Why would humming like a bee help you sleep?

How can I “bee hum” to help my sleep?

How did it go?

Alex Clarkson is Councillor for Borehamwood Hillside on Hertsmere Borough Council and is also Deputy Chairman of Hertsmere Conservative Association. He stood in Stevenage at the last General Election. He is a Founder Member of Conservatives Together and is the Vice-Chairman (Outreach) of LGBT+ Conservatives.  

I don’t know what it is, but I have always had a soft spot for village post offices. Maybe it was going down to my local one, before it was shut by the Blair government, to pick up my First Day Cover. Yes, philately anorak alert.

Maybe it is the fact that as an actor I voiced several male characters in Postman Pat: Special Delivery Service, still shown on CBBC most weekday mornings, with our hero Pat souped up for the 21st century now armed with a lorry, motorbike and helicopter.

Or maybe it is because village post offices are exactly what they appear to be. They are a quintessential part of British rural life. They are community hubs where villagers and passers-by do not just post letters or parcels, but natter in the queue and connect with one another, perhaps picking up some stationery or a Mother’s Day card just in time.

Now from experience voicing so many episodes, I can tell you that the goings-on in Mrs Goggins’ post office in the fictitious Cumbrian village of Greendale make an Eastenders Christmas special pale into insignificance. Unlike our much loved animation though, the realities of this Starmer government, with its 18 U-turns, higher taxes, higher borrowing and general chaos, means we are in a Greendale-like emergency, but with no Postman Pat to sort it out!

Labour’s threat to rural post offices

Ironically, one of the more monstrous proposals appeared in a Green Paper published last summer. It suggested abolishing the minimum number of 11,500 post offices nationwide introduced in 2010 by David Cameron, scrapping the Three Mile Rule that ensures 99 per cent of the population lives within three miles of a post office, and phasing out part time, mobile, or outreach branches that typically serve rural communities.

For our villages and small towns this would have been devastating. Post offices are often the last remaining public service in Hertfordshire’s rural communities.

The campaign in North East Hertfordshire

Credit to CCHQ and the Campaign Toolkit team. They were ahead of the curve from the outset, with leaflet and survey templates appearing in their own sub-section of the website within weeks of the Green Paper announcement.

Some Conservative members in our patch initially told us the issue was exaggerated and might generate complaints. It is right to be cautious yes, but once we showed them proof of the Green Paper announcement (which had of course been buried deep under other news announcements at the time), they got behind us. Meanwhile local Liberal Democrats went ballistic on the inevitable Facebook groups. Apparently, they believe they are the only party allowed to campaign on local issues!

But off we went last August, campaigning to save four village post offices in a corner of North East Hertfordshire. These are Greendale-style villages connected by winding country lanes and narrow rural roads, with cottages, village greens and small high streets where the post office still sits at the heart of the community.

These branches could easily have closed, forcing pensioners and residents to travel into Stevenage by bus simply to access basic services.

Listening on the doorstep

Using the ‘Knock, Drop & Collect’ system, dropping off an easy-to-use survey and returning in 20 minutes to collect it, we heard repeatedly how vital these post offices were. Residents told us they had helped keep villages connected during the pandemic. They explained how they allowed pensioners to manage their bank accounts after local bank branches closed. Two of them even offered to do social media videos for us illustrating these points, which of course we gladly accepted.

The key point is that we heard this directly, and residents felt heard.

We did not simply write a few bullet points on a leaflet and push it through doors, or post a graphic on Facebook. Using the knock, drop and collect model, we spoke to people directly.

The result was that we learned the issues first hand and, more importantly, voters saw us listening rather than simply asking for their vote. We received hundreds of voter intentions, and using the 0-10 system too rather than the old-fashioned (and largely useless) canvass letter code.

Bearing in mind this was territory that had not been canvassed for a while. With its council elections ‘all out’ rather than up ‘in thirds’, elections come once every four years with not much else happening in-between. These were villages that had been blue since time immemorial but were now either fair game for Reform or were already ensnared by the ‘Japanese knotweed’ that is the Liberal Democrats.

Now there is bang on up to date canvass data – these villages are campaign ready for a future local or General Election.

Unexpected campaigning bonuses

Two unexpected things happened.

First, a huge number of residents who were not home when we knocked, used the QR code to complete the survey online, or even sent the form back to our Association Office using their own stamp. Postman Pat would have been proud, and busy!

Second, we harvested what campaigners love most. Bonus prizes. Nearly two dozen residents requested information about Party membership, including one person interested in becoming a Conservative councillor and another keen to return as a branch chairman. We also recruited over a dozen new leaflet deliverers, the same number of social media supporters, and even gained several requests for postal votes.

What activists can learn

The lessons are clear.

– Knock, drop and collect works, but always include a QR code and return address for those not in

– Always include tick box options for membership, volunteering, or helping online.

– A strong local issue like ‘Save the Post Office’ dramatically increases engagement as it is relevant and emotive

– Check Campaign Toolkit for ready to use campaign materials

– Do not neglect areas you once assumed were ’true blue’ – in fact concentrate on them during ‘peacetime campaigning’ to shore up the core vote, lay the foundations and stop any bleed to rival parties

– Do not listen to local Fib Dems who will start whining, moaning and calling you liars the moment you start campaigning

A quiet but significant victory

Nationally, 180,000 people signed the Party’s petition to protect our post offices. In our corner of North East Hertfordshire we played our part.

On 22nd February Labour quietly performed another U turn. It barely made page eight of the Daily Mail, but for Dane End, Walkern, Watton-at-Stone and Weston it was big news.

The newspapers attributed the reversal to ‘public pressure’. In truth, it was Conservative pressure. A policy U turn, voter data gathered, new members recruited, and new volunteers signed up. Job done. For a moment the North East Herts team almost felt disappointed when the news arrived that the post offices were safe, because we were already preparing to campaign in a fifth village.

Not for long though. We are out saving the local pubs now!

And if Mrs Goggins had been watching from behind the counter of Greendale Post Office, I suspect she would have approved. Even Postman Pat would struggle to deliver that many campaign surveys!

The former Chancellor Sajid Javid said progress on social cohesion in the UK could be lost (Alamy)

4 min read25 min

Javid, a former Conservative MP of 14 years who served in six secretary of state roles, told PoliticsHome that debates about whether non-white politicians like him and former prime minister Rishi Sunak are British were not taking place a decade ago.

Last month, Sunak described himself as “British, English and British Asian” after right-wing podcaster Konstantin Kisin said last year that the senior Conservative MP was not English because he is a “brown-skinned Hindu”.

Sunak, who was the country’s first British Asian prime minister, warned that the UK was at risk of “slipping back” to a time of more undisguised racism.

Speaking on this week’s episode of The Rundown podcast from PoliticsHome, Javid said the fact that this sort of talking point was going viral online in the present day demonstrated how the UK was at risk of going backwards when it comes to social cohesion.

Asked whether he was surprised by it, the former chancellor said: “In a way, yes, because no one was asking questions like that, even a decade ago…

“Take Rishi as a great example. He became prime minister of our country, and someone dares question whether he’s British or not?”

“Obviously, it’s complete nonsense,” Javid added, “and I think questions like that often come from a divisive place, and that’s just the kind of division I think the vast majority of British people don’t have time for. 

“But one of the challenges that we’re having in today’s world, and especially how people consume or get their news is that, if you’re only getting news from your echo chambers on your social media channels, and those channels are inevitably pushing out divisive content because that’s what gets the clicks, then that is one of the features of today’s society.”

In his new memoir, The Colour of Home, Javid explains how his parents came to the UK from Pakistan with little money and “became proudly British”.

Speaking on the podcast, the former Tory MP reiterated his belief that “Britain is the most successful multiracial democracy in the world”, but called on ministers to do more to protect the progress made since the racism he faced in his own childhood in 1970s Bristol.

One of the roles he has taken on since leaving Parliament in 2024 is heading up The Independent Commission on Community & Cohesion, along with Jon Cruddas, the former Labour MP for Dagenham.

“A good friend, but someone on a different side politically, but I think what we definitely agree on is the division, sadly, in the UK, broadly put, has been on the rise, as it has been in many countries,” he told PoliticsHome.

He said it will be looking at “what more can we do to bring people together to have less segregation, more integration”, but admits he could have done more during his time in office.

As communities secretary in 2016, Javid commissioned a report from Dame Louise Casey, which said there were “worrying levels of segregation” in the UK, leading him to publish a government green paper and integration strategy. 

“I was just sort of getting going with it, and then Brexit happened”, Javid told PoliticsHome, bemoaning the fact that many priorities were jettisoned in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, adding: “We basically lost focus on many things.”

Earlier this month, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Steve Reed, announced a new social cohesion strategy, which included a new anti-Muslim hostility definition designed to help tackle rising abuse towards Muslims, as well as new government powers to close extremist charities and an additional £5m for the Common Ground Resilience Fund.

“Cohesion underpins our economic strength, our democratic freedom and our national security. It is a fundamental part of the Britain we love. We have made our choice in place of division, we choose unity, and we know the people of Britain have made the same choice,” Reed said.

The Rundown is presented by Alain Tolhurst, and is produced by Nick Hilton and edited by Ewan Cameron for Podot

• Click here to listen to the latest episode of The Rundown, or search for ‘PoliticsHome’ wherever you get your podcasts.

What does the data actually say?

Misdiagnosis can occur, but experts don’t think that’s the main issue here

Phil Woolas: 11 December 1959 – 14 March 2026 | Image by: PA Images / Alamy

4 min read14 min

Phil Woolas, who battled stoically for a year with brain cancer never stopped talking politics and political philosophy.

Having cut his teeth at Nelson and Colne Further Education College, he emerged as one of the great political campaigners.

His political heroes were the gasworkers union leader JR Clynes and John Smith, both Labour leaders and, like Phil, people whose sense of purpose and everyday reality made the GMB union their natural home. This was where Phil enjoyed his working life the most.

Phil was the one politician of his generation who preferred the company of journalists to his political peers. With a television background, he commanded respect among the media – but no one else built as many friendships, as opposed to contacts, as Phil. He understood what a good story was and he had a knack for how to deliver the pictures that made a journalist’s life so much easier. Phil was a teller, not a spinner, of stories.

Phil was also an exceptional raconteur. Once, he recalled, he was to be interviewed by a local Co-op Party while seeking their approval as a parliamentary nominee. He travelled back to his home region for the selection meeting.

The six candidates were sent up a wooden ladder into the attic of the Co-op secretary’s home, a terraced house. As the meeting started, the elderly Co-op host appeared at the top of the ladder with six mugs of hot drinks. “I’ve brought you a drink,” he chimed, “five teas and a coffee for the southerner.”

Phil would roar with laughter at the brutality of his initiation into parliamentary politics. He had already emerged as a Labour student leader, but the many current Labour MPs who have followed in his path know nothing about how much they owe him.

He fought to the very end because he had more to give

Phil understood that the mass of students in his era studied at FE, in technical colleges and in English polytechnics, and ran an entire campaign going out into uncharted territory to bring people in. It worked brilliantly and his strategising, with a tiny group of others, established the Labour Party hegemony in the student movement that was to last nearly three decades.

When I was elected as an MP after Phil, he came up to me in the Commons with one piece of wisdom. “Never forget that they treat people like you and me as the oiks in here.” And it wasn’t the mandarins or Commons staff he was talking about.

Phil was a good minister, and a brilliant MP. He saw his job as to empower those who needed someone to be on their side. He relished winning justice where it was being denied. While some scorn the minutiae of politics, he saw it as fundamental that he was there for his constituents and that he won for them. For Phil, it was the definition of leadership.

And he was at his happiest and most brilliant when given the freedom to campaign for the GMB union. Which other politician would have dared to entrust ex-coalminers from Worksop and Bolsover to march around London with Cedric the Pig to expose corporate guilt?

Clynes used to quote Shakespeare and Milton. Phil graduated in philosophy and had that rarity of a photographic memory. He painted pictures through his words, using philosophy as his guide. He didn’t see himself or anyone else as special or gifted. His essence was to reach out and draw in. For Phil, there were no ordinary people, no common people. Just a mass of extraordinary human beings, none more worthy than others. Like the rest of us, he had plenty of faults, but his Parliament and his party need his philosophy more than ever.

He fought to the very end because he had more to give. But he leaves us with his wisdom. More will miss you, my friend, than you could have ever dared imagine. 

Lord Mann is a Labour peer

Darren Millar MS is the leader of the Conservative Party in Wales.

It has been less than two years since Keir Starmer became Prime Minister and voters elected a UK Labour Government, yet his personal ratings are already at record lows and it’s clear that people are fed up.

Just imagine being lumbered with a Labour Government for more than quarter of a century. Because that is precisely the situation for us here in Wales, where we have endured 27 years of Welsh Labour, propped up by Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats.

The impact has been devastating.

Amongst other things, the Welsh Government is entirely responsible for running and funding the NHS, education, transport, economic development and local government.

Welsh Labour like to portray themselves as the architects of the National Health Service, although this is not entirely accurate (the NHS developed from the Emergency Medical Service established under Winston Churchill’s wartime government). But what matters is the situation today. And I am afraid that it is a sad fact that patients in Wales currently wait longer in emergency departments, longer for ambulances, and longer for tests and treatment than patients elsewhere in the UK. With patients here being hundreds of times more likely to be waiting two years plus for treatment than over the border in England.

And Labour’s record on education in Wales is equally woeful.

Wales’ most famous political figure, David Lloyd George, apparently described our nation as a land of “teachers and preachers.” But no matter how hard individual teachers work, our educational standards have plummeted. In the 1990s, GCSE pass rates suggested that education standards in Wales were broadly in line with the rest of the UK. Twenty-seven years later, the independent PISA tests show that Wales’ standards are the worst in the UK and ranking below former Soviet bloc countries.

The failure to get to grips with health and education standards are mirrored by Labour’s stewardship of the Welsh economy.

Wales has the lowest employment rate in the UK and the lowest pay packets in Great Britain. Small businesses such as pubs and post office pay higher business rates than in England. Tourists are threatened with an overnight tax, and major investors are put off by the slow planning system, Labour’s failure to invest in building new roads, and an unnecessary default 20mph speed limit that has slowed our motorists and economy down.

The results of Labour’s mismanagement of our economy and public services are plain to see. Just last week an IFS report found Wales has been receiving around 15 per cent more funding per head for public services than England, yet has delivered far worse outcomes.

But there is hope. Because on 7th May, the people of Wales will go to the polls.

The Welsh Conservatives have produced a manifesto with a clear plan to fix Wales and get Wales working.

On day one of a Welsh Conservative Government, we would declare a health emergency to  get every part of government focused on addressing the crisis in our NHS by surging bed numbers to end corridor care and free up ambulances stuck outside our hospitals.

We will restore discipline in schools, ban mobile phones, and back teachers by automatically expelling pupils who bring knives into schools; something which, amazingly, Labour has refused to do.

We have set out a range of measures to kick-start the Welsh economy. With an income tax cut of 1p in the pound to put £450 back into the pockets of the average hardworking family in Wales. And by scrapping Welsh Stamp Duty (known as Land Transaction Tax) on people’s main homes, to help people realise their dream of home ownership, move up and down the housing ladder, and support the many small businesses that depend on the housing market – plumbers, electricians, decorators and many others.

“But how would this be paid for?” cry the interviewers.

It is a pleasure to answer.

We would start by cutting back on the mountains of Labour waste.

For example, we would reverse the outrageous decision to spend £120 million increasing the number of Senedd Members from 60 to 96. We would make real efficiency savings in civil service costs which have increased by more than £150 million over the past few years.

We’d also scrap spending on matters for which the Welsh Government is not responsible, such as aviation, immigration, international development and foreign affairs.

The Welsh Labour is spending £200m on grants for the nationalised Cardiff Airport, millions on a ‘Nation of Sanctuary Plan’, a small fortune on tree planting in Africa and solar panelled canoes in the Amazon, and millions more of taxpayers’ money on overseas ‘embassies’ in a range of exotic cities. All this will face the axe.

Closer to home, Wales is dotted with empty Welsh Government offices, set up for civil servants who now largely work from home. We would end this waste.

We will also scrap business rates for small businesses such as pubs, cafes and post offices and axe Labour and Plaid’s toxic tourism tax.

We will expand free access to free childcare, which is vital for enabling new parents to return to work. Mums and dads here have been denied the 30 hours of free childcare available for parents in England, even though the funding has been made available to Wales as a result of the extension of childcare by the previous UK Conservative Government.

We will make sure this cash is spent to support families in Wales, so that working parents here have the same rights as those in England, and we will also pioneer a policy allowing new parents to choose to nominate a grandparent to care for their children instead of using a traditional childcare placement.

Under our proposals, a grandparent could receive a payment of up to £4,800, to recognise their role in supporting their families. Our plans would cost less than formal childcare provision and enable families to choose what works best for them.

Where Labour cancelled new road building because of their anti-motorist agenda, we are committed to investing in our economic arteries, including delivering an M4 relief road, upgrading the A55 and dualling the A40 to Fishguard in west Wales.

We will stand up for the rights and safety of women and girls, by respecting the ruling of the Supreme Court on women-only spaces, and commissioning a Wales-wide grooming gangs inquiry.

We will fight for our farmers and rural Wales, by boosting the farming budget, ditching unnecessary regulations, and promoting Welsh produce and honest labelling.

We will also honour our heroes. We are committed to establishing a National Military Museum for Wales to celebrate the enormous contribution Wales has made to the armed forces of the United Kingdom. And we will back our military veterans by increasing funding for Veterans NHS Wales, and extending free bus travel to all who have served in our armed forces.

Finally, we will stop the obsession with trying to grab more powers for the Senedd. Defence, immigration and policing are reserved matters, and rightly so. Only the Conservatives will respect the devolution settlement and promote the benefits of being part of the UK to the people of Wales.

This is a fully costed and authentically conservative manifesto.

After 27 years of falling standards and economic decline under Labour, this is an offer of a better future: lower taxes, better public services, and a growing economy.

After nearly three decades of Labour rule, we are offering real and credible change.