Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC is an international businessman, philanthropist, author and pollster. For more information on his work, visit lordashcroft.com

Ask an SNP voter to name the Scottish government’s greatest achievements since it came to power in 2007 and you are all but guaranteed to hear the following: free university tuition, free prescriptions, free school meals, baby boxes, and free bus travel for young people. Nicola Sturgeon’s handling of the covid pandemic might also get a mention.

The trouble with these feats of civic nationalism, towering though they may be, is that they date, respectively, from 2008, 2011, 2015, 2017 and 2020. In other words, none of this passes what political scientists call (or ought to call) the Janet Jackson test: What have you done for me lately?

In my latest round of Scottish research, even some previously loyal SNP voters were starting to wonder if their party’s record over 19 years – let alone the last five – wasn’t beginning to look a bit thin. Only around half of them say it has done a good job on health, schools or the economy, or on keeping its promises. Some even dared commit the heresy of asking whether the money spent on universal free benefits might have been better directed towards those actually in need.

Among voters as a whole, the proportion saying the SNP has done well on these measures barely exceeds three in ten. Things like the ferry fiasco, the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital scandal and the police investigations into the party’s finances have done nothing for its reputation for competence or for honesty and integrity – the single measure on which it scored lowest in my survey. Energy and momentum have drained away since the intoxicating days of the referendum campaign and the subsequent election surge. Voters described John Swinney as an “interim manager” and a “wet weekend”; nobody expects him to come up with anything that could honestly be called a new idea.

So why, in common with other pollsters, do I find the SNP once again entering the election campaign in pole position?

One reason is that – not for the first time – they have been given a considerable helping hand by their opponents. I barely found even a Labour voter in Scotland who had a good word to stay about Keir Starmer’s record since 2024. Few thought his party had brought any change for the better, and Scots were more than twice as likely to say the SNP were doing a good job in Holyrood as to say the same of Labour in Westminster. Though they were much more likely than not to think Anas Sarwar had been right to call for Starmer’s resignation, most also saw it as a somewhat desperate tactical move to try and distance Scottish Labour from the London party.

Another reason for wavering SNP voters to fall into line is the rise of Reform UK, vying to become the second largest party in Holyrood after May. This phenomenon has not come out of nowhere. The effects of small-boat migration are increasingly making themselves felt in Scotland, and the records of the Conservatives and Labour in London and the SNP in Edinburgh have condensed into what one chap articulated as “a strong need to give someone a sore face”. While former Tory voters are the biggest source of Reform support, they are not the only one: I found more than one in ten 2021 Labour list voters leaning in Reform’s direction, not to mention one in sixteen of those who backed the SNP.

Even so, this gives the SNP a new purpose: that of a bulwark against the “far right” and, of course, the threat of England’s nasty political culture taking hold north of the border. (I would expect to see that message on a leaflet or two in the next few weeks).

Being the antidote to England, whether in the form of Starmer’s hopelessness or Farage’s right-wingery, is the SNP’s sweet spot. “Standing up for Scotland” was the only area in which I found most Scots – and three quarters of SNP voters – saying the Holyrood government had done a good job.

This can only be pushed so far, however. Only a quarter of Scots backed the idea that a pro-independence majority would constitute a mandate for another referendum. Indeed, only just over half of likely SNP voters agreed with the proposition. Those leaning towards the Greens – whose profile and credibility had received a boost from their success in the Gorton and Denton by-election – were divided but on balance agreed that we can’t assume someone supports independence just because they vote for a particular party. In fact, only a quarter of likely SNP voters put independence in the top three most important issues facing Scotland; for those leaning Green, the issue ranked equal eighth.

Just as the failings of the established parties – including the SNP – have opened the door to Reform, so Nigel Farage will concentrate nationalist minds. In other words, in this election, Reform and the SNP need each other. Who knows what the campaign will bring. But if, when the votes are counted, Farage and Swinney are the two big winners, both will regard that as a pretty good night’s work.

4 min read8 min

Our nation is facing serious challenges: war in Europe, chaos in the Middle East, and a cost-of-living crisis that is hitting households and businesses hard.

Tough choices had to be made. Fiscal discipline and defence of Britain’s interests must be the order of the day.

This does not mean that the profound challenges faced by other countries around the globe no longer exist, particularly for those facing the impacts of extreme weather events. The government is therefore right to try to create a smarter, more streamlined aid budget, but it must leverage more private investment to make up the shortfall.

Last year at COP30 in Brazil, I heard firsthand about the damage wildfires are causing to both the Amazon rainforest and farmers’ livelihoods. But wildfires, floods, and droughts happening in faraway lands are not without consequences for the UK.

Although I would much rather British farmers feed our nation, we still import up to 48 per cent of our food, including products even the best British farmers would struggle to produce at scale, such as bananas, coffee, and cocoa. Britain still imports over 110,000 tonnes of tea annually, mainly from Kenya (36 per cent), which is on the frontline of extreme weather events.

If these crops are damaged or destroyed abroad, food shortages and price increases in the UK are inevitable.

But extreme weather events won’t just drive up the price of tea. When crops fail, and whole regions become uninhabitable, migration levels will continue to increase as people look to escape the harsh consequences of food systems failing.

Britain has to come first. We need to fix our own economy, increase defence spending, and keep inflation under control.

But we should remember that putting Britain first also means a role, even if it is much smaller, for strategic climate finance.

This spending has too often been used to fulfil some misplaced sense of moral obligation that makes us feel better. Instead, it should be about making a tangible difference that boosts Britain’s own security by protecting food prices and reducing migratory pressures.

Fortunately, even with tighter fiscal restraints, we still have levers we can pull to help mitigate these disasters, particularly from private finance.

That is why the government’s decision to cut funding for British International Investment (BII) by 70 per cent is such a damaging blow to our interests overseas, as this finance institution is the best vehicle for the UK to leverage private investment.

BII should be a core part of what a smarter aid budget looks like. It currently manages a £1.5bn portfolio, investing in aid opportunities globally with a mandate to make a return on its investment.

Due to its rate of success — a 5.1 per cent return in 2024 — private investors can see first-hand the value of investing with BII. For every $100 of public money invested, private investors add an extra $71, making this one of the most efficient ways that the government can spend our aid budget. The returns are then reinvested, creating an even larger portfolio to support developing countries by investing in climate-resilient crops, nature-based defences for flooding, or heat-proofing technologies.

Instead of cutting funding for BII, ministers should have at least protected it. BII is an overlooked organisation that strategically invests taxpayers’ money, grows aid spending organically via the returns it makes, and encourages private investment to serve our interests without burdening taxpayers. It’s an efficient, common-sense approach to spending public money.

While reducing the aid budget is necessary, the £300m cut to BII is a huge mistake. If we want to continue tackling the impact that extreme-weather events overseas have on us here in Britain, we have to incentivise private investment, not just rely on public money, and BII does precisely this.

Now more than ever, we have to build a more efficient and affordable aid budget, living within our means and ensuring that it serves Britain’s interests first. BII and private investment should be the cornerstone of this approach. Before it is too late, the government must reconsider its funding priorities and once again back the BII.

Blake Stephenson is Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire

Calum Davies is a Conservative councillor in Cardiff and a candidate for the Senedd in May.

A great deal has been written about Reform UK’s potential electoral performance in May’s devolved elections, but what do they actually stand for? There is much cause for concern.

Reform’s rise has come too quickly for its own good.

Polling suggests it will be the second largest party in both the Welsh and Scottish parliaments in two months’ time, and the most popular (and unpopular) party in the wider country. This has required a rapid and large scale-up not just in terms of its operations, but its philosophy. With so many new people and a general anti-establishment message, the party is courting a range of views from a variety of political hinterlands. This leads to intellectual inconsistency and a vibes-over-policy mindset.

This is quite handy for campaigning, being all things to all people, but it sows the seeds for an early demise as voters are led to believe they are for one thing when they are not. Once unravelled, it would be a particularly devastating charge for Reform who explicitly position themselves as more trustworthy than the traditional parties who they (not unfairly) claim have a poor record of keeping promises and delivering results.

The tightrope has been walked over the last two years as its more libertarian, tax-cutting desires clash with its more interventionist, statist approach. Only one can win and voters deserve to know which. Such an obvious misstep was its fluid position on the two-child benefit cap which, at the last vote, led to its MPs voting in different directions. A party confident in its guiding values would not have made a mistake like this.

Indeed, what does it tell us about their values? It has been suggested to me more than once that I defect to Reform – but what would I be joining? I know both the triumphs and shortcomings of the Conservative Party. It is imperfect, but I know where I stand. Can the Reform member say the same without reverting to the general lines of the anti-establishment protest voter?

What concerns me, in particular in these elections, is how Reform’s self-defining image as a party that is against so much and for so little will impact on the most important faultline of all.

In January, a piece in The Times highlighted Reform’s ambivalence towards the Union under its new Scottish leader, Lord Offord. One might think a party often caricatured as an English nationalist one and led by an ex-Tory would not be flirting with Scottish independence. Yet, Offord claimed, “rational nationalists” could find common ground with “moderate unionists,” and they could “deal with the constitution later”. He was not “ruling [a referendum] out in the future” when a decision on independence could be based on “strength, not just emotion”.

Those of us who place the preservation of the United Kingdom and recognise the dangers of enabling separatist rhetoric know that there is no such thing as a “rational nationalist” and understand that all their actions are designed to lead to an end goal. Reform may want to win pro-independence voters, but it should be through persuasion of the merits of their agenda (for what it is), not by humouring that of the separatist. It should oppose another referendum.

Something similar is happening in Wales too. The Welsh Conservatives produced a great montage of Reform figures, including Nigel Farage and his new Welsh frontman, saying they want more devolution and more powers in Cardiff Bay. Have they not learnt the lesson of the British Conservative Government who did that and the Welsh Labour Government who abused those powers, all in turn servicing Plaid Cymru’s nationalist agenda time and time again? They claim to hate the world Blair made, yet here they are building on his legacy, not demolishing it.

Reform supports the expansion of the Senedd from 60 to 96 members at a cost of £120m. On both enlarging and empowering the Senedd, Reform is on the same page as Labour, Plaid, the Lib Dems, and the Greens. Only the Welsh Conservatives have opposed this expansion from the start and want to reverse it. As a candidate, I have spoken with many people who are considering Reform believing they are anti-establishment. Once they are made aware of this enabling agenda, they reconsider and will look at the Conservatives again.

Reform councillors are not even living up to some of the party’s supposedly reliable positions, with their sole Cardiff councillor failing to back my motion to close the illegal migrant hotel in the city. If Reform councillors cannot back even this, then what can we expect of them?

It is this ongoing inability to pick a lane – as well as the feuds with Farage – that inspired the founding of Advance UK and Restore. It is noticeable that the Lowe outfit is established on the basis that Reform is too mainstream. Whilst this has mainly centred on immigration, given its closeness to establishment policy in Wales and Scotland, it does give credence to an emerging pattern – that Reform is not a radical break from the norm. It is just another flawed political party destined to repeat the mistakes all others make. Its new branding, but politics as usual.

However, Reform’s youth coupled with its sudden popularity is a recipe for these mistakes to become catastrophes. With less than two months until the Senedd election, Reform has announced no candidates. It is not just to avoid scrutiny – it has a serious problem in finding quality people to stand. My fear is a large group of Reform MSs will be elected but will fall under the spell of the devocratic establishment and go native, which correlates with its devocratic calls for more powers and politicians in Cardiff Bay. We need serious anti-establishment politicians to challenge the devolved system of government that has failed Wales for three decades, not easily bored rabble-rousers who don’t recognise the dangerous of separatism.

I assert that Reform is actually to the political left of the Conservatives. Faragists may talk in more forceful terms, but Kemi Badenoch’s policy programme does outflank Farage from the right. The Conservatives are notching up a lot of wins and doing much of the legwork of the Opposition but, frustratingly, the scars of government run deep, and other are the beneficiaries.

Convincing evidence of this is the volume of Conservative defectors, another source of anger for those who choose Restore but also those within Reform. Its Scottish and Welsh leader as well as all its MSPs and MSs are ex-Tories. Most Reform MPs used to be Conservative MPs. Whilst I consider Robert Jenrick and Danny Kruger to be losses to our party (in terms of their ability, not loyalty), Reform have also done us a favour in taking off our hands the mediocre and the mad.

Reform just being an outfit for the dregs of the Conservatives was further compounded at the launch of its Welsh manifesto earlier this month – a blatant rip-off of the Welsh Conservative programme of the last decade. Seriously, there was little difference in its contents – other than Reform’s suggestion to put tolls on the M4 relief road. Not sure how much traffic that will relieve.

With less than seven weeks to go until polling day, much remains uncertain. What we do need to know is for what does Reform actually stand and can it be trusted to protect the Union?

Donald Trump has called off his strikes on Iran’s energy sites for the next five days.

The US president said the US and Iran have had “very good and productive conversations” regarding a “complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East”.

He added, “I have instructed the Department of War to postpone any and all military strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for a five-day period”, depending on the success of ongoing discussions.

Trump had claimed only over the weekend that Iran had just 48 hours to open the major oil shipping lane, the Strait of Hormuz, or the US would “obliterate” its power plants.

That escalation came hours after two Iranian missiles struck southern Israel, injuring more than 100 people on Sunday.

His bizarre warning meant Iran had only until 11.44pm (GMT) tonight to respond.

Iran had threatened to “completely destroy” key military sites across the region in retaliation.

Here’s the president’s TruthSocial post in full:

I AM PLEASE TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST. BASED ON THE TENOR AND TONE OF THESE IN DEPTH, DETAILED, AND CONSTRUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS, WITCH WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD, SUBJECT TO THE SUCCESS OF THE ONGOING MEETINGS AND DISCUSSIONS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!

This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates or follow HuffPost UK on X at @HuffPostUK or on Facebook.

French judge Nicolas Guillou, who serves on the International Criminal Court (ICC), has told a French TV station how he is financially paralysed because the US sanctioned him last year for doing his job. That job? To issue a war crimes arrest warrant for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

Guillou’s predicament was explained by human rights law expert Ramy Abdul:

French judge Nicolas Gouyou, who issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu at the ICC:

• Visa and Mastercard have blocked all my cards
• I cannot make any purchases
• I am a judge, yet treated like a criminal
• Judges, lawyers, and politicians are being intimidated
• A… pic.twitter.com/vJdVGfa8X9

— Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده (@RamAbdu) March 22, 2026

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A transcript of the video is shown below:

I discovered that almost all payment methods, in fact, in France today, well they are American.

Your credit card no longer works.

Well, it was disconnected because in fact, the only cards we have in France are Visa and MasterCard.

I can no longer order on Amazon, I can no longer book an Airbnb. I tried, for example, to book a hotel on Booking.com.

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I understand that the transaction is blocked.

I made a transaction with Expedia.

I received an email that says: My transaction is cancelled. It’s very painful on a daily basis.

We go back thirty years. This is the Time Machine. In fact, we are returning to the pre-digital world.

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Another example. The judge is therefore in the Netherlands, he orders a frame in Brittany. Except that since it is by UPS, it will never be delivered.

So, faced with this grotesque situation of a judge on the same blacklist as the worst terrorists and drug traffickers in the world, the President of the [French] Republic wrote this letter to ask for the lifting of sanctions.

If prosecutors are afraid to prosecute, if lawyers are afraid to defend, if judges are afraid to judge, if parliamentarians are afraid to vote on laws, if ministers are afraid to apply them, there is no more democracy.

This means that we will act exclusively out of fear.

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Guillou is unfortunately not unique. His ICC colleague, Canadian judge Kimberley Prost, and United Nations human rights specialist Francesca Albanese have also been hit with sanctions which, as Prost said last year, are supposed to be restricted to terrorists and organised crime bosses.

Israel and the US are mafioso terror states.

Featured image via the Canary

The West is attempting to manufacture consent for a ground invasion of Iran, just like it did with Iraq in 2001.

From supporting Israel’s genocide in Palestine, to funding the arms industry, it is clear that the West has only one goal for the Middle East: unrelenting destabilisation founded on neo-colonialism.

This is no different to Iraq in 2003. At the time, journalists failed to challenge the US government’s narratives about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s links to al-Qaeda. Essentially, this failure is what created public support for the US to invade Iraq.

Iran war: how does the manufacture of consent work?

Manufacturing consent describes how a ‘free media’ – one without government censorship or fear of prison for journalists, and staffed by people who genuinely see themselves as holding power to account – still ends up producing systemic propaganda with a single, consistent message.

This can be inadvertent or intentional, and is usually done by letting the accounts of Western governments go unchallenged,

For example, in Gaza, instead of challenging statements from the Israeli government and military, or the US government, Western journalists just print the statements. They may as well be stenographers for state-run media.

Similarly, outlets like the BBC, Sky News, ITV, and Reuters frame Israeli attacks as ‘Palestinians killed’. They do this without mentioning who or what killed them. Did Darth Vader kill them?

Alternatively, when reporting on Palestinian deaths, they use the line ‘according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry’. This casts doubt on how many Palestinians Israel actually murdered.

Now, Israelis are dying from Iranian attacks. However, Western media do not report the deaths ‘according to the Likud-run Health Ministry’. They are presented as unquestioned facts. The tiny differences in language go a long way in shaping public opinion.

Additionally, the Israeli government has continuously told the world that it only targets Hamas in Gaza, despite carpet bombing the whole strip into oblivion. Western media have not challenged that narrative. This means that now Israel is getting away with the same lines about Hezbollah and the Iranian ‘regime’.

Media monopoly

Three companies control 90% of the UK’s newspaper circulation. These three companies are all owned by the ultra-wealthy.

And one man – Rupert Murdoch – owns around one-third of British newspapers. However, he also owns over 50% of Australian news outlets and some of the biggest news organisations in the US.

Murdoch is a staunch Zionist.

Benjamin Netanyahu once said:

Rupert Murdoch became a close friend to both me and Israel. He was always a staunch supporter of Israel and viewed it as the foundation stone of the free world in the Middle East. Israel has not had a better friend.

So, of course, when a billionaire and friend of Netanyahu, who also happens to be mentioned in the Epstein files, controls so much of the West’s media, how can we expect anything but a system which unequivocally supports the bullshit that comes out of our leaders’ mouths?

Deigo Garcia

Now, we have a situation where the Wall Street Journal have published an article stating that Iran fired two intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) at Diego Garcia, a UK/US base in the indian ocean.

Of course, it is typical of a corporate, Zionist-owned media outlet to put out that headline and then use a paywall to prevent people from reading who the actual sources are behind the claims.

Importantly, Iranian officials have denied that Iran was behind the attacks. Even NATO has said it “cannot confirm” Israel’s claim that the missiles were Iranian.

Yet, despite this, almost every news outlet between the UK and Mars published the same story, with no additional evidence, verification, or proof.

In the original article, the ‘sources’ are ‘multiple US officials’ – who are, of course, unnamed.

The article then quotes Iran Watch, which is part of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.

It claims that:

Iran has operational missiles that can reach 2,500 miles. Israel’s Alma Research and Education Centre put the top range for Iranian missiles at around 1,900 miles, but said there are reports of their weapons being developed with longer ranges. 

In 2015, Middle East Eye wrote:

WINEP is part of a vibrant “Iran watch” industry. Many of this industry’s players whipped up fear about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent chemical and biological weapons before the invasion of Iraq. Without displaying any signs of embarrassment about their past blunders, they are now posing as experts on the “threat” from neighbouring Iran.

The founder is Gary Milhollin. He is one of the same ‘experts’ who warned about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

In 2002, he said:

every Western intelligence service believes Saddam Hussein possessed a mass destruction arsenal.

So now, the Wall Street Journal has chosen to repeat the unverified claims of a man who we know lied about weapons of mass destruction. And they’ve done it behind a paywall, knowing most people will not be able to access the whole article. I don’t think I need to say anymore.

Editorial oversight?

The media has learnt no lessons in over 20 years. Outlets on both sides of the Atlantic have spent two and a half years whitewashing Israel’s crimes and ultimately created the exact conditions the terrorist state needed to further its Greater Israel project and invade both Lebanon and Iran.

Is the editorial oversight coming from Israel itself? Were the headlines promised to Israel 3000 years ago? Or are most Western journalists just lazy and publishing information without checking sources?

There is no surprise that in the last 24 hours, Israel has suddenly lifted its media censorship. And there can only be one reason for it – using the destruction in the videos as a tool to manufacture consent for whatever hell they’re planning next.

There is no justification for genocide, and every single time they repeat Israel’s claims, they further obscure and justify Israel’s and the US’s war crimes, and repeat the travesties of the Iraq war. 

Featured image via The Independent/YouTube

Amy Leversidge, General Secretary of the British Airlines Pilots’ Association (BALPA)

Every flight is a promise of something new. A deal struck, a market opened, a well-de­served holiday. Britain’s avia­tion sector is expanding, and the government’s ambition is for it to expand still further. More connections. More opportunity. More of what aviation, at its best, has always delivered.

Amy Leversidge, General Secretary of the British Airline Pilots’ Association (BALPA), does not dispute any of that. What she wants parliamentarians to understand, however, is a problem hiding in plain sight: the profession that will power that future is, for many, simply out of reach.

Leversidge, who took over as General Secretary in January 2024, has a clear-eyed view of how pilot training in the UK currently works, and how badly it needs to change.

The problem begins with cost. Becoming a commercial airline pilot requires complet­ing a demanding training programme that can cost well over £100,000. Doctors, solicitors and civil engineers all face significant training costs, but have mechanisms to pay that sum back over years. For pilots, no such mechanism exists. Applicants must find the money themselves, largely in full and upfront.

An aspiring pilot has no access to the student loan system and high street banks have withdrawn career development loans for pilot training. What remains are a couple of airline-funded cadet schemes, massively oversubscribed.

“The largest cadet scheme gets 100 applications for every place. That is not a queue of people who should all be pilots, but among them are people who absolutely should be,” Leversidge says. “Unfortunately, there will be many great potential pilots among the 99 per cent who fail to secure a place on a cadet scheme, but they will be out of options, at the end of the road. They are simply priced out of being a pilot. Right now, we are forcing too many to take their talents elsewhere.”

If the sector that connects us to the world can’t draw on the full range of talent in this country, both growth and opportunity suffer

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Some assume this is a problem of standards, that the profession is rightly exclusive. Leversidge addresses this directly.

“When you are six or seven miles up in the air, you need absolute confidence in the pilots flying the plane. The training to become a commercial airline pilot is demanding and exacting, as it should be. Every pilot in the sky today has earned their licence, that must never change. The only hurdle we want to remove is the six-figure paywall.”

 “Aspiring pilots must have the skills, strengths, talent and determination to train and work as a pilot and have enthusiasm for aviation,” Leversidge continued. “Let’s not keep on that list of demands that they also need to have access to over £100,000 for their training. We don’t want to lose potential talent from our profession, and decision-mak­ers shouldn’t want that either, given the core air transport sector’s £14bn annual contribution to the UK economy.”

It hasn’t always been this way. Cadet schemes were once far more common­place. Banks lent money for pilot training. There were routes in for able, ambitious people who needed a little help to pay their way. Those routes have narrowed dramatically, leaving the profession accessible largely only to those who can self-fund.

“This isn’t a pathway, it’s a paywall,” Leversidge asserts.

The timing of this matters. Airport expansion will substantially increase demand for pilots in the years ahead. At the same time, the number of BALPA members reaching the mandatory pilot retirement age of 65 will double by 2030. With the vast majority of UK commercial airline pilots holding BALPA member­ship, that seems a reliable measure of the looming wave of retirements.

“I want MPs and peers to understand the scale of the opportunity we are missing,” Leversidge says. “The ambition the government has for aviation and the contribution it can make to greater economic growth in the future requires a skilled aviation workforce to deliver it. We need to be working together – BALPA, industry, the government – to ensure we are training the right number of pilots for the future, and that those training spots are secured on talent alone.”

A solution is ready and waiting. An apprenticeship for pilots has been designed, developed, and approved. It would allow airlines to train pilots through the apprenticeship system, making the profession accessible in the same way apprenticeships have broadened access across other skilled sectors. Some refine­ments will be needed to make it work for industry and pilots alike, and those conversations are happening, confirms Leversidge.

“The apprenticeship could genuinely prove a breakthrough, and we back it,” Leversidge says, “but BALPA is not wedded to one particular mechanism. Pilots are practical people, and BALPA just wants something that works. Whether that is the apprenticeship, access to student loans, more airline-funded schemes, or a return of bank lending, we are open-minded.”

The apprenticeship is currently on pause, though the aviation minister has stated to parliament that restarting it is a cross-government priority. “We know the goodwill is there,” Leversidge acknowledges, “but goodwill needs to turn into action, and soon.”

This issue cuts across two of the govern­ment’s central priorities: economic growth and widening opportunity. Aviation is one of the UK’s most powerful drivers of growth, but its ability to deliver that growth relies on a steady supply of skilled pilots. Right now, talented young people are being priced out of that profession altogether. Leversidge sums it up, “If the sector that connects us to the world can’t draw on the full range of talent in this country, both growth and opportunity suffer. That should worry everyone in parliament.”

“We are not asking for anything that doesn’t already exist for other profes­sions,” Leversidge makes clear. “We are asking to be treated the same.”

Aviation is full of promises, to the businesses that depend on it, the fami­lies it connects, the young people who dream of a career at its heart. Pilots stitch the world together, and BALPA believes that the profession deserves a funding system that reflects that. “Keeping those promises depends on whether we are willing to open the doors that funding reform would unlock,” says Leversidge, “and that is a choice that parliament and government can help make happen.”

For more information please email Stuart Bonar, Head of Public Affairs, at [email protected].