2 min read18 May

In a visit to Labour HQ, the Prime Minister said he would offer his full backing to whoever the candidate is.

Labour’s ruling body will draw up a shortlist of people this week and local members will vote on Thursday. However, it is widely expected that Burnham, the Manchester mayor, will be selected after the NEC said it would not block his candidacy.

Starmer told activists on Monday the last 10 days had “not been easy” for the party and the local election results had demonstrated that the public had not felt the fruits of a Labour government quickly enough.

The Prime Minister said: “We need to build up the urgency of what we do. We need a bit more hope in there. And we need to remember at all times what we are here to do. We were elected to government to serve the people of this country.

“And I remind myself every day that in July 2024 millions of people voted for us to come into government, to get on with the job, to govern, and to bring about the change that they want.

“So I am focused on the job that I was asked to do, which is to serve my country and to carry out my duties as Prime Minister of this country. Delivering for the very many people who voted us into office, who are saying, ‘just get on with it, get on with the job, get on with the change that I need to see in my life’.

“And that is what I am going to be doing.”

Starmer said the Makerfield by-election was a straight fight between Nigel Farage’s party and Labour, and that he wanted every Labour member and person associated with the party to support Burnham.

“A Labour candidate to beat Reform. That is the fight that we are in.”

Burnham was blocked from standing as a candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election in February. The Prime Minister said it could have triggered a Manchester mayoral by-election, which would have cost the public at least £4million.

Burnham, who has previously served as a cabinet minister, is seen as a potential leadership challenger to Starmer if he wins the by-election. He is currently the bookmakers’ favourite to replace Starmer as prime minister and Labour leader.  

Illustration by Tracy Worrall

4 min read18 May

What did you think when you heard that Mo Salah was leaving Liverpool? Me, I wondered what it meant for the parasocial contact hypothesis.

Before you conclude I need to get out more, let me explain.

The idea that personal contact with people who are different – ‘out-groups’ in the lingo – can change attitudes has a long heritage; the ‘parasocial contact hypothesis’ is that indirect, mediated, contact – with celebrities, television characters and so on – has a similar effect.

Salah joined Liverpool in 2017, for what was then a club record fee. He helped them win the Champions League in 2019 and the Premier League in 2020. And in 2021, a fascinating paper published in the American Political Science Review examined the effect that having an elite player with what it called “conspicuous Islamic identity” had on Liverpool fans – and whether it reduced levels of Islamophobia.

In this case, it seems it does. After Salah’s arrival, researchers found that Liverpool fans became less likely to send anti-Muslim tweets when compared to other fans, at about half the expected rate. They also found levels of hate crime in Merseyside dropped by 16 per cent, again when compared to the expected rate. The authors concluded that “positive exposure to out-group celebrities can spark real-world behaviour changes in prejudice”.

Up to a point, at least. Because as I have said occasionally in this column before: size matters.

Take, for example, the third part of the study, in which researchers compared responses from Liverpool fans who were explicitly reminded of Salah’s religion with those who are not. The study tested three different views of Islam. In two cases, the differences were not statistically significant. In the third, when asked whether they thought Islam was compatible with British values, the primed respondents were more positive, and by an amount that was statistically significant, up by five percentage points.

To be fair, we might not expect great differences here. If the whole justification for studying responses to someone is that their identity is conspicuous, pretty much everyone should be primed already. But still, even that five per cent increase only gets you to 23 per cent. In other words, even after he’d helped them win all that silverware, the vast majority of respondents to the survey still thought Islam wasn’t compatible with British values. It’ll take a few more Salahs before that changes; and there is – in the words of the song – only one.

There are also two obvious follow-on questions. What about Liverpool’s (ahem) patchier form in some of the following seasons? A study of the Israeli football team in 2020, for example, found that when the national team were winning, the Arab players in the team were praised – but that didn’t last when things went south. To what extent do we think this effect is dependent upon performance? And second, and perhaps most important, will any effect survive Salah’s departure? The only person to have thrice been crowned PFA Players’ Player of the Year has his last game for Liverpool later this month. How long-lasting do we think any parasocial contact effect will be?

You want more Liverpool? Try Florian Foos and Daniel Bischof’s study of the effect that the boycott of the Sun had on attitudes towards the EU; they estimate the leave vote there to be around eight to nine percentage points lower as a result. Or David Jeffery’s book on the transformation of the Conservatives fortunes in the city. In the 1968 local elections, the Conservatives won almost 80 per cent of council seats; today, zero. A book examining what causes dramatic changes in local government fortunes sounds topical. 

A Alrababa’h et al, Can Exposure to Celebrities Reduce Prejudice? The Effect of Mohamed Salah on Islamophobic Behaviors and Attitudes, American Political Science Review (2021); F Foos and D Bischof, Tabloid Media Campaigns and Public Opinion: Quasi-Experimental Evidence on Euroscepticism in England. American Political Science Review (2022); D Jeffery, Whatever Happened To Tory Liverpool (2023)

Image by: PA Images / Alamy

3 min read18 May

Dave Clements’ book is lucid, well-informed and honest, highlighting a plethora of problems in the SEND system that many in education are reluctant to acknowledge. It is also is a deep cry of parental pain: the author has skin in the game.

As he lays out, the recent explosion in SEND is not about physical disability or cognitive impairment. Instead it is overwhelmingly about children like Clements’s son, diagnosed with one or more conditions of autism, ADHD and other disorders linked to behavioural problems.

Clements shows that some (not all) of this come from overdiagnosis. He does not mention the highly influential 2013 American DSM-5 definition of autism, which lowered the diagnostic bar substantially. One participating psychiatrist has apologised for his part, saying the wider definition is contributing to “massive, careless over-diagnosis of autism”. The book discusses how unnecessary diagnoses can affect children, reducing their agency and self-belief as well as lowering others’ expectations of them. And it recognises the problems when services are overwhelmed by demand from children who may not need or benefit from them, at the expense of those who really do need them.

It is easier for the state to be kind than to be honest

He bravely tackles parenting: some children’s very real problems may not be intrinsic to the child but about poor parenting, without the boundaries and certainties that children need to develop healthily. But our reluctance to stigmatise makes it easier to label children without naming the likely cause.

And equally bravely, he tackles the perverse incentives in the education, benefits and welfare systems. A SEND label can unlock extra help at school and other accommodations and dispensations: a reader and scribe and extra time for tests and exams, and may entitle the family to extra benefits. A rational parent will fight to keep this even if a child no longer needs the package.

Clements describes the burdens this creates for schools, but omits the evidential gap: we know little about what (beyond coherent and well-sequenced curriculum, well taught in an orderly classroom) is effective for different types of SEND, and almost nothing about what represents good value to the public purse – there is no NICE for SEND.

Spending more money on a child will not necessarily improve their experience or outcomes. But parents desperately want to believe that something can be done, and it is easier for the state to be kind than to be honest. This may explain why we already spend £15bn a year – more than £500 from every household – on high needs SEND and children’s disability living allowance, with no real idea of what difference this spending makes.

The tragedy is that the current system was created with good intentions, by governments of all colours. Statutory entitlements for SEND (and social care) were never expected to bankrupt local authorities and starve them of resources for other functions. But even bad law is difficult to unpick. The current government has already essentially ducked with its SEND white paper, which will create more workload in schools and, probably, more dissatisfied parents believing their children are being short-changed. Time to think again.

Baroness Spielman: Conservative peer and former Ofsted chief inspector

The Crisis in the Classroom: How the needs explosion is destroying education

By: Dave Clements

Publisher: Luath Press

3 min read18 May

I was out knocking doors the day after Josh Simons announced he’d be stepping down. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.

This is, historically, a Labour heartland and a seat that went our way just a couple of years ago. But last week, 24 out of 25 council seats in Wigan went to Reform.

I knew it would be tough. It wasn’t what I expected. The first door I knocked belonged to a woman in a semi-detached, path of white pebbles across grey stone.

She wasn’t in any hurry to close it. Surprised Labour was out this early, she said. I told her why it matters, why this party needs to rebuild trust in places like this.

She called her husband through from where he was decorating. Yorkshire and Lancashire, together chatting over a doorstep, unhurried, the way politics almost never allows.

He’d voted Reform the week before, and in the general election. If Andy Burnham stood here, he said he’d have to have a “really deep think”, but could convince him to come back to Labour. Eight days after putting a cross next to the party in teal, this man was genuinely reconsidering.

That matters. A few doors down, someone else put it with a directness I won’t forget. “I’ve got a bit of Labour left in me, just need to find a way to get it out.”

These aren’t voters who have abandoned us. They are voters who want a reason to come back. There is a difference, and Westminster forgets it constantly.

Andy Burnham’s name came up again and again. Not as a political calculation, but with the warmth you reserve for someone you actually know. “He’s done a lot for Manchester. I’d be sad to see him go as mayor.”

But they’d be glad to have him as their MP too. Everybody had a story, a friend, a family member, one degree of separation from the man. That kind of proximity counts for more than any amount of targeted advertising. I also heard something generous about Josh Simons, who is standing down. “He’s a young lad who moved his family from Cambridge and chose to bring them up locally. You can’t ask for more than that.” People notice authenticity. They always have. It’s a small reminder that north and south aren’t opposing forces.

They’re simply waiting for the right moment to be bound together. There were doors that didn’t swing so easily. I won’t pretend otherwise.

Whether it was schoolchildren running excitedly around the corner ready for their weekend to start, or a group of people having a chat outside the local chippy, there was a sense that people here look out for each other, and that underneath the frustration, something is still there.

The argument that Reform voters are beyond reach is not just wrong, it is condescending. We have been here before. In the ashes of 2019, we didn’t win back the voters we’d lost by telling them they were wrong to choose Johnson and the Tories.

We asked them why. And then we listened, properly, and acted accordingly. That is how we won. It is the only way we ever win.

The people I met in Makerfield weren’t making an ideological statement. They were asking to be listened to. And they were, when given the chance, very willing to have that conversation. Nigel Farage is in for a fight here. This is a seat with Labour in its bones. The right candidate, with roots that people can feel, can remind it of that. We should rise to that challenge.

Despite what you or we might think, in the eyes of the Scottish Football Association this ISN’T a pitch invasion. This is simply what a football match in progress looks like.

Because according to the absolutely extraordinary statement they’ve released this evening, that was game time. The clock was still running, nothing was being added to account for the fact that there were thousands of thugs rampaging across the field, and the game was still happening in that moment, until it was ended four seconds later.

It’s far from the only astonishing line in the statement.

There’s also the admission that the game ended because Hearts manager Derek McInnes, being advised by police before the game was over, feared for the safety of his players and didn’t want to risk carrying on.

That is, in the SFA’s view, if your team’s winning a game with a minute to go and you don’t want to take a chance on the other side scoring, you should not only pile onto the pitch but also do your active best to scare the living daylights out of their players, and the ref will just keep the clock ticking until time runs out, even though there isn’t even a ball any more.

(We imagine it’s proudly sitting on someone’s mantelpiece somewhere in the East End of Glasgow at the moment.)

The laws of the game are absolutely clear.

The referee CANNOT reduce the time declared by the fourth official, and he MUST add time for both goal celebrations and “interference by an outside agent”, ie thousands of thugs on the field of play. The SFA appear to have simply unilaterally overridden those global laws put in place by the International Football Association Board and said “Nah, it’s optional if there are a load of Neanderthal morons terrifying the players”.

It merits saying again: according to that SFA statement, this is not an interruption to play. This is a football match in normal progress, before full-time.

(Just two minutes later, incidentally, the pitch had been cleared and the last minute or so of the game could have been played.)

It is no small feat for the SFA to have limboed under even the incredibly low expectations bar we set for them. But hats off to them, they’ve done it with spades to spare.