‘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.

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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.

In war, death is usually a number. Not every casualty in Gaza has been identified however. The graves of women, children, and men lay empty and the burning question is not how they died but where they are? Where are their remains?

A documentary by Al Jazeera Arabic — The Rest of the Story — names the phenomenon ‘evaporation.’ They document 2,842 cases of Palestinians who have disappeared since October 2023. The victims have received no burials. With no bodies found, there have been no funerals either. Members of the Gaza Civil Defence who feature in the documentary underline Israel’s use of lethal thermal and thermo-pressurised munitions. This is used to account for the missing.

Counting the missing in Gaza

According to Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Gaza Civil Defence, these latest figures are the result of intricate fieldwork.

Recovery specialists have been matching the number of people inside the building that were targeted with the number of bodies recovered.

For example, when a family reports that five people were in the house, but only three bodies are found after extensive searches, the remaining two cases are recorded as missing persons.

Thermobaric weapons

Military experts have highlighted differences between thermo-pressurised weapons from conventional explosives. They reportedly scatter a cloud of fuel that ignites. This creates a fireball and a powerful shock wave within enclosed spaces. The result is multiplying the effects of heat, suffocation, and detonation compounded into a single moment.

It also refers to the use of explosive materials containing a mixture of TNT and aluminium powder, which raises the temperature of the explosion to very high levels within seconds. According to health officials in Gaza, featured in the documentary, exposure to extreme heat and pressure can lead to rapid tissue decomposition. This happens especially in enclosed spaces, where the effect of the heat wave is magnified.

Munitions galore

The report named specific types of bombs, including MK-84, BLU-109 and GBU-39, noting their technical characteristics. This applies both in terms of their ability to penetrate buildings before detonation and to generate intense internal shockwaves. It also reported finding metal remnants at some sites attributed to these munitions.

Legal experts who spoke to Al Jazeera Arabic condemned the use of weapons that do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. This, if proven, would constitute grave violations of international humanitarian law.

The issue of the responsibility of arms-exporting countries was also raised, given the continued flow of ammunition during the war. This comes in parallel with provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice. It opens up the issue of accountability beyond the battlefield.

The search continues

But behind the numbers, the story is one of despair and indignity, as families continue to search for their loves ones — or least what remains of them.

A mother waiting for her son’s body to bury him. A father carrying a small bag of remains said to belong to his children. And hundreds of homes that have found nothing to say goodbye to.

In Gaza, loss is no longer a scene of mourning. Sometimes loss is a complete void, a heavy silence, a question hanging in the air — how can a person disappear without a trace?

Featured image via the Canary

Callum Price is Director of Communications at the Institute of Economic Affairs, and a former Government special adviser. 

For someone who talks so much about how much he hates Westminster, Andy Burnham really enjoys popping down to SW1 to give a speech to an establishment think tank – particularly if there are live questions about the Labour leadership swirling around.

Last month, it was the IFS to talk about his brand of ‘Manchesterism’. This week it was the Resolution Foundation to discuss re-focusing politics on ‘un-sung Britain’. Among the usual huff and puff about the evils of unregulated markets (are these unregulated markets in the room with us now, Andy?) and how good the buses in Manchester are, he sought to address his previous comments about being ‘in hock to the bond markets’.

He never meant that we should ignore the bond markets, or even blame them, his clarification goes. It is the decisions of politicians that have led us to being in hock to those markets, and it is only the decisions of politicians that can get us out of this situation.

So far, so good. Next time the Labour Party is in crisis, he is welcome to come and speak to the IEA about how politicians need to get serious about our debt and spending problems.

But then it reverts.

The decisions that he wants politicians to take are not, in fact, to reduce spending; but to spend more. He argues that if we give away control of the essentials, we give away control of their costs. The key to getting costs down then, is to take control back through compulsory purchases and nationalisation. The markets, I’m sure, will be delighted.

The example he gives is housing: it is hard to control public spending when you need to chase private rented sector rents through the benefits system. He quotes research by the National Housing Federation that suggests building 90,000 social homes could save the Exchequer £3.3 billion in reduced Universal Credit claims over the next thirty years. Burnham extrapolates that to pay for a new target he sets, of building 500,000 new social homes by 2030, which he says will save £18 billion in the long run.

The same NHF report puts the cost of building those 90,000 social homes to the government at £12 billion, so following Burnham’s logic his target would require an outlay of £66 billion now, to save £18 billion over the next thirty years.

These numbers won’t exactly fill our creditors with confidence, but Andy has a plan to make us think more long-term and in a more market-friendly way.

In his mind, the broken Westminster political system has led to short-termism and instability, prevented politicians taking sensible long-term decisions and thus made the markets view us with distrust.

His diagnosis may not be entirely wrong – politics incentivises short termism. Westminster works to five-year windows (like his own 2030 hosing target), and governments will prioritise reforms that bear fruit sooner rather than later.

So, should we therefore make politics less important, take power out of the hands of a dysfunctional system and instead into one, the market, that empowers individuals, reduces prices, and drives living standards? Unfortunately, not for Burnham.

His prescription would only make the problem significantly worse. Firstly, he wants to renationalise swathes of the economy. He spoke about how bitter he was at having to pay millions for taking bus-depots back into public ownership after a fight in the courts, and wants to give councils the powers to compulsorily buy rented properties that aren’t up to standard.

If businesses care about one thing above all else when investing in a country, it is whether their assets are likely to be stripped from them by the state on arbitrary grounds. While the unique ability of a government to raise money through taxation is one of the things that enables it to borrow money at vast scales, a programme of appropriation is not the sort of things markets look for to secure a return on their government bonds. It will lead to a collapse in private investment and with it, tax receipts.

Secondly, Burnham wants ‘root and branch reform’ of Westminster and a new political culture. In practice, this means electoral reform, reform of the ‘whips’ system to empower individual MPs over the government, and Lords reform. This, he argues, would make a more stable and collaborative system in which the markets would have greater confidence and certainty.

I’m not sure what sort of stability Burnham has in mind here, but for anyone who has ever paid attention to Westminster politics, empowering MPs to vote and behave as individual actors over members of a governing party does not exactly scream consensus and unity. Maybe I am just a product of the failed Westminster consensus, but the ability of a government to whip its MPs in order to pass vital legislation like finance bills seems like a pretty important pre-requisite for stability.

Further to this, while British party politics is not exactly a bastion of majoritarian stability at the moment, it would be fair to assume that under a PR system the Greens and Reform would have had a larger seat at the table much sooner. One may argue that this is only fair given their vote shares, but to hold that this is the path to consensus and stability is a more questionable assertion.

Burnham’s diagnosis of the relationship between the British state and the bond markets is closer to the mark than often suggested. But given the solutions he proposes, it is no wonder those markets have a wobble every time he gets close to Westminster.

Opposition parties and housing activists have denounced a new housing bill passed in the Dáil. People Before Profit (PBP) TD Paul Murphy described it as a “landlord’s charter written by a landlord’s government”.

On the face of it, the housing bill seems to introduce a series of useful new protections for tenants. These include:

• No-fault evictions only allowed in very limited circumstances—for landlords with four tenancies or fewer who face certain forms of hardship such as financial difficulties or separation from a partner.
• A new minimum tenancy of six years that operates on a rolling basis.
• The whole of Ireland is treated as a Rent Pressure Zone (RPZ). This means that rents on tenants in-situ can only be raised by a maximum of 2% each year.

However, the right of landlords to raise rents for new tenancies or every six years is likely to still mean tenants pay extortionate sums, the key existing problem of the Irish housing crisis.

Housing rights groups hammer new bill

This was the thrust of Murphy’s stance when he said:

This is a bill for rip-off rents. That’s the purpose of it. It’s not an accidental outcome of it, that’s the purpose. The government strategy explicitly is to get rents to rise higher in order to attract more investment.

The government is indeed clear about this, with the minister for housing, local government and heritage James Browne saying:

I want to grow the supply of rental homes available – attract more landlords and retain existing landlords in the market. Providing the policy conditions for a sustained increase in supply is essential because it will help ease price pressures across the rental market, and will widen the pool of available rental properties, thereby facilitating greater choice for individuals and families.

So rather than proper public investment in housing, the government continues to trust in the private sector to solve a problem it has thus far totally failed at.

Tenants union CATU emphasised this, with organiser Helen Moynihan saying:

We have a really precarious housing setup that already overly relies on the private market, and now we’re looking at legislation that will make that even more precarious. So we’re especially concerned about the fact that landlords can raise [rent] to market [rate].

It’s just it’s really important not to get confused about this word supply. Houses that are not affordable for ordinary everyday workers do not increase supply. And this is the increase of the kind of properties we’re going to see. They’re not affordable for us. They’re not supply for your everyday worker.

Housing charity Threshold pointed out how those moving home will be unfairly penalised:

Threshold is concerned that the option for landlords to set market rents between tenancies may result in an unintended consequence whereby renters, particularly those who need to move home, end up paying high rents within three to four years and see their overall rental security undermined.

We are not aware of any modelling done to determine the impact this change could have on market rent levels. The recent Threshold and Housing Rights NI all-island survey of renters shows that approximately 25% of renters in the Republic of Ireland left their last rental tenancy voluntarily. Market trends already show tenants who move home pay higher rents, this will only be exacerbated by the proposed legislation.

Rushed through — ‘a truly appalling way to make legislation’

Protesters rallied outside the Dáil as the housing bill was ‘debated’, though in reality only:

…nine of 69 amendments that had been put forward by opposition parties were discussed.

The government accepted none of these, and Sinn Féin housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin described the ramming through of the bill as a:

…truly appalling way to make legislation.

Party leader Mary Lou McDonald raised the spectre of Irish people once again fleeing abroad as so many previous generations have, saying:

Seven thousand Irish medical professionals were registered to work in Australia last year. If your bill goes through, we will lose many many more. Because the rent hikes will be off the charts.

Predictably, landlords were unhappy at even the limited concessions being made to tenants. The Irish Property Owners Association (IPOA) said:

At the Irish Property Owners Association, we’re concerned that, as it stands, the Bill could unintentionally push more private landlords out of the market and reduce rental supply even further.

They continued:

Tenants need security and certainty, and that matters. But landlords also need clarity, fair treatment and confidence that they can manage or sell their properties when circumstances change. If too many landlords feel boxed in, the reality is they may sell up – leaving fewer homes, less choice and more pressure on renters.

In other words, won’t someone think of the poor landlords, the people who typically own multiple properties? They may have a point, though—if landlords get fed up, supply may indeed evaporate. That’s not an argument for giving in to their demands. It’s a reason to scrap a system that treats housing as a commodity, and relies  heavily on the whims of those looking to turn a profit from something that should be a basic human right.

Featured image via Unsplash/the Canary

5 min read45 min

In short – they cannot. Gaza cannot be rebuilt – physically or psychologically – without a credible political horizon that speaks to dignity, security, and self-determination.

I have spent many years engaged directly in the Middle East Peace Process, working with Israeli and Palestinian leaders across successive crises, ceasefires, and diplomatic initiatives.

One lesson stands above all others: when politics is deferred, violence returns. When the end goal is unclear, even the most well-intentioned interim arrangements eventually collapse under the weight of mistrust. Three decades on from the Oslo Accords, one state exists, Israel – the other, Palestine, does not.

It is in that context that the Olmert–Al-Kidwa initiative deserves renewed attention and support – not as an artefact of a more optimistic past, but as one of the clearest demonstrations in recent decades of what serious political courage looks like. It is the only living document signed by a prominent Israeli and a Palestinian.

I had the privilege of working directly with both Ehud Olmert and Nasser Al-Kidwa on their plan. They approached the task not as a public relations exercise, nor as a symbolic gesture to the international community, but as a genuine attempt to resolve the conflict at its core. Their dialogue was rooted in realism, honesty, and an unflinching recognition of each other’s national narratives and security concerns.

The Olmert–Al-Kidwa plan does something rare: it spells out, in practical and detailed terms, how a negotiated two-state solution could actually be delivered. It addresses borders based on the 1967 lines with agreed land swaps; it deals seriously with security arrangements to ensure Israel and Palestine’s long-term safety; it proposes an internationally supported framework for Jerusalem that respects the religious and national attachments of both peoples; and it confronts the refugee issue with realism rather than slogans.

Crucially, it makes clear that Palestinian statehood is not an abstract aspiration or a diplomatic reward to be deferred indefinitely. It is the organising principle of the entire process.

The objective is not merely recognition on paper, but the establishment of a viable, sovereign Palestine – living in peace and security alongside Israel, with borders, institutions, and legitimacy rooted in international law and mutual recognition.

This initiative has been sustained through years of quiet engagement, and notwithstanding the tragic terror attack on Israel of October 7th  2023 and the ensuing war on Gaza – facilitated discreetly by the International Communities Organisation (ICO), who provided a space for political thinking to continue when optimism was in short supply.

The plan demonstrates that even when official negotiations stall, conflicts ignite. Political thinking must not. They are practitioners and experienced political leaders who understand that peace requires both technical solutions and moral courage.

At the time, the plan received considerable attention, most notably across Europe. In France, in particular, the proposal helped re-energise high-level thinking around Palestinian self-determination and recognition.

The subsequent return to violence was not a refutation of that political work; rather, it underscored what happens when such efforts are abandoned and progress is not consolidated during brief windows of opportunity.

The US led Phase 2 announcements – focused on governance structures, demilitarisation, and reconstruction – contain echoes of that earlier thinking. But echoes are not enough. Administration without legitimacy, reconstruction without reconciliation, and security without political destination will not hold.

Having worked through previous ceasefires and collapses, I am deeply wary of approaches that promise order while avoiding the harder questions of statehood, sovereignty, and rights.

Palestinians must be able to see that reconstruction leads not to permanent limbo, but to genuine self-determination. Israelis must be able to trust that political progress will deliver enduring security, not temporary quiet.

If Phase 2 is to be more than a holding pattern, it must reconnect explicitly to a political end-state. The Olmert–Al-Kidwa plan shows that such an end-state is not imaginary. It is negotiable, achievable, and grounded in the lived realities of both peoples.

The recent establishment of President Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ and its endorsement by many Arab countries and some key nations across the wider Islamic World also provides an opportunity, if seized, to a genuine pathway to sustainable peace and with a united political will to finally deliver upon a sovereign state of Palestine.

Gaza’s ruins will not be cleared by technocrats alone. Its future will be secured only when the international community has the courage to insist that today’s plans lead somewhere real –towards a Palestine living in peace and security with Israel, and towards a settlement that finally brings an end to a conflict that has exacted too heavy a price from both nations and people. Let us grasp this moment and make peace a living reality.

Lord Tariq Ahmad of Wimbledon, Chair of ICO’s Advisory Board, is a British diplomat and parliamentarian who served as a Minister of State at the UK Foreign Office, with responsibility for the Middle East, South Asia, the Commonwealth, and human rights, and as the Prime Minister’s Special Representative on Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict.