10 min read3 min

By any standards, the England cricket team had a difficult winter. As well as the now-traditional overseas Ashes thumping, there were headlines about drinking and a general lack of preparation on tour.

Amid the opprobrium over their performance, another jibe became a refrain: the England team were overprivileged, as well as bad. Only three of the losing England team who were educated in the UK did not go to private school (by contrast, the 1985/6 tour saw five who went to private school and 11 who didn’t).

As the Guardian writer Barney Ronay had it: “England cricket has long since been Thatchered, emptied out, atomised. It’s a private party, a silent disco for a small and privileged minority. The England team are at least expressing some truth, that the sport exists most vividly in private schools and private fields.”

The truth, however, is rather more complex. English cricket is, to coin a phrase, working through some issues right now. The game is changing rapidly. Money is flowing in from the subcontinent to newfangled, noisy franchise teams that play in The Hundred, a short-form, city-based format that takes place throughout August, designed to attract a more diverse audience.

While a proportion of this money has flooded down to the counties and the recreational game, many of the stalwarts who are fans of a more traditional format are finding the pace of change bewildering at best and mortifying at worst. For them, a portion of the English summer has been sold off; the rest of cricket has been pushed to the margins of the season’s calendar, to little positive effect.

But at the same time, the women’s game has been utterly revolutionised: the first auction of its kind in a major British sport saw The Hundred create some of the highest-paid sportswomen in the UK this year. As around the world, there has been massive growth in viewership, commercial investment, and player remuneration.

And while this turbulence plays out, there is a genuine belief among the staff of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) that its chief executive’s stated aim to become “the most inclusive team sport in England and Wales” is now attainable.

It is five years since the ECB took the brave decision to give the green light to an independent commission into the game, which delivered a thunderbolt of a report. It described how private school players were 13 times more likely to become pro than those in state schools, found women faced sexism and structural pay discrimination, and described how working-class children and those from minority backgrounds faced huge barriers to inclusion, including clear, documented examples of racism.

Multiple ECB employees told this magazine at the time how uncomfortable a read it was, and how determined they were to make a change and open up the game to all.

Following the commission, the ECB developed an internal dashboard that measures cricket’s inclusion, diversity, fair access and equity, using a standardised grading system of A to F. In the ECB’s recent state of equity report, it awarded itself a C+; it was a D two years ago. The aim is to hit B by 2028. But to do so, there are significant structural challenges that must be overcome.

Take England’s mostly privately educated Test team. The reasons for the dominance of private school players in the professional game are complex, and demonstrate how a deeply flawed form of accessibility developed within a sport that became, over the years, increasingly exclusionary.

Just over half of professional cricketers will have gone to private school, but just under a fifth of male players will have seen 90 per cent or more of their fees funded by bursaries, while others will have received smaller grants.

While it’s inaccurate to dismiss the professional game as being entirely dominated by the rich and privileged, as the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) report had it, the resulting proliferation of former scholarship pro cricketers is “by no means a systemic response to the class and socio-economic inequities within the game”.

For Kate Aldridge, the ECB’s director of business operations, the key to broadening access is about working with the system as it stands and building partnerships between the state and private sector. “Private schools do contribute a lot to the cricket ecosystem in terms of facilities [and] opportunities… We’re focused on [how we can] work with private schools to open up their facilities, to share the expertise that they’ve got, the opportunities to play matches that they have with more children.”

The other side of the coin for Aldridge is about “levelling up the playing field” for state school children. State schools have been stretched by the hollowing out of statutory services. As Luke Sparkes of the Dixons Academies Trust recently told The Cricketer magazine: “They do this vital work with no extra money, stretching staff and burning them out… Too often it is the very things that bring joy, build character and create well-rounded citizens – sport, drama, and music – which are lost.”

Aldridge describes how the restructuring of the talent pathway will help: an early engagement programme will, she says, give 7,000 young people “a free-to-access trial, gives them coaching, gives them match play at a young age before they get selected into county age group”.

Another support programme designed for state school kids will give them 50 per cent extra training alongside the county programme. “What we know from our research,” says Aldridge, “Is that if you go to a private school, you get disproportionately more access to coaching, and then by the time you come… to U-15s or U-17 trials… you obviously are performing better.”

She says the narrative that there is no cricket in state schools is not true: a partnership with Chance to Shine and Recreational Cricket Boards delivers cricket in 4,268 primary schools, which is about a quarter of all primary schools in England and Wales. However, only two per cent of state-school students currently play in competitive inter-school or intra-school competitions.

Leshia Hawkins, the ECB’s managing director, describes the challenge: “You know, a lot of state schools don’t even have grass, let alone enough grass and a cut wicket… We tracked how many kids are playing each team sport in schools. And technically… dodgeball does beat us. But why? Because it’s so easy to do… you need limited equipment. You can sort of play it anywhere.”

So the ECB is launching a new national softball competition, softball being seen as much easier to deliver than hardball. The rules won’t be different, says Hawkins: “When you’re out, you’re out, you’re caught, etc, but [it’s about] introducing the joy and that first moment when you take a catch or you hit a four or a six.”

Getting state schools to adopt any new initiatives will require teacher buy-in. This is why the ECB has launched Cricket For Teachers, a short entry-level course. “It’s looking like in the pilot year, we’re probably going to train nearly 650 secondary school teachers,” says Hawkins, adding that there’s a 50:50 gender balance among those signed up. She suggests a quarter of a million children could be given access to the game as a result.

The recreational game, says Hawkins, will also benefit from money that has trickled down from the sale of stakes in the Hundred franchises: “we’re able to focus that investment on… women and girls, disabled participants, ethnically diverse participants, and those from lower socio-economic groups, those who’ve been underserved by cricket”.

On women’s cricket, from the poor base as described in the ICEC report, there has of course, been enormous progress in recent years: at a recreational level, the number of women’s and girls’ teams has doubled since 2021, while a record number of girls (30,627) took part in All Stars and Dynamos, the ECB’s national youth programmes. In the professional game, salaries for women in The Hundred have more than tripled in more than three years.

There is huge excitement around the potential for more commercial investment too. Back in 2013, Hawkins was a business development manager trying to sell sponsorship for women and girls’ recreational cricket (“I had to kiss a lot of frogs,” she jokes), and it feels like the game has come a long way in just a few years: “It’s not, you know, sponsors coming in now and just having their brand on the perimeter. It’s a real care… it’s a real purpose,” she says.

There are still areas where progress has been slow, however. The cricket writer Andy Bull recently noted that while women were fetching huge prices at the Hundred auction, it was still “a room full of men sitting around weighing the relative merits of young women so they can bid against each other for their services in a competitive auction”.

Aldridge acknowledges there is work to be done on leadership in cricket: “We’ve gone from eight per cent in 2019 to 20 per cent female. Now that is still far below where we want to be, but it is a consistent year-on-year improvement and increase, particularly in the recreational game.” Could they bring in targets? The challenge, she says, is that, “If you start to put quotas or targets in place around your workforce, particularly for professional counties and recreational cricket boards, you start to incentivise behaviour that could be illegal.”

Quicker progress also needs to be made on developing cricket in the Black community too, which the ICEC report noted had declined from a strong base in the 1980s to be so low as to be statistically irrelevant. Aldridge acknowledges an issue: “I don’t think we have cracked it yet… whether it’s enough initiatives, or whether the initiatives are quite working the way that we want them to.”

The playing base is smaller than for the South Asian population, and it presents a different challenge: the majority of the population lives in around 10 UK cities, in areas the ECB’s data shows are often lacking in facilities. The ECB is attempting to use non-turf pitches and domes to engage the population. One recent success came via upcoming superstar Davina Perrin, who smashed a staggering 42-ball century for Northern Superchargers in last year’s Hundred eliminator. She was mentored by Ebony Rainford Brent, founder of the African Caribbean Engagement programme.

For all this progress, there has also been one significant setback. In 2024 things were looking up: then-prime minister Rishi Sunak pledged £35m in grassroots cricket funding, which ECB staff told this magazine would never have happened without the ICEC report laying bare the game’s ills. But after the general election, that funding dropped to a mere £1.5m, with Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy deriding the funding as a “fantasy”.

It was a huge blow for the ECB. The money would have funded 16 all-weather domes as well as the delivery of cricket into state schools. The ECB is working on ways to fund these domes – with two now open in Bradford and Darwen, Lancashire, with a third opening soon in Willenhall, West Midlands. Further projects are advancing in Farington, Lancashire, and Luton. Just before this magazine went to press, a further £2.5m was announced, which The House understands will go towards funding four more domes.

When approached, Sunak did not comment on the decision itself, but told The House: “I love cricket and I believe it is one of the things that can bring people together. I know there is huge potential to grow the game even further and open it up to everyone, from all backgrounds and in all parts of the country.”

There is clearly a genuine belief the game is about to turn a corner. An ECB spokesperson said: “We have a golden opportunity to capitalise on England and Wales hosting this year’s ICC Women’s T20 World Cup, and the men’s competition in 2030, to inspire a generation to pick up a bat and ball. With government support we can reach so many more people through new and improved facilities.”

The only question is how quickly the game can force its way up the list of Westminster’s sporting priorities. 

Walter Tull with fellow officers (Credit: History and Art Collection / Alamy)

4 min read25 min

Standing at an imposing 20ft, cast in bronze, with his arms folded, wearing the same jersey he wore on that glorious July afternoon in 1966 when he lifted the Jules Rimet trophy, the statue of Bobby Moore casts an imposing shadow over all those who visit Wembley stadium.

On the plinth that supports the statue stands a likeness of the 10 other men who made up the team, frozen in time as the boys of ‘66. Cast alongside them is an England cap; on the peak are the words, “World Championship, Jules Rimet Cup, 1970”. The very last time England could claim to be the best football team in the world as it began its defence in Mexico.

Underneath is an inscription written by Moore’s great friend and Britain’s foremost sportswriter, Jeff Powell, that labels Moore as both a “national treasure and gentleman of all time”.

The same words could easily have been said of another captain – one who could claim, just like his West Ham United successor, to have led the best side in the world.

When England’s record goalscorer, Vivian Woodward, captained Great Britain to an Olympic gold medal in 1912 in Stockholm, to go with the one he won in London in 1908, he was probably the country’s most famous footballer – although those who knew him would’ve said he was much too modest to recognise that.

For Woodward, there would be no opportunity to secure a hat-trick of medals. By February 1916, with the world plunged into the Great War, now Lieutenant Woodward was recovering in a hospital bed.

Weeks earlier, he had to be dug out by fellow soldiers after being buried underneath a collapsed trench, his legs damaged from the carnage of a German grenade. He would never play football ever again. For the rest of his life, he would live with the pain from the wounds he sustained in northern France.

Such was Woodward’s fame, joining the British armed forces would be the equivalent of Harry Kane going to war today. He was just one of the 2,000 footballers who answered their country’s call to arms.

Among their number was the entire Clapton Orient team, who joined the 17th Middlesex Regiment – or Football Battalion – when it was formed in November 1914.

Books and plays would be written about William Jonas and Richard McFadden, lifelong friends who thrilled crowds as Clapton Orient’s star strikers. Under heavy fire, stuck in a trench, when certain death was near, Jonas would jump out telling McFadden to give his love to his wife. By the time the letter from McFadden arrived at the club telling them of Jonas’ death, McFadden had also lost his life.

Then there was Walter Tull, the first person of Afro-Caribbean descent to be commissioned as an officer in the British army. Having grown up in care homes and overcome racist abuse from football crowds when he played for Spurs and Northampton Town, he lost his life just months before the war’s end in 1918.

A teammate, Tom Billingham, tried in vain to retrieve his body from the field of battle. He loaded Tull on his back but was forced to give up in the face of shell fire and gas, leaving Tull in the French mud. Both William Jonas and Walter Tull have no known grave.

A memorial honouring the Clapton Orient team and supporters who enlisted in the Football Battalion can be found at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. However, there is still no lasting memorial at the home of football, Wembley, to those footballers and supporters who gave their lives for king and country.

Without their sacrifices, there may never have been the opportunity to celebrate the exploits of Bobby Moore and his boys in 1966. 

That is why the Football Association should honour them with a statue at Wembley – so the bravery of those footballers who went to war all those years ago is never forgotten. 

It was a Labour MP who first used the phrase to me: the Miliverse. He was worrying, before PMQs, about a world where Ed Miliband gets a promotion to Downing Street – either as Chancellor or, even, as Prime Minister.

If he was worried then, he’ll have been even more worried after PMQs. Because yesterday, in the House of Commons chamber, Sir Keir Starmer seemed not just comfortable with the idea that he is a member of Miliband’s government – he was almost eager to admit it.

Under questioning from Kemi Badenoch over the decision not to issue new licences for North Sea oil and gas drilling, Starmer slipped into full legal mode. He was at pains to clarify that the decision over the Jackdaw and Rosebank oilfields rested not with him but with the Secretary of State for Energy. Legally, it was Miliband’s call. Badenoch pounced. “He is the Prime Minister!” she told the chamber, deriding Starmer’s retreat into proceduralism.

The Prime Minister was, in effect, publicly conceding what one shadow cabinet minister put to me: that Miliband is “the real prime minister”. Another shadow cabinet minister joked: “It isn’t something we didn’t already know.”

But it is worth pausing on what that actually tells us about Starmer, because the Miliband story is, at its core, a Starmer story. Miliband’s influence over this government is not merely a function of his own ideological energy, though that is clearly considerable. It is also a function of the vacuum at the very top.

This is the context in which Miliband has thrived. When the man at the top is reluctant to own his government’s most politically contentious decisions – whether that’s the North Sea, net zero, or the broader direction of economic policy – someone else will own them instead. His Labour manifesto read: “We will not issue new licences to explore new fields because they will not take a penny off bills, cannot make us energy secure, and will only accelerate the worsening climate crisis.” That is clearly what they truly believe, so why won’t Starmer say it rather than hide behind legal process? Miliband is happily continuing the message of the manifesto, and filling the vacuum at the top while doing it.

As I have written before, Miliband’s influence on this Labour government has been perfectly clear: “The push towards ever more stringent net-zero obligations continues apace, even when the immediate effect is to increase costs for British taxpayers and businesses.” The Spectator’s Tim Shipman even reported that it was Miliband who commanded the majority around the National Security Council table on any involvement in Iran, with Starmer taking direction rather than giving it.

In a profile with the New Statesman, Miliband himself was candid about the scope of what he is trying to achieve. “We are charting a course to a different economic settlement,” he said. “I talked about it as leader and didn’t get to implement it.” He is implementing it now.

And there is the question of what comes next. Nigel Farage, of all people, has reportedly told friends he expects Miliband to be Prime Minister by 2027. That prediction may flatter his instinct for provocation, but it is not entirely absurd with Starmer’s leadership on the rocks.

Yesterday, the Prime Minister yet again tried to protect himself by hiding behind Miliband, but only revealed more about his lack of leadership in the process. 

The Labour MP fretting in the corridors before PMQs, I suspect, finds that prospect deeply worrying – Ed Miliband’s world is not one he wants to inhabit. But without any voters say, the Miliverse seems to be ever expanding.

John Oxley is a consultant, writer, and broadcaster. His SubStack is Joxley Writes.

Few in the Conservative Party will be relishing the thought of the local elections. With just over a month to go, our prospects in the contests look bleak. The party has never gone into a set of locals with such a poor national polling position. The rise of Reform also means we are likely to face challenges in areas where we were previously strong. Though the electoral geography this time leaves Labour more exposed overall, few positives are likely to come from the night.  

When talking about these shifts, we tend to focus on the shockwaves the results will send through Westminster. Commentators question how much jitteriness it will impart on MPs who see their local council fall away. Whether it will tempt more into defections or trigger another round of party regicide. But there is another question, less dramatic, more fundamental, that these elections ought to prompt – about what Conservatives are here to offer at the local level.  

Defeat in the 2024 election required an examination of where the party stands and how it relates to the challenges and voters in the current national political landscape. Our subsequent challenges in local politics should prompt the same sort of thinking about how we wield power where it most directly touches voters.  When it comes to delivering services, fostering communities, and making a difference that people see, the question is not just about how the party wins back power, but what it does with it.  

Localism, after all, should be close to the heart of the Conservative Party. Our suspicion of big government ought to incline us toward placing power in the hands of those who understand their areas best, the people who actually live in them. We should celebrate a government that is local, accessible, and human in scale. And local institutions should be central to any serious conservative vision of how the country works, the little platoons of boroughs and counties, trusted to know their ground, doing what distant Whitehall cannot. 

The reality of local government in 2026 makes that vision harder to sustain than it should be. The decades-long failure to address social care has left most councils unable to do much else. Local authorities are crushed under the burden of these obligations and funding shortfalls.  Even the most prudently run councils are struggling, and many are close to insolvency. Everything else that councils do, the small civic institutions that give communities their texture, seems unsustainable.  

This is a particular problem for the right. The traditional offering of local Conservatives has been fiscal prudence – less spending, and lower bills. That has now been pushed to the limit. Many of our councils have done well in adapting to constrained times and have found new efficiencies and savings they can pass on to the taxpayer. Now there is little fat to trim. Even Reform councils that replaced us have been forced to admit this, arriving with grand plans of cutting waste and instead colliding with fiscal reality.  

The other canard of local government campaigning, opposing development, has also now come to haunt the party. The instinct and the electoral calculus behind blocking housing were understandable, but their cumulative effects have exacerbated a national crisis. The shortage of homes falls hardest on the young, and in courting the settled, propertied voter, local conservatism has too often had little to say to anyone else. There is a deeper irony too: in resisting development, councils have sometimes prevented the very renewal that would keep their communities vibrant.  

These pressures have arrived alongside new political challenges rather than in spite of them. Reform has taken the most seats, but the Lib Dems and Greens have made gains too, in very different kinds of places, for very different reasons. The breadth of that squeeze suggests something more than a temporary unpopularity. The same offer, made in the same way, is unlikely to be enough, whether the goal is to win back councils or to give conservative local government a renewed sense of purpose. 

The Conservatives need a proper vision of what modern local governance looks and feels like. This should go beyond simply keeping council tax rates down and NIMBYism. Fiscal prudence is part of it, as is responsible development. But it should also be about delivering effective and responsive services, facilitating cohesive communities, civic trust and stewardship. In short, pushing towards councils that are truly Tory.  

This also requires a better conception of the relations between local and central government. When in power in Westminster, Tories have tended to be jealous guardians of power. We’ve favoured centralisation, lest loony Labour councils run away with it. Ultimately, we should be more comfortable with this risk, letting local voters decide who to trust. Equally, we should engage seriously with Rachel Reeves’ plans for greater fiscal devolution. Incentivising local authorities by allowing them to keep more of the proceeds of growth changes the dynamics of development, giving communities a clearer path to share in the upside as well as the costs.  

The local election results will captivate Westminster for a few days, but whoever wins may wield power for years. The actual business of governing our localities is forgotten, as are its challenges and impacts. For associations facing elections, the next six weeks will be a hard slog, and many of the results will be disappointing. But they may also offer an opportunity for renewal, re-examining what the Conservatives offer, and making our case in more volatile electoral politics. The night itself matters less than what the party does with it, and whether it advances our understanding of what Conservative local governance can offer.  

While this election season may be bruising, there is, nonetheless, reason for optimism. Reform’s polling is declining, and where they have won local power, they have proven unimpressive. Their gains last year have been dogged by scandal, infighting, and failure to deliver on many of their proposals. The insurgent offer is already looking tarnished, and the Conservatives can maintain their position as the serious party of the right. That creates a genuine opportunity, but only for a party that has done the harder thinking about what it believes, what it will build, and what kind of local government it wants to be trusted with.  

The Conservatives have a long and proud history in local government. It should be central to what drives us: the Toryism of local communities and networks, of prudent stewardship and genuine civic belonging. That tradition is worth recovering, not merely because it wins votes, but because it reflects something true about what the party is for. It also means regaining our sense of how, at all levels, we use politics to make things better. The local elections will come and go. The question of what conservatism is for, in the places where people live, will remain. It deserves a serious answer.

Terri Bloore is the Conservative candidate for Mayor of Newham.

When Mark Carney took to the stage at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026 in Davos less than two months ago there was deft silence followed by rapturous applaud. European’s and democrats saw his speech as somewhat anti-American. That conclusion says more about the current geopolitical mood than about what he said.

I was in attendance, wearing that odd combination of snow boots and a suit, and felt the atmosphere change, but in my view Carney’s message was not about turning away from the United States. It was about recognising that the world has changed and that countries in Europe and beyond must adapt accordingly.

With President Trump in attendance the American turnout was indeed palpable.  Yes ‘America House’ and its huge eagles dominated the promenade, yes there were robots walking streets and men dressed as polar bears – larger than life and a little more brash than years before. But the atmosphere was not anti-American.

In less than two months, the world has shifted dramatically.  The central theme of Carney’s speech was that a world order built on open trade, relatively stable institutions and strong American leadership is under strain and one we cannot take for granted. Since that speech, a lot has happened, not least the conflict in the Middle East. Looking back, it seems as though Carney was preparing us for this twists and turns that we are facing as soon as we turn on the news.

Economic policy, he argued, is increasingly becoming geopolitical policy. Supply chains, energy markets and trade are now instruments of power. For decades, many Western countries operated under the assumption that rules-based institutions and global economic integration would naturally reinforce stability. That assumption is now far less certain.

Carney’s argument was that countries such as Canada, the UK and many European nations can no longer simply rely on the system working as it once did. They must strengthen their resilience and work more closely with one another to protect shared values and economic stability.

None of this is particularly controversial in private discussions among policymakers. In Davos this year, it was practically the backdrop to every panel conversation. Yet the moment Carney suggested that middle powers needed to assert themselves more clearly, some observers interpreted it as a critique of the United States.

In today’s political climate, almost any conversation about strategic autonomy is quickly framed as a rejection of Washington. But that is not what Carney was arguing. Standing in Davos, the message sounded less like a rebuke and more like a pragmatic assessment of geopolitical reality. The world is becoming more fragmented. Economic competition between major powers is intensifying. Alliances must adjust.

The idea that Europe should have greater strategic confidence is not anti-American. In many ways it strengthens the Western alliance by making partners more capable and resilient. If Carney’s speech had truly been a rejection of American leadership, his subsequent positions would look very different.

Instead, when tensions escalated in the Middle East and the United States moved against Iran, Canada signalled its support for the broader security objectives shared by Western allies. That decision alone undermines the narrative that Carney was advocating a break from the United States. It demonstrated what most policymakers already understand: Western security and economic stability still depend heavily on cooperation between North America and Europe. The alliance may be evolving, but it has not disappeared.

What struck me most in Davos was not the speech itself but the reaction to it. In a world increasingly shaped by geopolitical rivalry, even moderate calls for strategic realism are quickly interpreted through a binary lens.

Pro-America or anti-America. Alignment or independence. Carney’s argument was more nuanced than that. The world is entering a period where the assumptions that once underpinned globalisation are weakening. Institutions are under pressure. Economic relationships are becoming more politicised. Strategic competition between major powers is intensifying. In that environment, middle powers cannot simply assume stability will hold. They must invest in their own economic resilience, cooperate more closely with partners and be prepared to defend the values that underpin open societies.

In many ways, the speech reflected the quiet consensus I saw across Davos this year.

The transatlantic alliance remains fundamental. But the world it operates in is becoming more volatile and more competitive. Recognising that reality is not a rejection of the United States. It is an acknowledgement that maintaining Western values in the twenty-first century will require stronger partnerships, greater resilience and a more honest understanding of power.