramatic semantic shift. This is part of a broader trend by which negative aspects of human experience and behaviour have become medicalised. In addition, an enormous disability lobby has emerged, which constantly demands that a variety of newly discovered disabilities be recognised with a formal diagnosis. The most important achievement of this lobby has been to alter public perceptions of the relationship between ability and disability. It has also succeeded in transforming what used to be characterised as children’s bad or problematic behaviour into medical issues.
Many of the ‘behavioural problems’ now designated to children have always been part of family life. Disobedience, aggression, disruptive and anti-social behaviour – now defined as ‘oppositional defiant disorder’ – have always posed a challenge to parents and schools. Yet these difficult patterns of behaviour are now often branded as psychological or medical issues. And so they become accepted, rather than something to be amended by adult guidance or firm discipline.
Clearly, parents are now actively courting disability diagnoses for their children. After all, the discovery of newly invented childhood disorders provides a welcome explanation for their children’s bad behaviour or poor performance in school: ‘She isn’t naughty, she is ill.’ It is also undeniable that the many welfare benefits now offered to parents with disabled children have also played a role. Nor can we ignore the role of teachers, some of whom are promoting the diagnosis of ADHD as an alternative to managing bad behaviour in the classroom through discipline and authority. A pupil’s failure to finish homework, inability to focus on class discussion and boredom in school are now blamed on some ‘condition’.
Unsurprisingly, over the past 30 or so years, children have internalised the disability narrative. Today’s young people readily communicate their problems in a psychological vocabulary. They describe their feelings in terms of stress, trauma and depression.
One of the gravest consequences of the disability culture is that many children no longer attend school at all. Last year, it was reported that the number of children missing more than 50 per cent of the school year in Oxfordshire had increased by more than five times in 10 years. This has been put down to ‘emotionally based school avoidance’, in which a child cannot attend school due to anxiety or stress. Half of UK secondary pupils avoided school due to anxiety at some point in the past year.
As a child, I can testify that my friends and I were more than happy to avoid going to school, and we had more than our share of anxiety. But we also knew that our parents and the rest of adult society had no sympathy for our predicament, and that not going to school was not an option. These days, adult society has become complicit in normalising truancy.
It is about time that society woke up to the fact that the current epidemic of childhood disability is not a medical problem. It is a cultural failure. Telling children that they are disabled, and unable to cope with the demands of life, is setting them up for a life of dependency and unfulfilled potential. Our children deserve better.
Frank Furedi is the executive director of the think-tank, MCC-Brussels.
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In the early hours of 25 March 2026, Israeli occupation forces (IOF) and police entered homes in Silwan, in occupied East Jerusalem, escorting settlers as Palestinian families were forced out of their properties in the Batn al-Hawa neighbourhood.
East Jerusalem — evicted after 10 year legal battles with settler organisation
16 Palestinian families, approximately 100 people, who had lived in the area for decades, were forcibly evicted from their homes. Their apartments were then emptied of their possessions. In many of these cases, illegal settlers from the settler organisation Ateret Cohanim moved into the properties immediately after the families were removed.
These evictions come after Israeli occupation courts upheld ownership claims based on pre-1948 Jewish property rights, which had been fought by Palestinian residents since 2016. Since 7 October, 2023, the Israeli occupation has forcibly displaced 28 Palestinian households from Batn al Hawa. Another 15 families are also expecting to be evicted from the neighbourhood imminently, by the same court order.
A law, known as the Legal and Administrative Matters Law of 1970, exclusively enables Jews to “reclaim” property in East Jerusalem. This is one of the many examples of the occupation’s discriminatory, apartheid policies. The many thousands of Palestinians who were forcibly displaced during the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba, in 1948, have not been allowed to return to their homes.
Since “Israel” occupied East Jerusalem, in 1967, it has expanded its presence and control over East Jerusalem, and attempted to alter the city’s religious identity, history, and demography- to Judaise Jerusalem. It has done this by exploiting its discriminatory laws and policies And through a combination of evictions, demolitions and restrictive planning policies, such as in Silwan, “Israel” is able to dispossess Palestinians of their land and property. .
Israeli occupation demolishing homes in al Bustan for biblical park tourist attraction
Several days after the Batn al Hawa evictions, on 30 March, the occupation’s police, military and bulldozers stormed the al-Bustan neighbourhood of Silwan, to demolish four Palestinian properties. No prior warning was given before the homes belonging to the Awad, Abu Shafaa, and Al-Ruwaidi families were destroyed. Retaining walls, gates and fences were also destroyed, roads bulldozed, and nearby infrastructure damaged,
The demolition of homes in the al Bustan neighbourhood, has been driven by the occupation’s plans to transform the area into public gardens, Torah-related projects, and settlers’ parking. He also highlighted that this neighborhood, located near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, is one of the most affected by Judaization and settlement initiatives.Demolitions accelerated in 2024 and 2025, and by February 2026, the occupation had demolished 35 homes and issued 17 additional demolition orders in al-Bustan. A total of 1500 Palestinians in the area have demolition orders on their homes, so further ethnic cleansing is expected any day.
The Israeli occupation’s interest in Silwan is due to its location, against the southern walls of the Old City and close to al Aqsa, which would allow the zionist regime to cement control over East Jerusalem. Archaeological tourism projects, settlement expansion, and court-backed property claims are all being used to forcibly displace Palestinians, and ethnically cleanse occupied Jerusalem of Palestinians.
Featured image via the author
Mariana Mazzucato, professor at UCL, has shown how Labour should be less willing to simply hand out public money to corporations. Instead, she says that subsidies and grants should come with a guarantee of public benefit.
‘Conditionalities’ — types of public benefit
There are various possibilities for making the most out of public money when it comes to partnering with the private sector.
Mazzucato outlines them in four categories. The first, ‘access’, means requiring that the resulting products or services that the government puts money towards are affordable to the population. The second, ‘directionality’, means mandating that the company follows desirable goals such as green power. The third, ‘profit sharing’ means that the company returns some of the profits to the government. This could go further, with the government taking a stake in company. The fourth, ‘reinvestment’, means that some of the company’s profits are reinvested into socially desirable activities.
Of course, a government could use the mandate and popular support of a manifesto to at least take basic essentials into public ownership, to deliver common good without relying on corporations. But if large corporations still dominate some sectors, equitable partnerships could be the way forward.
Mazzucato — No nonsense approach
The government can already use legislation to ensure companies act in a certain way. Failing that, public-private partnerships can be useful.
Direct subsidies are not the only way the government hands out money to corporations.
22% of The Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers receive universal credit (UC). That means the public purse is essentially subsidising the profits of companies like Tesco, which makes £6,150 of profit per employee.
This parliament, the government is providing £2.5bn to the steel industry. And that’s without taking a stake or profit-sharing with steel companies.
Although, the government has said that Tata Steel, which is receiving a £500m grant, will have to transition to Electric Arc Furnaces (EAFs) to address climate change or share its profits with the government. This is an example of a conditionality as Mazzucato outlines, but alone is quite the piecemeal approach to the neoliberal system.
Featured image via UCL
Today, Thursday 2 April, the Guardian ran an exclusive based on comments from the Prevent assistant commissioner, Laurence Taylor. He claimed that counter-terrorism scheme was being overwhelmed by a massive influx of referrals.
Trends indicate that Prevent will receive over 10,000 referrals in 2026. That represents a 33% increase compared to 2024. However, Taylor asserts that this doesn’t necessarily represent an uptick in the radical ideologies that Prevent was (nominally) set up to combat.
In fact, the majority of these referrals are apparently unrelated to extremist ideologies. Instead, they’re issued over concerns about people becoming interested in violence. As such, Taylor claims that Prevent’s time is being wasted, leaving it less able to deal with actual threats.
We at the Canary might phrase this another way. That is, the UK has invested so much in the very idea that (Muslim) terrorism is the greatest threat to our safety that we’ve actively started to damage the capacity to respond to non-terror threats.
‘Violence-fascinated individuals’
Back in July, interim independent Prevent reviewer David Anderson issued a report which responded, in part, to the scheme’s (mis)handling of the cases of Axel Rudakubana and Ali Harbi Ali.
The teenage Rudakubana murdered three young girls and wounded eight other people during his attack on a dance hall in Southport in 2022.
Ali was determined to have been motivated by Islamist ideology. However, Rudakubana displayed no clear motive, and was determined to have been driven by no fixed ideology. Anderson was appointed to:
identify remaining gaps or shortcomings that require further improvement and assure action to address them.
Released last July, the Anderson report stated that:
Several years before the attacks, both the perpetrators had been referred by their schools to Prevent … Prevent’s Channel programme for early interventions had the capacity to address concerns of the kind that were raised in these referrals. But in neither case did it do so.
In fact, Prevent declined to take on Rudakubana’s case three times. As such, Anderson recommended that Prevent’s remit be expanded radically to include non-terror threats. Alternatively, he also suggested that the government create a separate scheme to deal with non-ideological ‘violence-fascinated individuals’ (VFIs).
Prevent — ‘Overwhelmed with referrals’
Another report into the Southport attack is scheduled for release later this month. It’s expected to provide a damning indictment of local authorities, health services, and of course, Prevent itself.
After the attack, Prevent referrals started to rise dramatically. However, more than 50% of the individuals concerned had no clear ideological motivation. Assistant commissioner Taylor pinned this on the fact that there’s simply nowhere else to report these kinds of concerns.
However, he also claimed that this volume of non-terror referrals:
increases the risk of us not spotting somebody that is … because the system is overwhelmed with referrals.
He went on:
The challenge we have in the Prevent system is there is no triage that sits above it, so Prevent currently is the only bucket into which all of these referrals can sit.
We see people with material from Isis and neo-Nazis. We see people watching beheadings and school shootings. We see the gamification of that. So it’s people who are just absorbing horrible stuff that is creating concern for the people who refer them, but they’re not motivated by an ideology specifically, ie extreme rightwing or Islamist.
‘I wouldn’t like to say’
Taylor then rattled off increasing threat levels from states such as Iran and Russia, along with terror groups like Daesh. However, when faced with the question of whether Donald Trump and the American far-right was having a polarising effect, he suddenly became reticent to make a political statement.
Rather, per the Guardian, he characterised Trump as “one of several factors behind rising tensions”:
We’ve seen for a number of years an increasing polarisation, without doubt. You only need to look at the level of protest in London and the diversity of protest in London to see how many different views there are …. Whether you could directly attribute that to the US and Trump, I wouldn’t like to say.
I think there are many, many things at play here, of which that is but one.
If that isn’t the UK justice system’s attitude to ‘ideology’ in a nutshell, we don’t know what is. Is a fascist in the White House causing an uptick in radical ideology? Who’s to say? But look over there at the protesters!
Prevent, despite ostensibly being set up to target all extremist ideology, has disproportionately targeted Muslims from its outset. In fact, hundreds of babies and toddlers have been referred to the scheme, overwhelmingly due to “Islamist concerns”.
In 2022, the Shawcross review even had the nerve to call for a renewed focus on Islamic extremism, calling the definition of neo-Nazism has “expanded too widely”.
And now, we’re being told that non-ideological motivations are falling through the cracks precisely because of the state’s obsession with terrorist ideology? And, in fact, we have no real mechanisms in place for concerns of non-terrorist violence?
If the UK were any less Islamophobic, there’d be a lesson in all this. Pity, that.
Featured image via the Canary
Jeremy Corbyn-led Your Party won’t be fielding councillors in the upcoming local elections. They will, however, be backing various independents. Now, we’re learning such independents could include ex-Tory councillors:
‼️BREAKING | Your Party’s candidates for 2026 include three councillors who were Conservative members as recently as January 2026
Gaz Ali, Amo Hussain, Izzy Hussain all sat as Tories on Walsall Council until Jan ’26. Now backed by Corbyn.
(Leaflet edited to hide phone numbers) pic.twitter.com/azYoWufF0a
— Stats for Lefties 🍉🏳️⚧️ (@LeftieStats) April 2, 2026
“Endorsed by Jeremy Corbyn”
One thing to note is that the above flyer states “endorsed by Jeremy Corbyn” rather than ‘endorsed by Your Party‘. Corbyn is free to support whoever he likes, but as the party’s parliamentary leader, people will interpret his endorsement as the position of Your Party.
The endorsement was first highlighted by the Green Party’s Mish Rahman:
the candidates in my area are 3 deselected Tory cllrs, all cabinet portfolio holders part of the local Tory administration lol
They have moved wards as indys and are standing against me in the same ward. pic.twitter.com/b4Em7up7Ur— Mish Rahman (@mish_rahman) April 2, 2026
Rahman was a Labour NEC member between 2020 and 2024. When defecting to the Greens in January 2026, he said:
Politics must be about clarity and courage.
We are facing a convergence of crises: the rise of the far right, a cost of living emergency pushing working-class people to the brink and civil liberties eroded by successive governments. These are not abstract threats, they are lived realities for millions.
Today I have joined The Green Party because it is prepared to confront these challenges honestly: to defend democracy, stand up for social justice, and recognise that economic fairness and environmental responsibility are inseparable.
Earlier today (2 April), we reported on Your Party’s plans for the local elections:
As party structures continue to develop, Your Party will support around 250 candidates across England. The vast majority of these will be standing as Independents or for allied local community parties.
Your Party targets
Key targets for allied groups include:
- Tower Hamlets, run by Lutfur Rahman’s Aspire since 2022.
- Redbridge (see below).
- Newham, where the Newham Independents Party has recently won multiple by-elections.
- Bradford, where Labour’s support has been in massive decline.
Later in the day – and after the Mish Rahman tweet – New Statesman’s Ava-Santina posted that Walsall is in the mix too:
NEW: Your Party unveil their “get Labour out” local election strategy.
Full list of YP candidates coming later today
– Walsall
– Bradford
– Southport
– Oldham
– RedbridgeCorbyn: “These elections are the beginning of the fightback against austerity, privatisation and fear.
— Ava-Santina (@AvaSantina) April 2, 2026
This could be ex-Tories highlighted above, or it could be the ex-Labour independents who joined Your Party last year.
Stats for Lefties engaged in the following discussion on whether the endorsement is real (we’ve got to admit; we do keep rubbing our eyes and glancing back at it):
People outside Your Party have reacted as follows:
Independents
As reported by Birmingham Live, Gaz Ali and Amo Hussain were actually deselected by the Conservatives. In other words, if they didn’t go independent, they couldn’t have defended their council seats in the upcoming local elections.
In a statement on why the three men subsequently quit the Conservative Party, they said:
Our decision is driven by a number of factors. First and foremost is the treatment of several of our colleagues within the Aldridge and Brownhills Conservative Association. The exclusion of good, hard-working councillors, individuals who have given years of loyal service, has been deeply troubling.
In particular, the failure to approve respected councillors such as Keith Sears, who has dedicated over 50 years of service to Walsall and to the Conservative Party, is something we cannot overlook.
We are also increasingly concerned about the direction of the national Conservative Party. The tone and rhetoric emerging from parliamentary leadership appear divisive and risk marginalising communities.
We have always believed that politics should bring people together, and that the party should be inclusive and unifying. Regrettably, this is no longer a position we feel able to align ourselves with.
Ah yes – the Conservative Party – those great unifiers of modern Britain.
Who could forget how unified we felt when we suffered through the devastating austerity cuts of the 2010s – cuts which didn’t touch the rich even slightly.
It just doesn’t wash, does it?
Corbyn Endorsing Deselected Tories as “Independent Socialists” is no surprise, since we’ve already seen a near year of the “Social Conservative” shite from His Party.
Honestly, he should have just ran for London Mayor & Kept whatever respect he had left. He could have even won. https://t.co/VieTmnFXxi— Michael Walsh (@thatbloodyMikey) April 2, 2026
The big question is this: would the trio have quit if not for being deselected?
The answer is ‘we don’t know’.
Forgetting that, Corbyn and Your Party should have a policy of never endorsing anyone who’s ever had anything to do with the Tories.
And never in a million years did we think we’d need to explain that.
How did it come to this?
It’s not controversial to say Your Party has not turned out how many hoped it would.
Despite attracting 800,000 signups upons its announcement, the party would go on to secure a fraction of that number once it opened up to members. Since then, the party has failed to place in most polls, while the Green Party has captured much of Your Party’s initial enthusiasm.
There are good people in the party, and we know that many of them are struggling to process this latest development.
That’s quite enough for me, I think. What a massive disaster this has all been. Shame on those who squandered this opportunity to build a genuinely decent political alternative. https://t.co/G8Z6DHUCfj pic.twitter.com/eWWBi4ofpR
— chloe (@Dykeocletian) April 2, 2026
Solidarity with all those who just wanted Your Party to be a clear alternative to Labour and the Tories.
We contacted Your Party to confirm the endorsement, but had not heard back at the time of publication.
Featured image via X/Twitter
HUGE CRYPTO MARKET STRUCTURE CLARITY UPDATE TOMORROW? #crypto #cryptocurrency #xrp #bitcoin
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