Prime Minister Keir Starmer told MPs on Wednesday “there is no justification for more violence and disorder” following riots in Southampton.

4 min read19 min

Footage released this week by police showed 18-year-old student Nowak being handcuffed and arrested as he lay dying on the ground in Southampton in December, telling officers he was not able to breathe.

Nowak had been stabbed by 23-year-old Vickrum Digwa, who had falsely told officers at the scene that he himself had been a victim of a racist attack. On Monday, Digwa was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 21 years. 

There was unrest in Southampton on Tuesday night following the publication of the footage showing Nowak’s arrest. At the time of writing, two people had been arrested for their role in the protests, which resulted in 11 officers being injured, according to Hampshire Police.

Speaking in Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) on Wednesday, Starmer said now is “time for serious work, not rage”, and described attacks on police officers in Hampshire last night as “disgraceful and completely unacceptable”.

He paid tribute to the “extraordinary dignity” shown by Nowak’s family, “after their son’s life was stolen in appalling circumstances”.

“He was clearly a kind, thoughtful, and much-loved young man. There are serious questions to answer, including how accusations of racism informed police thinking. And we’re supporting the IOPC (Independent Office for Police Conduct) to get to the bottom of what happened,” he said.

The IOPC police watchdog has initiated an investigation into the conduct of the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, while at the same time, the Attorney General’s office is considering whether to review Digwa’s sentence.

Later in PMQs, Farage asked Starmer about “two-tier policing”.

“Following the horrendous circumstances of Henry Nowak’s death, can I urge the Prime Minister to consider this: it is now clear to growing millions in this country that we’re living under two-tier policing,” the Reform leader said.

“The instructions that are given to police officers from police bosses are clear and written down in ink: it says he must treat different ethnic groups in different ways.

“That apart from the upset and the anger at the circumstances of his death, the anger that you saw spilling out in Southampton last night, and which is in danger of getting considerably worse.”

Starmer said he doesn’t believe there is two-tier policing in the UK, then accused Farage of pretending to respect Nowak’s family.

“I’m really shocked that he pretends to have respect for Henry’s family, and then acts in this way.

“A grieving family have asked us not to respond in the way that the leader of Reform has responded: they’ve asked us not to, they have lost their son in the most appalling circumstances.

“They make a simple plea of us, as human beings, to please not exploit that. That is their plea to us, but we all need to reflect on those words of Henry’s father. My response, and the response of others… has been focused on the lessons to be learned, so we can deliver justice.

“His response has been to appeal for rage. Rage. That’s his response to a father who’s lost his son and asked for that not to happen. Exploiting this tragedy to create grievance and division would be wrong in any circumstances, but to do it when the family are expressly saying please don’t, is unforgivable.

“It shows exactly who he is.”

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch struck a similar tone to the PM, telling MPs it was the “responsibility of everyone to bring people together, not divide them”. 

“I also want to share my deepest condolences to the family and friends of Henry Nowak,” said Badenoch. 

“The circumstances around Henry’s wrongful arrest and tragic murder must be a wake-up call to the entire country and to our institutions that every life matters. And that it is the responsibility of everyone in this house to bring people together, not divide them.”

Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale: 12 July 1936 – 28 May 2026 | Image courtesy of UK Parliament

4 min read5 min

Meta Ramsay was an exceptional person in so many ways: a powerful woman in a man’s world, a most generous friend in every sense, and a mentor to many of us. She was loyal in every way: to her country, the Labour Party and, above all, to her friends.

Her background was relatively modest. Those who knew her mother, Sheila – the daughter of Jewish refugees from Ukraine – could see where Meta got her strength of character. Her father, Alexander, was a gentle man in every sense, but nevertheless an avid supporter of Glasgow Rangers. This likely explains why Meta, though not a football follower herself, would always know the Hearts result by the time we spoke on Sundays.

After happy years at her local Battlefield Primary School, her parents saved enough to send Meta to Hutchesons’, then a fee-paying corporation school, which enabled her to gain a place at the University of Glasgow. There, she joined a cohort of formidable debaters and politicians – including Donald Dewar, John Smith, Ming Campbell, and Douglas Alexander (father of the current secretary of state) – and was able not just to hold her own, but to better them.

At Scottish universities, the men’s and women’s unions were social and debating centres, but the students’ representative council (SRC) was the true hub of power. Meta became the first woman to serve as president of the Glasgow University SRC, a foretaste of things to come. Scotland also had its own national student body, the Scottish Union of Students, and, once again, Meta was the first woman to become its president. It was then that we met, when I attended their conferences as a representative from the Edinburgh SRC.

At the time, the Cold War was at its height, and the international student scene was divided between the Communist International Union of Students (IUS) headquartered in Prague and the International Student Conference (ISC) in Leiden. In a further portent of things to come, Meta moved to the ISC to serve as assistant secretary.

Meta’s service in MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, was known to very few at the time, long before the organisation became as open as it is today. Her frontline work in Finland, and her role in the defection of Oleg Gordievsky in particular, is now the stuff of legend – and rightly so.

One disobliging colleague said to Labour leader John Smith, ‘Be careful, she was a spy,’ to which John retorted, ‘I know, that’s why I’m appointing her!’

Away from the intense world of intelligence, Meta maintained a warm and deeply grounded personal life. She was utterly devoted to her dear Cairn Terrier, Tam, so much so that she once prevailed upon me to chauffeur him from Glasgow to London! How could I refuse?

When she retired from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), she soon moved to work as foreign affairs adviser to the Labour leader, John Smith. One disobliging colleague said to John, “Be careful, she was a spy,” to which John retorted, “I know, that’s why I’m appointing her!”

She was appointed to the House of Lords by Tony Blair and became a whip, skilfully piloting the Scotland Bill through the Lords and keeping her flock in line. And when Labour moved into opposition, she served, fittingly, as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee and on the North Atlantic Assembly, Nato’s parliamentary body.

Her activity in the Labour Party spanned her entire adult life, bookending her foreign service, including joining the Scottish Executive Committee to provide vital senior female leadership during the period when Ian Murray was Labour’s sole Scottish MP.

She fell ill in London but returned home to Glasgow, where she passed away accompanied by her longstanding friend, assistant, and executor, the wonderful Caroline Thickett. She has since received glowing tributes from all sides of the House of Lords and beyond.

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock is a Labour peer

Ahead of the ten year anniversary of the EU referendum on 23 June, UK in a Changing Europe experts have written a short series of blogs reflecting on some of the issues at the heart of Brexit then and now. Here, Jill Rutter considers how Brexit has impacted the civil service.

We could never persuade former Brexit minister and European Research Group chair Steve Baker to relive Brexit for UK in a Changing Europe’s Brexit Witness Archive. But two quotes from his recent Ministers Reflect interview for the Institute for Government are perfect illustrations of the way in which Brexit impacted the civil service.

Speaking of his own civil servants in his brief ministerial stint at the Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU) he said:  “The officials were absolutely excellent in the Department for Exiting the EU, absolutely brilliant and brilliantly led”.  But a few paragraphs later he describes how officials reacted to the DExEU ministerial team concluding that the UK had to leave the EU with an FTA-style agreement: “officials all sat there looking crestfallen. They’d all briefed us individually that we should do something hybrid that involved the customs union and alignment. We all said no individually. So they put on a summit. Again, notice they’re managing us, which is a thing to come back to. We gave them very clear directions on what we required as a team.” That sounds much more like the scepticism about the civil service to be expected from Eurosceptic ministers.

But Baker himself acknowledges that the civil servants were pursuing the Brexit that the Prime Minister and Chancellor wanted – and his real frustration (which resulted in his post-Chequers resignation) should be directed at his ministerial bosses, as they were the ones taking the policy in a direction he did not like, not the civil service.

The good news for the civil service is that it managed to deliver a Brexit which was broadly the one chosen by the Johnson government. Gaping holes did not emerge – either in UK legal frameworks or at the borders for goods (failure to stem cross-Channel irregular migration has become a running sore post-Brexit). UK regulators have mostly been able to substitute adequately for their EU counterparts – and, even before the final completion of Brexit, the UK’s medicines regulator gave the first approval for a Covid 19 vaccine. The UK developed missing trade capacity, rolled over EU-era trade agreements and negotiated its own new free trade agreements (FTAs) with countries such as New Zealand and Australia.

The price of that delivery was a massive expansion in the size of the civil service, which is now over a third bigger than it was in June 2016. Not all of that is down to Brexit itself – it was inflated by the need to deal with the pandemic and more recently by attempts to get on top of the asylum backlog. Nonetheless, that is an expansion that is way in excess of initial estimates of the impact of Brexit on the size civil service (and the expansion in the number of public servants in some arm’s length bodies should be added as well to take full account of Brexit as a driver of state expansion).

The bad news for the civil service is that Brexit catalysed a breakdown of relations with a significant segment of the political and ministerial class.

In the Theresa May government, civil servants were collateral damage as her cabinet could not agree on the model of Brexit it wanted to pursue. In some departments, Brexit supporting ministers were reluctant to confront the problems officials raised with them in implementing Brexit.  The UK’s permanent representative, Ivan Rogers, resigned after being “stabbed in the back” by Theresa May’s chiefs of staff briefing against him. The Treasury was already bruised by what then-Chancellor Philip Hammond described as “being painted as the villain of the referendum campaign”. Ministers went on the record rubbishing official forecasts.  Senior officials who had specialised in European relations found that their CVs were regarded as what former Deputy Permanent Representative to the EU Katrina Williams described as “unfortunate”. Theresa May herself repeatedly denied she was a puppet of her Europe adviser, Olly Robbins.

Although, in one part of the forest, Lord Frost was working more effectively with civil servants to deliver the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, relations elsewhere in government became ever tenser under the Johnson administration. In that administration’s version of Henry VIII, one permanent secretary resigned (the head of the Government Legal Department) over government willingness to break international law; the services of the Cabinet Secretary, Mark Sedwill, were dispensed with and several more permanent secretaries were sacked or not extended as part of Dominic Cummings’s war on the bureaucracy.  Meanwhile Johnson’s ministers went on the warpath against civil service wokery and working from home, while attempting to impose headcount reductions to roll back the increased numbers since Brexit.

Keir Starmer came in, determined not just to reset relations with the EU, but also with the civil service. But he too became disillusioned with a government “machine” which he never got to grips with managing – within months of taking office he was complaining about the civil service being too happy in the “tepid bath of managed decline”. Starmer’s peremptory sacking in April 2026 of Olly Robbins, who had rejoined the civil service eighteen months earlier, over Peter Mandelson’s vetting has reportedly had a dire effect on ministerial-civil service relations and on civil service morale, which intriguingly peaked in 2020.

Meanwhile, Starmer’s political opponents used his recruitment in opposition of former civil servant Sue Gray as chief of staff as evidence of political sympathies within the civil service – and to argue the case for the politicisation of appointments more along US lines. That remains a significant plank in Reform UK’s vision for the future state. Starmer’s actions make it harder for Labour to defend the current set-up.

The increasing frustration of ministers with the system and their civil servants is rooted in their own failure to deliver people’s aspirations for higher living standards, make inroads on regional inequality and improve public services, all while navigating an increasingly hostile external environment. That frustration contributed to the initial decision to vote for Brexit in June 2016. It is clear that ten years on, that frustration has grown rather than diminished.

By Jill Rutter, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government.

The Warm Homes Plan and the Future Homes and Buildings Standards set out clear objectives for decarbonising homes. Likewise, the Energy Security Bill, announced last month in the King’s Speech, will help to bring down energy costs in the long term.

But there are approximately two million non-domestic buildings in the UK. We now need a plan to retrofit these properties, which have so far been overlooked. Any plan should include a time-bound target for when existing fossil fuel systems must be replaced with a low-carbon system. While new non-domestic buildings will need to electrify under the Future Buildings Standards, ensuring existing buildings adopt low-carbon technologies is critical to the UK’s decarbonisation efforts.

The environmental benefits are clear, but a plan would also bring three key economic benefits:

• helping businesses to navigate volatile fossil fuel prices and plan for the transition
• addressing regional disparities
• strengthening the UK’s clean heat industry

Here’s how a plan for the decarbonisation of commercial buildings can drive energy security and economic growth:

1. Protecting business owners from fossil fuel volatility

The conflict in Iran and the ensuing energy shock have led to volatile gas prices, putting enormous pressure on businesses across the UK. Already stretched, many businesses are having to make difficult decisions on investment and jobs.

Currently, take-up of technologies such as heat pumps, solar panels and batteries among businesses lags behind the domestic sector. We need to see incentives for commercial building retrofit to help address this gap and provide businesses and landlords with the direction to invest.

By adopting these technologies, businesses will benefit from more efficient, modern heating. This will also shield businesses against price shocks in the future.

While there will be upfront costs for business and the government, the investment will prove extremely valuable in the event of any further energy price shocks and create a more secure economy.

2. Addressing regional disparities in the energy efficiency of commercial buildings

Large businesses, which are often based in major cities, are more likely to require high sustainability standards for their buildings, particularly as tenants increasingly seek buildings that meet higher sustainability standards as part of their own environmental commitments. This creates impetus for landlords to ensure their buildings meet these standards. As a result, we have seen successful retrofitting in business hubs – such as the Exchange Quay office campus in Manchester.

However, outside of major cities and existing business hubs, the demand for this technology is lower. This creates a vicious cycle, where businesses increasingly look to base themselves in cities with more modernised commercial buildings, and landlords focus their investments on these same places.

Regional disparities will continue to be reinforced unless the government acts. In addition to investment in retrofit, we also need clarity on timelines and a commitment to increasing minimum energy efficiency standards. Raising requirements for non-domestic buildings will raise the floor for commercial buildings and help improve supply across the UK.

3. Bolstering the UK’s clean heating sector

A stronger commitment to clean heating for commercial buildings will strengthen this growing sector of the green economy.

A key barrier to expanding the rollout of clean heating is having the right workforce to deliver it. However, 24 per cent of UK contractors say that there is not enough demand for heat pumps to justify training for installation.

A plan for the decarbonisation of commercial buildings would help create this demand and give workers the confidence to invest in skills.

More demand for clean technology also means more opportunity for manufacturers, increasing UK production, creating jobs and opening up new export opportunities – supporting the government’s ambitions for economic and industrial growth.

The logical next step for clean heating

The first few months of this year have seen significant progress on the government’s plans for decarbonising homes and promoting the adoption of clean heating.

The government has made it clear that the UK cannot rely on fossil fuels forever and has made vital steps to address this in the King’s Speech.

The next logical step is investment in clean heating for commercial buildings, which will give stability to business owners, raise standards across the UK, and help grow the green economy.

Now is the time to push forward and put forward a plan that gives equal backing, both in regulation and incentives, for non-domestic buildings.