How Rachel Reeves Fell into Britain’s Favourite Trap

There’s a certain irony in watching Rachel Reeves, the nation’s Chancellor, tripped up not by tax avoidance or offshore accounts, but by one of Britain’s most quietly pernicious bureaucratic inventions – the selective landlord licence.

These schemes began with noble intent, targeting slum landlords and unsafe housing. But instead of a simple national system, we’ve ended up with a scattergun of local fiefdoms – one side of a street needs a licence, the other doesn’t. Councils must “publicise” the scheme, but not actually tell anyone. If you rent out your home for a year, you’re expected to know the invisible rulebook.

Reeves did what most people would do – she hired professionals to handle it. The letting agent, who was paid to manage the property, failed to mention that her postcode required a licence. That isn’t just sloppy; it’s a breach of professional duty and quite possibly of contract. Agents are legally obliged to give landlords all material information, including local licensing rules. Their job is to prevent exactly this kind of mess. If a tenant or small landlord had been misled like that, they’d have every right to claim compensation for any fine or fallout.

Yet the law still dumps ultimate blame on the landlord. Councils are off the hook because they only have to make an announcement somewhere online. The agent shrugs and hides behind small print. And the press, scenting blood, paints it as moral failure rather than what it is – systemic incompetence wrapped in red tape.

The whole structure is designed to punish the conscientious while the rogues slip through untouched. Bureaucracy rewards the rule-makers and penalises the rule-takers. Reeves broke the rule, yes – but she fell into a trap built by the very system she’s now accused of mastering.

If the government were serious about improving standards, it would fix the machinery. One national postcode checker, automatic prompts when a property is listed, and shared liability for agents who fail to do their jobs. Instead, we cling to a labyrinth that confuses the honest, feeds headlines, and achieves nothing.

Britain has become expert at punishing error while excusing failure. We can’t fix the housing crisis or the NHS backlog, but heaven help anyone who forgets to click the right box on a council website. That’s not justice or accountability – it’s bureaucracy at its most British.

And now Kemi Badenoch, never one to miss a cheap shot, demands Reeves’s resignation. But that’s theatre, not principle. Reeves didn’t hide money offshore, fiddle expenses, or lie to Parliament – she rented her house and trusted an agent who failed to do their job. She admitted it, apologised, and rectified it. That’s how accountability is supposed to work. Badenoch, who’s been economical with the truth about her own cv, might want to reflect on that before throwing stones.

If every minister who made a bureaucratic error resigned, Westminster would be an empty building. The fair response isn’t to brand this as corruption, but to fix the system that created the trap. Britain doesn’t need another scalp – it needs to stop mistaking administrative failure for moral decay.

Trussonomics with a Pint

I decided to do some research on Farage’s tax promises I decided to do some research on Farage’s tax promises. You know, the ones that sound like they’ve been scribbled on a beer mat between rounds – raise the personal allowance to £20,000, slash corporation tax, scrap inheritance tax, and somehow pay for it all by “cutting waste.” It’s the same old populist bait-and-switch: handouts for the wealthy disguised as help for the working class.

The numbers, once you look at them, are laughable. Raising the income-tax threshold to £20,000 alone costs £50–80 billion a year. Add inheritance-tax abolition, corporation-tax cuts, and his shiny new “Britannia card” for the super-rich, and you’re over £100 billion down before the kettle’s boiled. The supposed savings from “waste” and “civil-service fat” don’t even cover stationery.

Strip away the pub banter and what’s left is Trussonomics with a pint in its hand. Farage is promising exactly what Liz Truss tried in 2022 – massive unfunded tax cuts in the name of growth. We all remember how that went: gilt yields exploded, the pound fell through the floor, and the Bank of England had to ride to the rescue while mortgage holders paid the price.

And look who’s backing Reform. It’s not the bloke on £25k trying to heat his house – it’s hedge-fund managers, property speculators, oil investors and the deregulation junkies who cheered Truss’s mini-budget right up to the moment it imploded. They bankroll Farage because he’s their kind of “anti-establishment” hero – the sort who rails against elites while writing their tax cuts.

So I asked ChatGPT to run the numbers properly – to model who would benefit, who would pay, and what happens when the bond markets inevitably react. The result was brutal. Then I had it chart the outcome for both Truss’s budget and Farage’s plan, side by side.

Now, yes – someone earning £20,000 would gain about £1,500 a year from the tax cut. But that’s the mirage. Once you factor in higher borrowing costs, reduced services, and market jitters, that £1,500 evaporates faster than a pint in July. The bond market doesn’t care about patriotism; it cares about arithmetic. A government trying to borrow tens of billions without a plan gets punished – and the punishment arrives in the form of higher mortgages, rents, and inflation.

So who gains? The same crowd who always do – the landlords, donors, and hedge-fund gamblers who thrive on volatility. Who pays? Everyone else. Taxpayers who pick up the tab, homeowners facing higher repayments, and pensioners watching services stripped bare.

It’s the oldest con in British politics: promise the working man relief while quietly wiring the proceeds to the already wealthy. Farage calls it “common sense economics.” In reality, it’s the ghost of Truss, wrapped in the Union Flag and holding a pint – another reheated fantasy for people who mistake nostalgia for competence.

The bond market won’t salute it. It’ll just price it. And when it does, Britain will pay again – because arithmetic, unlike populism, doesn’t lie.

Keeping the Lights on

You’d think that after every hurricane flattens another island nation, someone in government might look at the fleet of cars sitting idle in driveways and connect a couple of dots. The average modern car has an alternator that could power half a village’s fridges and phone chargers – yet when the lights go out, we’re still fumbling about with candles and praying the generator starts.

It’s daft, really. We’ve spent a century turning cars into rolling computers, capable of parallel parking themselves, chirping reminders about our seatbelts, and phoning home when they’re low on washer fluid – but ask one to run a fridge and it sulks. The technology’s there, it’s just not mandated.

In hurricane-prone countries like Jamaica, that’s a moral failure disguised as bureaucratic oversight. Every year, storms knock out power for days while perfectly serviceable vehicles sit in the street doing nothing but charging their own batteries. For the cost of a set of alloy wheels, every new car could include a 2-kilowatt inverter – a plug socket, in other words. Flick the switch, plug in the house, keep the insulin cold and the lights on. Not hard.

Japan figured this out after the 2011 tsunami. They didn’t wait for a committee to debate “the business case”. They told Toyota, Nissan, and Honda to make cars that could feed power back into homes. Ten years on, it’s standard practice. Meanwhile, the West is still busy arguing over the colour of the warning triangles.

And the numbers? They’re laughably small. Adding vehicle-to-load capability costs maybe £400 on a production line. In return, you get a national fleet of rolling generators – no fuel convoys, no panic buying, no daft politicians flying in for photo ops with torches. A country of 400,000 cars becomes 400,000 emergency power units overnight.

Governments love to talk about “resilience”. It’s a word they sprinkle into speeches after every disaster, usually followed by the promise of a task force. But resilience isn’t a slogan – it’s the ability to plug your house into your car and carry on living.

So here’s the challenge: mandate it. From 2027 onwards, every new car sold in hurricane-risk countries should come with a standard 230-volt outlet and a cut-off relay to prevent back-feeding. Call it what you like – a “Community Power Port”, if the marketing people insist. Then watch as entire islands stop going dark.

Because when the next hurricane comes, people won’t remember the minister’s statement. They’ll remember who had the sense to make sure the cars could keep the lights on.

The Dull Man’s Dilemma

Britain’s political tectonic plates are shifting again, though this time the movement isn’t revolutionary – it’s gravitational. After fourteen years of Conservative decay and a brief, disastrous flirtation with libertarian delusion, the electorate is crawling back toward stability like a hungover reveller seeking the cool side of the pillow. Starmer, ever the careful solicitor, has sensed the moment perfectly. He’s dull, deliberate, and disinclined to frighten the horses – which is precisely what Britain wants.

His strategy is almost Machiavellian in its restraint. He’s not attacking Reform because he doesn’t need to. Reform’s existence is the demolition crew. Every time Farage opens his mouth, another few bricks fall from the Tory wall. His policies – mass deportations, fantasy tax cuts, anti–Net Zero gibberish – can’t survive arithmetic, let alone reality. Yet for now, Labour’s best move is to let the wrecking ball swing. Farage is doing Starmer’s work for him.

Reform will implode long before the next general election. Its coalition of the aggrieved is held together only by fury. When scrutiny arrives – costings, legality, practicality – the fantasy collapses. The “common sense” they preach turns out to be nonsense on stilts. The party will consume itself in betrayal narratives, and by the time ballots are printed, it’ll be a spent force – noisy but irrelevant.

Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch is chasing them into the abyss, mistaking the echo chamber for the electorate. Every time she borrows Farage’s rhetoric, she validates him and exposes her own desperation. She’s leading the Tories into an identity crisis from which they may not recover – torn between nostalgia and nihilism, unsure whether they’re a party of government or a podcast.

It’s a tragic fall for what was once the most formidable election-winning machine in Western democracy. The Tories’ genius lay not in ideology but adaptability. They could reinvent themselves faster than their opponents could define them – Disraeli’s paternalism, Baldwin’s calm, Macmillan’s modernity, Thatcher’s conviction, Cameron’s rebrand. They never needed to be loved, only trusted. When times were good, they took credit; when times were bad, they promised order. Their strength was pragmatism wrapped in patriotism – a party that sniffed the public mood before the public could articulate it.

That instinct has gone. Brexit and the culture wars killed it. Today’s Conservatives mistake volume for vision, grievance for grit, and populism for patriotism. They no longer read the country – they shout at it.

And there sits Starmer, saying very little, moving very slowly, watching his opponents destroy each other. He’s playing for history, not headlines. The Corbynites can scream betrayal, but he knows they don’t deliver governments – only purity and defeat. Let them follow Corbyn into well–meaning irrelevance.

Yet there’s a risk creeping in – a sickness peculiar to governments that mistake control for competence. The urge to tidy away dissent, to sand down democracy until it no longer squeaks. Starmer’s plan to let police curb “repeated protests” isn’t about law and order; it’s about optics. He’s so terrified of appearing radical that he’s begun to sound authoritarian. The paradox of Starmerism is that in trying to appear safe, it risks becoming sterile – and sterility breeds resentment.

No Tory voter ever switches sides because Labour flirts with authoritarianism; they’ll always prefer the genuine article. But those who gave Labour its majority – the young, the idealists, the ones who still believe protest is part of democracy – may simply drift away. Disillusion doesn’t march; it stays home.

Starmer’s caution won him the crown, but if he confuses stillness with strength, he’ll lose the kingdom. Britain doesn’t crave spectacle – it craves fairness. And you can’t claim to champion free speech while throttling the means by which ordinary people exercise it.

So yes, the old order is collapsing. Reform consumes the Tories; Corbyn drains the far left. And when the shouting dies down, Starmer may still be standing in the middle – unglamorous, unflappable, victorious. But if he keeps mistaking obedience for stability, the quiet he inherits may not be consent. It may just be the calm before the next storm.

Something in the Air – and Then Silence

I was surprised, I’ll admit, when I dug into Thunderclap Newman. For years I’d assumed they were American – the name sounded it, for a start, and Something in the Air had that cinematic, widescreen quality that seemed more California than Croydon. You half expect Dennis Hopper to wander through the second verse. So when I discovered they were not only British but practically home-grown from Pete Townshend’s spare room, it stopped me in my tracks.

 

They weren’t even a proper band, more a benevolent experiment by Townshend: a pub pianist, a teenage guitar prodigy, and his ex-flatmate on drums. It reads like a joke setup – “An electrician, a schoolboy and a Who guitarist walk into a studio…” – yet somehow, for one perfect moment in 1969, it worked.

Something in the Air wasn’t just another track about peace and love. It was a soft-spoken revolution – a call to arms delivered with English politeness, like a manifesto slipped under the vicar’s door. The honky-tonk piano gave it a faint whiff of seaside nostalgia, the brass sounded as if the Salvation Army had gone rogue, and the lyrics promised a moral uprising wrapped in a lullaby. It’s the only protest song you could hum while queuing for a cup of tea.

The timing was uncanny. Britain was restless but restrained – a nation still ironing its trousers while plotting the overthrow of everything. Students were occupying colleges, strikes were rumbling, and the post-war dream was looking moth-eaten. Meanwhile, America was in full technicolour turmoil: Vietnam, civil rights, assassinations. Over there, the revolution was televised; over here, it was discussed over a pint.

When Something in the Air floated across the Atlantic, the Americans barely noticed. It reached No. 37 on the Billboard charts – respectable, but not the stuff of legend. Perhaps it was too civilised for them. U.S. radio was drenched in Hendrix, Dylan and Jefferson Airplane; this curious little British anthem arrived like a cup of cocoa at a riot. No screaming guitars, no righteous fury – just the calm insistence that “we have got to get it together now.”

Part of the problem was that Thunderclap Newman didn’t really exist in any tangible sense. They never toured, never gave interviews, never built the myth that America demands. Townshend had plucked them from obscurity, shepherded them through one transcendent session, and sent them back into the ether. By the time anyone asked for an encore, there was no band left to play it.

Still, the song refused to die. It’s been resurrected endlessly in film soundtracks – The Magic Christian, Almost Famous, Kingpin – whenever a director needs to summon that fleeting moment when idealism still seemed rational. It’s the sound of 1969 bottled: the last sweet breath before cynicism took over.

The fates of its creators only deepen the melancholy. Speedy Keen retreated to modest solo work before dying young. Jimmy McCulloch blazed through Wings before a heroin overdose silenced him at 26. Andy Newman went back to his drawing board, literally – an electrical draftsman who occasionally revived the band’s name for old time’s sake. Townshend, of course, carried on dismantling rock stardom for sport, but he later called Something in the Air “the best single The Who never made.”

And perhaps that’s true. It was The Who’s idealism without the racket – the revolution whispered rather than shouted. It suggested change could be graceful, rebellion could wear a waistcoat. For a few shining weeks in 1969, Britain believed it. Then the dream ebbed away and Thunderclap Newman dissolved like morning mist.

But every so often, when the world feels jammed in the same old loop of greed and grift, I hear that line – “We have got to get it together now” – and think perhaps it’s time we did.

Farage Inc.

Nigel Farage loves to pretend he is fuelled by the pennies of honest patriots in flat caps. The reality is somewhat different. His movement is powered not by the bloke in the Wetherspoons, but by a small cabal of ultra-wealthy benefactors who could not care less whether the average Briton can afford heating or a dentist.

Start with Christopher Harborne. Over £10 million ploughed into Reform. That is not charity. That is an investment. Then Jeremy Hosking with roughly £1.7 million. A financier who once bankrolled the Tories, now underwriting Farage. There is Nick Candy, luxury property baron, pledging a cool million. Terence Mordaunt, Peter Hall, Bassim Haidar — all big money. Roger Nagioff, ex-Lehman, lives in Monaco. Because nothing says “British patriot” quite like a tax exile waving a chequebook from the Riviera. Even Fiona Cottrell, mother of Farage’s aide, quietly dropping three-quarters of a million into the pot. And Zia Yusuf, wealthy tech investor, now chairing the party.

This isn’t a grassroots army. It is a donor pyramid, with Farage sitting right at the apex shouting about sovereignty while his paymasters eye deregulation and tax cuts like children at a sweet shop window.

His business interests tell the same story. REFORM 2025 Ltd — a “people’s party” owned and directed by the people at the very top. Farage Media Ltd — dormant, yet his pockets bulge from media gigs elsewhere. Thorn In The Side Ltd — named after his public persona, and the only accurate thing in the entire Farage business empire. Then the golden cherry on the cake — nearly £200,000 a year from a gold dealer for four hours a month. A fear-mongering side-hustle that relies on him catastrophising the country, because nothing sells bullion like panic.

He claims to fight for “ordinary Britons.” The evidence says he fights for Harborne, Hosking, Candy and the rest. His success depends on a divided nation, angry voters, and policies shaped to please those who already own most of the Monopoly board. He barks about elites while pocketing their money. He points at immigrants while shaking hands with tycoons who stash wealth offshore.

Farage’s true allegiance is not to the flag or the factory floor. It is to Farage Inc. It is to those who benefit from grievance, deregulation and fear. When he hoists a pint and bangs on about taking back control, you might wonder who actually pulled the strings that day.

Spoiler. It wasn’t the bloke buying the round.

Who Really Pays at the Checkout?

Supermarkets are staging a pantomime again. The bosses of Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and the rest have written to the Chancellor wringing their hands about the terrible injustice of business rates and muttering darkly that food prices will rise if taxes go up. It is the corporate equivalent of leaning on the price gun while staring you in the eye and saying it pains them more than you.

The first rule of supermarket lobbying. Whenever anyone suggests they pay a fair share towards the society they depend upon, the PR department immediately shouts that the poorest will suffer. They don’t mean it. They have simply learned that invoking struggling families is the quickest route to a government U turn.

Here is what they do not shout about. Tesco’s profits are nudging three billion pounds. Lidl’s profits have tripled. Sainsbury’s shareholders are not crying themselves to sleep. When energy costs surged and the war in Ukraine pushed food inflation off a cliff, margins tightened for a while, yet the big grocery chains survived. Somehow they did not go bust because Greggs was paying business rates.

The supermarkets want you to believe that a modest property tax rise leads automatically to higher prices. It does not. They choose how much to pass on. They choose whether the burden comes from shareholders, executives, landlords or the customer at the checkout. Claiming inevitability is simply refusing accountability.

What is really driving high food prices. Climate driven harvest failures. Fertiliser and fuel costs. Brexit’s endless paperwork circus. Global supply chains tying themselves in knots. All inconvenient facts that big retailers prefer to stuff quietly behind the bargain bin. They would rather wave a Budget document and pretend it is Rachel Reeves who made tomatoes expensive.

And here is the worst of it. Low income households feel every tiny rise. These are the families who do not have a “trimming luxuries” category. When prices creep up, they skip meals. The same supermarkets telling us they care about the poor will happily squeeze those customers dry to preserve executive bonuses and investor dividends.

If the supermarkets genuinely cared about struggling households, their letter would have said something radical. We will protect food essentials. We will absorb the increase. We will use our scale to shield those who have no cushion.

Instead, they effectively said. Raise our taxes and we will take it out of your hide.

The Chancellor faces a grim reality. Fourteen years of Conservative misrule hollowed out the state. Public services are wrecked. The debt is high. She must raise money or continue the decline. If she chooses to raise taxes on hugely profitable retailers, that is entirely defensible. The test will be whether she also protects those with the least by uprating benefits properly, expanding free school meals, and keeping staples zero rated.

Because here is the truth stripped of PR spin. Higher taxes do not have to hurt the poor. Treating the poor as a human shield for corporate profits definitely does.

So the next time a supermarket CEO claims they are “fighting for the customer,” remember who they actually fight for. The boardroom. The shareholders. The glossy advert budget. Everyone except the family at the checkout deciding whether tonight it will be beans or nothing at all.

Make America Glitter Again

Trump as an ardent fan of Strictly is almost too believable. Picture him sprawled in what used to be the East Wing, sequinned robe, bucket of KFC, shouting at the telly every Saturday night. “Ten. Ten. Ten. Unless they are losers. Then zero.”

He has clearly concluded that Britain’s greatest cultural export is not Shakespeare, nor the NHS, but a ballroom dancing show with more glitter than good sense. He adores the American version too. Dancing with the Stars is essentially his political philosophy: fame equals virtue, clapping equals legislation.

So of course he wants to host it from the White House. Bulldoze the heritage, carpet the Oval Office in gold lamé, and replace the visitor tours with tango lessons. The show must go on. Constitution to follow, once the confetti cannons have cooled.

He imagines himself as Bruce Forsyth reincarnated. “Nice to see you - to see you nice. And you are all delighted to be here with your President. You love him. Everyone loves him. Even Craig would give me a ten. Unless he is very rude.”

The judging panel becomes geopolitical. Shirley Ballas at NATO. Anton du Beke running the CIA with unusually stylish shoes. Peace in our time negotiated via paso doble.

World leaders would be paired for ratings. Putin and Zelenskyy performing an Argentine Tango down the Grand Staircase, intense eye contact, both pretending not to notice the concealed daggers. The crowd roars, unsure whether to applaud or call a ceasefire.

Then, in the most controversial dance-off in broadcasting history, Netanyahu and whoever is currently leading Hamas trying to get through a rumba without throwing each other off the balcony. “Keep your frame, gentlemen. No annexing the dancefloor.”

The voting. The audience texts their choices. Trump declares it rigged if he gets fewer votes than Ed Balls doing a Charleston. Only one couple ever wins: Trump and Trump, waltzing around constitutional norms as if they were temporary stage props.

Press briefing. “Greatest ballroom built by any President. Obama never had a ballroom. He did not even have a rhumba room. Total failure. Everybody says so. Many people crying with joy. Beautiful tears.”

Meanwhile the Smithsonian quietly sobs into a hankie.

Strictly Come Dancing is harmless fun. Joyful nonsense. Which is exactly why it should never be confused with running a country. Although I suspect Trump would far rather foxtrot with D-list influencers than read intelligence briefings. Glitter does not answer back.

At least you know how it ends. Results night. He loses. He declares victory anyway. Then demands a recount. Then sues the judges. Then bans the judges. Then insists the trophy was his all along because he won the popular samba.

We laugh because it is ridiculous. We worry because it is not that far from reality.

Diversity Is Not a Crime. Hypocrisy Is.

I have been watching the latest culture war flimflam unfold, and it is depressingly predictable. A Reform MP gets herself in a lather because adverts dare to feature Black and Asian people. Apparently this sight alone “drives her mad”, which is not exactly reassuring on the emotional stability front. Her defence is the usual guff about adverts not reflecting “ordinary Britain”, which is political code for “I am uncomfortable with visible diversity, so please hide it so I can pretend we are still in 1957.”

Then a study comes along that the right think proves their case. Channel 4’s Mirror on the Industry report shows representation in adverts is uneven. People of Black heritage appear in over half the adverts studied while they make up only around four per cent of the population. South and East Asian people are over-represented too. So yes, on one axis of identity, the pendulum has swung hard.

However, the same research shows disabled people, pregnant women, LGBTQ+ people and anyone over 70 are all shoved out of sight. Disabled people make up almost 18 per cent of the country and appear in just four per cent of adverts. Pensioners appear in only two per cent. That is erasure on a grand scale. A Britain whose most rapidly growing demographic is considered commercially invisible.

The MP in question has not complained once about that. Her outrage is laser guided at one thing alone. The presence of non white people. Not the absence of disabled people. Not the disappearance of the elderly. Not the fact that the advertising industry is petrified of showing anyone who looks like the average British consumer in a post office queue. Just melanin.

So let us be clear about what is happening. Advertising has made progress in one area and remains stuck in the mud in others. It is not a deliberate attempt to replace anyone. It is simply the industry doing what it always does. Chasing youth. Chasing aesthetics. Chasing a simplified idea of modern cool. And because of decades of absence, when inclusion for a few finally arrives, some viewers feel overwhelmed by the novelty.

Now the right are trying to rebrand their discomfort as a critique of “diversity washing.” That term does have a legitimate place. It is the sibling of greenwashing. Greenwashing is an oil company running an advert with a single wind turbine and a dolphin. Diversity washing is a bank running an advert with three photogenic minorities but a boardroom still run by men named Charles. In both cases, the glossy image hides the grubby truth.

And yes, advertisers are guilty of that at scale. Representation on screen improves while employment, pay and power structures remain firmly locked. Visibility without share of power is marketing theatre. It deserves to be called out.

But this MP is not asking for companies to employ more minorities. She is not demanding that disabled people or the elderly be given their fair share of casting or careers. She is not pushing for authenticity or seeking to end hypocrisy. She is irate because adverts sometimes show a Britain she does not like the look of. A Britain that actually exists.

Advertising has always been a cultural advance party. It reflects where society is going, not where a small, grumbling minority demand we freeze it. When people who were shoved to the edges are seen front and centre in a sunny kitchen making tea, the signal is simple. You belong here. You are part of the national story. That is what rattles the thin skinned. They want pretend Britain, where only they are visible.

So by all means, let us drag the ad industry out of its comfort zone. If they celebrate diversity in public, they must practise it throughout their organisations. Hire people. Promote them. Fund their creative decisions. Do not pretend the job is done because the cast in a washing powder advert look less like the attendees at a Rotary Club dinner.

What I will not do is indulge those who cry foul only when the visible change is racial. For them, diversity washing is a fig leaf. Their real grievance is that diversity is happening at all. That complaint has a name. We should stop dancing around it.

It is racism in a shiny new wrapper. Time to rip the wrapper off.

And here is the final irony. Most people hate adverts. They are white noise between the programmes we actually want to watch. We fast-forward them. We pick up our phones. We put the kettle on. The only people paying attention are those looking for something to be offended by. So if suddenly they are leaping from the sofa to shout at the television, the advertisers have accidentally become geniuses.

There is psychology at play. Diversity washing is not merely a lazy attempt to look modern. It is a provocation. It flushes out the ones who believe any representation beyond themselves is an assault. In the process, it reveals precisely who is terrified of Britain looking like Britain.

Perhaps the joke is on them.

The Gospel According to the Hat

There’s a special place in Hell for people who wear hats indoors. Not the unthinking ones – the farmer who forgets to take his cap off in the pub, or the pensioner shielding his pate from the glare of the bar lights – but the deliberate ones. The ones who do it for “the look.” The ones whose hat isn’t an accessory but a mission statement.

George Galloway’s hat, for instance, deserves its own peerage. A black fedora, permanently welded to his head, as though at some point it fused with the scalp and became symbiotic. He wears it not as clothing but as punctuation. It’s the full stop at the end of every pompous sentence. It says: I am not merely a man – I am an event.

It’s theatre, of course. Every time Galloway tilts that brim, you can practically hear the inner monologue: Revolutionary… rogue… raconteur… The hat completes the illusion of gravitas, the way a stage prop completes a pantomime villain. Without it, he’d just be another ageing showman with a pocket full of grievances and a voice trained in the art of rolling R’s like thunder. With it, he’s a caricature – a 21st-century Trotsky in trilby drag.

He’s not alone. Boy George wears a hat as if it’s a licence to be eccentric. It’s become his emotional firewall: the wider the brim, the thicker the armour. And The Edge – a name that already sounds like a parody – has made the beanie an emblem of tortured artistic authenticity. You can almost see the equation forming in his head: Hat + guitar pedalboard = mystery.

What unites these men is the delusion that a hat can elevate the soul. It’s the belief that millinery can manufacture depth. The truth, however, is brutally simple: a man who wears a hat indoors is telling you, without words, that he has mistaken style for identity.

You can date the decline of Western seriousness to the moment we stopped laughing at this. Once upon a time, removing your hat indoors was a basic act of civility – a mark that you’d left your vanity at the door. Now, it’s a costume piece, part of the theatre of self.

The problem isn’t the hat – it’s the need for it. The compulsion to signal, to brand oneself, to disguise emptiness with fabric. It’s the same syndrome that gives us politicians in hard hats on factory visits, pop stars in balaclavas, and middle-aged pundits in cowboy hats preaching authenticity from a Shoreditch café.

So yes – let’s talk about Galloway’s hat. Because it’s not just a hat. It’s the crown of the hollow man, the dome under which self-importance ferments. The next time you see it glint under studio lights, remember: underneath all that felt is nothing but scalp – and a desperate need to be noticed.

Reform – The Party That Needs Britain Broken

I’ve been following the fallout from the Caerphilly by-election, and something struck me like a bad smell in the wind. Everyone’s talking about Plaid Cymru’s “historic win”, but few are admitting the tactical truth – it wasn’t so much a surge for Plaid as a manoeuvre against Reform.

Plaid’s victory was the electorate’s emergency brake. Reform were closing fast, feeding off Labour’s decay and the stench of political exhaustion. Plaid became the acceptable protest – a way for people to say enough without giving Farage the keys. It worked, but only temporarily.

Because Plaid can’t deliver the change voters are desperate for. Not from lack of integrity, but from lack of power. Caerphilly’s problems – collapsing public services, stagnant wages, a hollowed-out high street – are structural. They can’t be fixed without real money, and real money means higher taxes. The voters just demanded transformation without payment, and that’s a trick no politician can pull off.

So when nothing visibly changes, who do you think will come striding back with that smug grin and another slogan about “betrayal”? Reform. They’ll point at Plaid, sneer “no better than the rest,” and the same angry voters will look right again – this time not tactically, but permanently.

Reform can’t run a bath, let alone a country. Their manifesto is fantasy economics: £80 billion in unfunded tax cuts, mass deportations that would require an army of charter planes, and “drill baby drill” nonsense in a North Sea that’s almost tapped out. But their followers don’t care – the rage is the point. It’s emotional theatre dressed up as policy.

Farage and his gang have turned grievance into an industry. GB News, TalkTV, social media echo chambers – all feeding the outrage machine that keeps them relevant and funded. They’re not trying to fix Britain; they’re strip-mining it for resentment. If things ever improved, they’d lose their market.

So yes, Caerphilly’s vote for Plaid was a tactical firewall – the last attempt to block the advance of political nihilism. But if Plaid can’t show visible progress, the wall will crumble, and through the gap will march the pyromaniacs of Reform, petrol cans in hand, calling themselves saviours while the rest of us choke on the smoke.

The Great Grooming Gang Scandal

For fourteen years the Conservatives sat on their hands while girls were raped, trafficked, and abandoned – then, having done nothing, they now have the gall to point at Jess Phillips and cry “resign!”

It would be funny if it weren’t grotesque.

Let’s start with the record. Between 2010 and 2024, Britain was run by a conveyor belt of Tory Home Secretaries – Theresa May, Amber Rudd, Sajid Javid, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, James Cleverly – each promising action, each delivering a new press release instead of a policy. They could have launched a national statutory inquiry at any time. They didn’t.

When the Rotherham report exploded in 2014, exposing 1,400 victims and police who looked the other way, May called it “shocking” and did absolutely nothing beyond convening another review. Her Home Office even suppressed its own research because it found no neat ethnic villain to blame. That report – inconveniently for the tabloids – concluded there was no single ethnic pattern. May buried it. The myth of the “Asian grooming gang” was born, and the truth suffocated beneath it.

Meanwhile, council after council – Rochdale, Oxford, Telford, Oldham, Bradford – commissioned their own investigations. They found the same story everywhere: broken safeguarding, ignored victims, underfunded social services, police inertia. The pattern screamed national crisis. Westminster heard the alarm and shut the door.

By 2020, under Johnson and Patel, the farce deepened. The Home Office finally published its long-awaited review – quietly, with no press release – confirming what experts already knew: most child sexual abuse occurs within families, not “gangs” at all. Again, inconvenient. So the government pretended it hadn’t read its own findings and moved on to photo ops about “cracking down on woke policing.”

All this time, local safeguarding teams were being gutted by austerity. Twenty thousand police officers gone. A quarter of child-protection budgets wiped out. Rape conviction rates collapsed to the lowest in recorded history – barely one in sixty cases leading to charge. That wasn’t “political correctness.” It was political cruelty, dressed up as fiscal prudence.

Then came the final insult. Elon Musk vomits out a tweet about “Muslim rape gangs” and suddenly the very same politicians who ignored victims for a decade rediscover their outrage. GB News turns it into an open sewer of race-baiting. Reform UK demands “justice for white girls.” Tory MPs start bleating about cover-ups – by Labour, of course – as though Theresa May, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman had never existed.

And now, into this swamp, step a handful of survivors demanding Jess Phillips’ resignation. Some are undoubtedly sincere, furious at years of betrayal. Others are being used, their pain co-opted by the same populist machine that ignored them for fourteen years. Phillips, who spent her life working with abuse victims, is suddenly branded the villain – by the people who cut the budgets, burned the files, and buried the truth.

The right calls it accountability. I call it arsonists pointing at the ruins and blaming the smoke.

Yes, the grooming-gang survivors deserve trust and justice. But that will not come from the likes of Lee Anderson, who can barely pronounce “inquiry” without turning it into a culture war. Nor from the same tabloids that profited from printing their pain while voting for the governments that caused it.

The plain fact is this: Jess Phillips may have mishandled the optics – brusque tone, defensive letters, poor communication – but she’s the first minister actually trying to do the job. She’s building the statutory inquiry the Tories ducked for fourteen years. For that, she’s being pilloried by the very people who created the vacuum she’s trying to fill.

And those vaunted “local inquiries” the Tories hide behind? They existed because of government failure, not instead of it. Brave local councils – often Labour-run, incidentally – exposed what Westminster ignored. The Conservatives cherry-picked their findings for soundbites about “Asian gangs” while defunding the very services trying to stop all child exploitation, regardless of race.

The truth is both uglier and simpler than the populists admit: grooming gangs flourished because the state stopped caring. Not because the perpetrators were Pakistani, but because the victims were working-class girls – expendable under austerity, invisible in a system obsessed with spreadsheets and headlines.

And now those same moral pygmies have the audacity to point their trembling fingers at a minister who actually gives a damn.

So no – Jess Phillips shouldn’t resign. The ones who should are the ghosts of governments past. The Home Secretaries who smirked, delayed, and silenced research. The commentators who sold fear for clicks. The MPs who turned child rape into a political football.

This isn’t about justice for survivors anymore. It’s about a right-wing establishment desperate to rewrite history before the inquiry it never wanted reveals just how completely it failed.

When the final report lands, it won’t be Jess Phillips who stands accused. It’ll be fourteen years of Conservative complicity – the longest, most shameful silence in modern British politics.

And now the inquiry itself is unravelling – not by accident, but by design. The Conservatives have made it so toxic that no one of integrity dares lead it, which suits them perfectly. Every resignation, every row, every leaked letter keeps the spotlight off their own record and on Labour instead. They don’t need to stop the inquiry – only to make it unworkable. The chaos is the cover-up.

The Spare

The thing about Prince Andrew – His Royal Hubris – is that he’s not especially unusual. Not for a royal. Not even for an aristocrat. In fact, he’s almost exactly what you’d expect if you took a man of average ability, insulated him from consequence, handed him a chestful of unearned medals – and one he actually did earn – and then acted shocked when he turned out to be a liability.

Most families have a black sheep. Someone who hoards margarine tubs, or married into crypto. But in aristocratic families, the odds of producing a full-blown walking scandal aren’t just higher – they’re practically guaranteed. When your family tree looks like a coat stand and your childhood is spent being raised by nannies in castles, the result is rarely a well-adjusted adult. What you get instead is someone like Andrew – a man who thinks it’s normal to be on first-name terms with sex traffickers and who still insists he’s the victim in all this.

To be fair – and it’s worth the line – he did serve in the Falklands. As a Royal Navy helicopter pilot aboard HMS Invincible, he flew real missions under real threat, and by all accounts acquitted himself well. For that, credit is due. Unfortunately, it’s just about the only thing on his CV that wasn’t ceremonial, indulgent, or ill-advised.

The rest reads like a work of satire. Trade envoy – until that awkward business with Epstein made the government quietly sideline him like an embarrassing uncle at a wedding. Patron of various golf clubs and yachting societies – naturally. Now stripped of duties, but still rattling around Windsor like a ghost in uniform. The real joke is that none of this is new. The aristocracy has always produced its fair share of dysfunction. The royal version simply happens under brighter lights and with fewer consequences.

There’s a kind of cultivated uselessness that only hereditary privilege can produce. When you’ve never had to find a job, pay rent, or be told you’re wrong, you end up believing you’re infallible. Ordinary people have mates who say, “Don’t be a prat.” Royals have courtiers who say, “Very good, sir,” while watching you stumble into scandals that would finish anyone else. Andrew didn’t fall far from the family standard – he simply got caught in an age where the press can’t be silenced with a stern glance and a hunting party.

It’s not just him, of course. Spare royals have a tendency to unravel. The heir gets the throne. The spare gets resentment, a few baubles, and a life of trying to matter. See also: Edward. See also: Harry. See also: Margaret, if you like your royal dysfunction laced with cigarette smoke and whispered bitterness. Andrew is just the current holder of the flaming baton in a relay of regal embarrassment. And still, we pay for it. Not just with dignity, but with money. Lots of it. He lives rent-free in Windsor, protected and pampered, while the rest of us are told to tighten our belts. His one job – staying quietly out of sight – and even that’s too much.

What makes this more farcical is the fact that the aristocracy already has a solution. Whenever a title is one dodgy cousin away from disgrace, they dig up someone obscure – a cattleman from Queensland or a retired bank clerk in British Columbia – and quietly install them as the 9th Duke of Hypocrisia. The peerage is full of accidental inheritors who were doing just fine baling hay or managing a hardware store when the call came. There’s no reason the same can’t be done with surplus Windsors. Just pick someone untainted, give them the sash and the sword, and quietly keep the rest of the clan in mothballs.

Because at some point, the question isn’t whether Andrew’s a disgrace – it’s why we ever allowed him to be a public figure at all. If he’d been born Andrew Windsor of Guildford, he’d be lucky to manage a garden centre. But he wasn’t. He was born into the national soap opera – and like all soap operas, the plotlines have grown tired, the characters absurd, and the sense of consequence completely vanished.

If we must have a Royal Family – and apparently we must – then the solution is simple. Hide everyone but the monarch and let the rest get a job. No palaces. No honours. No gold-braided nonsense. Just proper CVs, job interviews, and the slow dawning horror of office life. Let Andrew explain to a recruiter that his key skill is not sweating under pressure. Let Beatrice and Eugenie work out how to fund their flats without a family trust. Let the lot of them discover the joys of HR, deadlines, and the sandwich queue at Pret. It’s time they joined the country they claim to represent – the one that lives in the real world.

Katie Lam and the Mirage of Coherence

Katie Lam – Cambridge-educated, Goldman-honed, and now the latest bright hope of the post-truth Tory Party – has entered the political theatre dressed as a grown-up, while hawking ideas that belong in the dustbin of history. Her charm lies in the polish. Her danger lies in what she’s polishing.

She wants to make Britain “culturally coherent.” A fine slogan until you ask what it means. Because the last time this island was “culturally coherent,” half its inhabitants were painting themselves blue and the other half were sharpening swords to make them stop. The Scots, Irish, Welsh, and English have been at ideological arm’s length since before Parliament existed. The only thing binding us together has ever been law, not likeness.

So what is Lam actually proposing? A Britain where difference is a design flaw? Where “cultural coherence” becomes a euphemism for whitening the census and rewriting who belongs? That’s not a vision – it’s regression in a tailored jacket.

Her rhetoric about “outdated asylum” and “people who came legally but shouldn’t have” reeks of moral amnesia. Her grandparents fled Nazi Germany, yet she now dismisses the post-war rules-based order that gave their generation sanctuary. If that isn’t irony, it’s hypocrisy on stilts. The very conventions she sneers at were written in the ashes of the camps. They exist because nations once decided that turning people away was a crime against civilisation.

Then there’s her arithmetic – the fantasy of deporting “a million” people. She talks as if logistics were an afterthought and law a nuisance. The Home Office can’t even issue passports on time, yet she imagines fleets of aircraft shuttling the unwanted into oblivion. It’s not a policy; it’s an authoritarian daydream.

The real absurdity, though, lies in her premise. Britain has never been culturally coherent and never should be. Its genius has always been its incoherence – the messy, contradictory, argumentative jumble that somehow produces Shakespeare, steel ships, punk rock, and the NHS. The minute you start policing “coherence,” you begin deciding who counts as British, and that’s a road paved with ruin.

Katie Lam dresses her intolerance as intellect. She speaks in the calm tones of technocracy while tugging at the threads that hold a plural society together. That makes her more dangerous than the foam-flecked ranters. She’s the acceptable face of an unacceptable idea – that diversity is disorder and conformity is salvation.

The truth is simpler. A coherent Britain would be a dull, fearful Britain. Give me the noise, the argument, the contradictions. Give me a country too untidy to fit inside a slogan. And if Katie Lam wants coherence, she should start by explaining how a nation of Celts, Angles, Muslims, atheists, gays, Tories, and anarchists is meant to sing from the same hymn sheet.

Until she can do that, her coherence is a mirage – and her politics, for all their polish, belong to a darker age.

Energy Bills

We keep being told there’s nothing to be done about energy bills, as if Zeus himself etched the price cap into stone. But look at the breakdown and it’s obvious – around a tenth of what you pay isn’t for energy at all. It’s levies and policy costs, tacked on like an extra pint slipped onto your tab when you weren’t looking.

Shift those onto general taxation and the whole country would save the grief of seeing them on their bills. The Treasury would need roughly £5 billion a year to cover it. That sounds scary until you realise it’s about one penny on the basic rate of income tax. One penny – less than the change most people wouldn’t bother to stoop for in the street.

And here’s the rub: loading it onto bills is regressive. Everyone pays the same levy per unit, whether you’re a pensioner shivering in a semi or a hedge-fund manager heating his swimming pool. Do it through tax and you can scale it properly – the rich shoulder more, the poor shoulder less. Fairness 101.

Why don’t governments do it? Because no Chancellor wants a Budget headline that screams “1p on income tax.” So instead they bury it in your bill and let the energy companies take the blame, while ministers pose as guardians of “low taxes.” It’s smoke and mirrors – the money’s still coming out of your pocket, only in the most brutal way possible.

So the next time someone mutters darkly about “green levies pushing up bills,” tell them the truth. We could pay for the transition with a fair tax tweak the country wouldn’t even notice. But politicians would rather you stayed angry at your meter than at them.

Starmer’s Bargain: Silence for Stability

Britain’s moral compass has been pawned for a trade deal. Keir Starmer knows it, but he’d rather you didn’t notice. Israel is a lucrative partner – cybersecurity, defence tech, pharmaceuticals, AI – and a post-Brexit Britain has boxed itself in. The EU is gone, America is erratic, China is untouchable, and the Commonwealth is a postcard. What’s left are “strategic partners” like Israel, where commerce can masquerade as foreign policy. And so, post-Brexit, Starmer really has no choice. He’s governing a diminished nation that depends on transactional friendships to look globally relevant. He’s managing decline with a handshake.

So when Bezalel Smotrich talks of “erasing” Palestinian villages and Itamar Ben Gvir – a man once convicted of incitement to racism – parades as Israel’s security tsar, Downing Street looks away. Trade first, truth later – the moral cost already priced in.

The same logic played out on a smaller stage. West Midlands Police, working from clear intelligence, classed Aston Villa v Maccabi Tel Aviv as high-risk – Amsterdam’s riots last year still fresh, a Tel Aviv derby abandoned after flares and fighting. They acted prudently to prevent a repeat. Maccabi’s management reached for the oldest shield in politics: cry antisemitism. A public-safety call became “discrimination.” Ministers lined up to perform indignation while Aston Villa quietly told stewards they could skip the shift if they felt unsafe. The people mitigating risk were smeared; the provocateurs claimed victimhood. The micro mirrored the macro – moral clarity buried under politics.

Critics point out that other European clubs have far worse records of violence yet their fans travel freely. True – but their governments aren’t led by men like Smotrich and Ben Gvir, whose poison seeps into every aspect of Israeli life. Their rhetoric of supremacy and vengeance spills over borders, carried by satellite and social media, turning football fixtures into flashpoints. It’s not just the threat from Maccabi’s own ultras – it’s the reaction they provoke. Each chant, each flag, each away trip becomes a lightning rod for the fury those ministers – and Netanyahu, who indulges them – have stoked abroad. The provocation starts in Jerusalem and explodes on other people’s streets.

And over it all, Starmer repeats his anaesthetic line: “Israel has a right to defend itself, but must act within international law.” It sounds balanced until you realise it says nothing. We freeze Russian assets for war crimes, yet fly to Tel Aviv for trade memoranda. We preach a rules-based order while selling components to a government whose own ministers sneer at those rules. That isn’t diplomacy; it’s moral outsourcing disguised as pragmatism.

The Maccabi affair exposes the rot. It isn’t antisemitism. It isn’t anti-Israel. It’s anti-violence – a police force doing what the Foreign Office won’t: confront reality without political permission. And for that, they’re chastised. In Britain 2025, morality is measured in export potential, and “post-Brexit realism” has become a euphemism for surrender.

Starmer’s silence isn’t statesmanship. It’s the dull hum of a man trapped by history, buying credibility one contract at a time. Smotrich sneers, Ben Gvir preens, Netanyahu nods along, and Britain politely pretends not to notice – provided the paperwork clears. When trade becomes the excuse for everything, morality becomes the price of entry.

The UK Media Landscape

Britain’s media landscape these days resembles a badly run pub quiz – half the teams are drunk, one’s been bought by a hedge fund, and the quizmaster keeps shouting “woke” instead of reading the questions.

Take GB News, for instance. It bills itself as the “home of free speech,” though you’d get more balanced debate from a taxi radio at closing time. It’s where logic goes to die between adverts for gold bullion and vitamin supplements. If the presenters get any redder in the face, Ofcom will have to issue a fire warning.

Then there’s the Daily Express, which treats every drizzle as a “biblical deluge” and every Home Office statistic as proof that Armageddon begins in Dover. It’s essentially the Daily Mail’s excitable younger cousin – the one who discovered Facebook in 2016 and never recovered.

Speaking of which, the Daily Mail remains the country’s premier supplier of moral panic. Its front pages are an emotional rollercoaster for people who haven’t left their suburb since 1983. Immigrants, vegans, the BBC, Meghan Markle – whoever’s handy will do. It’s less a newspaper than a long scream into a net curtain.

The Telegraph once had gravitas, but now reads like the minutes of a Conservative Association séance. Its op-ed pages feature retired colonels who think rationing ended last week and hedge funders explaining why cutting taxes for themselves is an act of national mercy. If it were any more deferential to the wealthy, it would come with a shoehorn and a bottle of polish.

Meanwhile, The Times keeps pretending to be grown-up, sighing heavily as it explains to its readers why the government they supported has set the curtains on fire again. The Financial Times is still the only paper that can terrify billionaires and bore students in equal measure – though it remains the last refuge for anyone who understands numbers.

Over on the liberal side, The Guardian continues to wring its hands so hard it could power a small hydroelectric plant. It means well, it really does, but sometimes you sense it would apologise to a brick wall for its structural privilege. The Independent, having gone fully digital, exists mainly to tell you which types of hummus define your personality.

As for the broadcasters: BBC News now bends so far to prove it’s not biased, it’s practically doing yoga. Channel 4 News still has the temerity to ask questions, ITV News is politely baffled by everything, and Sky News delivers rolling coverage of Britain’s decline with all the energy of a weary schoolteacher.

Put together, it’s less a media ecosystem than a food chain of hysteria. The Mail terrifies the Telegraph, the Telegraph misleads the Express, GB News shouts about it, and the BBC holds a panel discussion asking whether shouting is “problematic”.

And yet, amid the noise, the truth still squeaks through – usually buried on page 14 between “Cat predicts cold snap” and “King enjoys pint”. Britain still produces fine journalists; it’s just that most of them are busy being shouted over by columnists who think nuance is a left-wing plot.

So the next time someone says “the mainstream media can’t be trusted,” remember: they’re right, but for the wrong reasons. The problem isn’t bias – it’s theatre. Everyone’s performing outrage for clicks, and the audience hasn’t realised the bar’s already closed.

I can’t resist weekend newspapers, but I buy The Times on Saturday and The Observer on Sunday. It’s a kind of ritual – the comforting rustle of pages that promise both enlightenment and mild irritation. The Times gives me the illusion of balance, all sober fonts and cautious conservatism, while The Observer restores my faith that someone, somewhere, still reads beyond the headlines. Between them, I get a weekend diet of respectability and rebellion – one telling me to mind my manners, the other reminding me why I shouldn’t.

BBC Balance - Again

Yesterday I made a post on Betfred, having read a BBC article on it; however, on reflection, it wasn’t Fred Done who deserved the spotlight – it was the BBC’s journalism. Or rather, the lack of it.

The piece was a masterclass in what the Corporation now seems to think “balance” means: repeat the words of a billionaire unchallenged, then toss in a few opposing quotes near the end for seasoning. Job done, impartiality achieved, time for coffee. The problem is, that’s not balance – it’s stenography with punctuation.

Fred Done, a billionaire bookmaker with operations stretching from Manchester to Gibraltar, tells the BBC that a modest tax rise could spell “the end of the industry”, costing 7,500 jobs. No one asks why a firm that rakes in a billion pounds in revenue and owns premises across several tax-light jurisdictions makes only half a million in operating profit. No one asks how much profit is quietly parked offshore. No one challenges his claim that a 35 per cent duty would finish him off. It’s all dutifully reported as if gospel.

This is what happens when “he said, she said” reporting replaces investigation. The journalists treat Done’s threats of shop closures as fact, yet offer no counter-data. The piece even repeats his claim that higher taxes would drive punters to offshore betting sites – without mentioning that the industry already shifted online years ago. Half the story, half the truth.

And then, right on cue, comes the ritual paragraph from the other side: a think tank quote, a charity soundbite, and an obligatory “critics say” to preserve the illusion of fairness. What’s missing is analysis. No exploration of whether Betfred’s model is even viable. No comparison of effective tax rates. No attempt to quantify the real social cost of gambling – estimated at up to £1.7 billion a year – against his alleged £20 million rise in company costs.

The BBC used to pride itself on calling power to account. Now it seems content to quote it. “Balance” has become a shield for timidity – the kind that leaves readers more misled than informed.

If Rachel Reeves does raise gambling taxes, it won’t be because the BBC held the industry to scrutiny. It’ll be despite their reluctance to do so. Because when journalism trades courage for caution, billionaires get to write the script – and the public gets the advert.

Bet Fred

"Right then," said Fred – cue the violins, because Fred Done’s got his handkerchief out. The Betfred boss has warned that if Rachel Reeves dares to raise gambling taxes, he might have to close all 1,287 of his beloved High Street betting shops. Seven and a half thousand jobs gone, he sobs. The British High Street in ruins, he wails. The nation’s punters forced – forced! – to bet with unscrupulous offshore bookies instead of his nice, respectable ones in Manchester.

Let’s get this straight. Betfred took in nearly a billion quid last year. After “asset writedowns” (translation: creative accounting), it somehow made only half a million in operating profit. Meanwhile, Fred himself is a billionaire with bolt-holes in Gibraltar, the US, and South Africa – which, funnily enough, are not known for their punishing tax regimes. Yet he’d have us believe that an extra 5 per cent on gambling duty will send him to the poorhouse.

He reckons 300 of his shops already lose money. Raise taxes, he warns, and that number could rise to 430. Quite. Because what better business model is there than keeping 300 loss-making shops open on principle? He admits punters are moving online anyway, but apparently Reeves is to blame for that too. The High Street’s dying, he says, and if it goes, it’ll never come back. Which, given he also admits it’s got “about 20 years of life left”, sounds less like a threat and more like an obituary notice.

Then there’s the moral gymnastics. According to Fred, High Street betting shops “safeguard” problem gamblers better than online casinos. Nothing says “responsible gambling” quite like a bloke in a tabard offering you a loyalty card and a free bet on the 3:30 at Kempton. The truth is, most of the industry’s profit comes from a tiny number of addicts – exactly why the Institute for Public Policy Research suggests taxing it more heavily, like cigarettes and booze.

And if Gordon Brown wants that revenue to tackle child poverty, who can argue? Only the sort of man who thinks a one-armed bandit is part of the nation’s cultural fabric. Fred warns that if Reeves listens to Brown, we’ll drive punters offshore. But that’s like the drinks industry saying higher beer duty will make everyone start home-brewing methanol. The punters will keep punting – they always do.

What’s really going on is that Reeves is taking aim at a sector that’s profited handsomely from human weakness, and Fred doesn’t like it. He calls it a “threat” to his business; the rest of us might call it overdue. His odds of winning this particular bet? By his own admission, “ten to one against.” Which is fitting, really – since the house usually wins.

Except this time, it might not.

The Existing Digital ID

It’s rather funny, isn’t it? The government already has a perfectly decent digital ID system — the GOV.UK ID Check app - that does everything anyone sensible could want. It proves who you are, does its job, and then has the decency to forget you exist. It’s the digital equivalent of a butler who takes your coat without rummaging through your pockets.

So naturally, they’re planning to replace it. Not because it’s broken, but because it isn’t ambitious enough. What they really want is persistence - a permanent identity framework linking your tax records, health data, benefits, bank accounts, and possibly what colour socks you bought on Amazon. All for “convenience,” of course. And if you don’t like it, well, what are you trying to hide?

Yet here’s the rich irony: the loudest critics of a National Digital ID are the same mob cheering to scrap the European Convention on Human Rights - the very safeguard that stops governments from turning such a system into an instrument of surveillance and abuse. They’ll rant about “freedom” while campaigning to remove the legal protections that actually guarantee it. They’ll call digital ID a step toward tyranny, then vote to bin the very treaty that would stop a tyranny from forming. You couldn’t make it up.

The GOV.UK app already strikes the balance - confirm, comply, delete. It’s a one-off handshake, not a lifelong digital leash. But that won’t do for the power-hungry technocrats or their authoritarian cheerleaders. They want efficiency, which in bureaucratic English means control. And they want sovereignty, which they confuse with impunity.

So, while the government busies itself reinventing the wheel into a tracking device, and the populists howl about their “freedom” while dismantling the laws that protect it, the rest of us are left wondering: how do you protect liberty from people who don’t understand what it is?

Perhaps the simplest answer is to keep the system we already have - the one that knows when to stop watching. Because the true test of freedom isn’t how loudly you shout about it, but whether your government remembers to look away once it’s seen enough.

The Grand Old Duke of York

They say the House of York has always been cursed – and looking back through history, you’d be hard pressed to argue otherwise. It’s as if the title itself were fashioned from bad luck and tarnished silver, passed down from one unfortunate duke to the next like a relay baton of doom.

It began, of course, with ambition and blood. The first Yorkists thought they were destined for greatness, and for a brief, shining moment, they were. Edward IV seized the throne, Richard III followed, and then – splat – the princes in the Tower vanished, Richard ended up face down in a car park, and the Tudor age began. If curses exist, that’s usually the bit where they get written.

Ever since, every Duke of York has seemed to walk under a cloud. The title keeps returning to the Crown, as if the monarchy itself can’t bear to leave it lying around unsupervised. A duke inherits it, something dreadful happens, and back it goes to the royal cupboard marked “do not open – haunted.”

One marched his men up a hill and down again – the “Grand Old Duke of York” of nursery fame – and achieved nothing more than becoming a punchline for toddlers. Another went to sea and managed to lose an entire fleet. Others died childless, disgraced, or simply irrelevant. It’s as if fate itself insists that no Duke of York may die content or leave the world with a shred of dignity intact.

And now, in our own time, the latest bearer of the name has bowed to inevitability. He’s given up the title – or at least agreed not to use it – which is the royal equivalent of the ghost tapping you on the shoulder and whispering, “Your turn’s over.” For years, the Curse had been biding its time, watching him bluster through scandal, denial, and disastrous interviews. Then, with grim precision, it collected its due – not with swords or poison, but with mortification.

Not that the current holder could pass it on anyway. The hereditary line was already a cul-de-sac – no male heirs, no succession, just an echo rattling around the family vaults. The Duke of York giving up his title is like resigning from a job no one was ever going to offer you again. The Curse didn’t need to strike him down this time; it simply waited for biology to finish the job.

It’s fitting, really. In an age when nobility has been replaced by PR damage control, the Curse of York no longer needs plague or battlefields. It simply destroys reputations. Once it felled kings; now it dismantles interview footage frame by frame.

So here the line ends, at least for now – another Duke of York stripped of his pride, another generation warned that the title offers only embarrassment and eventual retreat. Perhaps the Curse will rest for a while, though history suggests otherwise.

Because somewhere in the vaults of Buckingham Palace, that dusty scroll marked “Duke of York” still waits patiently for its next victim – humming quietly, as if amused by its own persistence.

New Lamps for Old - Part II

Back on the 2nd of August, I wrote about my plan to make a lamp from a gunstock I’d seen in an hotel (photo below) – a plan born, as these things often are, from a few pints and an inflated sense of competence. 

At the time, my bright idea was to drill a hole right through the stock for the flex. When that seemed optimistic, requiring an improbably long drill bit, I refined it: cut the stock into sections, drill each one, and glue it all back together – hoping the holes would line up somewhere near the middle. The sort of plan that sounds entirely reasonable until you imagine trying to thread a cable through what’s effectively a wooden trombone.

Then, a few weeks ago, I visited my brother – an engineer by trade and temperament. He listened patiently, then said, “Why don’t you just saw it in half longitudinally and router a channel into each half?” Logical. Elegant. Devastatingly obvious.

So, after consulting ChatGPT about the best saw for the job, I bought a Japanese pull saw. I’d never used one before, and it’s an entirely different beast. A western saw pushes and chatters its way through timber; a Japanese saw pulls – clean, quiet, and precise. The blade’s so thin it looks like it should fold at the first knot, but it doesn’t. It rewards patience and punishes haste.

It did, however, take the better part of a morning to complete the cut. I began to suspect that perhaps a better – and certainly quicker – approach would be to use my bench saw. The width of the blade doesn’t really matter, provided the cut is dead centre, because the same amount of wood would be removed from each half and they’d still fit together perfectly. The challenge, of course, is alignment: the stock would need a proper jig to hold it upright and perfectly square as it passes through the rotating blade. I’ve yet to build such a contraption, but the idea has lodged itself firmly in my mind for the second gunstock.

As it was, I persevered with the pull saw, and the result was worth it. The far side of the cut came out as smooth as glass; the near side, where I started, looked like an archaeological find – but it was straight enough. My first attempt at routing the flex channel was a disaster: because of the shape and the difficulty of pinning it in place, it was like routering a squealing cat. So I came up with something better for the other half.

I soaked a length of rope in white paint, laid it in the routed groove, pressed the other half of the stock against it, and when I separated them, I had a perfect mirrored line. Using that paint trace as a guide, I took an angle grinder with a flat disc and carved out a flowing channel that followed the stock’s natural curves. It looks far more intentional – less engineering, more craftsmanship – and it’ll take a brown braided flex beautifully.

The next step is the top section, where the lamp holder will sit. It currently sports pine inserts, for some unknown reason, which have to go – too soft, too pale, and not in keeping – so I chiseled them out and have ordered some solid beech blocks. Once glued and planed flush, it’ll form a sturdy, unified block strong enough to hold a brass fitting without fear of splitting. I may even fit a threaded brass insert, just to make it bulletproof – if you’ll pardon the pun.

The base will also be beech, probably deep enough to allow the cable to turn through ninety degrees internally, though I might route a discreet channel underneath and hide it with felt. I’ll decide once I see how the line of the cable sits – aesthetics first, practicality second.

It’s remarkable how something that began as a whim in an hotel bar has turned into a slow, methodical act of engineering, or wood butchering. The “test stock” I’d written off is becoming something altogether more refined – a lamp that looks as if it grew that way, and I may end up with a matching pair. Proof, if ever it were needed, that a daft idea, a sharp saw, and a dash of obstinacy can turn out something rather good in the end.

The Match They Made Political

When Aston Villa drew Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Europa League, it should have been just another football fixture. But in modern Britain, where everything is now a proxy battlefield, even a game of football can turn into a referendum on identity, religion and political loyalty.

West Midlands Police did what they’re paid to do: assess risk and protect the public. Their intelligence officers, having watched what happened in Amsterdam last year – the riots, the violence, the arrests – classified the match as high-risk. The Safety Advisory Group agreed. Away fans banned. End of. It wasn’t anti-Israel, it was anti-violence.

But the minute Israel is mentioned, reason leaves the room. Within hours came the cries of “antisemitism,” as if the police had suddenly turned into a branch of Hamas. Lobby groups and backbenchers seized the opportunity, denouncing a safety decision as prejudice. Then Downing Street waded in, demanding the ban be reviewed – not because of new intelligence, but because of political optics.

And in the middle of it all, there was Kemi Badenoch, waving her flag and climbing aboard the outrage express. She never misses a culture-war bandwagon. One week it’s “woke headteachers,” the next it’s “anti-Israel bias.” Her moral compass is magnetic – it points wherever the cameras are.

The irony is that the police are now being punished for doing their jobs. If they bow to political pressure and violence erupts, those same ministers will claim they “failed to keep order.” It’s a no-win situation, engineered by people who wouldn’t know a matchday policing plan if it landed in their lap.

This was never about football. It was about opportunists turning a safety call into a moral crusade. The police acted to keep people safe; politicians acted to keep themselves in the news. And that’s the real disgrace – not antisemitism, not discrimination, but the corruption of professional judgment by political vanity.

Maccabi’s travelling fans aren’t the monsters some portray, but neither are they saints in yellow and blue. They are part of an ultra culture that feeds on defiance, and when that meets Europe’s febrile politics, sparks fly. The Amsterdam riot proved it – football becomes the stage on which bigger arguments are fought. The police saw that, understood it, and acted accordingly. What followed was not a stand against antisemitism, but a failure to distinguish between prejudice and prudence. And once again, the shouting drowned out the sense.  

When politicians start leaning on the police, the rot sets in. The public begins to suspect that every operational call is political – that safety advice is tailored to suit the headlines. It’s the same disease that hollowed out the civil service and warped the BBC: truth and professionalism subordinated to whatever keeps the populists fed.

The tragedy is that trust, once lost, is almost impossible to rebuild. The police didn’t create this storm – they walked straight into it, trying to do their job. Now, instead of being backed for taking a calm, apolitical stance, they’re being paraded as villains in someone else’s narrative. And all because, in the age of permanent outrage, nothing is allowed to stay professional. Everything has to be political – even football.